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CHAPTER XX. THE
ORIGINS OF THE KINGDOM OF PRUSSIA.
Although the complexity of the phenomena of modem history
is such as to baffle any attempt to render them subservient to preconceived
conclusions, yet it must be allowed that the theory of so-called historic
missions has been very plausibly exemplified from the growth of the
Brandenburg-Prussian polity. Not many European dynasties have furthered the
interests of their dominions so steadily as the Hohenzollerns, both before and
since they declared themselves the servants of the State; and few populations
with whose history we can daim to be fairly well acquainted have been found
more consistently ready to cany out the designs of their rulers than the
inhabitants of the lands out of which has grown the most powerful monarchy of
the present age. The subjects of the Electors of Brandenburg were, in the words
of Lord Acton, “conscious that Nature had not favoured them excessively, and that
they could prosper only by the action of their Government”; and, he might have
added, the discipline to which they submitted with so exceptional a readiness
was rendered easier to them after they had become possessed of a trained
intelligence which at times enabled them to anticipate the action of their
rulers. Yet it would be futile to ascribe to the insight or to the energy of
either the Hohenzollems or their subjects a controlling share in the shaping of
their historic achievements. Rare as are the instances of States or dynasties
that have accomplished more for themselves than Prussia and the Hohenzollems,
they have been conspicuously, and to all intents and purposes avowedly, the
heirs of time and the beneficiaries of circumstance. But time and circumstance
only rarely found the Brandenburg-Prussian State, as they had not often found
either of its chief component parts, unprepared for the action demanded by
them. In earlier days the necessity of expansion had been almost identical with
that of self-preservation; in later times the traditions had definitely formed
themselves, in accordance with which the ship of State, as if obeying laws that
had become part of her being, continued her onward course.
The history
of the Prussian monarchy cannot be surveyed as that of any particular tribe
which in the end consolidated itself, together with
I. A very few
pages must suffice, at a point so advanced as that which the course of this History has reached, to recall the most noteworthy stages in the growth and
development of the two chief factors of the Brandenburg-Prussian State, before
the time of their union in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The
Mark Brandenburg was the foundation of the great Saxon Duke who, as King Henry
I, was the first to give to Germany so much of cohesion as could result from
the general recognition of a vigorously asserted royal supremacy. But his more
notable service to the German “name” was his actual assertion of his power
from the Elbe towards the Oder. This implied, in the first instance, the subjugation
of the Wends, who, seated in these regions from perhaps so early a date as the
beginning of the sixth century, absorbed the remnants of the Germanic
populations which held the country at the beginning of the Christian era. By
the end of the ninth century—the birth-time of the national kingdoms of Western
Europe—all the land to the east of the Elbe, besides not a little of it to the
west, had come to be inhabited by Slavs; and it was as a bulwark against the
great Slav inundation, which he had striven to drive back from the borders of
his realm, that King Henry established (or reestablished on the lines of
Charles the Great) the Northern Mark of the Saxons. Henry’s son, Otto the
Great, developed the margravate system in his habitual grand style; and, while
the Saxon Dukes themselves guarded the lower Elbe, the Counts of the Northern
Mark steadily extended their authority eastwards from Brandenburg (Brennibor),
a fastness which already Henry I had wrested from the Wends, over the marsh
Notwithstanding
the episcopal sees set up by Otto I in the halfsubdued Wendic lands (Havelberg
in 946; Brandenburg in 949; Lebus cannot be traced with certainty further back
than the early part of the twelfth century), and in spite of the advance of the
Christianised kingdom of Poland, the struggle was maintained by the Wends and
Paganism for the better part of two centuries. In accordance with the physical
features of the country, the contest had little of grandeur about it, and no
great missionary efforts imparted to it a heroic character. After the great
insurrection of 983, the conquered lands between Elbe and Oder long remained lost
to Germany and Christendom, while the fortress of Brandenburg repeatedly
changed its masters. Thus things went on, till, in 1133, the Emperor Lothar
conferred the vacant countship of the Saxon North Mark upon the man who was to
become the real founder of the power of Brandenburg. Albert the Bear, of the
House of Ballenstadt, which called itself the Ascanian, from the old castle
(Aschersleben) where he set up his judicial tribunal, and which was afterwards
known as the House of Anhalt, failed in his attempt to oust the Guelf Henry the
Proud (the father of Henry the Lion) from the Saxon duchy. But in the end he
succeeded in recovering his Northern Mark, now first called the margravate of
Brandenburg from the definitive seizure of that fortress, and extending
eastward several miles beyond the site of Berlin. Thus Albert the Bear
illustrated the value of the ancient adage that the half is often greater than
the whole; for the foundations of dominion laid by him proved more solid and
enduring than the vast structure raised by Henry the Lion. Now that the Mark
Brandenburg protected the Empire against both Scandinavian pressure in the
north and Polish in the north-east, its guardianship of the frontier and
furtherance of the Christian mission on each side of it had been changed into a
settled territorial dominion. The changes of nomenclature which accompanied
its growth need not detain us here. Unlike
In the work
of Germanisation the Margraves were greatly aided by the efforts of the
Christian Church, and in particular of the Praemonstratensian and still more
of the Cistercian Orders. The Wends were not annihilated; they were pushed
aside into their villages, or absorbed by their conquerors, without being able
to impregnate the language, manners, religion, or legends and traditions of the
latter with any distinctive elements of their own. While the mass of the
Wendic population, without being admitted by intermarriage into the
communities of the towns, had thus to choose between serfdom and expatriation,
all rebellion being rigorously repressed, the Slav nobles in the Mark were
accorded an equality of rights with their German neighbours, on whom a large
proportion of the land had as a matter of course been bestowed. Free
intermarriage ensued; an accord of sentiment and opinion (there being no longer
any religious barrier in the way) was gradually produced; and thus the upper or
ruling classes peacefully amalgamated, some Slavonic family names being
preserved among the landed gentry, while no analogous process was so much as
attempted in the case of the lower orders. In this social sphere immigration,
to which probably no ancient or modern State has been more largely indebted
than the Brandenburg-Prussian in the successive stages of its progress, was
welcomed by a country broken up by invasion and depopulated by revolt; but in
these early times, as afterwards, it took place in small numbers or bodies, so
that the authority of the Government was not impaired but strengthened by it.
