Maurice was born in 1696, the progeny of an extra-marital liaison between Frederick Augustus II (at right), Elector of Saxony, and the beautiful Swedish countess Marie Aurora von Königsmarck. Augustus was twenty-four when he launched his pursuit of the beautiful Swede, and already a veteran campaigner of the boudoir, though Maurice was his first illegitimate child. Augustus was handsome, wealthy, had a charming manner and a strong and virile constitution, all of which combined to cause the ladies to swoon. He was known in the courts of Europe and amongst his people as Augustus the Strong, due in large part to his great physical strength. Augustus could break horseshoes in one hand and was known to perform parlor tricks like twirling fully armored men about over his head then flinging them off balconies.

Another reason for the sobriquet was because Saxony was a powerful central European power during his reign, and he would eventually come to rule several other countries, including Poland. Nevertheless, many consider him "The Strong" because his relentless pursuit of the fair sex reflected a sexual prowess and stamina that eventually achieved for him the informal European title for Most Illegitimate Children Born to a Nobleman, at 354. I believe the record holds to this day. As one biographer wryly comments, Augustus truly was the father of his people.

Marie-Aurora

The much-admired Marie-Aurora was the granddaughter of an infamous Swedish general of the Thirty Years War, Hans Christoph von Königsmarck, generally known as "Old Königsmarck." Marie Aurora is reported to have been one of the most vivacious, talented, intelligent, politically astute, and outspoken women of her age. Voltaire even had nice things to say about her. Long after their romance cooled, Augustus continued to rely on her political counsel. At the low point of Saxon fortunes in the Great Northern War he even sent her to sue for peace with Charles XII.

Though meriting only a footnote in history, Old Königsmarck's stony effigy inexplicably appears on the tomb of Gustavus Adolphus alongside the far more celebrated and able Swedish generals of the Thirty Years War. The best one biographer could write of him was that: "Sword and torch in hand he sabred and sacked his way through all the brawl and tumult of the Thirty Years War. You would have said the scene and the actor were specially created for one another. Yet without knowing anything of the art of war or possessing the least military capacity he managed to conquer by his sheer audacity and soldier's courage a place beside the Wrangels, the Baners, the Horns, those generals whom Sweden honoured most."

By 1648, the closing year of the Thirty Years War, Old Königsmarck was leading a Swedish army in an invasion of Bohemia. As we might expect, his troops acquitted themselves brutishly in the field, adding a full measure of horror to one of the most dreadful European wars ever fought. When the war ended Königsmarck and his men were pursuing an altogether beastly siege of Prague, and in general making themselves obnoxious throughout the area of their operations (Coincidentally, Maurice himself would later orchestrate a far more successful and less bloody conclusion to another siege of that strife-torn city).

In 1650 Old Königsmarck, who was actually of Brandenburg origin, was made a Swedish count and a field marshal. As further reward for his services during the war, he was appointed governor of the Principality of Werden, and the Duchy of Bremen, then under Swedish hegemony. He built a palace at Stade, near Hamburg, which became the family seat. This is where Marie Aurora and her siblings were born and raised. Old Königsmarck retired temporarily from "public service" with his reputation apparently none the worse for wear. Ironically, he then devoted a few years to the peaceful pursuit of the arts and other finer things of life before once more taking the field to fight for Sweden in the First Northern War (1655-60), during which he was captured and imprisoned for a few years. He died in 1663.

Marie-Aurora's father, Karl Christoph, his brother Otto Wilhelm, and both her brothers pursued military careers as soldiers of fortune. These Königsmarcks were noteworthy chiefly for the gallant manner in which they threw themselves at the foe with a sort of reckless desperation. In fact, we are not too far off the mark to regard these forebears of Maurice as a sort of incorrigible band of erratically gifted military loons. Perhaps a brief profile of the career of Otto Wilhelm, Marie-Aurora's uncle, will help give us a needed sense of the nature of the whole lot.

Otto was one of the family, gifted, though like his father, of tarnished reputation due to a rapacious appetite for spoils. He first took service in the French army of Louis XIV, fighting in the Dutch War (1672-78). He was commended by the great French commander Turenne for his services at the siege of Maastricht (1673), and later that year received a sword of honor from the king himself for gallantry at the battle of Senef, a victory won for France by the Great Condé.

After the war, Otto left the employ of Louis XIV and sought service with the Venetian army, which was busy fighting the Turks in the Mediterranean and Aegean. While commanding an army in Greece, his successful assault on Athens led to the near destruction of the Parthenon, which was bombarded by his artillery because it was allegedly serving as a Turkish arsenal.

Although Otto's apologists have made strenuous efforts to blame others for the deed, Otto usually gets the blame for this atrocity against art. He is also implicated in the wanton destruction of the temple of Pallas Athena, and especially for the theft of a giant sculpture of a lion that guarded the goddess's temple. The purloined lion guards the Arsenal of Venice to this day.

But in 1688 Otto's burgeoning career was cut short when he succumbed to disease while conducting the siege of Negroponte, and thus lovers of antiquities throughout the world wheezed a metaphorical sigh of relief. In fact, all the Königsmarck men except the old man died by the sword, or from disease while at war, and the line died out before Maurice was born.

Anyway, when Augustus the Strong laid eyes on Marie-Aurora, he had to have her, but with such relatives as described, it is hardly surprising that she put up a stout defense before finally succumbing to the charms of the stridently passionate Augustus. It took every trick in Augustus's seduction repertoire to achieve romantic victory. One of Maurice's biographers describes the final engagement of his campagne d'amour;

"At first she was lodged as a royal guest in the palace of Augustenburg; but when the Elector's infatuation for her began to infringe the bounds of modesty, she was installed instead in the distant Moritzberg, a famous hunting-lodge originally built by the great Elector Maurice in 1542 beside a lake among the mountains. Here she was fęted with a succession of masked balls and hunting parties, and was finally seduced during the course of a spectacular pageant in which the Elector impersonated the Grand Turk in the midst of his harem."

Moritz is German for Maurice. Thus, it appears one of the most famous bastards in European history was named after the place where his mother was seduced.

More Marshal Saxe

Introduction
Genes: Parents and Family
Early Days
War and Debt
Lessons Learned in Flanders
In Action Against the Swedes

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