Beginnings
In the Middle Ages the site was outside the city walls on the road to Spandau and contained a manor farmstead of the prince-elector of Brandenburg. The entire area was devastated in the Thirty Years’ War.
In 1649 Frederick William I, Elector of Brandenburg, popularly known as the Great Elector (Der Große Kurfürst) for his military and political skills, ordered the property to be recultivated and presented it to his first consort, Louise Henriette of the House of Orange-Nassau. With great dedication she established there an exemplary rural estate including crops and dairy farming following the Dutch model. The first potatoes in the Margraviate of Brandenburg were grown there as an ornamental plant and curiosity. After Henriette’s death in 1667 the property went to the elector’s second wife, Sophia Dorothea of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. She added a garden with a small summer house, the nucleus of the future palace and grounds. Frederick I, who became Elector of Brandenburg on the death of his father in 1688 and King in Prussia in 1701, decided to expand the estate. Count von Wartenberg, his chief minister and favorite, was the developer of a “pleasure house”, a small palace of just 400 square meters, erected by the royal architect Eosander von Göthe between 1703 and 1706 in a late Baroque style. Friedrich I presented it to Countess Wartenberg, his mistress.
Read more about this topic: Monbijou Palace
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)