Joseph II could be seen as the Frederick of the Habsburg Monarchy. He took Frederick the Great as his model and pursued goals similar to Frederick's. Before Joseph began ruling in his own right, during his continual tours and incognito inspections, he had already noticed the abuses of landlords' control over peasants' labor. Ripe grain went unharvested because lords forced peasants into service, wasting a year of toil. And when the peasants tried to seek protection from the government, the landlords were often the local law enforcement officers.
But Frederick II's state was far smaller than the Holy Roman Empire, while Frederick, as a king, wielded far greater power than Joseph did as emperor. Moreover, the King of Prussia was Prussia's largest landowner, controlling one-third of the kingdom's arable land. When the Prussian king declared that he wished to treat the kingdom's peasants better, especially the pitiful tenant farmers and the already dying class of independent smallholders, the Prussian nobles all said that for more than a century, the king had led the oppression of peasants. If the king was willing to improve the lot of peasants on his own estates, then the nobles had no reason not to follow his example.
Even Frederick the Great had proceeded cautiously in dealing with the Silesian issue. Although major administrative reforms and restructuring had taken place in the region known as West Prussia, local elites had been retained in office as continuously as possible. After ascending the throne, Emperor Joseph could not wait to begin his reforms. During his ten-year reign, he issued six thousand decrees, an average of 1.6 a day. Only a small number of those decrees were successfully implemented. Most were shelved, while some provoked fierce resistance and widespread outrage.
The "Edict of Tolerance" was one of the few