Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (64 page)

Such was the genesis of the solution that was duly put into effect in 1525. The grand master resigned. The Order, together with any Knights who so chose, retired to its northern province of Courland-Livonia (see p.
270
), and the rest swore allegiance to the new Lutheran faith. Then, by prior agreement, Albrecht von Hohenzollern travelled to Kraków to proclaim his fealty to the king of Poland, and to receive Prussia in fief. According to the Treaty of Kraków, the ex-grand master became a duke, and his possessions a duchy.

The act of Prussian homage, which was staged in public on 10 April 1525 in Kraków’s great market square, did not belong to the historic scenes which the Hohenzollerns would later care to publicize, but it formed an essential element in the make-up of sixteenth-century Europe. As depicted by the Romantic painter Jan Matejko, it would become a favourite prop to Polish national pride. In the painting, Sigismund- August, King Sigismund I, sits grandly on his throne. Albrecht von Hohenzollern, bareheaded and dressed in full armour, kneels before him, holding the Prussian standard of the black eagle. A Prussian knight touches the hem of the standard in a gesture which was later said to have rendered the homage invalid.
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The series of ducal acts of homage to Poland was to continue with every change of duke or king: 1569, 1578, 1611, 1621, 1633, 1641… Europe would forget, but time was when the king of Poland was boss and the Hohenzollern was an underling.

The second stage of Duke Albrecht’s investment took place in Königsberg, where he arrived on 9 May 1525, seeking the formal approbation of the Prussian Estates:

The whole city welcomed [the duke] with the ringing of bells and the firing of cannon. The Confirmation Diet, assembled on 25 May, was attended by three Polish commissioners – the
wojewoda
of Marienburg, the Chamberlain of Pomerania, and the
starosta
of Bratian… The viceroy, Jerzy Polentz, feared opposition… Albrecht personally justified the need for the Treaty with Poland, blaming all previous misfortunes on the bad conduct of the Order.

On the 28th, Georg Kunheim stated the willingness of the Estates to accept the authority of the duke and of the royal commissioners… Only the City Council of Königsberg demurred, but it was won over by the efforts of Friedrich Heydeck. That same day, the Estates paid homage to the duke in front of the Castle steps; and on the 29th and 30th, they passed resolutions to give Albrecht a significant financial grant of 82,000 guilders…

On the 31st, during the last session, a nobleman calling himself ‘the Old Pilgrim’ cut out the [black] cross from the cloak of one of the Knights, Caspar Blumanau. With this gesture, the Teutonic Order ceased to exist in Prussia.
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Much scholarly comment about the events of 1525 is coloured by knowledge of subsequent developments. It assumes that Poland was bound to weaken, and that the Hohenzollerns were destined for greatness. No one at the time possessed such knowledge. The king of Poland was by far the stronger player. He had weighed the plan to create the duchy against an alternative of sending the Order to Ukraine to crusade against the Tartars. He would have been advised that the Order had lost much of its military potential, and chose the option of transforming the remnant of the
Ordensstaat
in the hope of creating a powerful and lasting Polish-Prussian unit. Success or failure depended on the evolution of Catholic–Protestant relations, on the uncertain fortunes of the Hohenzollerns and, above all, on the shifting balance of power. If the Kingdom of Poland were to remain dominant, the Duchy of Prussia would remain dependent. If Poland faltered, the duchy might try to cut loose.

Historical judgements on the Teutonic State differ widely. Heinrich von Treitschke, court historian at Berlin in the late nineteenth century, idolized it:

What thrills us… in the history of the
Ordensland
… is the profound doctrine of the supreme value of the state and of civic subordination to the purposes of the state, which the Teutonic Knights proclaimed [so] clearly… The full harshness of the Germans favoured the position of the Order amidst the heedless frivolity of the Slavs. Thus Prussia earns the name of the new Germany.
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Polish historians, whose views receive less publicity, find less to enthuse them.
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Treitschke’s ethnic comparisons, though typical for his age, presaged much worse to come. An exiled German historian who took refuge in Britain during the Second World War sought to balance the extremes by talking economics. ‘All in all,’ he wrote, ‘the image of the Teutonic Order as the agent of extermination is a cliché no longer tenable… The most lasting legacy of [their] state… was its economic system based on large-scale agricultural production.’
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To impartial ears, this opinion may sound like a faint-hearted attempt to avoid troublesome issues.

