267 THE WAR OF THE BAVARIAN SUCCESSION, 1778-9exercised control of the Polish foreign trade, and especially the export
of grains, which could now be diverted to Prussia in the event of
shortage.
West Prussia was a barren and backward territory, but it yielded
annual revenues of 1,700,000 thaler, of which 1,200,000 were devoted
to maintaining the locally raised troops (five new regiments of
fusiliers, one of hussars, four garrison battalions, and two battalions
of artillery). A visit to West Prussia was now incorporated into the
routine of the royal year, and Frederick had a half-timbered cottage
built at Mockrau, near Graudenz, to serve as his headquarters for the
reviews.
Frederick commissioned many young West Prussians as officers
in the new regiments, without looking too closely into their ancestry,
but he failed entirely in his ambition to make some military use of the
considerable Jewish population:
They vainly remonstrated to His Majesty, that war was neither
analogous to their native genius, nor agreeable to their private
feelings. But such was found to be on trial, their
insurmountable disinclination to bear arms, that after many
vain endeavours, they were finally broken and disbanded.
(Wraxall, 1806, I, 219)The peace, or rather the temporary satiation of appetites induced by
the Polish Partition, ran for only five years before Frederick was faced
with the prospect of dragging his old bones off to a new war.
Austria had failed in the great enterprise of recovering Silesia,
but now in the later 1770s Joseph and Chancellor Kaunitz snatched at
the opportunity of gaining a more than adequate compensation in
southern and western Germany. The last of the direct line of the
Bavarian electoral House of Wittelsbach died on 30 December 1777,
and his successor, the dissolute Carl Theodor, agreed to sell Lower
Bavaria to the Austrians outright, and surrender to them the rever-
sionary title to the Upper Palatinate. All of this might appear to be
the small change of eighteenth-century diplomacy. However, if the
deal had gone ahead unchallenged, Austria would have been
strengthened so mightily in territory, population, and above all in its
Germanic character that the Prussian state would have been put at a
permanent disadvantage.
Joseph had gained an ascendency in the counsels of Vienna over
his mother Maria Theresa, who dreaded a new war, and he dismissed
all Frederick's offers of negotiation as so many signs of weakness.
Maria Theresa herself joined in the laughter at the ludicrous spelling
mistakes in Frederick's letters.
On 26 January 1778 Frederick set in train the process of a lengthy
mobilisation. The impoverished electorate of Saxony was now a