 Berlin: During one of his trips to the Continent to gather archival materials and see to the publication of his Twenty-six Books of Commentary on Swedish Affairs from the Expedition of King Gustav Adolph into Germany up to the Abdication of [Queen] Christina (Gust. Ad. 1686a), Pufendorf entered into negotiations with the Great Elector, Frederick William of Brandenburg, who issued a formal invitation in 1686. This was doubly attractive at the time. For not only had Brandenburg replaced Sweden as the main defender of an increasingly beleaguered Protestantism, now squeezed between Austria and France, but Sweden’s internal affairs had taken a sharp turn to the right, toward monarchical absolutism and religious conservatism. In Berlin, by contrast, Frederick William’s long-standing toleration politics met Louis XIV’s recent revocation of the Edict of Nantes with the Edict of Potsdam (1685), which invited the fleeing Huguenots to his territories. Also in Stockholm, despite Pufendorf’s still close relations to Charles XI and Hedwig Eleonora, some of his main supporters at court had been dismissed, and his brother Esaias – whose pro-French stance was now out of favor – would soon leave Swedish service (1687) and be sentenced to death in absentia (1689). Among the last works written by Pufendorf in Sweden was a defense of Cartesianism (in the sense of independent philosophical inquiry) against the Swedish clergy, who had sought to ban it from the universities there (in KVS 1995e, pp. 432–47), and Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society (Habitu 1687), a treatise that condemned the French dragonades and argued for the separation of church and state as a means to religious toleration.