For the century following 1525, the Duchy of Prussia, the successor to the Teutonic
Ordensstaat
, remained a dependent fief of the Kingdom of Poland; it maintained its status in 1569 when, by the Union of Lublin, the kingdom joined the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the
Rzeczpospolita
or Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (see p.
272
). It was undoubtedly one of the jewels in the Polish Crown during Poland’s ‘Golden Age’ and, as such, is well known to students of Polish history. Yet in the annals of the Hohenzollerns it is often skipped over by those eager to reach the age of the ‘Great Elector’ and of Frederick the Great. In the later age of nationalism, Germans were disinclined to remember how Germany’s premier dynasty played a subservient role to the Jagiellons and their successors.
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It is entirely anachronistic, however, to regard Albrecht of Hohenzollern, duke of Prussia, as a defiant Germanic champion. To be exact, he was the son of Jagiellons on his maternal side, and hence half-Polish; and he kept in close contact with his Polish relatives: King Sigismund I was his uncle and Sigismund II August his cousin. Furthermore, since Albrecht’s conversion to Lutheranism had resulted in his excommunication by the papacy and banishment from the Empire, he naturally relied all the more on Poland as the duchy’s chief guarantor. When Prussian Lutheranism was rent by an internal schism involving the duke’s protégé, Andreas Osiander, for example, it was Sigismund-August who acted as mediator. The Polish king, who had to cope with Protestants among his own nobles, was no champion of the Counter-Reformation. He was to say that he wanted ‘no windows into men’s souls’; his tolerant attitude to religious differences certainly helped the first Lutheran state to take root.

Sixteenth-century Königsberg, known in Polish as Królewiec, blossomed into the capital city of this small state. It was the site both of an independent Protestant university – the Albertina (from 1544) – and of the ducal mint, which issued some fine coins bearing the inscription ‘JUSTUS Ex FIDE VIVIT’, ‘The Just Man Lives By Faith’. It was also the seat of the Prussian Estates, an assembly which acted as a brake on the duke’s arbitrary tendencies, and enjoyed the right of appeal to the Polish overlord. Like the burghers of neighbouring Danzig, many of the Prussian nobles greatly appreciated the liberties which the Polish connection afforded them.

Duke Albrecht’s reign in Prussia lasted more than forty years. It was severely disturbed in the 1520s by the Peasants War, which the duke suppressed with ferocity and which confirmed the continued existence of serfdom. From 1530, the duchy was drawn into the Wars of the Schmalkaldic League, fought against the German emperor to confirm the right of the Protestant states to self-determination, and ended by acceptance of the principle
cuius regio, eius religio
– the religion of a state’s ruler was the religion which was to prevail there. In the 1550s the duchy was disturbed by a storm in court politics provoked by the intrigues of a Croatian adventurer, Paul Skalić, and the duke participated somewhat fitfully in the campaign against Emperor Charles V. Yet his ambitions turned increasingly to his own dynastic matters. Since he was one of eight brothers, the duke had a superabundance of relatives. Thanks to his newfound Protestantism, the previously celibate grand master had been able to marry; and his marriage to Dorothea of Denmark produced another large brood of children. According to a proclamation of 1561, in addition to his Prussian dukedom, he claimed to be margrave of Brandenburg and of Stettin in Pomerania, duke of the Kashubians and Wends, burgrave of Nuremberg, and count of Rügen.
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Nonetheless, during the duke’s lifetime, religion raised a near-insurmountable barrier to any thoughts of uniting the two main Hohenzollern lines. The duke’s cousins, the Hohenzollern margrave-electors
*
of Brandenburg, were staunch Roman Catholics. Joachim I Nestor (r. 1491–1535) forced his sons, on pain of disinheritance, to swear eternal loyalty to the Catholic faith. Nevertheless, Joachim II Hector (r. 1535–71), though married to Jadwiga Jagiellonka, daughter of the Polish king, gradually embraced the growing Protestant faction in Berlin, and formally proclaimed Lutheranism as Brandenburg’s religion in 1555.
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Throughout the sixteenth century, in fact, Prussia’s connections with Poland stayed stronger than those with the Holy Roman Empire in Germany. Royal or West Prussia, joined to the Kingdom of Poland, was largely inhabited by Poles. Ducal or East Prussia, though mainly Lutheran and German-speaking, was a Polish fief and dependent on Poland’s goodwill.

