Few rulers can have rejoiced in a less appropriate sobriquet than Augustus the Strong

Augustus the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, is often labelled one of the worst monarchs in European history. His reign is billed by Tim Blanning’s publishers as ‘a study in failed statecraft, showing how a ruler can shape history as much by incompetence as brilliance’. Yet this thorough and often hilarious study of Augustus’s life and times reveals these harsh headline words to be exaggerated. Indeed the man comes across as quite a good egg, as much sinned against as sinning. With disarming immodesty, Augustus described himself as:

A lively fellow, carefree, showing from a young age that he was blessed with a strong body, a robust constitution, an amiable, generous disposition, equipped with everything that makes up an honourable man, more devoted to physical exercise than book learning and a born soldier.

Compared with his psychotic contemporaries, the violent incel Charles XII of Sweden and the enthusiastic amateur dentist Peter the Great of Russia, I’d take Augustus’s bumbling ineptitude over alleged greatness any day.

Augustus was, by turns, a mid-ranking military incompetent, an averagely vain spendthrift and a moderate libertine. The great political project of his life – the reckless purchase of the crown of Poland – did indeed prove, in his own words, ‘a crown of thorns’. By the time of his death he left the Polish polity so damaged that it would disappear as an independent state until the 20th century. On the other hand, his public relations were effective – at least to the extent that his sobriquet, ‘the Strong’, based on a fiction of physical strength and sexual athleticism, stuck. And his insatiable desire to show off, combined with driving energy, exquisite taste and considerable resources, led to the creation of the baroque jewel of Dresden, his Saxon capital.