Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  The Germanization of the conquered province, therefore, was a very long process. Though the Knights and the majority of colonists were German-speaking, the official language of the Church and of administration was Latin. What is more, once the Old Prussian population was baptized, the campaign to eradicate their culture waned. Many Old Prussian place names and river names (Tawe, Tawelle, Tawelninken) and even personal names survived, as did small rural pockets of native speakers. As things worked out, the Ordensstaat disappeared before the Old Prussian language did.

  No sooner had the Ordensstaat been established than it ran into open conflict with its neighbouring Polish duchies. The Knights had never shown much respect for their neighbours, and for most of the thirteenth century, when the fragmented Kingdom of Poland was unable to stand up for itself, they probably imagined that they could exploit their military advantage unopposed. In the long run, however, they were awakening a powerful rival who would eventually bring them low.39 The Poles always felt cheated by the way that their Teutonic ‘guests’ had ‘abused their hospitality’; but so long as the Order confined itself to battling the pagans they were not unduly concerned. Yet the Order’s threat to the lower Vistula valley commanding Poland’s access to the sea could not be ignored. The Polish–Teutonic contest over this crucial territory would last for nearly 200 years.

  Ever since the Goths had moved away from the lower Vistula in the early part of the first millennium AD, the area had been systematically settled by Slavic tribes. Together with the port of Gdańsk, the area had formed part of the Polish realm for centuries, and was the funnel through which Poland’s contacts with the sea had to pass. It was now coming under double pressure – from the creeping growth of Brandenburg along the coast to the west, and from the Teutonic State to the east.

  Brandenburg, it should be stressed, had no earlier connection with Prussia. Based on an infertile and unpromising piece of territory beyond the River Oder, in the Empire’s Nordmark or ‘North March’, it was originally inhabited by Slavs, who knew it as Brennibor. It was not yet an electorate of the Empire, and was still to fall into the grasp of the Hohenzollern family. It was ruled by the House of Ascania, heirs of Albert the Bear (c. 1100–70), first margrave of Brandenburg and the founder of Berlin. A century after Margrave Albert’s death, the Brandenburgers had crossed the Oder and were entrenched on its eastern bank in their so-called Neumark or ‘New March’. Two hundred miles and more of Poland and of Polish-controlled Pomerania separated them from the nearest holdings of the Teutonic Order.40

  The Poles were either too divided, or too slow, to avert the danger. Their capital lay far over the horizon in Kraków, and their rulers had grown careless of northern interests. In the decade starting in 1300 the Polish throne fell temporarily to the Bohemian Premyslid dynasty, which also ruled Hungary, and which cared nothing for Baltic affairs. The key moment arrived in 1308–9, when a party of magnates in eastern Pomerania, seeing the distractions of their nominal Polish overlords, transferred their allegiance to the Brandenburgers. Then, in a repetition of Conrad duke of Mazovia’s fatal blunder eighty years before, a pro-Polish party in Pomerania called on the Teutonic Knights to help them retain Gdańsk. The Knights rode in, and kept Gdańsk for themselves. According to one report, to ease the introduction of submissive German colonists, they massacred the entire population of the city. Within a short time they had annexed the entire lower Vistula, and the Polish court was left appealing in vain to a papal tribunal. The Knights had turned from fighting pagans to fighting fellow Catholics.

  In the fourteenth century the territorial possessions of the Ordensstaat reached their maximum extent. Courland and Livonia had been merged. The last native rebellions had been suppressed, the rural economy thrived, and several cities – Danzig (Gdańsk), Marienburg, Elbing and Königsberg – joined the international trading network of the Hanseatic League. Fine churches were built, like the Marienkirche in Danzig or the cathedral at Frauenburg; monasteries were planted in the countryside; church schools trained an educated class. Crusading continued beyond Prussia, settling down into a routine of seasonal campaigns in Lithuania, where many a foreign knight won his spurs. The Knights had created a disciplined, purposeful and prosperous medieval state, and the fame of Preussen spread far and wide. Chaucer’s Knight from the Canterbury Tales had been there:

  A knight ther was and that a worthy man

  That fro the tyme that he first bigan

  To ryden out, he loved chivalrye

  Trouthe and honour, fredom and curtesie.

  …

  At Alisaundre he was, when it was wonne;

  Ful oft tyme he hadde the bord bigonne

  Aboven all naciouns in Pruce:

  In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce.41

  So, too, in his youth, had the English king, Henry IV.42

  The Order’s wars with Poland are too extensive, and perhaps too tedious, to recount in detail. There were endless skirmishes and numerous lengthy conflicts. As time wore on, however, the Poles gradually strengthened their position. In 1320 the Kingdom of Poland was reunited. In 1333–70, under Casimir the Great, it rationalized its holdings by incorporating Red Ruthenia and voluntarily ceding Silesia to the Holy Roman Empire. In 1385, at the Union of Kreva, it established a personal union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, thereby creating the largest state on the European map (see pp. 254–5 above). The threat posed by the Teutonic Order lay at the root of the Poland-Lithuania Union. Henceforth, the Jagiellonian dynasty consciously set out to dig the Order’s grave.

