Royal Prussia

gigatos | May 30, 2022

Post Views: 27

Summary

Royal Prussia (Polish Prusy Królewskie, also Prussia Royal Share or Polish Prussia) was called the western part of Prussia from 1454, which included extensive areas of the historical territory of Pomerelia.

Royal Prussia was an autonomous Estates State with its own Diet, which had broken away from the Teutonic Order State and which had voluntarily subordinated itself to the person of the Polish monarch as the highest state authority. The attribute “royal” distinguished it from the rest of the Order State, which became the Duchy of Prussia in 1525 and the “Kingdom of Prussia” in 1701. Royal Prussia was linked to the Polish crown from 1454, first in a union not clearly defined in international law – often referred to in historiography as a “personal union” – and then from 1569 in a real union. As a result of the partitions of Poland in 1772 and 1793, Royal Prussia became part of the state of Prussia by annexation as the province of West Prussia.

Chroniclers and cartographers referred to the area in Latin as “Prussia Occidentalis” or “Prut(h)enia Occidentalis” – parts of it also as “Pom(m)erella” (like Abraham Ortelius, who explicitly described its location as “uterque ripis Vistulae”: “on both banks of the Vistula”).

After the Prussian Confederation placed itself under the protective rule of the Polish king as Prussia Royal Share, the country was divided into three voivodeships, with the exception of the Bishopric of Warmia, which was left to the bishop, so that there were four administrative districts in total:

The Principality of Warmia was equal to a voivodeship in terms of state law.

The Diet (Polish: Sejmiki) of the Pomeranian Voivodeship, the other two Voivodeships and the Prince-Bishopric, elected by the landed gentry, each sent one deputy to the Diet of the Kingdom of Poland, and from 1569 to the joint Polish-Lithuanian Diet of the Noble Republic of Poland-Lithuania.

Each of the three voivodeships was subdivided into smaller administrative units called districts, (These districts were larger than later German counties or the Polish powiats roughly corresponding to them in area).

The cities of Gdansk, Elblag and Thorn were formally subject to this structure, but had extensive autonomy rights.

Also read, biographies – Nikos Kavvadias

Kulm Voivodeship

Kulm Voivodeship was divided into five smaller administrative units:

The latter two districts together formed the Michelau Land. The following important towns were located in these five districts:

Mariánské Lázn? Voivodeship

Mariánské Lázn? Voivodeship was divided into four smaller administrative units:

It covered three Werder in the Vistula delta, namely the Great Marienburg Werder, the Small Marienburg Werder and the Elbingen Werder. The following important towns were located in these four districts:

Also read, biographies – Wanli Emperor

Voivodeship Pomerelia

The Voivodeship of Pomerania, which had been a part of the Duchy of Pomerania from ancient times, was divided into seven smaller administrative units:

In these seven districts were located the following significant localities.

Also read, history – Abbasid–Carolingian alliance

Principality of Warmia

The Principality of Warmia, which was under the rule of the bishops of Warmia, was divided into ten administrative districts. The most important localities were:

Alliance of the Prussian Confederation with the King of Poland

Out of dissatisfaction with the domestic and fiscal policies of the Teutonic Order, the Prussian League was founded in 1440. In 1452, the Prussian cities had their privileges and handholds confirmed by Emperor Frederick III so that the Teutonic Order would be deterred from diminishing them. Under the leadership of Hans von Baysen, the League broke away from the Teutonic Order at the beginning of 1454 and placed itself under the protection of the King of Poland, Casimir II the Jagiellonian.

The Prussian territory offered by the Confederation to the king for protection was indeed incorporated pro forma by the Polish king into his realm, as the Krakow charter (Privilegium incorporationis) backdated to March 6, 1454 describes it, but the accession became effective only by the counter-deed of the Prussian estates of April 14, 1454, establishing the agreed autonomy rights. The pair of documents is an essential part of the constitution of the Prussian Estates under the Polish crown.

Thus, Prussia Royal Share did not become a Polish province at all, but remained an independent country with its own national constitution. The mutual agreements essentially concerned the following points:

All inhabitants kept their privileges and privileges and the free use of the rights that had been common in the country until then (in the towns only the Kulm law applied), and the payment of the feudal nexus ceased.

