Within days the pope confirmed Piccolomini’s election and gave him full authority to arrange matters there and in the region as he wished. Whatever was necessary to restore peace, the pope promised his fullest co-operation. Of course, Piccolomini could not go to Prussia in person. He had much too much to do in Rome, and the pope was not in good health. Instead, he gave detailed instructions to Liebenwald, named him episcopal vicar, and gave him full authority to negotiate, to raise armies, and to collect taxes. He wrote sweet letters to the Polish king, urging Casimir to send a representative to Rome to negotiate a peace. The monarch was not pleased, nor was he co-operative. So Piccolomini raised the stakes.
The death of the bishop of Culm gave Piccolomini his opportunity. The bishop of Ermland had been a dependable supporter of the Prussian League – in fact, a key member of the leadership. When a Polish candidate for the Culm bishopric appeared in Rome, then the grand master’s candidate, Piccolomini spoke on behalf of the former, only to have the pope refer the matter to a jurist, who told Piccolomini to choose between the candidates. Confusion abounded. Just what was the wily Italian up to? The confusion was doubled when he refused a sizeable bribe. What was the world coming to when you couldn’t even trust an Italian (and a churchman, to boot) to take a bribe?
Speculation was rife. Would Piccolomini demand the payment of Peter’s Pence in West Prussia? That speculation diminished only when his efforts to bring the parties together in Prague failed. Then, in August 1458, Piccolomini became Pope Pius II. No longer did he have the time, nor the physical strength, for efforts to bring the candidates, the royal representatives, the League’s lawyers, and the grand master’s procurator together again for peace talks. Pius II retained the pro forma title of bishop of Ermland, rejected renewed efforts at bribery, and sent an administrator north to manage the diocese and to work toward a peace settlement. That administrator was first the grand master’s ally, then neutral, and finally a supporter of the League. His military role in the conflict was insignificant, but from that time forth Ermland was an independent territory, freed from the direct domination of either grand master or king. The truce he arranged from October 1458 to July 1459 failed to lead to concrete results, but there was no serious fighting until the end of 1461.
Piccolomini was an unusual figure for a man of letters. First a reformer; then a diplomat and author; at the end he was a crusader. However, his efforts to organise European resistance to the Turkish advance were a mirror image of his failure in Prussia. The Holy Roman emperor, Friedrich III, was more interested in taking Hungary from Matthias Corvinus (1458 – 90) than in fighting in the Balkans, so that the successful defence of Belgrade in 1456 had resulted only in a temporary respite, not a rollback of Ottoman gains; and when Jan Hunyady died during the siege, the Christians lost an irreplaceable general. Furthermore, the French were offended by the pope’s Italian policies, the Italian cities were too absorbed in their own affairs to look abroad, and even Rome itself was in constant turmoil. In 1464, after four years of preparation, Pius II managed to gather together a small, ill-disciplined force, which he led south to meet the Venetian fleet and be transported across the Adriatic Sea to the Balkans. However, the ill, gout-ridden pontiff died before any of his unruly troops could board ship. He was succeeded by a pope, Paul II (1464 – 71), who could not speak proper Latin but who understood politics. Determined to expunge the Hussite heresy, he was very displeased with Gregor von Heimburg, lawyer for Georg of Podiebrady (1458 – 71), the pro-Hussite king of Bohemia. Since Heimburg was also representing the Teutonic Order, the pope automatically favoured the grand master’s enemies. Thus the proud papacy of Pius II, the epitome of Renaissance Humanism, began its descent into its pre-Reformation squalor. Papal interest in the North was henceforth confined largely to the return on financial assets. But money was hard to come by.
Since not even Danzig could pay all the mercenaries now, the Prussian League had to release many of its hired troops. Dismissing the soldiers of fortune, however, did not remove them from the country – it simply turned them loose on the peasantry. As the ragged soldiers ravaged the countryside, sometimes they acknowledged being in the service of one side or the other, sometimes not. They were joined by bands of impoverished peasants originally raised to defend harvests and villages, but who now went from region to region seeking food and shelter, not begging, but as armed units, taking what they needed through threats or force. It was a war of all against all, with pity, loyalty, and morality long forgotten.