The Flemish, Dutch, Westphalian, and Franconian settlers, dependent as they
were upon the hand of authority for the protection of their holdings, and for
the security of the franchises granted to them in an environment of serfs, were
steadily loyal to the Margraves. These considerations account on the one hand
for the early growth of an arrogant and self-reliant Junkertum, a squirearchy
rather than an aristocracy—for the subdivision of the Mark prevented the
growing up of States General, or any other kind of comprehensive representative
body capable of much beyond petty interference with expenditure— which only a
strong hand could force into submission to the authority of the State. And, on
the other hand, they explain how there grew up, as the best support of that
authority, an industrious burgher class, whose intelligence was quickened by
the perpetual struggle with the difficulties
The
comparative remoteness of the dominions which had grown out of the Northern
Mark allowed its rulers to pursue their own dynastic interests without seeking
to take part in the European conflicts of the Hohenstaufen age. Nevertheless,
the outlook of the Brandenburgers was always wide. The investment, at so early
a date as 1186, of Margrave Otto II by the Emperor Frederick II with Pomerania
created claims leading to an endless series of feuds, raids and disputes which,
as has been seen in a previous volume, were not ended even by the Succession
Treaty of 1529; and the complete union of Pomerania and Brandenburg was only
established by the Vienna Treaties of 1815. Although, when in 1196 Margrave
Otto II and his brother Albert II for ulterior purposes of their own commended
all their possessions to the Archbishop of Magdeburg, this did not imply any
diminution of their political power, their successors came to judge differently
of the relation of dependence thus established, and it was ended in 1449 by the
Hohenzollem Elector Frederick II.
Early in the
thirteenth century the collapse of the Danish King Waldemar the Victorious at
Bomhoved (1226) had led to the acquisition by the Margraves of the Spree
district, in which the foundations of Berlin seem about this time to have been
laid, and of the Ukermark. Their older possessions were about the same time
multiplying their centres of civil and ecclesiastical life; it is from this
period that, among other foundations, dates that of Lehnin, whose prominent
position in the history of the Mark afterwards gave rise to a celebrated forged
prophecy (the Vaticinium Lehninense) as to the interdependence of their
destinies.
Conformably
to the uncontrollable practice of German dynasties, immediate or mediate, partitions
went on without ceasing in the House of Brandenburg, but with the prevailing
characteristic that they were usually amicable, and always treated as revocable
in the common interest of a clear-sighted dynasty. Early in the fourteenth
century the power of the House had, in the person of its all but single male
representative, Waldemar the Great, reached an unprecedented height, and,
largely by means of a good understanding with the Church, extended from Danzig
to Dresden.
But the death
of the great Waldemar (1319) was followed by a period of trouble, in which the
neighbours of Brandenburg fell upon the land to seize what they could of it.
The victorious Emperor Lewis the Bavarian invested his son Lewis, a child eight
years of age, with Brandenburg, together with Lusatia and other dependencies.
For nearly half a century (1324-73) the Mark was nominally subject to the House
of
For more than
a generation Brandenburg was subject to a Government which had been imposed
upon it by methods as unscrupulous as those of Ferdinand of Aragon or of Louis
XIV, but which gave to the province a fair share in the order and prosperity
prevailing in the kingdom of Bohemia. The neighbours were pacified; and at home
the insolence of some of the nobles was curbed, while at the same time the
privileges of their order and of the towns were extended. Unfortunately, after
the death of Charles IV (1378) the excellent intentions of his second son
Sigismund, who succeeded in Brandenburg, were frustrated by his ambition; and,
though in 1382 he ascended the Hungarian throne, he aimed at the succession
both in Bohemia and to the Imperial Crown. In Brandenburg, under his lieutenants,
the old dangers revived on the north-western frontier, and the old turbulence
within. Being always in want of money, he in 1385 mortgaged the Old Mark to his
kinsmen, Margraves Jodocus and Procopius of Moravia, in spite of the opposition
of the Estates of the land, both spiritual and temporal; and three years later
he threw into the mortgage his electoral dignity and the entire margravate with
the exception of the New Mark, which, having been bequeathed to his younger
brother John by their father, could not be alienated till John’s death in 1402,
when it was mortgaged to the German Order. Margrave Jodocus, although in time
he became legal
With the
investment of Frederick of Hohenzollern, Burgrave of Nürnberg, with the
margravate of Brandenburg (he was appointed vicar and captain-general of it in 1411,
made his first appearance there in 1412, practically settled matters with the
Quitzows in 1416, and was finally invested in April, 1417), a new chapter
begins in the histoiy of the land.
