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.48
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.49
Polish historians, whose views receive less publicity, find less to enthuse them.50 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.’51 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.52
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.53
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 1555.54
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 p
ermanently, 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.55
The Brandenburg party eventually gained the upper hand, possibly by bribery; the royal commissioners suddenly announced the imminent handover of the duchy’s administration at the end of May. After that, the king concentrated on winning Georg Wilhelm’s co-operation in his dynastic feud with the Swedish Vasas.56 He never managed to insist on the reinstatement of the speaker, who had been physically ejected from Königsberg by guardsmen from Brandenburg. The game closed with the would-be duke’s candidature approved. Georg Wilhelm was received in Warsaw, where he was obliged to swear on oath that his sister’s marriage to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had been arranged without his knowledge. The act of homage was performed on 23 October. The dual state of Brandenburg-Prussia was finally under way.
From 1621 to 1657 the Duchy of Prussia was ruled from Berlin but as a distinctly separate element of the doubly dependent, dual state of Brandenburg-Prussia. Its continuing feudal link to Poland required some residual obligations, but in practice it meant little more than an understanding not to oppose the overlord’s interests in foreign policy. The reign of Margrave-Duke-Elector Georg Wilhelm was overshadowed by the Thirty Years War, from which he sought to stay aloof. In this he was successful with respect to Prussia, but unsuccessful with respect to Brandenburg. In 1631 he was drawn into the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus. His tiny army was unable to compete and large parts of his ancestral lands were ravaged. He retired exhausted to Königsberg six years later, and was succeeded by his only son, Friedrich Wilhelm (r. 1640–88), known to Berlin-biased history as ‘The Great Elector’, Der Grosser Kurfurst.57
The constitutional position of the Great Elector is worth elucidating. Later German history would always present him as a prince of the German Empire with subsidiary interests in the distant outpost of Prussia. The key to his policies, however, lay in the fact that he was bound by two loyalties, not one. As elector of Brandenburg, he was a dependant of the Habsburg-run Empire. But as duke of Prussia he was a dependant, and a formal vassal, of the Kingdom of Poland. Especially in the early years of his reign, it was far from clear which of the two allegiances would be the more important. He later became a past master of playing off one against the other, but prior to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, when the Thirty Years War finally ended, Poland attracted much of his loyalty. The court of Ladislas IV Vasa in Warsaw, where religious tolerance prevailed, could be reached in a day from Königsberg, at least on a winter sleigh ride, and the young Hohenzollern loved to go there. He spoke bad Polish fluently, and as a ‘prince of Poland’ was eager to participate in all the gatherings, rites and ceremonies. His own act of homage was performed on 6 October 1641 in the courtyard of Warsaw’s royal castle. This outlook would not be modified until the following decades, when Poland would be overtaken by calamities every bit as horrendous as those visited earlier on Germany.
The lessons which the young margrave-duke-elector learned from his father’s unhappy experiences were threefold. First, since he had forsaken Lutheranism for the Calvinism of his mother and his uncle Frederick, elector palatine, the ‘winter king’ of Bohemia, he cannot have failed to realize that Poland’s religious pluralism brought many benefits. Secondly, seeing Poland’s vulnerability despite its size, he decided that a large standing army was a sine qua non for self-protection. Thirdly, he calculated that the fiscal and commercial policies of smaller states would have to be unusually efficient if they were to support a viable military establishment. In short, he was encouraged to adopt the inimitable mixture of toleration, militarism and mercantilism for which the Hohenzollern state would become famous. In this, the margrave-duke-elector’s chief adviser was to be J. F. von Blumenthal (1609–57), sometime chief military commissar of the Empire, diplomat, administrator and financier.
The establishment of Brandenburg-Prussia encouraged the consolidation of a social class whose fortun
es would for ever be tied to the image of the Hohenzollern state. Landowning and military service had gone hand in hand throughout European history; but conditions to the east of the Elbe in the seventeenth century fostered a very special breed of noble families, whose rise has been extravagantly described as ‘the most important factor in German History’.58 The Junkers* benefited both from the availability of large expanses of uncultivated land, which enabled them to build up unusually extensive estates, typically of 5,000–7,000 acres, and from a dynamic state machine eager to employ them. As a result, they would acquire a near-monopoly on higher posts in the Hohenzollerns’ army and bureaucracy; and they cultivated a corporate ideology and ethos which has been defined as ‘the opposite of everything bourgeois’.59 Combining land improvement with soldiering, the typical Junker was a patriarchal Hausvater, a stickler for discipline, a political loyalist, a social conservative, an agrarian capitalist, a cultural philistine, a devotee of his honour, duty and masculinity, and the self-appointed master of his home locality. He had more in common with his brothers and neighbours, the Polish szlachta, than with counterparts in France or England. Several of the largest Junker families, like the Donhoffs of Friedrichstein, had close relatives, like the Denhoffs of Parnava, who lived and served in Poland and Lithuania.60 But one should take care not to run ahead too fast. ‘In early modern times,’ writes a specialist, ‘the Junkers were interested above all in farming; their military inclinations date from the eighteenth century.’61
In 1648 the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was struck by an explosion of chaos similar to that which had hit Germany in 1618. It was brought low in the first instance by a long-running and destructive rebellion of the Ukrainian Cossacks. But then the Muscovite armies invaded, followed in close order by those of Charles X of Sweden, who launched simultaneous attacks from both north and west. These were the years of the Swedish ‘Flood’, the Potop. Pillage, rapine, plague and hunger ensued. A quarter of the population died. The royal government virtually collapsed. The king, Jan Kasimierz Vasa, fled his kingdom (see p. 281).62 In the midst of the anarchy, the duke of Prussia attempted to stay neutral. But in 1656, when another Swedish army landed in Danzig, Brandenburg-Prussia could either join the invader or risk being invaded. Moreover, the Swedish campaign was dressed up as a Protestant crusade, to which the Protestant Prussians were expected to adhere. Also, since Charles X Vasa was posing as the rightful king of Poland, he could reward the Hohenzollern duke by releasing him from his feudal dues. Friedrich Wilhelm made his choice, and in late July the Prussians entered Warsaw in triumph with the Swedes. Charles X then declared that the Duchy of Prussia was sovereign and independent.
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