For more than three hundred years Germany had been steadily conquering the Slavs, driving them eastwards, or subjecting them to overwhelming German influences. |War with Poland.| Thanks to the Hanseatic League and to the Teutonic Knights, the Baltic had been made into a German sea. But with the fifteenth century a reaction set in in favour of both Scandinavians and Slavs. Just as the Union of Kalmar involved a serious danger to the Hanse towns, so the close association of Lithuania and Poland threatened the vital interests of the Teutonic Knights. In Bohemia the same reaction against German predominance found expression in the Hussite movement, and in the internal quarrels within the University of Prague (see p. 209). But it was in Prussia that the Slavs gained their most durable successes, though the victories of Ziska and Prokop over the crusading armies of Germany made the greater impression upon Europe at the time. The inevitable struggle which altered conditions forced upon the Teutonic Order broke out in 1409. In the next year the largest armies which had ever met in these northern wars confronted each other on the field of Tannenberg. After a |Battle of Tannenberg.| terrible contest, in which John Ziska, the future leader of the Hussites, fought for the men of his own race, superior numbers gave a decisive victory to the forces of Poland and Lithuania. The grand-master and the flower of his Knights fell in the battle, and Prussia seemed to be at the mercy of the conquerors. But the progress of King Ladislas was checked by the heroic resistance of the fortress of Marienburg; and he consented, in the Peace of Thorn (1411), to give up all his conquests except one district, which was to be ceded only for his own lifetime. The ruin of the Order was postponed for half a century.
The defeat at Tannenberg might have proved less fatal in its results if it had not been accompanied by growing internal weakness. An order of militant monks may provide |Decline of the Order.| a magnificent fighting force, but it is unlikely to prove a satisfactory conductor of civil administration. The great evil in Prussia was the absence of any substantial common interest between the governors and the governed. At first the German settlers were bound to the Knights as their protectors against the original inhabitants; but as time went on, and new generations grew up in the country of their birth, the original enmity between Germans and Slavs gradually cooled, and the two peoples were brought closer together in the ordinary intercourse of industry, trade, and social life. But this growing union was a source of danger rather than of gain to the ruling Order, because it deprived them of the aid of that section of the population which might naturally have been expected to support the Government. The Knights themselves, being bound by the priestly vow of celibacy, could not train up successors with a hereditary knowledge of the people and the country. Each generation of Knights came from other districts, and had to learn the work of government afresh. They came for the most part from southern Germany, and their habits and even their language differed in many respects from those of the Low Germans who had come in to settle in their towns and villages. And strict as the disciplinary code of the Order was, it was difficult to enforce its rules among men who were not secluded from the world in monasteries, but were busily engaged in the work of war and administration, and were in constant intercourse with visitors from all countries. The charges of immorality and unbelief which had been urged against the Templars could certainly be brought with equal if not with greater force against the members of the Teutonic Order. The Knights had none of the ordinary restraints of family affection, private property, and home life; and it would have been superhuman if most of them had been able to resist the temptations to which their mode of life and their despotic authority over their subjects exposed them. For there was nothing like constitutional life in Prussia outside the Order itself. The authority of the grand-master was limited by the necessity of gaining the consent of his chapter and by the great independence of the provincial masters. But there was no machinery by which the Knights could receive advice and information from the people whom they ruled. Even the Prussian nobles, whether of German or Slavonic origin, were excluded from all voice in the government. After the battle of Tannenberg an attempt was made to establish a representative diet, in order to enlist popular sympathy in the task of resisting invasion. But it was the arbitrary act of an individual grand-master, and it broke the standing rule which forbade priests to be guided by the counsel of laymen. The economic policy of the Order was peculiarly affected by this want of easy intercourse with the traders whose interests were at stake. The most important towns within its dominions—Danzig, Elbing, Memel, Thorn, Kulm, and Königsberg—were extremely flourishing, and all except Memel were members of the Hanseatic League. On the whole, a wise instinct impelled the Knights to maintain a close alliance with the League, which so ably championed the cause of Germany in the western Baltic, and thus the danger of conflicting interests between the Order and the Hanse towns proved less than might have been expected. But the Knights themselves embarked in trade, especially in amber; and, after the fashion of rulers, they sought to regulate the market to bring gain to themselves, a course of action which excited the jealous hostility of the professional merchants. And their imitation of the action of the League proved disastrous. For the maintenance of their great war against Denmark, the Hanse towns had imposed a duty upon all exports to be levied at each port (see p. 434). The Teutonic Order imposed a similar tax for the Polish war, and endeavoured to make it a permanent source of revenue. But the inevitable comparison was not in their favour. The Hanseatic League was fighting in the common interests of all German traders, and it was reasonable to ask them to contribute. The Order was conducting a war in which the merchants as such had no appreciable interest at all. The heavy taxation necessitated by the employment of mercenaries raised the question whether the government of the Order was worth the expense. Both nobles, citizens, and peasants were gradually convinced that their welfare was by no means bound up with crusades in Lithuania and perpetual warfare with Poland. In 1440 a number of nobles and twenty-one towns combined to form a ‘Prussian League’ for the defence of their liberties and common interests. There was no overt defiance of the Order, but the League constituted a state within the state, and a collision with the older government was sooner or later inevitable. And when it did occur, it was more than probable that the foreign enemies of the Order would be able to make use of the League to serve their own purposes.