Burgrave
Frederick VI of Nürnberg, now Elector Frederick I of Brandenburg, was a
descendant of the Alemannic Counts of Zollem, who are mentioned as early as the
tenth century, and who soon afterwards had reached a prominent position among
the magnates of Swabia. Early in the thirteenth century (1210), Count Frederick
of Hohenzollern is proved by documentary evidence to have been Burgrave of
Nümberg; from his second son and namesake sprang the Swabian Hohenzollems,
whose rights as territorial Princes were resigned by them into the hands of
their Prussian kinsmen more than six centuries afterwards (1849); to his eldest
son Conrad II passed the newly acquired Franconian dominions. These latter
would by partitions and donations to the Church have been reduced to almost
nothing, but for the marriage of Burgrave Frederick III to the heiress of
Meran, whose possessions included Baireuth and probably Culmbach. He was the
right hand of Rudolf of Habsburg; and it should be added that the burgravate
itself, as involving the guardianship of a large body of Imperial domains, was an
important trust, by their loyal fulfilment of which the Franconian Hohenzollerns
endeared themselves to the Habsburg Emperors, and no doubt greatly contributed
to their own advancement. In 1420 Baireuth and Ansbach were once more united in
the hands of Burgrave Frederick VI, the founder of the power of the House of
Brandenburg.
Frederick I,
a soldier and a scholar, and gifted, as it would seem, with the supreme
political faculty of distinguishing between things essential and non-essential,
and suiting his action to this perception, knew how to bide his time. The
services which he had rendered to Sigismund both in the field and in finally
securing his election as Roman King sufficiently account for his being in
flagramti Caesaris gratia, and for the transfer to him of the Electoral Mark
Brandenburg on easy and practically (though perhaps not technically) permanent
terms. Frederick’s undertaking to renounce the fief,, should he ever attain to
the dignity of Roman King, at all events proves Sigismund’s estimate of the
importance of his friend in the affairs of the Empire.
But although
Frederick, with the cooperation of the Archbishop of Magdeburg, with the aid of
his own new artillery, and by judicious concessions to the main body of the
Brandenburg nobles, pacified the Mark, his services to Emperor and Empire
failed to secure a continuance of confidence between them. Frederick, although
Brandenburg had suffered terribly from the Hussites, supported the policy of
making terms with them; on the other hand, his design of becoming possessed of
the Saxon in addition to the Brandenburg electorate, could not commend itself
to the House of Austria. Still, the old feeling of loyalty, united no doubt to
the sense of inadequate power, ranged him on the side of those who, after
acquiescing in the election of Albert II as Roman King, agreed to that of
Frederick III, whose long and impotent reign lasted for more than half a
century (1440-93). Thus the founder of the new House of Brandenburg cannot be
said to have either effectively promoted or vigorously resisted the beginning
of an occupation of the Imperial throne by the House of Austria, which was to
continue till 1740, just three centuries after his death.
The founder
of the greatness of the Hohenzollems necessarily moved within the limits of his
own political horizon; and the testamentary disposition which he made of his
dominions, although partly explained by personal considerations, fails to
indicate that he was intent on securing a great future to his electorate, or
even on preserving its territorial integrity. While his eldest son (John “the
Alchemist”) succeeded in Baireuth, it was to the second, Frederick II, that he
left the inheritance of Brandenburg. The new Elector had, like his contemporary,
Louis XI, to wage a hard struggle with a still disaffected nobility; but he
also had to hold his own against the towns, sufficiently awake to their own
interests to confederate themselves with the great Hanseatic League whose
system was extended over northern Germany. Finally, he had to meet the claims
of a Church naturally inclined Homewards; but, while he put a decisive stop on
the feudal dependence of part of his dominions on the archbishopric of
Magdeburg, he contrived to secure, in the spirit of his own age and in good
time for the opportunities which that of the Reformation was to bring, the
right
The Dispositio Achillea. Albert
Achilles (1470-86)—his cognomen, like those of some of his successors, is
redolent of the Renaissance sympathies of the age—was in certain other respects
a Prince on the pattern of Maximilian I, who owed to the hereditary attachment
of the Brandenburger his own election as Roman King. At home Albert Achilles
conducted the government of his electorate with vigour, while he enlarged his
dominions by the acquisition of parts of Silesia, and was definitely invested
with Pomerania-Stettin, though he obtained no immediate possession of the
duchy. The steady support which he gave to the decadent Empire was important,
inasmuch as he was probably, at the time, its most powerful Prince. But,
though, following in his father’s footsteps, he contrived to assert his
authority as supreme in Brandenburg, his heart was in his Franconian
possessions; and the task of consolidating his inheritance weighed heavily on
him, as it did on so many German Princes of his times. Thus his famous
testamentary disposition—known hereafter as the Dispositio Achillea—was at once
a compromise and an enduring fiat. It laid down in perpetuum the principle that,
while his whole inheritance should at no future time be divided into more than
three parts, the margravate of Brandenburg should henceforth never be subjected
to partition. Thus Albert Achilles, in different circumstances, corroborated
the critical action of Albert the Bear.
