Ending the Stagnation

In 1697 Friedrich Augustus II became king of Poland. His reputation was never good. He was a German and because of his inability to win a war he himself had started he is considered a rather bad Polish king. However, when Friedrich Augustus became king he had a plan. He was not a stupid man, and he intended to turn the Commonwealth into a centralized monarchical state. He was a child of the same ideas as his contemporaries in Berlin, Hannover and München, and he needed a war to accomplish it. Like Sobieski, he saw war as the surest way to gain prestige and a free hand to carry out his plan. Now Friedrich Augustus made certain mistakes. He and his allies underestimated the ease with which they would smash the eighteen year old monarch of Sweden and secondly Friedrich August was no Sobieskian General. The failure of the war and his lost prestige from being a lousy soldier and having been forced to a humiliating abdication ruined every chance to reform anything. Instead, he ruined any chance for monarchism in Poland as his return was with the arrivals of Russian bayonets. However... had he won the war and Poland had been a winner while Russia had become rather mauled then his position would have been different. Instead of buying art for his castles in Dresden he might very well have used that prestige and military power with boldness and brute force to accomplish the impossible...