1501-35]

Joachim I and Jägerndorf

625

And at the

towns of the Old Mark; his successor strung up in a single batch forty members of the recalcitrant nobility of that Kückeritz and Lüderitz, Kracht and Itzenplitz, sort, from which the litany of the peasants prayed the Lord to deliver them. The introduction of Roman law, coinciding with the establishment at Berlin of the Electoral Cameral Tribunal, was of much advantage to these processes of the executive. same time the traditional policy of maintaining a close connexion with the central authority of the Empire was steadily maintained; and when, in 1514, Joachim I's younger brother Albert, Archbishop of Magdeburg and Administrator of Halberstadt, had been elected Archbishop of Mainz, the Brandenburg dynasty was in possession of two electoral votes. Never before had the House of Brandenburg loomed so large in the eyes of Europe; but it will suffice for our purpose to mention the election, in 1512, as High Master of the German Knights of the Franconian Margrave Albert, a grandson of the Elector Albert Achilles.

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 Hohenzollerns. 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 Hohenzollern Prince, Margrave George of Ansbach, had during the reign of King Lewis II of Bohemia (and Hungary) been invested with the principality of Jägerndorf (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 Jägerndorf 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 re-establishment through them, they continuously stood to it in a relation of protectorship. The

C. M. H. V.

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The Reformation in Brandenburg

[1517-48

Brandenburg Bishops were nominated by the Margraves, and merely confirmed by the vote of their Chapters; and they were in all temporal matters subject to the territorial authority, sitting in the Landtage and not in the Imperial Diet. Indeed, if the relations of the Margrave Electors to the monastic Orders within their dominions be taken into account, their authority may be said to have resembled that of the contemporary great monarchical Powers.

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 policy. 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

1548-1608] Lutheranism.

The first Council of State 627

h began to estrange him from the Emperor Charles V. He became a supLaporter of the bold policy of his neighbour, the Elector Maurice of Saxony; and as he continued to go hand in hand with Maurice's sagacious successor, Augustus, the conjunction between Saxony, Brandenburg, and Hesse, materially helped to bring about the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555). The Brandenburg reformation was now carried through; but though the three episcopal sees within the electorate were secularised, and the administration of them was conferred upon princes of the dynasty, as few changes as possible were made in forms of worship, and the doctrinal teaching of the Swiss and other more advanced reformers was kept at a distance. Politically, the great achievement of Joachim II's reign was his success in securing the administration of the see of Magdeburg to his grandson, Joachim Frederick (1566), as the centre of gravity of the dominions of his dynasty was thus definitively fixed between the middle Elbe and Oder.

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 Jülich, Cleves, and Berg, if the prosecution of them was to involve joint action with the Calvinistic Netherlanders.

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 formula 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 Geheimräthe) 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 Brandenburg-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

628 The Rhenish duchies.-John Sigismunda Calvinist [1605-18

had already done what a generation later Strafford and his helpers vainly attempted to do in England - they had taken the real control of the government out of the hands of the parliamentary representation. 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 JülichCleves-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 Hohenzollerns.

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 JülichCleves 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 found 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

997-1222]

Early history of Prussia

629

yet it led the Princes, and with them the population, of the State to accept and assimilate principles of toleration which, besides having signally augmented its economic resources, have come to be its priceless moral and intellectual inheritance. Thus, by the great designs which it was his lot to carry out, and by the consequences of an act of pure conscientiousness, John Sigismund's reign marks an epoch in the history of his land.

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 the 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 corner 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