A prolonged
tranquillity along their frontiers enabled the successors of Albert Achilles to
give security to their territorial authority, which neither Poland nor Hungary,
alike preoccupied by conflicts with the Turks, was disposed to menace. But the
Elector John Cicero (148699) and his successors Joachim I and II and John
George, whose reigns covered the ensuing century (1499-1598), were strong
rulers as well as intelligent patrons of learning. (The foundation of the
University of Frankfort-on-the-Oder, 1505, was almost contemporary with that of
the University of Wittenberg, whose importance overshadowed that of her younger
foster-sister.) John Cicero had to suppress a revolt of the
At a critical
stage in the celebrated Imperial election of 1519 the Elector Joachim I, though
by no means anti-Habsburg in sentiment, was gained over by the profuseness of
the French promises to give his support to the candidature of Francis I. It was
an age of bargains, but this particular move proved futile; and the accession
of the new Emperor’s brother Ferdinand to the kingship of Hungary and Bohemia
(1526) for the first time brought the vastly augmented dominions of the
Habsburgs into contiguity with those of the Hohenzollems. A special germ of
future complications lay in the fact that in the borderland of Silesia, now a
dependency of the Bohemian Crown under Habsburg supremacy, a Hohenzollem
Prince, Margrave George of Ansbach, had during the reign of King Lewis II of
Bohemia (and Hungary) been invested with the principality of Jagerndorf (1523)
and had acquired a reversionary interest in that of Oppeln (1528), thus
materially advancing the long-continued efforts of the Brandenburg dynasty to
establish a firm footing in Silesia. But, although Jagerndorf remained in
Brandenburg hands for an entire century (to 1623), Joachim I failed to foresee
the ultimate effect of these Silesian possessions and claims upon the relations
of his dynasty with the continuously growing power of the House of Austria.
Equally
little was it in his mind, as it afterwards came to be in the minds of his
descendants, to identify the interests of his dynasty with the cause of the
Reformation. It should be premised that the Margraves of Brandenburg had from
the first stood in a quite peculiar relation to the Church, so that the
ecclesiastical supremacy of the Electors in their dominions was not a work of
the Reformation. The episcopal authority never reached the same development in
the territories beyond the Elbe as that to which it attained in the older
regions of the Empire; and, after its complete collapse and reestablishment
through them, they continuously stood to it in a relation of protectorship. The
The Reformation in Brandenburg. [1517-48 The reception
of the Reformation in Brandenburg was, notwithstanding, one of those instances
in which, contrary to a common assumption, the mind of the population of the
electorate moved more rapidly than did that of its ruling House. All the
neighbouring parts of Germany had passed, or were passing, over to the
Protestant side, and no attempt at resistance to the current could be
permanently successful. Although therefore Joachim I, without remaining
insensible to the influence of the Renaissance, held out to the best of his
power against the Reformation, joining the League of Halle (1533) and actually
offering to renounce his claims on Pomerania if its Dukes would remain orthodox,
he could not even unite his own House in the support of his religious polity.
The Franconian Hohenzollerns were early adherents of the Reformation—among them
Margrave George “the Pious” of Ansbach, to whose Silesian acquisitions
reference has been made above, and his younger brother Margrave Albert, of
whom, as the first Duke of Prussia, more will immediately have to be said.
On the death
of Joachim I (1535) his son Joachim II Hector, to whom his father had left
two-thirds of the margravate with the electoral dignity, did not, like his
younger brother John, to whom passed most of the New Mark, at once declare
himself a Lutheran; but he allowed the Reformation movement to progress freely
in his electorate, while himself aiming at something of an Erasmian middle
course. Thus, while the Brandenburg reformation received the Imperial sanction
in 1541, Joachim II remained on friendly terms with the Imperial House, and
commanded against the Turks in Hungary. So long, moreover, as that eminent
pluralist, Joachim II’s uncle, Cardinal Albert, Archbishop and Elector of
Mainz, Archbishop of Magdeburg, and Bishop of Halberstadt, survived, Joachim’s
liberal conservatism was sure of a very potent support. His own attitude in
matters of religion was probably in the first instance due to conscientious
motives; but it is difficult to palliate his having entered, in the course of
the Schmalkaldic War (1547), into an understanding with the future Emperor
Ferdinand I, by which he actually undertook to send a small auxiliary force to
the Imperial side, in return for the promise to one of his sons of the sees of
Magdeburg and Halberstadt, between which and the electorate a connexion was
thus preserved by him. Yet, though he agreed to the Interim, the unwillingness
of his subjects to accept it, or some other cause, soon afterwards brought him
to see the situation more clearly and
The
conscientious and frugal John George (1571-98), though he over-governed his
subjects, proved how well he meant by them by securing to them the peace in
which alone they could prosper. In matters of religion he was, in accordance
with the sterile inspirations of this age, a narrow Lutheran—as is shown by his
waiving the claims of his dynasty on the inheritance of Jiilich, Cleves, and
Berg, if the prosecution of them was to involve joint action with the
Calvinistic Netherlander.
