Question: What was the royal title of the man whose German government backed the colonization of Poland by German settlers, one ofthe factors leading to the plight of rural Poland which was the focus of the novel The Outpost?

The Barossa Valley wine region is one of Australia's oldest wine regions.  Located in South Australia, the Barossa Valley is about 56 km (35 miles) northeast of the city of Adelaide.  Unlike most of Australia whose wine industry was heavily influenced by the British, the wine industry of the Barossa Valley was founded by German settlers fleeing persecution from the Prussian province of Silesia (in what is now Poland).  The hot continental climate of the region promoted the production of very ripe grapes that was the linchpin of the early Australian fortified wine industry.  As the modern Australian wine industry shifted towards red table wines (particularly those made by the prestigious Cabernet Sauvignon) in the mid-20th century, the Barossa Valley fell out of favor due to its reputation for being largely a Syrah from producers whose grapes were destined for blending.  During this period the name "Barossa Valley" rarely appeared on wine labels.  In the 1980s, the emergence of several boutique families specializing in old vine Shiraz wines began to capture international attention for the distinctive style of Barossa Shiraz, a full bodied red wine with rich chocolate and spice notes.  This led to a renaissance in the Barossa Valley which catapulted the region to the forefront of the Australian wine industry. <SEP> The Outpost (Polish title: "Placówka") was the first of four major novels by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus.  The author, writing in a Poland that had been partitioned a century earlier by Russia, Prussia and Austria, sought to bring attention to the plight of rural Poland, which had to contend with poverty, ignorance, neglect by the country's upper crust, and colonization by German settlers backed by Otto von Bismarck's German government. <SEP> The Act of 5th November of 1916 was a declaration of Emperors Wilhelm II of Germany and Franz Joseph of Austria.  This act promised the creation of the Kingdom of Poland out of territory of Congress Poland, envisioned by its authors as a puppet state controlled by the Central Powers.  The origin of that document was the dire need to draft new recruits from German-occupied Poland for the war with Russia.  Even though the act itself expressed very little in concrete terms, its declaration is regarded as one of main factors in the Polish efforts to regain independence.  Despite official statements, the German Empire really planned to annex up to 35,000 km² of prewar Congress Poland, with ethnic cleansing of between 2 and 3 million Poles and Jews out of these territories to make room for German settlers. <SEP>  In the 1860s, he engineered a series of wars that unified the German states, deliberately excluding Austria, into a powerful German Empire under Prussian leadership.  With that accomplished by 1871, he skillfully used balance of power diplomacy to maintain Germany's position in a Europe which, despite many disputes and war scares, remained at peace.  For historian Eric Hobsbawm, it was Bismarck who "remained undisputed world champion at the game of multilateral diplomatic chess for almost twenty years after 1871, [and] devoted himself exclusively, and successfully, to maintaining peace between the powers". Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg (1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898), known as Otto von Bismarck (] ), was a conservative Prussian statesman who dominated German and European affairs from the 1860s until 1890.  However, his annexation of Alsace-Lorraine gave new fuel to French nationalism and promoted Germanophobia in France.  This helped set the stage for the First World War.