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company of his dogs and library at Sans Souci palace. Several times since 1700, the death of a European monarch had brought war as rivals scrambled for territory or advantage. Frederick himself, in the first year of his reign, had attacked Austria on such an occasion, and Jefferson presumed that his death (which finally occurred in August 1786 at the age of seventy-four) might force another violent realignment among the great powers. Europe’s other enlightened despots—Catherine the Great in Moscow, Joseph II in Vienna, Gustav III in Stockholm, and Carlos III in Madrid—as well as the constitutional monarch George III in London and the relative royal newcomer, Louis XVI at Versailles, were equally alert for news.
    Among these liberal autocrats and philosophe kings, none was more able or eminent (or was now more elderly) than the king who came to the throne of Prussia three years before Jefferson was born. Frederick the Great had transformed Prussia into a world power by his military genius, administrative talent, and political skill. Renowned as a patron of the arts, music, and education, a talented flautist and prolific writer, a longtime friend of Voltaire and an admirer of George Washington, Frederick II had opened his reign in 1740 with the publication of his
Antimachiavell
(in which he denounced statecraft in favor of peaceful and enlightened rule) and the invasion of Austria. By the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Frederick’s victorious armies in Europe (along with Britain’s great navy and its redcoats in North America) had entirely redrawn political boundaries on both sides of the North Atlantic. France had been forced to surrender Canada to England and Louisiana to Spain, while Prussia began to challenge the Austrian Habsburgs for domination of the German states on the Continent.
    Thousands of miles from home, surveying the geopolitical prospects of Europe and the Americas in his remarkable letter to Archibald Stuart, Jefferson’s gaze quickly focused on Madrid, where Carlos III, king of Spain since 1759, was seventy years old. The realpolitik of Frederick the Great was important for the future peace of Europe, but it was Carlos III who controlled New Orleans and the vast watershed of the Mississippi.
    Carlos Ill’s dominions sprawled from the Caribbean past California to the Philippines, north beyond the Missouri River, and south to the tip of Chile. On the map, the empire founded by his predecessors, the Castilian sponsors of Christopher Columbus, had never been larger. All of Mexico, Central America, and South America except the Guianas and Brazil answered to Spain. Of the major Caribbean islands, Spain held Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Trinidad. Of the territory that nowcomprises the United States, Spain ruled Florida, southern Alabama and Mississippi, and almost everything west of the Mississippi River and south of Canada.

    Spanish North America in 1794. Adapted from a plate in Robert Laurie and James Whittle’s
Imperial Sheet Atlas
(London, 1799), this map reflects Spain’s territorial ambitions on the eve of the Louisiana Purchase. Carlos III and his ministers regarded Louisiana as a borderland defensive buffer zone to keep foreigners away from the lucrative mines of Mexico, which produced half the annual revenue of the entire Spanish empire. An annual subsidy for the support of Louisiana was part of the operating budget of the province of New Spain, or Mexico.
(Courtesy Taqueria Corona, Magazine Street, New Orleans)
    The Spanish empire was impressive on the map, but by the late eighteenth century it was less solid on the ground or when viewed from the royal treasury. In the two centuries since the loss of the great armada of1588, Britain, France, and even the Netherlands had challenged Spain on the high seas, while France, Austria, and Prussia rivaled her influence on the Continent—but wounded beasts and ailing empires can be more dangerous than healthy ones.
    Jefferson was less