As we have seen, in the military chaos that followed the fall of Rome, the dukes were the most powerful military men on the scene. And there was a lot of competition among them for the spoils of Europe.
With a weak economy, the solution for creating large armies was a system of payments and obligations between superiors and subordinates. The man above promised to give lands (counties and duchies) and resources (serfs!) to the man below, in return for the man below providing management and protection to the serfs, and in return for providing soldiers when the man above needed to go to war. The man below was the vassal, the man above, his liege lord ("land lord.") This, in essence, was the Feudal system.
As groups of dukes banded together to to protect themselves from other bands of dukes or barbarian invaders, the need was felt to have one of their number speak for them all. So the dukes elected one of their number - usually the weakest - to be the nominal king of their group. Thus did the first kingdoms of Europe come into being.
And thus began the struggle of the kings to suppress their dukes and establish the primacy of their own power. In France, this process was successful and ended in the absolutism of the later French kings who ruled until the French revolution. The success of the Sun King of France resulted in much emulation in Continental Europe. In England, there were a number of detours, one of which was the Magna Charta. These detours ended with England becoming a constitutional monarchy, pretty much in opposition to the absolute sovereigns of the continent.
In the modern age, we tend to think of the old kings and queens as being exalted persons of great power and long linage. The Sun King, Louis XIV, Catherine the Great, Czarina of all the Russias. Etc. (but there are some amusing titles as well: Ethelred the Unready. English King, c. 968 – 23 April 1016. He lost a battle.)
But the history of Prussia, the new upstart kingdom created in the 1700's shows that these long-lived titles that evolved into great nations where all originally started by what can only be called entrepenuers. And entrepenuers of marriage in particular.
"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!" sayth the Bible (Isaiah 5:8) But that's exactly what these entrepenuers of marriage did.
They started out as minor nobility with set pieces of land and they intermarried until their descendents were handed down parcels of land big enough to be a duchy. (The Habsburg rulers of Austria in fact bragged about doing this. At one point their motto was "What others achieve by war, let you, happy Austria, achieve by marriage.")
With two duchy's, you could qualify for the title of king. Which is apparently what the first "King IN Prussia" managed to do. The first King IN Prussia not only had a first name, Frederick, but a last name, Hohenzollern. Think of it. The Kingdom of Prussia was started by a guy named Fred Hohenzollern because he got permission to call himself "King IN Prussia." [He settled for being a king IN Prussia instead of King OF Prussia so as not to alarm the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.]
Who's at the bottom of these other European kingdoms? Let's use a short hand of archetypes. Louie Bourbon? (France) Charlie Habsburg? (Austria), Gus Vasa (Sweden), Pete Romanov? (Russia). Could the whole of European history be envisioned as Fred Hohenzollern, Louie Bourbon, Charlie Habsburg, Gus Vasa, and Peter Romanov being put in a small, crowded backyard and commencing to have a great big poop-kicking party? I leave to you, my readers, to decide.
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