The first Polish city to feel its influence and to respond to it was the important commercial city of Danzig. In less than a year from the posting of Luther’s theses on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg, Luther’s reform doctrines were preached and championed in Danzig. The man who accepted them and began to preach them publicly was James Knade, a monk and preacher at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. Knade renounced his monastic vows, married Anna, the beautiful step-daughter of James Rohboze, a wealthy burgher of Danzig, and, fearlessly opposing Rome and Roman practices, advocated reforms in the church. Being a popular preacher, liked and respected by the people of the city, his activity was very dangerous to the Church of Rome. He was, therefore, seized, by order of the bishop of Kuyavia, tried, found guilty, and imprisoned. Shortly after his imprisonment, he was released, but had to leave the city. He took refuge on the estate of a country gentleman by the name of Krokow, near the city of Thorn, where, protected by his patron, he continued his reform activity without further interference.[48]
Suppressed for a time, the reform movement broke out again four years later with accumulated force. The interval had given the people of Danzig time to think, to form opinions, and to take sides either for or against the Reformation. The year 1522, therefore, found the majority of the people of Danzig in favor of the Reformation. Some, however, wanted to carry it through conservatively, others by radical action. The advocates of conservative reform were drawn from among the well-to-do, and included the city council. The radicals came from the plebeian class, and represented the wishes of the common people. The conservatives favored the dogmatic aspect of the new reform movement, and opposed changes in organization, forms, and practices. The radicals, on the other hand, kept their eyes on the practical aspects of the new ideas, and proposed to carry them out to their logical limit.[49] The leader of the conservative reform party was Dr. Alexander, a Franciscan friar, an eloquent preacher, thoroughly educated and well balanced. The leader of the radical reform party was James Hegge, at first preacher at various churches outside the city wall, then prebendary of St. Mary’s, the largest and most beautiful church in the city, and still later of St. Catherine’s. Hegge was likewise an eloquent and popular preacher and a man of a very practical turn of mind.
While Hegge was the first to come forward in July, 1522, with a fresh attack upon the Church of Rome and its clergy, advocating the necessity of religious and ecclesiastical reforms both in doctrine and in practice, the conservative reform party, headed by Dr. Alexander, was able to control and to guide the movement for some time.[50] At length, however, the control of it passed into the hands of the radicals. These were not satisfied with any half-way measures, like preaching the new doctrines, while still retaining the old forms and practices. They began to demolish all sacred pictures, to clean out the churches of all forms of idolatry, and to give up old practices.[51] Owing to their strength and pressure, the conservative city government was induced to issue a proclamation, freeing all monks and nuns from their monastic vows, forbidding new candidates to enter any monastic order, and restraining all monks from preaching, hearing confessions, soliciting contributions, and visiting homes.[52] Conscious now of its power, the radical reform party went still farther, and demanded a share in politics and in the government of the city, with the result that early in 1525 it finally overthrew the conservative aristocratic city council, and established a popular city government.[53] The new city council closed all monasteries and convents, abolished Roman forms of worship, took possession of all church property, and appointed Lutheran preachers.[54] In its results, then, the Danzig Reformation was not only religious and ecclesiastical, but also social and political.
