CHAPTER XX.

THE ORIGINS OF THE KINGDOM OP PRUSSIA.

ALTHOUGH the complexity of the phenomena of modern 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 Hohen-zollerns, both before and since they declared themselves the servants of the State; and few populations with whose history we can claim to be fairly well acquainted have been found more consistently ready to carry 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 Hohenzollerns 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 Hohenzollerns, 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.

Notwithstanding the episcopal sees set up by Otto I in the half-subdued 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 count-ship 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 Ballenstädt, 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 here1. Unlike

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 I 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 Hohenzollern Elector Frederick II.

Early in the thirteenth century the collapse of the Danish King Waldemar the Victorious at Bornhöved (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 Vaticimum 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.

Wittelsbach ; and it almost seemed as if the centre of gravity of the territorial possessions of that House might come to lie in those northern lands whose future relations to the Empire were so wholly unforeseen. But the Wittelsbach rule had never struck root in the Mark; under Lewis it had been devastated by a Polish invasion, blessed by the Pope (John XXII); and after the death of the Emperor Lewis (1347) his three sons had to contend not only against the statecraft of Charles IV of Bohemia, now generally acknowledged as Roman King, but against a popular current of mysterious force. The story of the False Waldemar (1348-55), in whose favour almost the entire margravate (except Treuenbrietzen) renounced its Bavarian ruler, attests a tenacious loyalty of which Brandenburg-Prussian history was to furnish many later examples, but none more remarkable than this. The Bavarian sway over Brandenburg survived this shock ; but it continued to be exposed to the hostility of the Imperial House and to the feebler efforts of the spiritual power of Rome. Finally, after a terrible devastation of the margravate by the Emperor's Bohemian soldiery (1371), the Elector Otto resigned his authority; and at Tangemünde (1374) the perpetual union of the Mark Brandenburg with the Bohemian Crown was proclaimed. Brandenburg had probably been thus preserved from disruption, but with the prospect of becoming, like Silesia, a mere element in the dynastic power of Bohemia, whose furthest advance in political importance, in economic prosperity, and in intellectual activity, is marked by the reign of Charles IV.

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 history of the land.

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 flagranti, 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.

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.

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 \vas 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.

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.

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 Netherlanders.

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 Jiilich-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 Hohenzollerns.

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 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.

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 cTêtre 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 German Order's real occupation had gone after, towards the close of the fourteenth century, it had completed the official Christianisa-tion of Lithuania-a process bearing a most shadowy resemblance to a crusade, and rather resembling annual manœuvres, to which foreign visitors of distinction and adventurers " reysing in Littowe " were largely 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 Flauen (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 Thorn (1411).

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 Hohenzollern 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 Thorn 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.

Margrave Albert, through whose action the ultimate expansion of the dynastic power of the Hohenzollerns 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 fell1 ; 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 Nürnberg, 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 very names of its towns, Marienburg itself becoming Malborg-were

Polonised so far as might be, and the very existence of the Order was forgotten. Danzig-perhaps alone-derived great material advantage from this close connexion with Poland, of whose trade the city enjoyed an uncontested monopoly.

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 scries 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 very year (1573) in which he was married to Maria Eleonora, the heiress of Duke William of Jiilich, Cleves, and Berg, he had to be placed under continuous personal control, and his cousin, Margrave George Frederick of Ansbach and Jägerndorf, 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.

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.