  The Battle of Grunwald, which was fought on open ground near the town of Allenstein (Olsztyn) on 15 July 1410, saw the Teutonic Knights humbled. In later times, it would be presented as a decisive clash of arms between ‘Teuton’ and ‘Slav’. In reality, its significance was regional, not racial, but it certainly marked the watershed of the Order’s military power. The victor, Władysław Jagiełło, king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, captured the Teutonic camp, where he found a score of wagons loaded with iron shackles prepared for the intended prisoners, now turned victors. Resplendent in silver armour on the crest of a hillock, he received the standard of the bishop of Prussian Pomerania, and sent it to Kraków as a trophy. With it he dispatched a letter to his queen:

  Most serene, excellent Princess, dearest Spouse! On Tuesday, the Feast of the Apostles, the grand master with all his power drew close, and demanded that battle be joined… After we had watched each other for a time, the grand master sent two swords over to us with this message: ‘Know you, King and Witold, that this very hour we shall do battle with you. For this, we send you these swords for your assistance.’… At which, with the troops standing in full order, we advanced to the fray without delay. Among the numberless dead, we ourselves had few losses… We cut down the Master, and the Marshal, SCHWARTSBURG, and many of the Komturs, forcing many others to flee… The pursuit continued for two miles. Many were drowned in the lakes and rivers, and many killed, so that very few escaped.

  Before Grunwald, the Knights could think of themselves as all but invincible. After Grunwald, they were thrown onto the defensive.

  The battle may equally be seen as a confrontation between two opposing strains of Christianity. The Teutonic Knights belonged to the brutal, supremacist crusading tradition of Western Europe, built on the assumption that infidels and ‘other-believers’ were for extirpating. The Jagiellons, in contrast, whose realms contained a great plurality of religious belief, deplored both the crusading tradition and the theory of papal supremacy behind which the Knights concealed their rapacity. On the eve of Grunwald, the Polish contingents intoned their ‘Hymn to the Virgin’, the Bogurodzica, thereby underlining their conviction that the Knights’ own cult of the Virgin Mary was false. They were joined in the fray by ranks of Orthodox Ruthenians and by Muslim Tartar cavalry. This was the era which witnessed the beginnings of the conciliar movement, which sought to subordinate the papacy to the decisions of Church Councils. One of the members of the
Polish-Lithuanian delegation to the Council of Constance, Paulus Vladimiri (Paweł Włodkowic, c. 1385–1435), rector of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, led the intellectual assault on the Teutonic Order’s pretensions. His Tractatus de potestate papae et imperatoris respectu infidelium, a ‘Treatise on the power of the pope and the emperor with regard to non-believers’, did not immediately win universal support. But it sowed the first seeds of serious doubt concerning the validity of the Order’s mission.43

  The first cracks in the Ordensstaat’s fabric appeared in the mid-fifteenth century. To bolster their flagging military machine, the Knights mercilessly raised taxes to the point at which their commercial cities sought to escape. The Prussian League, first formed with like-minded municipalities in 1440 by the city fathers of Danzig, appealed to the Polish king for protection. An act of incorporation issued by King Casimir Jagiellończyk in 1456 provided the immediate cause of the third, thirteen-year Polish-Teutonic War. The outcome, following another Polish victory, was exactly what the Order had sought to prevent. The Treaty of Thorn (1466) divided the Ordensstaat into two. The western part, henceforth known as Royal Prussia, and which included Danzig, was returned to the Kingdom of Poland after a gap of 157 years. The eastern part, centred on Königsberg, remained in Teutonic hands as a Polish fief. The Order lost more than half of its human and economic resources. Königsberg became its fourth capital.

  The division of the Ordensstaat in 1466 created distinctions that lasted until the Second World War. Despite a complicated political history, and repeated changes of nomenclature, the western section (Royal Prussia/Polish Prussia /Westpreussen, and, in large part, and using Nazi terminology, the ‘Polish Corridor’) was never again fully merged with the eastern section (East Prussia/Ducal Prussia/Prussian Prussia/Ostpreussen). In the eyes of those who admire the Ordensstaat and regret its misfortunes, the Treaty of Thorn has been described as the start of the ‘partitions of Prussia’.44

  The history of Royal Prussia, which fell into the Polish orbit, is little known to those who approach the Prussian story from an exclusively German perspective. (The subject was actively suppressed by bans and book-burnings when the Hohenzollerns eventually took over.) Yet for 300 years this ‘Other Prussia’ flourished, not only as a separate institutional entity, but as the source of a separate political ideology and culture, based on concepts of freedom and liberty. Though the population was ethically mixed, Polish and German – with a strong German predominance in the cities – the corporate identity and fierce local patriotism of Royal Prussia digressed markedly from the values with which the name of ‘Prussia’ is usually associated.45

  Royal Prussia’s territory consisted of the valley of the lower Vistula from the river’s ‘elbow’ near Thorn to the Baltic coast, plus the protruding province of Varmia. Its three major centres were Danzig (Gdańsk), Elbing (Elbla˛g) and Thorn (Toruń), together with a constellation of lesser towns. These prosperous urban communities provided the motor both for commercial dynamism and for startlingly original cultural developments.

