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378 General History of Europe this purpose a bit of territory on the Baltic which he had con- quered from Sweden. Here he built St. Petersburg 1 at enormous expense and colonized it with Russians and foreigners. Russia was at last becoming a European power. 652. Russia gains on the Baltic. The next problem was to get control of the provinces lying between the Russian boundary and the Baltic Sea. After much fighting, Peter forced Sweden to cede to him Livonia, Esthonia, and other Swedish territory which had previously cut Russia off from the sea. For a generation after the death of Peter the Great, Russia fell into the hands of incompetent rulers, but from the time that the great Catherine II (664,722) came to the throne (1762) the Western powers had always to consider the vast Slavic empire in their great struggles. They had also to reckon with a new kingdom in northern Germany, which was just growing into a great power as Peter began his work. This was Prussia, whose beginnings we must now consider. II. THE KINGDOM OF PRUSSIA ; FREDERICK THE GREAT 653. Brandenburg acquired by the Hohenzollerns. The origin of the kingdom of Prussia was very humble. In the early fifteenth century the emperor sold to the unimportant House of Hohenzollern a strip of territory known as the electorate of Brandenburg, extending some ninety or a hundred miles to the east and to the west of the little town of Berlin. The successive representatives of the line of Hohenzollerns gradually increased their possessions until the kingdom of Prussia finally embraced, in the nineteenth century, nearly two thirds of Germany. 654. Brandenburg becomes the Kingdom of Prussia. At the opening of the Thirty Years' War (1618) the Hohenzollerns came into possession of Prussia, a district on the Baltic, far to the east of their other holdings. In 1700 the electors of Brandenburg arranged with the emperor to have their title changed to "King 1 Changed to Petrograd during the war with Germany in 1914 so that the Russian capital should no longer be called by a German name.