As the alienation of their subjects became more and more pronounced, the Knights were driven to maintain their power by measures of ever-increasing severity. They denounced their opponents as traitors. But they themselves had no better claim to be considered as patriots. They were not native Prussians, and they had none of that instinctive devotion to the cause of their country which can hardly ever be acquired except under the subtle influences of birth and early training. For this love of the soil loyalty to a corporation proved a very inadequate substitute. Henry of Plauen, the hero of the defence of Marienburg in 1410, was rewarded for his services by election to the vacant grand-mastership. But a few years later he incurred the displeasure of the chapter and was formally deposed. In his chagrin he did not hesitate to open treacherous negotiations with the Polish king, and ultimately he died in the prison to which he was justly condemned. Such an instance was by no means isolated; and, in fact, many of the Knights were secretly members of the Prussian League. The wonder is, not that the Order fell, but that its rule was for a time so successful, and that it lasted as long as it did.
Under the circumstances that grew up in the fifteenth century, with the Government divided in itself and confronted by the growing hostility of its subjects, a renewal |Civil war and Polish invasion.| of the Polish war could only be attended with disaster. For many years a quarrel was averted by a series of abject concessions, which were interpreted as a sign of weakness, and naturally encouraged further demands. At last the final catastrophe was hurried on by the outbreak of civil war. The Prussian League had become more and more openly antagonistic to the rule of the Order, and it was determined to make a resolute effort to crush the disaffection. In 1453 the Emperor Frederick III. was induced to condemn the League, and the Order armed its forces to carry out the imperial decree. The result might have been foreseen. The League renounced all allegiance to the Teutonic Order, and offered the suzerainty of Prussia to Casimir of Poland. The offer was accepted. The Polish king declared Prussia to be annexed to his dominions, and an army was led by Casimir himself to aid the rebels. For twelve years the unfortunate country was doomed to suffer all the horrors of civil strife and foreign invasion. In spite of the tremendous odds against them, the Knights offered a resistance worthy of their military reputation in the past. In 1457 the grand-master was forced to quit the fortress of Marienburg, where seventy of his predecessors had held their residence for a century and a half. A refuge was found for a time in the eastern castle of Königsberg, which was to be the future home of kings of Prussia in times of similar distress. But the town of Marienburg held out with heroic obstinacy for another three years, and siege operations there and elsewhere delayed the progress of the Poles long after they had crushed all resistance in the open field. The grand-master made frantic appeals to the Emperor and the German princes for aid against the Slavonic conquerors of the great province which the Order had won for Germany. To Frederick II. of Brandenburg he sold the Neumark (1455), which had been handed over to the Teutonic Knights by Sigismund in 1402. But prayers and bribes were equally unavailing to excite any sentiment of nationality among princes who had long ceased to regard anything but their own territorial interests. In 1466 it was at last necessary to submit to the consequences of defeat |Treaty of Thorn, 1466.| and to sign the Treaty of Thorn. The whole of western Prussia, with Pomerellen, including the towns of Danzig, Thorn, Elbing, and Kulm, was ceded to Poland, and the valley of the Vistula passed once more into the hands of the Slavs. Eastern Prussia, with Königsberg as its capital, was left in the hands of the Order, but it was to be held as a Polish fief. All allegiance to any other secular prince was to be repudiated, and thus the connection with Germany was formally ended. Future grand-masters were to do homage on election to the king of Poland, and were to sit on his left hand in the Polish Diet.
It is needless to dwell at any length on the subsequent fate of the Teutonic Order, which had fallen so lamentably |End of the Teutonic Order.| from its high estate. The Knights of the Sword repudiated their subordination to a grand-master who was no longer a sovereign prince, and assumed the independent rule of Livonia and Esthonia. The House of Jagellon went from one triumph to another; and its ascendency in eastern Europe seemed to be established when Ladislas, a younger son of Casimir IV., was elected to the crown of Bohemia in 1471, and to that of Hungary in 1490. Resistance to so great a power as Poland had now become must have seemed chimerical, yet the Knights continued to cherish the idea of recovering their lost independence. With this object in view they resisted all proposals to unite the grand-mastership with the Polish monarchy, and adopted the policy of electing successive chiefs from the great families of northern Germany, in the hope of enlisting their support for the cause of Prussia. Thus in 1498 they chose Frederick of Saxony, and in 1511 Albert of Hohenzollern. The latter was for a time encouraged by the promise of assistance held out by Maximilian I. But the Hapsburgs ever preferred the interests of their house to those of Germany; and the hopes of Albert were dashed to the ground when he learned that Maximilian had, in 1516, concluded a treaty and a double marriage alliance with the Jagellon princes in order to secure to his grandson Ferdinand the succession in Hungary and Bohemia. In anger and despair Albert determined to repudiate his allegiance both to Church and Empire. In 1525 he adopted the Protestant faith, confirmed the cession of West Prussia to Poland, and received East Prussia as a hereditary duchy for himself and his heirs. Although an obstinate minority of the Knights refused to acknowledge the validity of the grand-master’s action, the Teutonic Order was practically dissolved. The remnant of the state which it had built up with such strenuous exertions fell a century later to the main line of the electors of Brandenburg, and gave a title to the monarchy which has become in later times the paramount power in a united Germany.
