Red Eagle, Black Eagle

February 1699
Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria survives his bout of smallpox.

November 1700
Charles II of Spain dies, a Wittelsbach dynasty is successfully installed into Spain.

1701
Brandenburg-Prussia joins the Great Northern War on the coalition side, takes and holds Swedish Pomerania.

1703
Treaty of Stettin. Sweden renounces their claims on Pomerania, B-P joins Sweden's side.

1704
Brandenburg-Prussia occupies Lusatia. Augustus II is overwhelmed and offers Frederick III large swathes of Polish territory to dissuade him from occupying the rest of his Saxon territories. The Polish acquisitions are integrated into the Duchy of Prussia, which gets elevated into a Grand Duchy, as Leopold I refuses to recognise it as a kingdom.

The Hohenzollerns have doubled their holdings, but their dreams of being kings have been dashed for the next century.

map_brandenburg-prussia2.png
 
December 1716
Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel's second pregnancy, a baby girl, ends in miscarriage.

1717
Charles VI dies in an accident.
War of the Austrian Succession breaks out.
Brandenburg-Prussia allies itself with Saxony, with the stipulation that they will be ceded Silesia if the Saxons gain control of Bohemia.
Kingdom of Hungary declares independence. Ottoman Empire makes a move for the Balkans.

1722
Treaty of Dresden. Hungarian independence is recognised. The remaining Hapsburg territories are partitioned between Saxony and Bavaria.
Brandenburg-Prussia receives the Duchy of Silesia as per their prior agreement with Saxony.

1733
War of the Polish Succession.
Brandenburg-Prussia, Hungary, France and Poland-Lithuania VS Russia. Russia manages to gain everything east of Minsk,
but the Kingdom of Poland survives as a protectorate of Hungary.

1803-1817
Napoleonic Wars.
Holy Roman Empire is dissolved, Kingdom of Brandenburg-Prussia is declared.

1818
Treaty of Prague. Brandenburg-Prussia gains Saxony, and trades its western exclaves for Anhalt and other enclaves within its borders.

1834
The Czech Revolution. The Kingdom of Bohemia becomes the Czech Republic and cedes from the German Confederation.

1856
The Kingdom of Brandenburg-Prussia cedes from the German Confederation in protest to Bavaria making grabby hands at Sudetenland and
Holstein doing the same to Schleswig.

1867
The German Revolution. Riots, forced abdications and civil war in the German Confederation. Brandenburg-Prussia's disillusionment
with German nationalism is complete. B-P backs away from German affairs like one backs away from a rabid dog.

--

Map shows the provinces of the Kingdom of Brandenburg-Prussia somewhere in the 1870s. It's going to get ugly soon,
with the German Confederation and Poland agreeing to split the country in half....

map_brandenburg-prussia3.png
 
Nicely illustrated TL. However, there might be some issues in the details.
The first couple of them which came to my mind:



1704
Brandenburg-Prussia occupies Lusatia. Augustus II is overwhelmed and offers Frederick III large swathes of Polish territory to dissuade him from occupying the rest of his Saxon territories.

Is there a reason that Saxony is not even attempting to defend it,
or to find other allies against Prussia?



1722
Treaty of Dresden. Hungarian independence is recognised. The remaining Hapsburg territories are partitioned between Saxony and Bavaria.

What did the other European powers say about how to disembowel a has-been great power?


1834
The Czech Revolution. The Kingdom of Bohemia becomes the Czech Republic and cedes from the German Confederation.


Why exactly are the Czech revolutioneers strong enough to defy (Prussia-allied) Saxony? And why is Czech nationalism stronger than IOTL?
 
Why exactly are the Czech revolutioneers strong enough to defy (Prussia-allied) Saxony? And why is Czech nationalism stronger than IOTL?
There is no Saxony to defy, it got annexed by Brandenburg-Prussia.

A detail that wasn't mentioned in the timeline was that German dualism existed, but it was between Bohemia-Saxony and Bavaria. Once Saxony proper was lost, the King of Bohemia didn't stop meddling in German affairs. Czech-majority country and a Spanish sockpuppet fighting over Germans = accelerated Czech and German nationalism.

Your other points... yeah, that's just me being incompetent. I waffled for a good while whether I should just shove the maps into the map thread or post the timeline. I may have made the wrong decision.

Btw, weren't Cleve and Mark adjacent to each other?
Or was that only true until the Palatinean War of Succession?
Color me confused, because I didn't find any maps from that time period where Cleves and Mark were connected. I found a map from 1700 where Lingen and Ravensberg were connected, of all things. Didn't use that one.
 
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Stuff I should've mentioned the first time around but couldn't find an opening for:

Somewhere between the Great Northern War and the Napoleonic Wars, a Hohenzollern has a stroke of genius of ASB proportions: people are more willing to co-operate with you when you don't oppress them. The Slavs of Lusatia, Silesia and Prussia therefore get treated better than they were OTL; education in their mother tongue, more equal status with Germans etc.

(And that's why the annexation of Lusatia is part of the timeline in the first place; I needed the crunchy Sorbian filling.)

By the time of the German Confederation's founding, almost a third of Brandenburg-Prussia's citizens are Slavs. Once German nationalism first starts raising its head; B-P's reactions are along the lines of "Well, that's very nice, but what about the massive amounts of non-Germans within the Confederation?"

Once the German Confederation starts making demands for the Sudetenland and Schleswig, the King of Brandenburg-Prussia is convinced that as far as the German Confederation is concerned, one third of his subjects can go fuck themselves. This is the main incentive for the secession of B-P from the Confederation.
 
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