The town of Marienburg temporarily came back into the possession of the order, betrayed by a Bohemian mercenary commander; but it was lost again, after a year’s siege, to hunger. The grand master had no money to hire a relief force, and he had no ships available to carry grain from Livonia to the beleaguered garrison. The revenge of the victors was gruesome and uncommonly severe – execution for the officers of the order’s mercenaries.
Despite these setbacks, both emperor and pope encouraged the order to fight on. Pius II had even used his ecclesiastical weapons against the League and the king of Poland – placing them under the interdict – but to no avail. The Polish king ignored the pope’s demands as complacently as any grand master had ever dared; and the rebellious German nobles and burghers were equally as capable of ignoring papal edicts. The war spread to include all Scandinavia and the Hanseatic cities, to involve Poland and Hussite Bohemia, and the ambitions of the emperor, but in Prussia it remained essentially a civil conflict; Polish troops were often but a minor factor in the warfare. Casimir was unable to raise taxes or call out the general levy without the consent of the diet, and the nobles were reluctant to see the king successful in Prussia. Oleśnicki had returned from the Council of Basel in 1451 to denounce the royal policies. His death in 1455 had not ended clerical opposition to the crown, since Casimir was determined to control the appointment of ecclesiastical officials; in contrast, the churchmen thought that it would be more appropriate for them to appoint the king.
The Lithuanian contribution to the war was to tie down the troops of the Livonian Order. In 1454 the Council of Lords, having negotiated with the Teutonic Knights for an alliance, coerced Casimir into rendering the long-delayed oath to protect Lithuanian rights, then into returning Volhynia to the grand duchy. Afterward they let him fight the war on his own. Casimir could obtain the money to hire mercenaries only by offering concessions to the Polish diet; this was a major step toward establishing the powers of the chamber of deputies as equal to those of the senate (the royal council).
At the end of 1461 the grand master raised a body of mercenaries in Germany which, in spite of its small numbers, seemed capable of sweeping his exhausted enemy from the field. The only major battle of the war resulted, fought in September 1462 between two diminutive forces. The grand master’s army advanced out of Culm, where a base had been established with great effort. The League forces came out of Danzig, the mainstay of the rebel coalition and the only city able to pay any mercenaries. Actually, both armies were ragtag assemblages of city levies, dispossessed farmers, unruly mercenaries, and a handful of knights. The units of the Prussian League proved to be the least weak. Employing the difficult tactic of fighting behind a wagon-fort, they destroyed the grand master’s forces, occupied a number of castles and towns, and threw Erlichshausen back to his last refuges. In the autumn of 1463 the Prussian League’s navy destroyed the order’s fleet.
It was time for peace talks but not yet for a peace agreement; for that both sides had to become even more exhausted. Almost everyone who was anyone offered to mediate the dispute. Pope Paul II and the Hanseatic League made the most determined efforts, and finally, in 1466, a papal legate arranged a settlement. Only repeated reverses and the inability to hire more troops persuaded Erlichshausen to accept the harsh terms.
The Second Peace of Thorn 1466
The peace treaty provided for West Prussia and Culm to be ‘returned’ to the king of Poland and for Ermland to become independent. Marienburg, Elbing
, and Christburg also went to Poland. This collection of lands was henceforth known as Royal Prussia. Moreover, the order promised to abandon its ties to the Holy Roman Empire, become a fief of the Polish crown, and accept up to half of its members from Polish subjects. The incompleteness of the victory was a disappointment to those who had hoped to uproot the grand master’s state altogether, but it was a realistic settlement that reflected battle lines that neither side seemed capable of changing significantly no matter how long they fought. Poles could take heart from having at last come into possession of long-disputed territories, and they anticipated that the division of Prussia would leave their ancient enemies too weak to make trouble again. The Prussian League, however, did not see the legal situation in exactly that way: Prussians, even those now under Polish sovereignty, still continued to think of themselves as belonging to one country.
The formal ceremonies disguised all this. Erlichshausen went to Casimir and swore to uphold the peace. Of course, he had no intention of honouring the full terms of the agreement. He did not offer homage as required, arguing that he was restrained by his prior commitments to the pope and the emperor, neither of whom would allow their rights to be infringed in this matter. The papacy quickly supported him in this by declaring the treaty void, a violation of papal charters and harmful to the interests of the Church. The tie of the military order to the papacy again came to supersede secular bonds, to present the Polish king with seemingly insoluble problems in disposing of this troublesome neighbour even after he had won near total military victory. Nor were there any Polish knights who had an interest in joining the Teutonic Order. That provision of the treaty was a dead letter from the beginning.
Despite official rejection of the peace terms, there was nothing to prevent them from being implemented at a later date (homage was finally rendered in 1478, though it was strictly personal, obligating the grand master alone, and not his order or its lands), and certainly there was no reason for the war to begin again. The most important provisions – the territorial concessions to Poland and the independence of the Prussian League – were fait accompli. The other provisions were comparatively minor. Casimir had obtained the grand master’s submission once, and that would not be forgotten. The precedent had been set.
The grand master moved his residence to Königsberg, taking the marshal’s quarters. This was accomplished without difficulty since the marshal was in Polish captivity, but there were expensive changes necessary for the castle to serve as the seat of a grand master and his court. Königsberg was not Marienburg, but it was still impressive. Perhaps the change in residence should be seen as symbolic of the grand master’s general loss of status and authority. His castellans and advocates took possession of the most important estates and incomes, leaving him with insufficient income to perform his statutory duties. Power devolved into the hands of the marshal, Heinrich Reuss von Plauen, who was elected grand master in 1469. Plauen was able to continue the reorganisation of the order’s administration for only one year. Upon his death, he was succeeded by a cautious but more traditional grand master, Heinrich Reffle von Richtenberg, whose hope was to restore the prosperity of the land and to end the complicated internal quarrels. However, he could not reach those goals with the slender resources at his command; the selfish interests of the castellans and advocates blocked every effort at reform now and later.
The Thirteen Years’ War had made radical changes in Prussia. By 1466 the estates were no longer complaining about the order’s misrule in matters such as taxation or devaluation of the coinage. Those abuses seemed laughable in retrospect. The noble and burgher estates had won only one significant advantage out of all their struggles – control of their local governments – which they used to suppress the guildsmen and labourers so as to increase their profits to the point that they could pay the few self-imposed taxes and exactions more easily. In East Prussia there was a new land-owning class composed of former mercenaries, who had been paid with fiefs taken from secular knights who had perished and from estates of the Teutonic Order. These mercenaries replaced many of the native knights, and from them descended many of the Junker families of Prussia. Future grand masters would know better than to embark on ambitious projects in support of Livonia or imperial efforts in the Balkans, to challenge the Prussian estates or the king of Poland, or even their own membership. The Teutonic Order was marking time, without even much of an idea of what to do if an opportunity presented itself.
Poland, in contrast, had reached the sea. It had taken lands claimed by the crown since the thirteenth century – Culm, Pomerellia, Danzig – and extended its reach onto lands beyond those: to Stolp and Pomerania. For a short period Casimir had the opportunity to lay a new foundation for royal authority, basing it on the cities and gentry. That policy had achieved military and political victories in Prussia. That he did not extend this to the cities and gentry throughout Poland was a long-term mistake. He had entered into the Thirteen Years’ War against the wishes of the magnates and the Church. (In 1454 Oleśnicki had counselled accepting the concessions the grand master had been willing to make at that time; he had foreseen the stubborn resistance that the well-fortified grand master could offer.) Having achieved peace in Prussia, the king’s interests turned to dynastic politics. To that goal he sacrificed the possibility of internal reforms and his temporary ascendancy over those who would limit royal authority.
For much of the next fifty years the grand masters were impoverished vassals of the Polish kings. Technically their allegiances were divided, but practically there was nothing that they could do. Any effort to change their situation would result in swift cries of outrage from the cities and vassals, opposition from important officers, and rebukes from one or another of their lords. As the fifteenth century came to a close, however, the knights noticed that a number of German princes seemed to have discovered ways to increase their authority over their subjects, foster industry and commerce, and then tax the profits. The knights began to discuss means by which their order might do the same in Prussia. It is worth noting that those same secular reformers were also the swiftest to seize upon the popular demands for reforms in the Church, reforms that ultimately led to the Reformation.
Dissolution and Rebirth
The thunderstorm that the Reformation represented struck Prussia, Lithuania, and Poland one after the other. The Roman Catholic Church in Poland, beset by German demands for reforms, Lithuanian resentment of Polish domination, Uniate desires for more autonomy, Orthodox hatred, and its own parishioners’ fears of each of these foreign peoples, was hard-pressed to find adequate responses. Moreover, the papacy saw East Central Europe as an unimportant backwater, one which could be ignored while the Church concentrated on preserving the physical liberty of the pope in Rome from local families, preventing either Spanish or French domination over Italy, and assisting the Holy Roman emperor in re-establishing the authority of the Church over Lutheran dissidents in Germany. How the papacy could assist the young emperor, Charles V (1519 – 56), in crushing his various enemies – which now included an ever-more aggressive Turkish sultan – without at the same time making him so powerful as to endanger the pope’s own independence was a conundrum which was never resolved satisfactorily. Similarly, it could find no way to help the Polish king until the Counter-Reformation, when the Jesuits came to Cracow and Vilnius.
But this is to move the story along too swiftly. The Reformation did not come all at once, nor did contemporaries instantly recognise in its beginnings what it later became. In East Central Europe as elsewhere the forerunner of the Reformation was the spread of Renaissance culture among the nobility and intellectuals. The centres of the New Latin that marked the adoption of Renaissance ideas and attitudes were always the chanceries – that of the king, first of all, then those of the bishops; and as the model for all, that of the papacy. In Germany the princes vied with proud cities and ambitious prelates in demonstrating their support of the new art, literature, and manners of the Renaissance. F
ounding and fostering universities was even more irrefutable evidence of intellectual superiority in an age which appreciated the bold façade more than perhaps any other in European history.
Saxony led the way in applying the imaginative yet logical processes of Renaissance thought to government. Humanistically trained scholars, despising the noble-born office-holders and their inefficient ways, proposed to receptive princes ways of centralising authority, raising greater revenues, and encouraging trade and commerce. So successful had the Saxon princes been that the Teutonic Order had elected the physical weakling Friedrich of Saxony as grand master in the hope that he could work the same magic on the economy and government of Prussia.
Friedrich did what he could, which was insufficient to reverse the downward trend of the order’s fortunes, but he did prepare the way for reforms such as those which would be proposed in a few years by a professor at the Saxon university at Wittenberg – Martin Luther. On the whole, however, this grand master’s role was indirect: Friedrich encouraged the bishops to introduce humanists into their cathedral chapters and give them as free a hand as practical to reorganise the administration so as to improve economic and moral life in their dioceses; Friedrich also hired humanists to create an effective bureaucracy on the Saxon model that would permit a more efficient and more just government.
Friedrich’s humanists – first Paul Watt, his former tutor, a professor at Leipzig; and subsequently Dietrich von Werthern, a lawyer – established new offices, thereby eliminating ageing knights from important administrative posts; consolidated convents, appropriating some of their incomes for the grand master’s use; eliminated the practice whereby one estate or the other could veto legislation; redefined court procedure and etiquette; and lastly, in ruthless bureaucratic warfare, drove their conservative enemies from the country. When the German master died, Friedrich’s brother, Duke Georg of Saxony, came up with a plan for dealing with potentially obstructionist successors by abolishing the office. As might have been anticipated, the idea found little support in the Holy Roman Empire. The new German master organised opposition to changes in the traditional practices, and Friedrich’s visits to Germany in 1504 and 1507 led only to a clarification of the issues, not a resolution of them.
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