The accomplished reforms, however, were too thorough-going and too far-reaching to be lasting. The ecclesiastical authorities and the overthrown city council appealed to King Sigismund I (1506-1548) for help. The king, a loyal Catholic, first sent a commission to inquire into the situation and to restore the old order of things. When the insurrectionary city government would not yield to the representatives of the royal commission, the king in person set out for Danzig, accompanied by an armed force, forced the new city government into submission, punished fifteen of the revolutionary lay leaders by ordering them to be beheaded, and restored the former aristocratic city government and the Roman Catholic form of worship.[55]
In reality the king’s intervention restored only the old political order of things. The old religion was restored in outward appearance only, and for the time being as a matter of expedience. At heart the people of Danzig remained thoroughly sympathetic with the new religious teaching and the proposed religious reforms. So did the aristocratic city council now restored again to power as a result of the king’s intervention. With the restoration of the conservatives to power every effort was made to preserve the old forms of worship. At the same time the conservative aristocratic city council saw to it that to the pulpits of all the more important city churches only preachers sympathetic with the new teaching were appointed.[56] Under the leadership of this council and such conservative and tactful men as Dr. Alexander, Urban Ulric, Peter Bischoff, Pancratius Klemme, and Klein, the Reformation in Danzig went forward quietly, and by 1540 became an accomplished fact, not only in spirit, but also in form. This being the case, the king acquiesced.[57]
The Reformation spread rapidly to other West Prussian cities, and was accepted everywhere with enthusiasm. In the city of Thorn, the birth-place of Copernicus, Luther’s doctrines were preached as early as 1520-1521. That they were favorably received and found many adherents may be seen from the following incident. The papal legate Ferrei, having come to Thorn at this time, proceeded publicly to burn Luther’s portrait and some of his writings before the Church of St. John. The residents of the city made an attack on him and his followers, drove them away with stones, and rescued Luther’s picture from the flames.[58] It is more than probable that the ferment the Reformation was causing at Thorn was partly responsible for the publication in that city, July the 24, 1520, of the king’s Thorn Edict, by which the importation of Luther’s writings into the land were forbidden under penalty of confiscation of all property and of exile from the country.[59]
In Braunsberg, the seat of the bishop of Warmya, the Lutheran form of worship was introduced in 1520 without the bishop’s persecution of the innovators. When the cathedral canons upbraided the bishop for his leniency, he laconically replied that Luther based his doctrines on the Scriptures, and that whosoever felt himself capable of refuting them was welcome to undertake the job.[60] Other West Prussian cities, too, felt the force of the new movement, and responded to it in varied degrees. The Reformation struck roots into the West Prussian soil so deeply that even the vigorous suppression of it in Danzig in 1526 and the following reaction through West Prussia were unable to exterminate it.[61]
The attitude of the West Prussian cities toward the Reformation exerted a strong influence on the Duchy of East Prussia, since 1466 a vassal principality of Poland.[62] In 1525, the year when the Reformation resulted in most far-reaching changes in Danzig, Albert Hohenzollern, Grand Master of the Order of the Teutonic Knights, left the Roman Church, accepted Lutheranism, secularized the possessions of the Order with the consent of the Polish king, and by the Treaty of Cracow of the same year became the secular hereditary ruler of the vassal Duchy of East Prussia with a right to the first seat in the Polish Senate.[63] The Pope and the German emperor naturally protested against this arrangement, but without any effect. Owing to the popularity of the Reformation in West Prussia and the revolution it caused in the city of Danzig, and fearing that a refusal to grant Albert’s request might lead him to bring to a head the reform movement in the whole of Prussia and possibly tear the whole Prussian territory away from the kingdom, Sigismund I preferred to sanction the arrangement described above even at the risk of being suspected of disloyalty to the Church of Rome.[64] In accordance with the agreement made with the Polish crown, Duke Albert commanded, by an edict issued July 6, 1525, that the Holy Gospel, the word of Christ, pure and simple, be preached in his possessions “under the penalty of exile.”[65] At the same time he made every effort to evangelize the population of the Duchy. For this purpose he secured through Bishop Speratus of Pomerania the publication at Wittenberg of Luther’s Shorter Catechism. A copy of this catechism he sent in 1531 by Nipczyc to Chojnicki, archdeacon of Cracow, who read it eagerly.[66]
The introduction and legalization of the Reformation in East Prussia, one of Poland’s autonomous provinces, exerted a potent influence in favor of the movement’s spread in other parts of the country. Duke Albert became a patron and promoter of the new movement. He established in Königsberg a press, from which thousands of Polish religious pamphlets and books were issued, and a university, in which several generations of Polish Protestant ministers received their education. Thus East Prussia became a place of refuge for reformers and adherents of the new faith, persecuted in other parts of Poland, as well as a training ground for Polish Protestant clergy, and a source of Polish Protestant literature.[67]
In the neighboring Duchy of Mazovia the Reformation did not make much progress. Yet even here it evidently met with some success; for Duke Janusz of Mazovia felt it to be necessary to issue in 1525 at a council assembled in Warsaw an edict, forbidding, under penalty of death and confiscation of all property for the benefit of the ducal treasury, the possession and reading of Luther’s writings in whatever language, the teaching of his doctrines, or any discussion of them with anyone.[68]