Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 as concerto grosso: the first, third and sixth of these concertos have however no concertino versus orchestra distinction. The concerto grosso was a Roman invention, typically featuring two violins and a cello as concertino, with a string orchestra of multiple string instruments per part. Venetian composers seemed slow in adopting the genre, and as Bach and his German contemporaries rather turned to Venetian music they may have been hardly aware of it. The fifth "Brandenburg Concerto" seems intended to be performed with one instrument per part, as to not overpower the harpsichord with its relatively restrained volume, and was not
Brandenburg-Prussia after the victory at Fehrbellin and the Brandenburg-Prussian advance in Swedish Pomerania during the Scanian War, Frederick William decided to establish a navy. He engaged Dutch merchant and shipowner Benjamin Raule as his advisor, who after a first personal meeting with Frederick William in 1675 settled in Brandenburg in 1676 and became the major figure of Brandenburg-Prussia's emerging naval and colonial enterprise. The Brandenburg-Prussian navy was established from ten ships which Frederick William leased from Raule, and achieved first successes in the war against Sweden supporting the siege of Stralsund and Stettin and the invasion of Rügen. In Pillau (now