The Duchy of Prussia, which came into existence on the 8th of April 1525, was a strange country even by the standards of its strange parent. It was the first political entity in the world to make Protestantism its official religion. It was a hereditary duchy ruled by a former monk — Albert had taken vows on his election as Grand Master — who was about to marry a Danish princess and produce a family. It was a fief of Catholic Poland that was militantly Protestant. And it was, geographically, a slice of pine forests and inland lakes that almost no one in western Europe could find on a map.
For the next ninety-three years, until it was inherited by the senior Hohenzollern line in Brandenburg, this peculiar country quietly accumulated three things that would matter a great deal later: a literate, multi-lingual Protestant population; a university that punched far above its weight; and a habit of solvent, hard-working government that became, in time, what the world would call Prussian.
Albert, the convert
Albert of Hohenzollern was thirty-five years old when he became the first duke. He had been raised in the comfortable Catholic court of his uncle, the Elector of Brandenburg. He had taken Teutonic vows because his family needed a son in the Order for political reasons, not because he had a vocation. And he had spent the years between 1521 and 1525 in a slow, increasingly anguished re-reading of the New Testament, encouraged by Lutheran pastors he had met in Nuremberg. By the time he went to Wittenberg he was, in his own estimation, already a Lutheran. The conversation with Luther only confirmed what he had already decided.
The new duke set about his country with a clarity that suggested he had been planning it for years. Within months of his investiture he had appointed a Lutheran bishop for Sambia, a Lutheran bishop for Pomesania, and a network of Protestant superintendents to oversee the parishes. He commissioned a Prussian church order — a written constitution for the Lutheran establishment — that would, with adjustments, govern religious life in the country for the next four centuries.
He married, in 1526, the Princess Dorothea of Denmark. Their first child died. So did the next. So did the next. Of six children, only one — a daughter, Anna Sophia — survived to adulthood. Dorothea herself died in 1547. Albert remarried a German princess, Anna Maria of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and had two more children. Of these, only one son, Albert Frederick, survived. He would become the second and last Duke of Prussia of the junior Hohenzollern line, and he would, in middle age, go mad. His descendants would die out within a generation. This is the demographic accident that would, in 1618, deliver the duchy to the senior Brandenburg line and create — though no one at the time understood the consequences — the entity we now call Brandenburg-Prussia.
The Albertina
The most consequential thing Albert did, however, was not in Berlin or Brussels but in his own capital. In 1544 he founded a university at Königsberg.
The Albertina, as it became known, was the second Protestant university in the world, after Marburg. It was endowed with land taken from former monasteries. Its first rector was a Lutheran reformer; its first theology professors had studied directly under Luther and Melanchthon. The duke wanted, and got, an institution that could produce his pastors, his civil servants, his lawyers, and his teachers without his having to send promising young men south to Wittenberg or Leipzig and risk losing them to better-paid posts.
What he produced, over time, was something far stranger. The Albertina became — and would remain, for four centuries — the intellectual hinge between the German world and the Baltic. It taught in German, in Latin, and, uniquely among major European universities, in Polish and Lithuanian. The first books ever printed in the Lithuanian language were printed in Königsberg in 1547 by a Lutheran pastor named Martynas Mažvydas. The first New Testament printed in Old Prussian — a despairing attempt to evangelise the dying language — was produced by the university in 1561. The Albertina, more than any other institution, is the reason we have the textual evidence of Old Prussian that survives at all.
It would, much later, employ Immanuel Kant for forty years. It would house Johann Georg Hamann, J. G. Herder, and Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. It would publish Copernicus's astronomical tables. It would teach the philosophy faculty that, in time, would teach Hegel, who would teach the men who taught Marx. The Albertina is, in its quiet, foggy way, one of the founding institutions of the modern mind.
"I would rather have one Polish New Testament printed in Königsberg than a hundred elsewhere, because here the duke himself pays for the paper." — Jan Seklucjan, Polish Lutheran preacher, 1551
The Polish vassal
The Duchy of Prussia was, throughout its independent existence, a sovereign country in everything but one respect: its dukes had to ride south every reign to Kraków, kneel before the Polish king, and swear homage. This was the price Albert had paid for his transformation in 1525, and his descendants paid it as faithfully as he had. Anna Sophia's brother Albert Frederick made the journey in 1569. His Hohenzollern cousins from Brandenburg, when they came to inherit the duchy, would make it three times — in 1611, 1641, and 1669 — through gritted teeth.
The Polish overlordship was not heavy. The Polish kings took oaths but levied no taxes, intervened in no religious matters, and kept no troops on Prussian soil. But they noticed the duchy's prosperity. And they were Catholic. The Counter-Reformation, when it reached Polish-Lithuanian elite politics in the 1570s, raised the possibility — at first quietly, then openly — that one day a Polish king might decide to take the duchy back and re-Catholicise it. This fear shaped Prussian foreign policy for a century, and it is part of the reason that the senior Hohenzollern line, when it inherited the duchy in 1618, set about converting it from a vulnerable vassalage into something more like a state.
The lost language
One last thing about the duchy. It is in this period — between Albert's investiture in 1525 and the inheritance of 1618 — that the Old Prussian language finally died.
It had been retreating for three centuries. In the towns, it was already gone by 1400, suppressed under the Order. In the countryside, particularly in Sambia and parts of Natangia, it had persisted as a household and field language, passed down by Prussian-speaking peasants who farmed for German-speaking landlords. The Reformation, by insisting that pastors preach in the language of the people, briefly held it up. Three small Lutheran catechisms in Old Prussian — the so-called Elbing Vocabulary having come earlier — were printed at Königsberg in the 1540s and 1550s. The very late translations of Luther's Small Catechism into Old Prussian, made for use in the Sambian countryside, are the longest texts we have in the language.
And then, around the year 1700, it was gone. Linguists have identified the last fluent speakers as having lived in a few obscure villages on the Curonian Spit and in the parishes east of Königsberg. After their deaths the language survived only in the dictionaries and grammars produced by the curious. The country called Prussia would carry on, for another two hundred and forty-seven years, as a state. The people who had originally given it its name had ceased to speak.
The Hohenzollerns, who would inherit the duchy in the year after this chapter ends, did not particularly mourn the loss. They were busy. Their country, far away on the Spree, was about to be drawn into the longest and worst war central Europe would see before the twentieth century. And it would not, when the war was finished, be in any shape to mourn anything.
End of Chapter III