Jacob Paul von Gundling

From 1690 to 1693, Gundling attended the Pforta county school in Naumburg, later studying law and history at the universities of Altdorf, Helmstedt and Jena as well as Halle.

King Frederick I of Prussia appointed him Professor of History and Law at the Berlin Knights' Academy in 1705, and as historian at the Chief Herald's Office in 1706.

[2] The king's dining room had had a sort of pulpit erected in it, from which Gundling, as royal newspaper reader, would expound on the topics in the news while the guests were eating.

Under the late King Frederick I, the Tobacco Cabinet had been a relaxed and informal social circle, including women, which ran on a convivial basis.

One night, in the middle of winter, when he was making his way home over the castle drawbridge, he was seized by four burly Grenadier Guards and dropped repeatedly onto the frozen moat below until his weight broke the ice, and he was ridiculed from above as he struggled in agony.

[8] In 1716 Gundling sought to escape his misery by fleeing to his brother Nicholas Jerome Gundlingius, professor and scholar in Halle, but he was brought back.

Incensed by what he was hearing, Gundling seized a silver pan filled with charcoal which was used for lighting pipes, and flung it at Fassman's face, singeing his eyebrows and lashes.

Court society correctly believed that the decision to marry was a move on Gundling's part to escape the constraints of his existence as the king's learned fool, or at least to establish a second, domestic aspect to his life in distinction to it, and therefore did everything possible to prevent the project.

The King entrusted him with a number of high state offices, appointed him to the position of President of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and on 25 September 1724 made him a baron.

Whenever Austrian affairs were being discussed, this man insinuated into the king's ear falsa principia; that he was worth winning by the present of a golden chain and a miniature of the Emperor.'

All are constrained by the fact that the main extant source of information about Gundling is a one-sided diatribe, published four years after his death, by his hated enemy Fassman.

By 1750 the Academy of Sciences was keen to distance themselves from their own inglorious history under the Soldier King, and stories about the arbitrary and vicious behaviour of their former President were not something they wished to preserve the memory of.

On one hand, liberal historians re-evaluated the time before the Enlightenment: Gundling's scholarly qualifications were highlighted and the barren intellectual climate during the lifetime of the soldier king bemoaned.

[18] On the other hand, in the last third of the 19th century, Prussian historians tried to finesse away a view of history in which an ancestor of the ruling Hohenzollerns was responsible for the scandalous treatment of science in general and of Gundling in particular.

[19] Up to the present day there continue to be attempts of many different sorts to do justice to Gundling, some of which concentrate almost exclusively on his vanity, his drunkenness and the resulting "fun" while others take a sharply differentiated, source-critical view, which brings his significant scientific achievements into consideration.