KESSELSDORF 1745

When one thinks of the wars of the eighteenth century, one thinks of the significant clashes of great military powers: the War of the Spanish Succession and the Battles of Blenheim and Malplaquet, the Great Northern War and the Battles of Narva and Poltava, the War of the Austrian Succession and Fontenoy, the Seven Years War with Roßbach, Leuthen and Zorndorf, or the American War of Independence with Saratoga and Yorktown. All of these engagements appear again and again in the lists of the great battles of world history, and there are reasons why they deserve a place in them. Yet none of them brought an end to the war in which they were fought. Not so the Battle of Kesselsdorf, which is largely forgotten today and will probably never find its way into an anthology of world- historically significant battles yet surely deserves such a place. For the immediate consequence of the victory of the Prussian army under Leopold von Anhalt-Dessau over a Saxon army on the heights near Kesselsdorf was the peace agreement at Dresden. In it, Austria once again renounced its claims to the province of Silesia, which had been lost to Prussia in the First Silesian War. In addition, Prussia rose to the rank of the great European powers and became the regional hegemon in northern Germany, while ambitious Electoral Saxony lost considerable political importance in the Empire and in Europe.