Prussia spanned 1527–1947. It was the leading state of the German Empire during Prussia’s tenure on this planet. The last capital of Prussia was Berlin.
[Frederick I of Prussia (1657-1713) is not to be confused with sundry other ‘Frederick I’ personages, including Frederick I (1122-1190), Holy Roman Emperor a.k.a. Frederick Barbarosa. Nor is he to be confused with Frederick I of Sweden, who had an overlapping lifetime (1676-1751) and political tenure.]
Frederick II, grandson of Frederick I of Prussia, was to be known as Frederick the Great (1740-1786). He wrote deprecatingly of his grandfather: “All in all, he was great in small matters, and small in great.”
During the eighteenth century Prussia itself became a great European power under the reign of Frederick the Great (Frederick II). During the nineteenth century, Otto von Bismarck (first a Prussian statesman, and then Chancellor of the Northern German Federation and then of the German Empire) pursued a policy of successfully uniting the German principalities and of astutely projecting German political power across Europe.