47 THE SILESIAN WARS, 1740-5Prussian lands it was to make by far the greatest single contribution
(18,000,000 thaler out of 43,000,000) to the cost of the Seven Years
War.
The British major-general Joseph Yorke travelled through the
region in 1758, and he commented:
The mountains are well-cultivated and peopled, and great
manufactures [exist] in all parts of them; indeed, the whole
duchy of Silesia is as fine a country as one can see and well
worth fighting for, and the inhabitants of it [are] beautiful; out
of England I never saw so handsome a race of people as the
Silesians, very different from their neighbours in Brandenburg
and Bohemia, who are very plain. (Yorke, 1913, III, 210)The linen industry was well established, 'the soul of Silesia', in
Frederick's words (Voltz, 1926-7, II, 260), but the mineral wealth of
Upper Silesia and the Waldenburg Hills was at first little appreciated,
and so it played no part in the calculation of the statesmen in the
great wars. After 1777, however, a new minister of mines, Friedrich
Anton von Heinitz, exploited the reserves of coal on a large scale, and
within six years the air was fouled with the exhalations of more than
5,000 coal-fired furnaces.
Frederick always regarded the administration of Silesia as some-
thing to be held under his personal control. The otherwise all-
embracing General-Directorium was allowed no share in the running
of this region, and Frederick instead appointed Count Ludwig
Wilhelm von Miinchow as the first of a series of Silesian ministers,
directly answerable to himself - an arrangement which greatly
facilitated the operations of the army in Silesia. Miinchow reached a
number of sensible compromises with the local interests, and
Frederick's nominee as the Catholic bishop of Breslau, the dissipated
Count Philipp Gotthard von Schaffgotsch, sought (with no great
success) to establish good relations between the Prussian authorities
and the native Catholics of Upper Silesia.
The policy of leniency did not apply to the border enclave of the
County of Glatz, where the royal favourite Henri-Auguste de la
Motte-Fouqu6 exercised virtual vice-regal powers from 1742 until
- As an embittered Huguenot, Fouque treated the Catholics
harshly, and he finally succeeded in producing a genuine religious
martyr in the person of the priest Andreas Faulhaber, who went to the
gallows on 30 December 1757 rather than break the seal of the
confessional (Bach, 1885, passim).
The conquest of Silesia accentuated a Prusso-Austrian antagon-
ism that was to endure for almost one and a half centuries. A
commentator wrote in 1756: