In fact, the fate of the Hohenzollern offspring Prince Albrecht (1490-1568) in the 16th century had predetermined a less than spectacular career: he was only the third-born son of Friedrich V, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach (ruled 1486-1515) and from 1495 also from Brandenburg-Kulmbach. While his older brothers were to inherit their father’s worldly rule, Albrecht was left with only a clerical career. This is what the testamentary determination of the “Dispositio Achillea” of 1473 intended to prevent a division of the Mark Brandenburg. And yet it was Albrecht of all people who was to lay the foundation for what would later become the Kingdom of Prussia – out of sheer desperation.
The young Albrecht was educated in the Archdiocese of Cologne, ordained as a priest and given a position as a canon before he suddenly rose to become the 37th Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in 1511, at the age of 21. Although he did not have any special qualifications for this office, he did have an exclusive family background: after all, the Brandenburg Hohenzollern line provided an elector in Joachim I (ruled 1499–1535), and at the same time Albrecht was the nephew of the Polish king Sigismund I. (reigned 1507–1548).
The friars hoped for better relations with the Holy Roman Empire and especially with Poland from their new Grand Master. Because at the beginning of the 16th century, the once proud order of knights, which was formally subordinate to the Vatican, was long past its prime. The disastrous defeat by Poland at Tannenberg in 1410 was followed by the Second Peace of Thorn in 1466, after which West Prussia, including Danzig, Thorn and Elbing, fell to the victor. Above all, East Prussia with Königsberg remained. The state of the Teutonic Order was now completely surrounded by Poland and had to recognize the sovereignty of its king.
Albrecht should stop the decline. First, the new Grand Master provoked his uncle Sigismund I by refusing to take the oath of fealty. His goal: an independent religious order. Despite the family connection, the conflict escalated. In 1519 Polish horsemen invaded Albrecht’s land, but were unable to achieve a decisive victory. Two years later, war-weary, an armistice was agreed.
The Grand Master was still trying to enlist support from the Holy Roman Empire, but was ultimately left alone. Albrecht’s situation was hopeless: there was a lack of money and troops for a new war, and a victory for Poland threatened the final end of the religious order. At the same time, the country lay fallow in many places since the Polish invasions; at the same time, the Reformation made its way eastwards and caused unrest among the landed gentry and the population.
In 1525, Albrecht took a radical step: he dissolved the state of the Teutonic Order in Prussia without further ado. On April 10, 1525, he took the oath of fealty to King Sigismund of Poland on Kraków’s Town Hall Square, putting himself under his protection. In return, Sigismund converted the territory of the order into a secular duchy.
As if that were not enough, Albrecht also introduced the Reformation. The Catholic Sigismund accepted that. He was concerned with finally pacifying restless Prussia so that he could fend off the expanding Ottomans in the south with his troops. “In this way, Albrecht became ‘Duke in Prussia’ and during his long reign, which lasted until 1568, he turned his small country into a model Protestant state,” says historian Frank-Lothar Kroll. It was also the birth of the first “Protestant” territorial state.
The fact that Albrecht, who had been Catholic until then, changed his denomination was not a rash act. The reformer Martin Luther himself advised him to do so at two meetings in Wittenberg. “Behold the miracle! The gospel rushes to Prussia with full sails,” Luther rejoiced.
In any case, Albrecht had not been a supporter of the old, strict rules of the order. Those who live their lives according to vows of chastity, a ban on marriage and childlessness follow the “most cruel and most disgraceful” rules and are driven by “erroneous spirits and the teachings of the devil,” he wrote. Instead, the duke wanted to spread “true” Christianity in Prussia.
In fact, most of the monks – there were only 56 left in Prussia – joined Albrecht and converted to Protestantism. After all, they could now command secular fiefdoms and produce legitimate offspring to whom they could inherit these lands.
For the other branches of the Teutonic Order, in Livonia and in the Holy Roman Empire, the founder of the state, Albrecht, was a traitor who stole Prussia from the order in a kind of coup d’état. The emperor also scolded Albrecht as “disobedient”. The imperial ban was even imposed on the Hohenzoller. However, the Emperor did not take military action because he would have risked a war with Poland.
From then on, Duke Albrecht worked as a promoter of the Reformation, but was also committed to culture and education. The founding of the University of Königsberg in 1544 was largely due to his personal initiative, and the city itself became a center of humanistic culture under him.
However, Albrecht did not succeed in founding his own dynasty because his mentally ill son Albrecht Friedrich left no male heirs. After his death in 1618, this Hohenzollern line died out. Despite this, Prussia did not come to Poland, because “Duke Albrecht, through dynastic marriage ties, ensured that his land would become property of the Brandenburg Hohenzollerns in the event of the expected extinction of the ducal-Prussian house,” explains Kroll. Albrecht’s granddaughter Anna had already married Margrave Johann Sigismund, later Elector of Brandenburg, in 1594.
Therefore, the dominion of the Brandenburg Hohenzollern extended to Prussia in 1618, which was formally still subject to the fiefdom of the Polish king. It was not until 1656/57, during the Northern Wars, that Brandenburg gained full sovereignty over Prussia with the treaties of Wehlau and Labiau. Now both parts of the country slowly developed into a state entity. In 1701, Friedrich I crowned himself the first king in Prussia. His grandson Frederick the Great (ruled 1740-1786) led the country into the circle of the great European powers and was allowed to call himself King of Prussia from 1772.
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