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the settlement of hardworking outsiders in their towns and villages—rulers have a tendency to think in terms of tax andskills bases—but the old-established natives were not so favorably impressed. Mutual massacres followed, in which Germans were terrorized and forcibly expelled from their strongholds in the towns and, in return, troublesome Czechs tossed down mineshafts—the usual bloodstained small change of ethnic conflict. Decades of war between Germans and Czechs, Catholics and Hussites, finally ended in uneasy peace. Dresden lies less than thirty miles north of the Bohemian borderlands where the Elbe rises and where this agonizing ethnic drama was being played out. In 1429 a Czech army reached the gates of Dresden and laid waste to the suburbs.
    Nevertheless, around the turn of the sixteenth century, Dresden acquired the status that it would never again lose: capital of Saxony. The Wettin dynasty split the Saxon lands between two competing sons. The richer part, including Dresden, was given to Albert, thence-forward prince elector ( Kurfürst )—acknowledged master of eastern Saxony and member of the committee of princes that chose each Holy Roman ruler—not just a kingmaker but an emperor maker. There was a fire, which destroyed substantial parts of the town, not for the first or last time. As a result, architects were instructed to build in less readily combustible stone—in most cases the local sandstone—a feature that became characteristic of Dresden’s architecture.
    Through the sixteenth century Dresden developed into an artistic capital as well as a political one. Martin Luther threw out his Protestant challenge to the pope, and the elector of Saxony became his chief protector. Soon Saxony was predominantly Lutheran and the leading Protestant power in Germany. With religious divisions making Europe in general, and Germany in particular, a more dangerous place, the elector built an elegant Schloss on the Elbe and surrounded it with substantial fortifications. Despite all the splendor and pride, during all that time the city retained the faint, beleaguered aura of a frontier encampment. Soon it was time for a new dispute over who ruled Bohemia and by what religious law. The old, still smoldering enmity lit the fuse that started the Thirty Years’ War.
    Europe was ravaged by marauding armies on a scale not seen since the fall of the Roman Empire. When peace came in 1648, Bohemia lost its remnants of independence, and both Catholicism and Germandom were strengthened there. Nevertheless, the Czech lands were left with a mix of Slav majority and German minority that wouldalways be combustible. On the positive side, the reputation of Dresden as a military stronghold had led to a rapid influx of anxious country folk seeking to escape the rampaging armies. Most of Europe might be exhausted and depopulated, but the Saxon capital had grown into a community of twenty-one thousand souls. By the standards of the time, it was a very substantial city.
    Yet Dresden is, as we approach the end of the seventeenth century, still a provincial center. A Residenzstadt or residence town where an important but nevertheless, in European terms, middle-ranking regional magnate holds court. Literally. Almost every advantage the people of Dresden enjoy—jobs, industries, trade, arts, and amusements—is conditional on the elector of Saxony continuing to choose this place to live in. It is a factor that will shape, perhaps unconsciously, many attitudes in the city even when it has outgrown that status as royal residence and found itself transformed into a teeming modern metropolis.
    However, at this stage, royal decisions definitely remain final. So the first step toward this distant destination is taken by a new prince elector, a bull-necked young adventurer—Wettins have rarely matched the beauty of their capital—named Frederick Augustus. When he unexpectedly succeeds his sickly brother