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sacrifices in the Thirty Years’ War were still just within living memory. But under the Polish constitution, only a Catholic could be elected king, and a king is what Frederick Augustus was determined to be.
    There were mutterings of rebellion in Saxony at the prince elector’s proposed conversion. Frederick Augustus’s wife, already forced to put up with his womanizing, stubbornly refused to abandon her Protestant heritage. They separated. She withdrew to a remote castle, where she died thirty years later. All this made no difference. Frederick Augustus stuck to his new faith—though he was politically shrewd enough to reassure his Saxon subjects that no one would be forced to submit to Rome, and set up a council of Protestant worthies to guarantee this. The flames of revolt subsided.
    And so a Catholic Frederick Augustus became. He was crowned King Augustus II of Poland amid pomp and celebration on September 15, 1697. The Cathedral of Cracow, traditional city of Polish coronations, was surrounded by Saxon troops.
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    â€œTHE STRONG” may be what his subjects called him—a reference to his physical robustness and amatory prowess—but the reign of Augustus II would not be considered a success in political terms. The general historical verdict was that the final death throes of Poland began with the accession of its first Saxon ruler, and by the time the second was done with it, almost seventy years later, the country was coughing its last.
    While this might not turn out to be Poland’s greatest hour, or Saxony’s easiest (Augustus uses it as a military cash cow—and that is before he starts on the mistresses, the hunting lodges, and the collections of really nice things), it is certainly good news for the craftspeople, merchants, artists, and influence peddlers of Dresden, the privileged Saxon royal city or Residenzstadt . Because, if he is going to be a European monarch, Augustus needs a capital that gives the right impression, he needs it in short order, and he is determined to spend whatever it takes to make that happen.
    As a contemporary wrote: “Augustus the Strong can boast of having found Dresden a small city made of wood, but to have left it a large, glorious city built of stone.” These few exhilarating, some would say crazy, opening decades of the eighteenth century are when pretty, postmedieval Dresden becomes grand, iconic “Dresden”: a visitor destination, center for the arts and crafts, and perforce (given the monarch’s delicate religio-political situation) a showcase for Protestant-Catholic understanding.
    The capital that Augustus the Strong built. The Florence of the North. City as work of art.
    Forty years later, on the king’s death hundreds of miles away in Poland, Dresden glowed with sophisticated sandstone palaces and churches, surrounded by Baroque apartment buildings and squares, mostly made of that same native stone. It is curious—to rush forward more than two hundred years to Dresden’s nemesis—that a British RAF pilot could be said to have observed, as he swooped over the darkened city center to mark it for bombing, that he had glimpses of the river Elbe lined with “old half-timbered houses.” There were in fact none in the heart of the city, only in the outer suburbs where hardly any bombs were dropped. This was not quaint, wooden Hildesheim or Würzburg.Augustus the Strong had made sure of that. The British pilot was imagining, based on his own preconceptions about how old German cities ought to look. Dresden was and is different.
    It was the combination of royal interference and municipal pride that was to make Dresden unique. Dresden was a case where, well into the twentieth century, the useful and the beautiful—function and fashion—nourished each other. Saxony’s rulers wanted a fine showcase, but they also wanted a functioning capital that supplied them with all the practical needs of