The gradual rapprochement between the Hohenzollerns of Königsberg and the Hohenzollerns of Berlin did not start until after Duke Albrecht’s death. The principal cause lay in the protracted bouts of mental illness which afflicted the duke’s son and heir, Albrecht Friedrich (r. 1568–1618) throughout another very long reign. According to custom, a fief could be revoked in cases of heirlessness or incapacity, and the family was forced to take precautions. First, the Berlin Hohenzollerns persuaded the Polish king to sell them the legal rights to the duchy’s reversion. This meant that, if Albrecht Friedrich were to be incapacitated permanently, the Brandenburgers were entitled to act as if they were his legal heirs. Secondly, they appointed a Berliner as regent (effectively viceroy) in Prussia. Thirdly, in 1594, they married the duke’s daughter, Anna, to the margrave-elector’s son, Johann Sigismund (1572–1619). By that time, the Jagiellons had died out; the elective monarchy of Poland-Lithuania had been dragged by a Vasa king into the civil wars of Sweden, and its close supervision of Prussian affairs was slipping.

From the viewpoint of Hohenzollern dynastic planners, everything fell into place in 1618, though not without complications. Duke Albrecht Friedrich finally died on the eve of the Thirty Years War, and was succeeded without contest by his son-in-law, Johann Sigismund, thereby creating a personal union between Prussia and Brandenburg. But barely a year later Johann Sigismund died unexpectedly, and his twenty-four-year-old son, Georg Wilhelm (r. 1619–40), was not able to assume his legacy so smoothly. This time the court lawyers in Warsaw took a close interest, and insisted that procedures be followed. Margrave-Elector Georg Wilhelm was kept waiting two years before claiming his right of succession to the duchy.

The merger of the Hohenzollerns’ twin states can be viewed from different perspectives. From Berlin, no doubt – especially in later times – it was seen as a magnanimous gesture by the senior branch to graciously open the family firm to their country cousins. From Königsberg, in contrast, it looked more like a voluntary decision taken between equal partners. In the first phase of the Thirty Years War, both Brandenburg and the Empire to which it belonged were deeply traumatized. Prussia, in contrast, was enjoying an enviable position on the Baltic as the natural ‘halfway house’ between the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, on which it was constitutionally dependent, and the nearby Swedish Empire, which shared its Protestant and commercial interests. The decisive trials of strength still lay in the future. It was to stand aloof from the wars in Germany, and would be neutral in the Polish-Swedish conflict, when Gustavus Adolphus blazed his trail of glory and destruction across the Continent. At that time, Poland-Lithuania, unlike the Empire, was avoiding religious embroilments. Anyone peering into the future would have had grounds to suppose that Prussia’s destiny in the Polish-Swedish Vasa orbit was no less stable than Brandenburg’s precarious position in a divided and warring Germany.

The admission of the Brandenburgers into Prussia was not just a simple decision between monarchs. The king of Poland was not an absolute ruler, and in order to implement the agreement with Berlin over the fusion of the two Hohenzollern possessions, he was obliged to obtain the assent both of the commonwealth’s Diet and of the Prussian Estates. The procedures were cumbersome, and the negotiations tortuous. What might have looked to the court at Berlin as a foregone conclusion proved in Warsaw and Königsberg to be a protracted political cliffhanger.

The key session of the Estates of Ducal Prussia lasted from 11 March to 16 July 1621 in the thirty-fourth year of the reign of Sigismund III Vasa. It opened with a protest from the court in Berlin, which regarded the confirmation procedures in general, and the presence of the king of Poland’s commissioners in particular, as unwanted interference in the duchy’s internal affairs. Georg Wilhelm had imagined that he could be invested first and discuss conditions later, but the opposite applied. The king’s commissioners, led by the royal secretary, Stefan Zadowski, faced the Estates with four demands before he agreed to continue: an increase in the subsidy for the Turkish War, the building of a second Catholic Church in Königsberg, the appointment of a royal naval inspector at Pillau and the fortification of the port of Pillau against Swedish attack. A walk-out by the pro-Brandenburg faction had little effect, since they proved to be in a minority. So the session resumed with an agreement to discuss the list of
gravamina
or local ‘complaints’ alongside the king’s demands. Another wrangle concerned appointments to vacant offices. The would-be duke was informed in writing that he had no right to make appointments until he had performed the act of homage. In response, Berlin refused to recognize the speaker of the Diet, a royal candidate, and objected to the custom whereby the duchy’s officials swore dual oaths of allegiance both to the king and to the duke.
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