  The government of Royal Prussia was based on the municipal liberties granted to the towns, and on the provincial Diet, which provided a forum for a politically active nobility. Following the statute of Nihil Novi (see p. 271, above), courts and provincial assemblies developed in the wider Kingdom of Poland too. When the constitutional Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was created in 1569, Royal Prussia was formally incorporated. From then until the First Partition of Poland of 1773, it was divided into the palatinates of Pomerania (Danzig), Kulm and Marienburg, and the autonomous diocese of Varmia. Deputies were sent to the central Diet in Warsaw and to royal elections, while sejmiki or district noble assemblies functioned in each palatinate.

  The high degree of self-government enjoyed by Royal Prussia’s burghers and nobles fostered a high degree of originality in the realms of history-writing and myth-making. Simon Grunau’s Preussische Chronik, produced in fifteenth-century Elbing, was fundamentally hostile to the record of the Teutonic Knights. The scholar Erasmus Stella (d. 1521) explored the origins of Prussia, presenting the ancient Prusai as a ‘people born to freedom’, and publicizing the legend of ‘Mother Borussia’ and her many sons. In due course, both the Gothic Myth and the Sarmatian Myth* were adapted to reinforce the idea that ‘the Prussians will not suffer a lord amongst them’. The Sarmatian strand in this ideology invented a common oriental origin for Prussians, Poles and Lithuanians, so that the authors’ contemporary attachment to the right of resistance could be shown to have ancient roots. It was an effective barrier to absolutist ideas coming from the West, and a fertile seed-bed for the ‘Royal Prussian Enlightenment’ centred in the eighteenth century around the figure of Gottfried Lengnich (1689–1774).46

  All in all, Royal Prussia generated a strong sense of ‘pre-modern identity’ that stands apart from ethnic nationalism, but was firmly grounded in the experience of a long-lasting political community. This identity, which saw Poland as protector and its easterly neighbour, the growing Hohenzollern state, as a menace, inspired heart-warming loyalty in successive wars, and exercised a significant influence on oppositional circles in adjacent Königsberg. It would persist until the eventual arrival of the army and officialdom of Frederick II of Prussia in 1773, after which it was suppressed by force.

  In the fifty or sixty years following the Treaty of Thorn, the Teutonic Knights gradually lost their raison d’être. They had no more pagans to convert, and the twin stars of their ideological firmament, the Empire and the papacy, were both in disgraceful disarray. Their former subjects in Royal Prussia had won impressive liberties, and were now surging ahead in prosperity. After losing their edge in the latest armed conflicts with Poland, many of the Knights in Teutonic Prussia could have seen little hope in a future of endlessly lost battles. Their state was ripe for a revolution that none saw coming.

  The Knights had a further problem. The Treaty of Thorn required their grand masters to pay homage to the Polish king. The act of homage was normal feudal practice, and since the Order’s lands lay outside the Empire, it was not an issue on which the Empire could intervene. Even so, it grated. Later German commentaries would invariably call it ‘humiliating’. Each subsequent homage strengthened the feeling among the Knights that arrangements had to change, and after 1493 the Knights tried to withdraw their Polish allegiance. Moreover, two grand masters enjoyed strong political connections in Germany. Friedrich von Sachsen (r. 1497–1510) was a prince of Saxony. His successor, Albrecht von Hohenzollern (r. 1510–25), was a scion of the dynasty that had taken over the imperial Electorate of Brandenburg.

  It was in 1517 that Martin Luther (probably) nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. Even he could not have guessed that the Teutonic Knights, long famed for their militant Catholicism, would prove to be one of his most receptive audiences. Within a couple of years, however, Grand Master von Hohenzollern had been won over to the need for radical measures to reform the Church. After consultations with Martin Luther in person, he determined to transform the Catholic Ordensstaat into a confessional state devoted to what would soon be called Protestantism. This meant that the grand master would have to resign from his office and assume a secular title, that the Order would have to be disbanded or dismissed, and that individual Knights would have to choose between joining the new state or leaving. Most crucially, approval would have to be obtained from Poland-Lithuania. If it was not, the chances were that the Order’s part of Prussia would simply be annexed, or that the Knights would be sent by their feudal superior on military service against his enemies elsewhere (Poland-Lithuania was sorely troubled at the time by marauding Tartar hordes: see p. 260).

  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.47 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: