Teutonic Knights

by William Urban

  Foreign policy was similarly militant. One war scare followed another, with blame for the tensions shared by all sides. The Teutonic Order made no great secret of its ambitions to be freed of all obligations to the Polish crown, to recover its lost territories, and even to become a great power again. In return, the king and his advisors began to discuss means of eliminating the hated order altogether, if possible; at the least to humble its notorious pride. The king, however, was well aware that Duke Georg, whose armies could easily cross Silesia into the Polish heartland, was ready to protect his brother. (Much later Augustus the Strong of Saxony demonstrated the closeness of the two lands.) Furthermore, war in the north of Poland would not go unnoticed by the king’s neighbours. But what really kept the two parties from going beyond burning villages and stealing cattle was the immense cost of warfare. Neither king nor grand master could afford to raise an army; the king could not persuade the diet to levy war taxes, because the representatives did not want royal authority increased, lest he emulate those German lords the Teutonic Order so admired.

  The demise of Grand Master Friedrich in late 1510 again presented an opportunity to consider new ideas at the ‘national’ level. One suggestion, made principally by Polish nobles and clerics, was for the election of the Polish king as grand master. They would have welcomed a celibate monarchy, because that would have guaranteed the elective nature of their kingdom. The king, in fact, was willing to consider this proposal for his descendants, provided he could get a papal exemption for himself to marry! The Teutonic Knights, however, had their own candidate already selected: Albrecht of Hohenzollern-Ansbach (1490 – 1568). The family was one of the most important in Germany, but it was hardly wealthy enough to endow eight sons with a suitable living. The order’s interests and the Hohenzollerns’ coincided perfectly.

  Obtaining universal approval of the order’s choice was not easy, although the young man was related to the king of Poland and the king of Bohemia and Hungary, and had excellent connections to the Empire and Church. The approval of the convents in Germany and Livonia was obtained – there was no proper election – and in 1511 Albrecht was made a member of the order and installed as grand master on the same day. He immediately received moral and political support from the Emperor Maximilian (1493 – 1519), who urged him to attend the Reichstag and other imperial gatherings and, by the way, to give more attention to imperial wishes. In their meeting in Nuremberg in early 1512, Albrecht explained that before he could give his oath to the emperor he had to be freed from his obligations to the king of Poland. Forbidden by the emperor to render homage to the Polish king, he immediately adopted the internal and foreign policies of his predecessor – to reverse the provisions of the two treaties of Thorn by any means possible – but he introduced an entirely different personal life style.

  Albrecht had been forthright about his lack of interest in a life without sex, but the members had hastily explained that while ordinary knights and priests had to follow the rules carefully, the grand master was a prominent noble and high official who was exempt from petty requirements. All that he had to sacrifice was marriage, they said, since the vow was celibacy, not chastity. Surely, if popes could live openly with their women, and cardinals and archbishops flaunt their mistresses in public, a great German prince, twenty-one years of age and reared for a secular life, could be excused for not playing the role of a lowly friar?

  Albrecht saw more clearly than many of his contemporaries that the future belonged to those princes who could take control of their territories, suppress contentious nobles and unco-operative assemblies, encourage trade and industry, tax the increased prosperity of their subjects, and then hire professional armies for a rational yet daring foreign policy that could take advantage of opportunities when they appeared. He was, in short, among the first of the absolutist princes, more able to exploit his opportunities because the Teutonic Order had already made discipline and order a state tradition – at least, it honoured discipline and order, though those ideals had fallen low since the glorious days of the fourteenth century; although recent grand masters had reduced the strife inside the membership and reasserted control over their officers, they had lacked the means to do more than stage impressive parades and public ceremonies of a mixed ecclesiastical and chivalric nature. Without question, the elaborate costumes of the officers and knights, the bishops and their canons, the abbots with their friars and monks, the burghers with their guilds, and the mounted knights with their troops, made for first-class spectacle. But there was a difference between spectacle and power, and what separated Albrecht from many contemporaries is that, as time passed, he learned how to discern the difference.

  The young prince’s plans involved great patience, first to make the necessary reforms so as to increase his power, and second to await the opportunities to exercise this power. At first he relied on the ‘Iron Bishop’ of Pomesania, Hiob, one of the great humanists of the era, whose respect for tradition and moderation was not lost on the Polish monarch and his prelates. In 1515, however, Albrecht came under the influence of Dietrich von Schönberg, a charismatic young charlatan who specialised in mathematics, astronomy, and astrology. The young grand master, always alert to the latest cultural trends, became an enthusiastic listener to his favourite’s astrological predictions. He also became Schönberg’s companion on immoral nocturnal adventures. Freed finally from the company of priests and elderly pious knights, Albrecht proved himself an accomplished student of libertine life, at least of such as Königsberg had to offer. Schönberg also persuaded him that the time had arrived to interject himself into foreign affairs, to use Prussia’s strategic position in the rear of Lithuania now that the Polish monarch, Sigismund I (1506 – 48), was about to go to war with Basil III (1505 – 33) of Russia. Schönberg travelled to Moscow, returning with a treaty promising financial support for an army sufficient in size to tie down Polish troops or even inflict devastating defeats on them; Schönberg then used his considerable rhetorical skills to confuse the Prussian assembly and whip up a war fever among the representatives – he outlined in graphic detail Polish plans (mostly fictitious, the rest exaggerated, but with just enough truth to be plausible) to require that half the knights in the order be Poles and to introduce a tyrannical government on the Polish model, with the inevitable result of seeing poverty and serfdom spread into the yet relatively prosperous provinces of Prussia. The townspeople and knights of Prussia were not complete fools, but their knowledge of the damage that Polish nobles and prelates were doing to their country made them susceptible to the grossest propaganda and racial prejudice.

  Such activities could not be kept secret from King Sigismund, nor did Albrecht want them to be. Only when universally recognised as the man who could tip the balance between the great powers could Albrecht make the kind of demands that would restore to his order the lands and authority it had possessed eleven decades earlier. That obviously required a different kind of ruler than those whose piety and loyalty had led them to obey orders from past Holy Roman emperors which had led the military order into one disaster after another. Albrecht was probably not more intelligent than his predecessors; he may not even have been more devious; certainly he did not work harder, at least not when he was young. What he had was a kind of presence, an understanding that he stood above tradition and customary rules. His knights were awed by his birth and breeding – that finely developed air of authority, the assumption that one has the right to make judgements and give orders, and the posture and tone of voice that make inferiors aware that they are in the presence of one of their betters. Certainly no previous grand master would have considered holding a tournament, much less participated in it personally, but Albrecht staged one in Königsberg in 1518 and not only jousted but joined in the melee.

  While the adventurous policies of the new grand master made him important in the considerations of high diplomacy, it was an impractical programme. As long as there was no war, Albrecht could strut about as a great figure,
impressing the German master with his plans and plans for plans; but when it actually came to war between Poland-Lithuania and Moscow in 1519, he learned that the promised Russian subsidies would not come and therefore he could not pay his troops. Imperial help was likewise absent; Maximilian was rather more interested in Polish help for his own ventures than in rescuing the grand master. As a result of Albrecht’s political miscalculations, every effort to escape from his problems made his situation more precarious. Königsberg’s fortifications indeed repelled the Polish assaults at the last minute, and much of the ground lost in the opening months of the war was recovered, but all his hopes rested ultimately on a great army raised by the German master and brought to the frontier. Eighteen hundred horsemen and 8,000 foot soldiers passed through Brandenburg to Danzig. There, however, the mercenaries waited in vain for the grand master and his money. Albrecht was unable to appear: Polish garrisons blocked the crossings of the Vistula, and Danzig warships patrolled the seas; moreover, he had too little money to pay the army. Ultimately, the mercenaries went home, undoubtedly spreading the word about the grand master’s unreliability as a paymaster.

  If Sigismund had not been occupied in the south, that would have been the end of Albrecht, but in fact the king had only a small force that he could send to Prussia. This was insufficient to hold the order’s troops in check long. The grand master’s forces ravaged Royal Prussia, reconquered the Neumark, and worried about the appearance of Polish troops. When the Poles came at last, they brought with them Tatars, Bohemian mercenaries, and good artillery; but their numbers were insufficient to capture Albrecht’s fortresses. Nevertheless, the grand master, knowing that all would be lost if a larger enemy force came north, seeing that he now possessed but few subjects who had not been robbed of the means to provide food for his troops and pay taxes, willingly signed a truce at the end of 1520. Schönberg left for Germany, to die in the battle of Pavia (1525), fighting for Emperor Charles V; he was unable to spin a magic web over the emperor as he had Albrecht – Charles V had too many problems already with the Turks, the French, and the Protestants to seek a confrontation with the Polish monarch over the distant and unimportant province of Prussia.

  The end of Roman Catholicism in East Prussia came as no surprise. During Albrecht’s 1522 visit to Nuremberg to plead in vain for money from the princes of the Holy Roman Empire, it was clear that he had been visibly affected by Lutheran teachings. In early 1523 Martin Luther had directed one of his major statements ‘to the lords of the Teutonic Knights, that they avoid false chastity’. It was not hard to make inroads among the membership. The knights, and there were fewer of them now, had been reared in a Germany seething with unrest over church corruption. They understood the issues involved in Luther’s protests, and they were unhappy with the lack of morality at the papal curia. Moreover, they understood corruption – Pope Clement VII’s appointment of one absentee bishop to office in Pomerellia and nomination of a relative for the post brought that issue forcefully home. Albrecht, perhaps aware of the public mood and certainly personally concerned about ecclesiastical corruption, took steps to prepare the members of his order for reform proposals: during the Christmas holiday of 1523, while the grand master was still in Germany, he allowed Lutheran preachers to deliver sermons at his court in Königsberg.

  This was not hypocrisy. The once brash young prince had learned piety through harsh experience. His youthful sins had led not only him to disaster, but also his innocent subjects. Albrecht had apparently decided to devote the rest of his life to atoning for his early foolishness and indiscretion. Unlike repentant men of an earlier generation, however, he never contemplated withdrawing into a cloister for prayer and penitence. This Renaissance-era prince instead reflected on the choices available to him, and he selected a hard one: the correction of the basic flaw in his order’s status that had condemned Prussia to a century of foreign invasion and civil conflict, its awkward mixture of secular and clerical duties that made it something more than a religious order and something less than a sovereign state.

  The grand master quietly sought to discover what response neighbouring princes would make if he followed Luther’s advice, as many northern German bishops were doing, and secularised his Prussian lands. Already during his absence Protestant ministers had carried through the essentials of the Protestant reforms: they had introduced the German language into the worship services, had begun the singing of hymns, and had abolished pilgrimages and the veneration of saints. It was a very practical reform, one based on the general unhappiness with current church conditions but without methodological or theological justifications. Those came later. As the monks, nuns, and priests renounced their vows of celibacy, rumours inevitably began to circulate that the grand master, too, was planning to lay aside his vows, marry, and make himself the head of a secular state. The rumours concentrated on the scandal of the grand master leaving the clerical state and contracting a marriage.

  Surprisingly, there was little outrage. The pope and the emperor, of course, warned him against such a course, and his Brandenburg relatives did not approve, but the knights in Prussia and the cities and nobles favoured it decisively and the king of Poland allowed himself to approve it. Secularisation resolved two pressing problems at once: confiscation of the remaining ecclesiastical properties made money available to pay the grand master’s debts, and the way was open to incorporate East Prussia into the Polish kingdom, thereby establishing a peaceful and mutually unthreatening relationship with the monarch. On 10 April 1525, Duke Albrecht took the oath of allegiance in Cracow, a scene immortalised on one of the greatest Polish canvases by the nineteenth-century nationalist painter, Jan Matejko.

  East Prussia was not absorbed into the Polish state even to the minimal extent that West Prussia had been. The duke maintained his own army, currency, assembly, and a more or less independent foreign policy. The administrative system changed hardly at all, and the former laws remained in force. A few titles were revised. It was the introduction of Lutheran reforms that had the most profound results.

  In 1526 Albrecht entered the ‘true chastity of marriage’ with Dorothea, the eldest daughter of Friedrich of Denmark (1523 – 33). The Danes specialised in providing spouses to the German states along the Baltic; East Prussia completed the collection of regional alliances. This provided Albrecht with a powerful protector and a number of well-placed brothers- and sisters-in-law. Friedrich was also the most important Lutheran ruler of the time.

  The uproar in Catholic Germany was as loud and denunciatory as the applause in Protestant Germany, but in Prussia all was quiet. The handful of knights who were too old or unprepared to assume the demands of secular knighthood or who still kept faith with the old belief went to the German master in Mergentheim, who distributed them among his convents and hospitals. Those who remained in Prussia were given fiefs or offices; a few married and founded families, becoming a part of that Junker class for which Brandenburg-Prussia was later famous. However, on the whole, the noble class changed little in its composition. What changed was the nobles’ authority over the serfs, which grew considerably once East Prussia was a secular state. However, the nobles and burghers failed to acquire the political influence they had anticipated obtaining according to the Treaty of Cracow. The Great Peasant Revolt of 1525 was the free farmers’ reaction to rumours that they would be reduced to serfdom by their new lords. Albrecht suppressed the rising easily, but the event undermined the self-confidence of the nobles and gentry so greatly that they looked to the duke for leadership in this and all other matters.

  Duke Albrecht of Prussia soon abandoned his efforts to be named a prince of the empire, thus assuring himself of imperial forgiveness and giving him the protection of the Holy Roman Empire against excessive demands by the Polish king in the future. However, Charles V had been too far away, in Spain, or too busy with Luther and the Turks, to give careful consideration to such a minor matter while there was still time. In 1526, however, having seen what happened in E
ast Prussia because he had failed to act, the emperor granted that status to the Livonian master and his possessions. In 1530 Charles named the German master to be the new grand master; henceforth the Teutonic Order was expected to serve the Habsburg dynasty’s political programme.

  Royal Prussia was not affected by the secularisation of East Prussia’s government, except, of course, in that Protestant ideas circulated from town to town more easily. Potentially, the people already considered themselves an autonomous German-speaking part of the Polish kingdom with the right to make independent decisions on religion. The townsfolk welcomed both the prospect of peace and the spread of the Lutheran reforms. Not only did the way to a spiritual and cultural reunification of Prussia seem to have opened, but also another means of asserting the authority of the commercial classes and gentry over the ecclesiastical figures who were the nominal rulers of many cities and much of the countryside.

  Many who might have objected to the reforms found themselves muted by the even more appalling prospect of the peasant revolt. The rising of peasants here and there in Prussia during 1525 in imitation of the Great Peasant Revolt in Germany was a sobering warning that there were worse changes possible than those associated with cleaning up long-festering problems in the local churches and monasteries. The 1526 uprising in Danzig further demonstrated that unrest had spread to the lower classes in the towns. This was not a time for the upper classes to quarrel over religion – live and let live was the only practical policy.