Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco, Tim Blanning, Penguin, £30

Augustus II was famed for his exuberance. When he first met Peter the Great in 1697, the two men – both in their mid-20s – spent three days drinking their way through 12 kegs of Hungarian wine, unspecified quantities of champagne, and ‘other foreign beverages’. His vigour clearly undiminished, 30 years later Augustus founded an ‘Anti-Sobriety Society’ with the Prussian King Frederick William, whose stated purpose was a ‘war on temperance’. Any member who failed an intoxication test would be expelled.

Even more notorious than Augustus’ drinking was his siring. Legend has it that he produced hundreds of illegitimate offspring, a reflection of his reputation as the ‘Saxon Hercules’, a manly, towering figure who could break horseshoes with his bare hands, apparently attracting an endless procession of women in the process. His spectacular wealth presumably played its role, too.

As Tim Blanning reveals, the true number was just eight, one of many such myths that have survived the centuries. In his breezy biography of this ambitious early 18th-century prince, the larger-than-life Augustus ‘the Strong’ is brought back down to earth. As a statesman, as a great leader that would secure for his House of Wettin a leading position in the pantheon of illustrious royal houses, the Saxon Prince-Elector and Polish King Augustus II was a miserable failure. The only war he won was against temperance. His only conquests were those of the flesh, but it is in these contradictions that we discover a man who truly embodied the spirit of his time.

In 1694 he inherited the Saxon throne from his brother. Though the House of Wettin enjoyed substantial prestige as one of the oldest houses in Europe and Saxony and was both rich and influential through its leading constitutional role in the Holy Roman Empire, Augustus always wanted more. He wanted glory and opulence on the scale of a great king like Louis XIV rather than the meagre provincial tastes of a petty German prince. Indeed, he wanted to be a king.

He fulfilled this lofty ambition, but it proved to be a poisoned chalice. His election to the throne of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1697 drew him into a political abyss of war, dethronement, and rebellion. The vast country was dominated by a fiercely independent nobility that ruled over a sparsely-populated countryside punctuated by few towns or natural barriers. It was a loose confederation of noble fiefdoms rather than a centralised monarchy – impossible to rule, impossible to defend, and impossible to conquer.

This would all be revealed in the protracted Great Northern War that lasted from 1700 to 1721, taking up the majority of Augustus’ reign as both Saxon elector and Polish-Lithuanian king. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the labyrinthine drama of this war – effectively an attempt by Augustus and Peter the Great to partition the Swedish empire on the Baltic – takes up a considerable portion of the book. Augustus is absent for most of the action, forced to renounce his claim to the Polish throne in 1706 after Sweden’s young war-obsessed king scored victory after victory against Danish, Russian, and Saxon forces.

This war is in fact so central to Blanning’s account that it often feels more like a history of the Great Northern War than of Augustus himself – a fact not necessarily unwelcome considering the dearth of popular histories of this war that so thoroughly shaped modern European history. Indeed, the Great Northern War is one of those meandering early modern conflicts that only seems to end because everyone grows bored of it, leaving the reader wondering what it was all about in the first place.

As Blanning recounts, the conflict lasted so long largely because the Swedish King Charles XII seemed to think campaigning was the purpose of life, boasting as he spent years roaming around the vast expanses of the North European Plain: ‘I have no plan’. It cost him dearly in the end. He died in 1718 and the treaties that ended the war marked Russia’s triumphant entrance onto the stage of European great power politics and Sweden’s concurrent exit.

Augustus retained the Polish-Lithuanian throne in the end, but his ambitious plan to turn it into a centralised, hereditary monarchy never came to fruition. If nothing else, Blanning’s extensive account of the Great Northern War is a powerful lesson in historical contingency. All three of the leading monarchs in the war suffered terrible tactical defeats, with only Peter the Great recovering and leveraging his position into a powerful strategic victory.

Perhaps underlying weaknesses in the Polish-Lithuanian state, the precarity of Sweden’s empire, and the natural advantages enjoyed by the vast Russian state meant that the map of what people then called Northern Europe was inevitably tending towards Russian domination. Or perhaps it was the result of Augustus’ failed ambitions. His poorly-prepared siege of Riga, his underestimation of his Swedish foe, his inability to coordinate with his allies.

Yet despite the political disaster of the Great Northern War, Blanning argues that Augustus deserves to be remembered for his true success as an artist. He mastered the art of royal ceremony in an age when absolutist rulers harnessed the power of representational culture – deploying music, art, drama, and architecture alike – to turn their rule into a never-ending spectacle of power and glory.

Had he not spent vast sums bribing his way into Polish politics, Augustus’ plans for Dresden would have been even more spectacular. Still, he left an impressive architectural legacy in the Saxon capital, while his patronage of industrial endeavours, such as the first factory of true porcelain in Europe at Meissen, created a brand that has survived centuries. Successes tarnished only by his failure to secure a royal legacy. While Augustus’ son managed to win his own election to the Polish throne, his reign was marred by the rise of Prussia at Saxony’s expense, permanently turning the Wettin state into a junior partner in an Austro-Prussian rivalry that would come to define German politics for over a century.

Few modern historians have contributed more to our understanding of 18th-century Europe as much as Tim Blanning. Most influential was his monograph – The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture – which explored how culture was deployed by Enlightenment-era rulers to transform how their rule was literally ‘re-presented’ to their subjects, something for which Augustus serves as something of a case study in his biography.

To this Blanning has added a whole series of biographies on some of the most prominent rulers of the era – the daring Prussian monarch Frederick the Great, the first ‘Hanoverian’ British king George I, the reforming Austrian Emperor Joseph II. Now to that he has added Augustus ‘the Strong’, with a highly readable, enjoyable, and insightful portrait of one of the 18th-century’s most colourful princes.