His son,
Joachim Frederick (1598-1608), who as Administrator of Magdeburg had completely
carried out the reformation of the see, had been strongly impressed by the
divisions among the Protestants which prevented them from making head at the
Diet against their Catholic opponents, who refused to allow him to take his
seat there on the Spiritual Bench. He thus came to accept the rigidly Lutheran Jbrmula
concordiae as binding upon the whole of his electorate; but the necessity of
this submission, and still more the persistent intervention of his Estates in
the administration of the State, led him to cease convening them unless on
quite exceptional occasions, and to appoint a Council of State (whose original
members, nine in number, were the earliest of many generations of Geheimrathe)
charged with the initiation of all except Church and judicial business. This
Council may be regarded as the germ of the Prussian bureaucracy—if so slovenly
a designation must be adopted for so strenuous a thing—assuredly one of the
most important of all the factors in the political development of the Branden-
burg-Prussian State. Joachim Frederick’s successor, John Sigismund, quite early
in his reign formally approved the principle already established in practice
under his father: that the Elector would take no step in the affairs of his
House or dominions without having previously sought the advice of his Privy
Council. In other words, by about the second decade of the century the heads of
the administration in Brandenburg
In his
foreign policy, Joachim Frederick was not destined to see the results of his
efforts in connexion with the affairs of the lower Rhine, The great issue, on
the other hand, of the union between Brandenburg and Prussia he advanced by
obtaining (1605) the administratorship of the latter duchy on behalf of its
demented Duke Albert Frederick and by marrying one of his younger daughters (Eleanor),
the eldest (Anne) having been married several years before to the Electoral
Prince. But he made little way with the Prussian nobles; and in this direction
also left the fruits of his steadfast endeavours to be gathered in by his son
and successor.
John
Sigismund (1608-19), though really a less remarkable man than his father, had
the good fortune to advance signally the importance and power of his dynasty.
Among the claimants of the disputed Jülich-Cleves-Berg inheritance, John
Sigismund of Brandenburg was, as has been narrated in an earlier passage of
this History, the first in the field; and his interests and those of the
promptest among his competitors (the Palatinate-Neuburg Duke), when they
obtained, first joint and then several, possession of the coveted territories,
really coincided with the interests of European peace. Thus the House of
Brandenburg virtually secured an important extension of its dominions, although
not one which was throughout of unmistakable advantage to it. In the person of John
Sigismund was also accomplished, on the death of Duke Albert Frederick in
August, 1618, the all-important union between the Brandenburg electorate and
the duchy of Prussia; so that, when his weary life came to a close, the eastern
and the western limits of the future kingdom of Prussia in its earliest stage
had already been reached by the dominions of the Brandenburg Hohenzollems.
John
Sigismund’s reign had, however, left a distinctly personal mark upon the
history of the State of which he had become one of the founders. Though first
brought up as a strict Lutheran, he had been subjected to Calvinistic
influences during his University life at Strassburg and Heidelberg, and at the
latter place to that of the Electress Palatine, Louisa Juliana, the daughter of
William of Orange, with whose House his own was later to become so closely
connected. Thus, in 1613, at a most critical time for the future of his line
(upon which the Jülich-Cleves succession difficulty might at one time have
possibly brought down the ban of the Empire), he declared himself a Calvinist.
Rarely in Hohenzollern annals has a head of his House fouud himself face to
face with a resistance so irreconcilable as that provoked by this step both in
Brandenburg, where its censors were encouraged by the neighbouring Lutheran
rulers of Saxony and Pomerania, and in Prussia, where it provoked a resistance
as bitter as it was unanimous. And
II
No account,
complete even in outline, can here be attempted of the history of the duchy of
Prussia before its union with the electorate of Brandenburg. The Prussians who
inhabited the region between Vistula and Pregel were more nearly akin to their
Lithuanian neighbours on the north-east than to the Pomeranians, Poles and
Russians on the south and the south-east; and it was Lithuanian support on
which they had to depend in their struggle against Germanic invaders. For a
long time, protected seawards by the sand-banks of the Haffs, and landwards by
impenetrable marshes and , forests, the seats of these old Prussians, in an
isolation which still impresses itself on thd traveller, remained impervious
alike to the hostile attacks of their powerful neighbours and to the peaceable
inroads of Christian missionaries. Neither the martyrdoms of St Adalbert
(997), whose shrine at Gnesen afterwards became a kind of rallying-point
against the German advance, and (rather more than a decade later) of St Brun,
nor the sword of either Pole or Dane, could bend or break the resistance of
this pagan people. By the middle of the twelfth century the sum total of the
struggle seems to have been the reduction to dependence upon Poland of a small
southern comer of Prussia, the Culmland. The efforts which resulted in the
actual Christianisation and subsequent Germanisation of Prussia date from the
following (thirteenth) century, and are associated with the name of Christian,
a monk of the Cistercian convent of Oliva near Danzig, and afterwards the first
Prussian bishop. The consequent insurrection of the Prussians led to the
proclamation by Pope Honorius III of a crusade against them (1218). Various
restrictions were imposed upon the participation in this crusade, and upon the
application to be made of its results; in short, the intention appears to have
been to make Prussia, when conquered, a kind of ecclesiastical province apart,
under conditions revealing a singular loftiness as well as self-consciousness
of purpose. But political considerations of all kinds, with which after the
manner of the age religions were closely intermixed, obscured the prospect and
delayed the accomplishment of the conversion of Prussia; and no real change was
effected in its condition by the (virtually) Polish and Pomeranian crusade of
1222.
