Augustus was the second and youngest son of the Elector
Johann Georg III and
Anne Sophie of Denmark.
As the second son, Augustus had no expectation to inherited the Electorate since his older brother,
Johann Georg IV, assumed the post after the death of their father, on
12 September 1691.
In
Bayreuth on
20 January 1693, the then only prince Augustus married with
Christiane Eberhardine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. They had only one son:
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Frederick Augustus II (b. Dresden,
17 October 1696 - d. Dresden,
5 October 1763), succesor of his father as Elector of Saxony and King of Poland as Augustus III.
While he was in the Carnival of Venice, his older brother, the Elector Johann Georg IV, contracted smallpox from his death mistress Magdalene Sybille of Neidschutz. On
27 April 1694 Johann Georg died without legitimate issue and Augustus became
Elector of Saxony,
as Frederick Augustus I.
In order to be eligible for the throne of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Augustus had to convert to Roman-Catholicism. Given that the Saxon dukes traditionally had been called "champions of the
Reformation" and that the duchy was a stronghold of German Protestantism, Augustus's conversion was most spectacular. Subsequently the now Roman-Catholic electors of Saxony lost the prestigious leading role of the Protestant estates in the Imperial Diet (see
Reichstag) to
Brandenburg-Prussia. Although the prince-elector guaranteed Saxony's religious status quo he somewhat alienated his Protestant subjects with his embracing the Papacy, and because of the huge amount of money necessary to bribe Polish noblemen and clergy at the expense of the Saxon treasury, Augustus's royal ambitions were referred to as his "Polish adventure" by some contemporaries.
It is, however, noteworthy that the directorate of the
Corpus Evangelicorum, which was the official Imperial board of the Protestant estates and the counterpart of the
Corpus Catholicorum, remained with Saxony and thus, paradoxically, with the Roman-Catholic Augustus as its head. His church policy within the
Holy Roman Empire was orthodoxly Lutheran on behalf of his Saxon subjects (and apparently against his newly found religious and also absolutistic convictions), whereas the Protestant Princes of the Empire and the two remaining Protestant Electors (of Hanover and Prussia) were anxious to keep Saxony well-integrated in their camp. According to the
Peace of Augsburg Augustus theoretically had the right to re-introduce Roman-Catholicism (see
Cuius regio, eius religio) or at least give religious freedom to his fellow Catholics to the full extent, but it never happened. Saxony remained Lutheran altogether and the few Roman-Catholics were without any political or civil rights, and in 1717 it became clear how awkward the issue was: For his ambitious family-plans in Poland and Germany it was necessary that his heirs became Roman-Catholics, too. So, after five years as a convert in disguise, his son--the future Augustus III--publicly came out as a Roman-Catholic. The Saxon estates were outraged and revolting, because now it was certain that Roman-Catholicism wasn’t just an episode in Saxony of Augustus II.
His wife, the Electress Christiane Eberhardine, interestingly refused to follow her husband's example and remained a staunch Protestant. She didn't attend her husband's coronation in Poland and led a rather quiet life outside of Dresden. She gained some popularity for her stubbornness.
