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to the Saxon throne in 1694 at the age of twenty-three, he has already shown a precocious interest in mistresses, architecture, and the art of war. Frederick Augustus has money and gold and jewels, he has an inbuilt confidence and seemingly limitless ambition. Saxony has prospered since the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Frederick Augustus, sent on the grand tour by his princely parents as a teenager, had fallen in love with the glories of Renaissance Italy. Above all, though, he had been deeply impressed by the splendor of Versailles and the towering, absolutist figure cut by the great King Louis XIV of France.
    Frederick Augustus is determined to carve out an important position for himself not just in Germany, but in Europe as a whole. He will shamelessly exploit his Saxon dominions to achieve this goal. But, truth be told, he needs a larger power base than Saxony alone can provide.
    And it so happens that, not far to the east, there is a kingdom for sale.

2
The Twin Kingdom
    THE PRIZE THAT ATTRACTED Frederick Augustus’s notice was Poland—or, to give it its proper title, the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania.
    Just over a decade earlier, in 1683, its gallant king, John III Sobieski, had led a heavily outnumbered Catholic-Protestant army against the Turkish siege of Vienna. He put the sultan’s troops to flight and, in effect, saved the capital of the Holy Roman Empire from becoming an outstation of the Islamic caliphate. One of his comrades-in-arms was Frederick Augustus’s father, Prince Elector George of Saxony.
    Now, in 1696, the old Polish king lay dying at his family’s castle of Wilanow. Emperor Leopold of Austria had repaid Sobieski’s help with arrogant disdain; the notoriously fractious nobility of Poland had greeted their king’s attempts to revive a weakened Polish state with its usual combination of jealous suspicion and kamikaze arrogance. John had a son, James, but James would never succeed him as king. For Poland was not a hereditary but an elective monarchy, and the nobles who chose their own master wanted a foreigner for the throne. A rich one.
    Within months of John III’s death, the Polish parliament—called the Sejm—seemed ready to choose the French prince of Conti. However, young Frederick Augustus of Saxony was looking for a kingdom, and he had cultivated powerful friends, including Emperor Leopold of Austria and Czar Peter the Great of Russia. Between them, they had already agreed that the Sejm’s decision was not, after all, final. They had large armies waiting on Poland’s borders to hint thatthe nobility should think again. More than that, Frederick Augustus had amassed huge sums of money by mortgaging his country, imposing new taxes, and selling quantities of precious metals and stones. His representative, the Count von Flemming, busied himself distributing it to influential individuals in Poland itself. A lot of country gentlemen all over Poland suddenly found themselves, it is reasonable to suspect, able to contemplate a new stable block on the estate or a new mistress in town.
    All the same, when the election was run, Frederick Augustus and the prince of Conti achieved equal shares of the chaotically organized vote. Each side duly declared itself the winner. Frederick Augustus, twenty-seven and in no doubt, despite all this election nonsense, as to where power really comes from, marched his Saxon troops over the border and on to Warsaw. Settled? Not quite.
    There was a final problem to be solved before Frederick Augustus could give his soon-to-be-adopted country the push it needed to recognize the overwhelming, not to say intimidating, justice of his claim. He had to change his religion. This meant a minor political earthquake in central Europe. Since Luther’s time the prince elector of Saxony had been recognized as the predominant ruler in Protestant northern Germany, the Reformation’s shield and defender. Saxony’s