This failure
had lost Poland a fair chance of definitively mastering the
Starting from
the Culm lands, made over to Hermann and his Knights in 1226 by the Duke of
Masovia, a vassal of the Polish Crown, as its base of action, the German Order
was to invade Prussia and conquer it to the honour and glory of God. But the
High Master took care at the outset to obtain for himself and his successors
investment with all the rights of a Prince of the Empire over all the Prussian
lands of which the Order might possess itself. Its advance was promoted, while
its design of controlling the eastern coast of the Baltic was indicated, by the
union effected by him between his Order and that of the Sword, which had
subdued Livonia (1237). Still, the conquest of Prussia, a process carried on by
a small and compact body of assailants against a population which can hardly
have reached a quarter of a million, occupied rather more than half a century.
Neither the advance to the north-eastern comer, where to this day Memel is the
northeastern boundary-point of the German Empire, nor the subsequent
construction (1255) in Samland of the fortress called Konigsberg in
This advance
continued during the greater part of the thirteenth century. At every stage in
its course—from Danzig to Narva on the Gulf of Finland—it was seconded by the
mercantile instinct, which insisted on the foundation and organisation of
centres of civic life. The terrific outbreak of the repressed Prussian spirit
of nationality, which began in 1261 and rapidly spread through the whole Lettic
group of populations, placed the Order on the defensive, and is rightly held to
have given rise to its heroic period. A season of rigorous, and even cruel,
repression and reorganisation ensued, which left its mark on the history of
Prussia. The old nobility of the land virtually ceased to exist; while, with
certain privileged exceptions, the entire population capable of bearing arms
was obliged to take part, not only in defensive war, but in the reysings or
excursions beyond the frontier which were an integral part of the regular work
of the Order. In a word, its dominions were organised strictly on the footing
of a military State, without any sustained attempt to raise the civilisation of
the lower classes of the population, whose use of their own language lasted
into the sixteenth century. Inasmuch, however, as the primary purpose of this
State was the Christian propaganda, it rapidly arrived at a clear and definite
understanding with the Church; so that the Prussian clergy (more especially as
no archbishopric had been established within the borders of Prussia) submitted
to the authority of the Order even after it had come into conflict with Rome.
This authority was further strengthened by the fact that the German colonists
who found their way to Prussia came from every part of the Empire—in the
patient German fashion— seeking, rather than bringing with them, the elements
of cohesion.
Scarcely had
the conquest of Prussia been accomplished, when the Order cast an eager eye
upon the territory of Pomerelia on the western bank of the Vistula. Pomerelia
was under the rule of Dukes who were the vassals of Poland; but the Order was
strong enough to assert its power in this direction without asking any
cooperation from either the Dukes of Pomerania-Wolgast or the Brandenburg
Margraves. In 1311 the Order established its authority over Danzig which was to
become the wealthiest of the cities of the Baltic—its inglorious Venice; and
for a generation the Knights were the masters of Pomerelia. This great advance
of the power of the Order thus coincided with the widest expansion of the early
power of Brandenburg under Waldemar the Great.
It was in
this very period that the German Knights had once more to face the problem of
their corporate future; for the Order of the Templars was abolished by the
Council of Vienne (1313), and the younger Order did not escape the papal
thunderbolts. Very wisely, it determined
Yet, already
in the earlier half of the fourteenth century, the revival of the national
spirit of the Poles under Casimir III the Great, the last in the male line of
their national Kings, the Piasts, and the design of a union of Poland and
Lithuania, threatened the overthrow of the German Order. But, after a
protracted struggle, the Peace of Kalisch (1343) assured to the Order a
dominion even wider than that to which it had laid claim. Now began its golden
days, during which it was not only esteemed the high school of Christian chivalry,
practising on the vast mass of Lithuanian heathendom, but also asserted
itself—and this is the great age of the Hansa—as a notable commercial and
maritime Power.
The land of “Spruce” was now something of a promised land, and the sprusado the militant
darling of the age. The ulterior political designs of the Order were fully
commensurate with its actual achievements; and if the partition of Poland
which it negotiated was not actually carried out, it obtained possession, as
has been seen, of the New Mark of Brandenburg in pledge from the still-vext
Sigismund. At home it maintained the freedom of its government from all alien
interference. No Peter’s Pence were levied in Prussia; the Bishops, though
their dioceses were of papal foundation, and the great convents of Oliva and
Peplin, were subject to the territorial authority of the High Master. On the
other hand, a large measure of liberty was left to the towns, of which in the
fourteenth century a vast network, together with a multitude of German villages,
overspread the land; the Culmische Handfeste became a kind of model charter of
municipal rights.
The reason
for the decline of so strenuous and prosperous a polity as that of the German
Order cannot be examined here. The loyalty of the Knights began to give way, so
soon as the religious basis of the Order became mere formalism; the allegiance
of the towns, tired of being mastered by a garrison of monks, and jealous of
their mercantile competition, had never rested on any foundation beyond the
traditions of force; the military system of Europe was passing through a change
to which the heirs of the crusaders could not accommodate themselves; and the
real raison d'être of their actual position—the carrying on of warfare against
the heathen—was at least not so self-evident as of old. Meanwhile Poland, the
hereditary foe of the Order, was preparing for a resumption of the struggle.