The Order of the Sword lingered a few years longer, only to meet with a similar fate in the end. In 1561 the last grand-master, Gotthard Ketteler, finding it impossible |End of the Order of the Sword.| to maintain independence, imitated the action of Albert of Hohenzollern. He carved out for himself the secular duchy of Courland, to be held in vassalage to Poland, while the rest of Livonia and Esthonia was thrown as an apple of discord into the midst of the rival Baltic states—Poland, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia. The struggle which followed is noteworthy, not only because it led to the temporary ascendency of Sweden in the Baltic, and so to the achievements of its warrior-kings, Gustavus Adolphus, Charles X., and Charles XII., but also because it gave occasion for the first appearance of Russia as a European power.
CHAPTER XX
THE CHRISTIAN STATES OF SPAIN
Suspension of the Moorish wars in the middle of the thirteenth century—Constitution of Castile—Disorders in the kingdom—Alfonso XI.’s victories over the Moors—Peter the Cruel and Henry of Trastamara—John of Gaunt in Spain—John II. of Castile and Alvaro de Luna—Henry III. and the accession of Isabella in Castile—The Constitution of Aragon—Acquisition of Sicily and Sardinia—The general Privilege and the Privilege of Union—Reign of Peter IV.—Re-union of Sicily with Aragon—Accession of the House of Trastamara in Aragon—Alfonso V. gains Naples—Relations of Aragon and Navarre—John II. and Charles of Viana—Union of Castile and Aragon—Government of Ferdinand and Isabella—The Santa Hermandad and the Inquisition—Conquest of Granada—Geographical discoveries of Portugal and Castile—The Bull of Borgia and the Treaty of Tordesillas.
The middle of the thirteenth century was an important turning-point in the history of Spain. Hitherto the Christian |Suspension of Moorish wars.| states had been engaged in a continuous crusade for the conquest or expulsion of the Moors, who had held almost the whole peninsula in the eighth century. But the capture of Cordova in 1236, and of Seville in 1248, with the reduction of the province of Murcia in 1266, drove the Moors to their last stronghold in the kingdom of Granada, which they were allowed to retain in comparative peace for nearly two centuries and a half. This cessation of military activity in the south was due to several causes. Granada itself was strongly defended by nature, and its population was more homogeneous than that of the dominions which had been lost. And the old enemies of the Moors were now diminished in number. Portugal was cut off from all direct contact with the infidel by the district round Seville and Cadiz, and Aragon was equally isolated by the intervention of the Castilian province of Murcia. The only state which had a conterminous frontier with the Moors was Castile, and the attention of Castile was distracted from its southern neighbours by internal feuds and foreign interests. One result of the termination of the religious war is that Spanish history loses such unity as it had hitherto possessed, and it is henceforth necessary to follow the separate history of its component states. And with its unity the history of the peninsula loses much of its dignity and importance. The record of internal feuds, of dynastic revolutions, and of criminal bloodshed, which fills the annals of the Spanish kingdoms, and especially of Castile, would hardly be worth preserving if it were not the necessary prelude to the rise of Spain in the sixteenth century to a foremost position among the powers of Europe.
Castile, permanently united with Leon since 1230, was the largest, and ultimately the dominant state of Spain. It had been formed in the course of a prolonged religious |Constitution of Castile.| war, and this had left a permanent impress on the constitution. While the kings had risen to power as military leaders, the nobles and cities had also earned great independence in a struggle which had often depended more upon sudden local effort than upon the action of large armies; and the clergy, as the preachers of religious ardour against the infidel, retained more authority than in any other country in Europe. When national exertion was relaxed by the diminution of external danger, a struggle between the rival forces was inevitable; and though the victory rested in the end with the monarchy, it was long before this result was assured. The national assembly, or Cortes, was composed of three estates—clergy, nobles, and citizens—and its importance varied very much from time to time. But the royal power was more effectually limited by the danger of armed resistance than by any formal constitutional restrictions. The great nobles were independent princes in their own domains, and could command the allegiance of their vassals in private feuds with each other, and even in warfare against the crown. For the vindication of their own rights, and for resisting the encroachments of the barons, the towns claimed and exercised the right of forming an armed union or hermandad. It was fortunate for the kings that conflicting interests and mutual jealousy prevented any common action between classes whose power both of offence and defence was so extremely formidable.