After these treaties, the Thirteen Years” War, or the Prussian Town War, was fought by parts of the Prussian estates and towns against the rule of the Teutonic Order, which quickly lost many of the weakly occupied castles. In the Battle of Konice, 1454, the Teutonic Order, thanks to its mercenaries from Silesia and Bohemia, put to flight the Polish king together with the troops of the General Nobility Posse, but this victory had no effect on the outcome of the war. After that, Polish troops of the nobility hardly intervened in the conflict, but the Order could not benefit from it, because after the loss of tax revenues it lacked the financial strength to recruit more mercenary troops.

Also read, battles – Battle of Roncevaux Pass

Second Peace of Thorn

In 1466, the Second Peace of Thorn sealed the stalemate that had arisen and divided the Teutonic Order state in Prussia according to ownership. While the eastern part remained to the Teutonic Order as a Polish fief, the western Prussian land formed an “autonomous German Estates State under Polish Crown”, in which the large cities of Thorn, Elbing and especially Gdansk assumed the position of city republics, similar to the Free and Imperial Cities in the Holy Roman Empire. The lands of Lauenburg and Bütow went in pledge to Duke Erich II of Pomerania-Wolgast as thanks for his support against the Teutonic Order.

The independence of Royal Prussia from the Crown of Poland was particularly evident in the Prussian citizenship, its own state constitution, the retention of its own borders, as well as in the guarantee of its special rights, such as its own parliament, its own state government with von Baysen as gubernator, its own judicial system, as well as its own coinage rights, the preservation of which had contributed not insignificantly to the breakaway from the Teutonic Order, as well as its own diplomatic representations and its own military of the large cities. The Culm law, known as “the old Culm”, continued to apply.

Also read, biographies – George Petrie (antiquarian)

Prussian Estates under Polish Crown

The largely autonomous “Prussia of Royal Proportion” was a state of estates and had its own state parliaments, including German as the language of negotiation, its own state government (Prussian State Council with two chambers for cities and nobility) and its own mint. In addition, the large cities had their own military sovereignty and their right to maintain their own diplomatic relations with foreign countries. They also became the subject of conflicts between the Prussian Estates and the Polish king.

Hans von Baysen, former knight of the Order and leader of the Prussian League, was appointed gubernator of Prussia by the king as agreed, but he died already in 1459. His brother Stibor von Baysen was elected as his successor, but the king abolished the post in 1467. The Estates, however, ignored the royal decision and continued to consider Stibor of Baysen as their Gubernator of the country. It was not until 1472 that King Casimir Andrew finally appointed him as gubernator, or only attorney and captain of the land.

In 1467, the investiture dispute between the Polish King Casimir IV the Jagiellonian and the Prince-Bishop of Warmia, the so-called “Pfaffenkrieg”, lasted from 1467 to 1479.

Insufficiently regulated between Prussia Royal Share on the one hand and Poland on the other hand was, among other things, the mutual duty of assistance in the case of warlike undertakings outside the country”s borders. When in 1486 Poland demanded money and assistance from Prussia Royal Share for foreign military measures against the expanding Ottoman Empire, it was initially refused assistance with the argument that the mutual agreements only concerned the interior of the country, and only in 1490 did the Prussians relent and pay the Turkish tax, for which Casimir then thanked the city of Gdansk in particular.

Also read, biographies – Vlad the Impaler

Reformation Ideas and the War of the Grand Master

Reformation ideas spread from 1518, especially in the larger cities of Gdansk, Elblag and Thorn, but were initially suppressed by Bishop Matthias Drzewicki of Kujawy and the city councils.

Poland”s war with the Teutonic Order from 1519 to 1521 also took place on Polish-Prussian territory.In Gdansk, since 1522, there were riots against the council, which was deposed in 1525. In the process, Protestant preachers were employed in five churches for the first time and the monasteries were taken into possession.King Sigismund put an end to this development in 1526, but could not eliminate the reformatory attitude of many citizens.The Prince-Bishopric of Warmia remained Catholic, Prince-Bishop Stanislaus Hosius was one of the most effective opponents of any reformatory movement in the Kingdom of Poland and can be called the savior of Catholicism.

Since 1535, Mennonites from the southwest of the German-speaking area and from the Netherlands settled in the Vistula Delta and made the area arable through drainage measures. They developed their Low German dialect called Plautdietsch. Their Protestant religion was tolerated.

Since the privilege of King Sigismund II. August of 1557, Prussian cities could officially employ Protestant preachers. In the following decades, Polish Prussia became predominantly Protestant (see Reformation in Poland).

Autonomous part of the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic

By the Union of Lublin in 1569, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania merged into the Real Union of Poland-Lithuania, also known as the First Rzeczpospolita. The bilateral unification process was accompanied by an attempt to transform the autonomous Prussia Royal Share into a province of the Polish Empire through a kind of coup d”état.

The Lublin Diet had been preceded for years by “the increasingly open endeavor of the Poles” to “deprive West Prussia of its special position, established in 1454, and to degrade it to a Polish province by transforming the personal union of the same with Poland into a real union.” In 1555, King Sigismund II. August solemnly repeated before the Polish greats his earlier pledge that Prussia should be incorporated into the Empire as a province. In 1562 the Prussian provincial envoys were summoned to the Polish Imperial Diet, now already under threats in case of absence. The Prussians did not attend the imperial diets of 1565, 1566 and 1567; despite the absence of Prussian representatives, the Polish Diet formally decided to annex Prussia to the Polish Empire.

Under threat of severe penalties in case of violation, King Sigismund II. August in a decree of March 16, 1569, at the Lublin Sejm, which was handed to the Prussian Landesbote on March 18. As the “highest and only interpreter of all laws and privileges,” he declared that the Prussian provincial councillors were also councillors of the empire and had their places in the imperial senate and, as often as they were summoned by the king of Poland, were required to advise on Prussian and imperial matters and to vote in the imperial senate with the councillors of the crown, “because they are the limbs of an inseparable body and in the same way the Prussian emissaries should sit and advise with the Polish ones.

The city republics of Danzig, Thorn and Elbing were represented in the Diet of Poland-Lithuania as “quarter cities” of the Prussian Federation. Even within the framework of this “Royal Republic”, Royal Prussia retained extensive autonomous special rights. It received a number of special constitutional regulations, which a newly elected king of Poland had to approve before being recognized by the Prussians. Later kings and the institutions of the Republic continued to try to limit the special status of the Prussian lands. One example was the dispute over seals. Finally, it was agreed to use the Prussian seal, which was kept in Elbing, for internal documents (in German), and the Polish seal for documents in Polish.

An area of conflict arose in the second half of the 16th century between the city republic of Gdansk and the Polish royalty. On the one hand, Gdansk was the only city in the lands of the Polish crown that refused to adapt its laws to the requirements of the Union of Lublin. On the other hand, the king wanted to establish a Polish navy based in Gdansk, which the city considered a violation of its military autonomy. The delegation of Danzig, led by Albrecht Giese, even stood firm when the king put them in bail. Eventually, the king renounced the fleet stationing in exchange for a compensation sum, and the negotiators were reinstated to their posts.

After this tug-of-war, Gdansk refused homage to the newly elected King Stephen Báthory in 1577, before the latter did not grant the privileges (of June 16, 1454, July 9, 1455, and May 25, 1457, concerning its own foreign policy, right to independent warfare, its own administration, German official language and law; as well as after 1525

Since the Reformation, religious tensions had been constantly simmering between the Polish Catholic clergy, who were striving for dominance and working towards Polishization, and the Protestants, who were in the majority among the population. 150 years later, after the devastation of a monastery in 1724, several citizens fell victim to the political justice of the King of Poland, who, however, was none other than the Elector Augustus the Strong of Saxony, who had converted to Catholicism. Against this background, the supremacy of the Polish crown was perceived as foreign domination by the Protestant camp in the 18th century at the latest.

A regional special consciousness persisted, which required a certain distance both from the Polish king in Warsaw – whom one nevertheless served dutifully – and from the Duchy of Prussia – with which one felt closely connected historically and culturally:

In the Jus Culmense or Culmische Recht, the constitutional law of the entire lands of Prussia, which always retained a separate body of state from Poland, all laws, rights and arbitrary acts are written down. In 1767, another edition was printed by Friedrich Bartels in Danzig.

Also read, biographies – Charles Demuth

Province of the Kingdom of Prussia

The history of “Royal Polish Prussia” ended with the First Partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1772. On the one hand, as a result of the annexation by King Frederick II, the country had lost its special legal status as well as estates” privileges and was subjected to the laws of the Absolute Monarchy of the House of Brandenburg-Prussia. With the exception of the cities of Danzig and Thorn, it became the new province of West Prussia of the Kingdom of Prussia. Gdansk and Thorn joined it only with the Second Partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1793 and, similarly to Elblag before, lost their autonomous status as city republics. On the other hand, the Protestant camp felt liberated from the political pressure emanating from the Polish clergy, and the Jews regained normal civil rights. For example, the ban on Jews imposed on Bydgoszcz was lifted.

Sources