The memorable
attempt to extend once more the range of power and influence covered by the
Slavonic nationality connects itself with the
The German
Order’s real occupation had gone after, towards the dose of the fourteenth
century, it had completed the official Christianisation of Lithuania—a process
bearing a most shadowy resemblance to a crusade, and rather resembling annual
manoeuvres, to which foreign visitors of distinction and adventurers “reysing
in Littowe” were largiely attracted. About the same period, the power of the
Hanseatic League, the natural and all but indispensable ally of the Order, had,
in face of the union between the Scandinavian States, visibly begun to decline.
We pass by the successive attempts at resistance to the authority of the Order,
the losses to which it was subjected by the decline of its maritime power and
by the fickleness of the native Prussian nobility (the Knights of the Lizard)
under the influence of unscrupulous Polish intrigue. The collision was only a
question of time; and, as the Order was true to its chivalrous traditions in
refusing to avoid the decision of arms, the contest might seem to have been at
an end with the crushing victory of the Polish host at Tannenberg (1410). But
the siege of Marienburg broke down, and, thanks to the resolution and sagacity of
the new High Master, Henry of Plauen (from whose House are descended the
Princes of Reuss), the whole of the territories held by the Order at the
outbreak of the war, with the exception of Samogitia, were preserved to it in
the First Peace of Thom (1411).
Henry of
Plauen endeavoured to strengthen the administrative system of the Knights by
establishing a Landrath—a Council of Estates consisting of deputies of nobility
and towns; but all his efforts were in vain, and his deposition, half-treason,
and miserable end signified that the last shadow of its former greatness had
departed from the Order. While its dominions had to suffer a series of inroads,
which it sought rather to avert than to resist, the Slav peoples, excited
beyond bounds by the Hussite successes, drew closer and closer together. The
Order had, in a word, lived too long. As has been well said, being nothing but
a corporation, it had not in itself the power of self-renewal which is inherent
in a nation. It was no longer German in its composition; the Knights made no
pretence of observing their vows of poverty or chastity,
It was in its
dire distress and supreme need of funds for paying its mercenaries that the
Order, as has been seen, sold the New Mark of Brandenburg to the Hohenzollem
Elector, Frederick II; but the sum received proved quite insufficient for the
purpose. The turbulent mercenaries (among whom there were many Bohemian
Hussites) drove the High Master forth from the Marienburg (1457), which they
incontinently sold to the King of Poland, though it was some time before he
could succeed in taking the town. In the end both sides were exhausted, and the
second or so-called Perpetual Peace of Thom put an end to the thirteen years’
war (1466). It divided Prussia into two parts. West Prussia, i.e. the country
to the west of the Vistula and the Nogent, including Danzig, together with the
land of Culm, Marienburg, the seaport of Elbing, and the bishopric of Warmia
(Ermeland), became an integral part of the Polish kingdom, and was as such
called Royal Prussia. East or, as it afterwards came to be called, Ducal
Prussia, was restored to the Order as a Polish fief. Thus the humiliation of
the Order, of which the League had refused to countenance the reconstruction
on a new basis that would have placed it under German control, was shared with
the Order itself by the Empire, then weak and shrinking, and under an Emperor
(Frederick III) who had nothing to contribute to the situation but brave words.
The decay of
the German Order was as sorry as its greatness had been deserving of
admiration. Neither the Hansa, unable to stay the progress of Scandinavians or
of Muscovites on the Baltic shores, nor the provinces and dependencies of the
Order itself, were able to raise an arm on its behalf; and the inner
constitution of its ruling oligarchy was a mere nest of jobbeiy. At length the
obvious counsels of worldly wisdom found acceptance, and the Knights began to
follow the practice of electing as their High Master a member of some important
princely House, whose support in the struggle for existence might thus be
conciliated. At Konigsberg, whither the seat of the Order had now been
transferred, Duke Frederick of Saxony from 1498 carried on the
Margrave
Albert, through whose action the ultimate expansion of the dynastic power of
the Hohenzollems may be said to have been first rendered possible, was by his
own confession inadequately trained for playing a part in times such as those
in which his lot fell; and towards the close of his career he
showed much moral weakness. But he was from the first animated by a
determination to put an end to his relation of vassalage as High Master towards
the Polish Crown. In this all-important design he was encouraged by the
Emperor Maximilian I— whose actions, however, were not always on the level of
his aspirations, and in this instance contradicted them. Albert’s attempt to
throw off his vassalage by his own strength, supported by such volunteer aid as
he could obtain, failed; and, after making his peace with the Poles as best he
could (1519), he fell back on another line of action, less heroic, but destined
to prove more productive of results. This was the secularisation of the
dominions over which he presided as head of the German Order. He had been more
than once admonished from Rome, when the spirit of reform ruled in the person
of Pope Adrian VI, to bring new life into the decayed and degenerate company of
Knights; and at Nurmberg, where he had sought the countenance of the Diet, he
had become subject to the influence of the rigorous Lutheran theologian Osiander,
whom he afterwards designated as his “spiritual father.” Thus, at a loss how to
obey the papal injunction, Albert betook himself to Luther, whose advice to him
and to his Order was administered in no spirit of restraint (1523). Luther
opined that the High Master should cast aside the foolish rule of his Order,
marry, and turn its dominions into a secular State; and this counsel was
without much loss of time carried into execution by Albert.
In 1525,
Albert was invested by Sigismund I of Poland with the secularised duchy of
Prussia; the Black Cross vanished from his coat of arms, but the Black Eagle
remained, with the suzerain’s initials on his breast. In the same year Albert
married Dorothea, daughter of Frederick I of Denmark. The recalcitrance shown by
some of the Knights cannot occupy us here, nor the later vicissitudes of the
German Order as an interesting relic of an irrecoverable past. West Prussia
remained untouched by the results of Albert’s action. Its feudal subjection to
Poland continued, and the life of its population—the veiy names of its towns,
Marienburg itself becoming Malborg—were
Duke Albert
did his best to reorganise the administration of East Prussia; but unfortunately
he gave deep offence to his subjects by identifying himself with a school of
Lutheran theology (Osiander and the Osiandrists) to whose teaching the bulk of
them were opposed with a fury of dogmatic partisanship such as would have been
hardly explicable in any particular age, and with a less stubborn race. Thus
the period of his rule ended in cruel differences and bitter disappointment
(1568). The question of the succession had for some time been beset with a
series of intrigues and demonstrations; and when on his death his son Albert
Frederick (1568-1618) was invested by Sigismund II of Poland with the duchy of
Prussia, the Brandenburg Elector, Joachim II, succeeded in obtaining
simultaneous investiture for himself and his son John George. The Brandenburg
tradition of making prospective acquisitions was never more signally justified.
The unhappy orphan boy who had succeeded to Albert’s troubled inheritance,
distracted by political and religious discords, and by fears not wholly
illusory of attempts on his life, lapsed into melancholy and before long became
insane. In the veiy year (1573) in which he was married to Maria Eleonora, the
heiress of Duke William of Jülich, Cleves, and Berg, he had to be placed under
continuous personal control, and his cousin, Margrave George Frederick of
Ansbach and Jagerndorf, was appointed administrator of his duchy with the title
of Duke. Though his rule failed to conciliate the goodwill of the Prussian
Estates, they seem on the whole to have favoured the ultimate union with
Brandenburg, partly no doubt because the event seemed still remote.
The prospect
of the union advanced with George Frederick’s death in 1603, when the Elector
Joachim Frederick of Brandenburg with much difficulty succeeded in being named
Administrator of the duchy of Prussia, neither of Albert Frederick’s sons
having survived beyond infancy. He could not, however, obtain his investiture
as eventual successor to the duchy from King Sigismund III of Poland; and it
was only with great difficulty and under hard and humiliating conditions that
after his death (1608) his son and successor, John Sigismund, after obtaining
from the Polish King the guardianship and administration, at last, in 1611,
secured the desired investiture for himself, his three brothers, and his heirs
male. His rule was accepted most reluctantly by the Prussian nobility; and his
adoption of the Reformed (Calvinist) faith stank in the nostrils of the
orthodox Lutheran population. With the assistance of the Polish Crown, an
organised Lutheran revolt against his government and a systematic persecution
of his fellow-Calvinists were set on foot. So paradoxically irreconcilable were
the relations
John
Sigismund, who had in circumstances so untoward united the long-coveted
Prussian duchy with his electorate, and who had likewise established a hold
upon the disputed duchies on the lower Rhine that was to bring first part and
ultimately the whole of them into the possession of his House, died at the
close of 1619, with his spirit broken. He had shown himself tolerant to
Catholicism, and had taken up no decisive attitude towards the issues involved
in the outbreak of the Great War, by whose course, as has been seen in a
previous volume, no State was to be more continuously and more momentously
affected than Brandenburg. But, as has been also shown, his son and successor
George William (1619-40) was utterly incapable of making his augmented
dynastic power felt in times so difficult and dangerous. As it seems necessary
to repeat (for the plain fact is often lost sight of in judging the princes and
magnates of this age), the failure of his career and of others such as his was
due less to his inconsistencies, than to his consistencies—in other words, in
his addiction to the diversions of the chase and the pleasures of the table. In
justice to him, it should be remembered that his long-enduring and obstinate
self-subjection to the ascendancy of his Minister Count Adam von Schwarzenberg
was largely due to his own traditional regard for the Imperial House.
It is
unnecessary to go back here to the difficulties in which the government of
George William was involved, and the troubles brought upon his electorate, by
the course of the war and the political changes consequent upon it, more
especially after the landing in Pomerania of his brother-in-law, Gustavus
Adolphus. The adherence of the Elector of Brandenburg to the Peace of Prague
(1634) warranted the Dutch in occupying the Rhenish duchies, whence they and
the Spaniards had been more or less excluded since the provisional compact of
Xanten in 1614; and it had the more important consequence of a declaration of
war by Brandenburg against Sweden (January, 1636). When, in the following year,
the long-expected vacancy in Pomerania at last occurred by the death of Duke
Bogislav XIV, the inheritor of the entire duchy, and the Estates were in favour
of the union with Brandenburg, the Swedes were accordingly found in possession,
and such attempts as were made to dislodge them proved futile. In 1638 George
William finally abandoned any attempt to guide the fortunes of his electorate,
and, abandoning the control of its affairs to Schwarzenberg, withdrew for the
remainder of his days into Prussia.
Here, as
fortune would have it, his rule benefited from the inevitable reaction against
the uncompromising resistance offered by the nobility to his predecessor, and
from the struggle of the “Protesters” (who
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