Kitobni o'qish: «History of Friedrich II of Prussia — Volume 03», sahifa 2

Chapter III. — KURFURST FRIEDRICH II

The First Friedrich's successor was a younger son, Friedrich II.; who lasted till 1471, above thirty years; and proved likewise a notable manager and governor. Very capable to assert himself, and his just rights, in this world. He was but Twenty-seven at his accession; but the Berlin Burghers, attempting to take some liberties with him, found he was old enough. He got the name IRONTEETH. Friedrich FERRATIS DENTIBUS, from his decisive ways then and afterwards. He had his share of brabbling with intricate litigant neighbors; quarrels now and then not to be settled without strokes. His worst war was with Pommern,—just claims disputed there, and much confused bickering, sieging and harassing in consequence: of which quarrel we must speak anon. It was he who first built the conspicuous Schloss or Palace at Berlin, having got the ground for it (same ground still covered by the actual fine Edifice, which is a second edition of Friedrich's) from the repentant Burghers; and took up his chief residence there. [1442-1431 (Nicolari, i. 81).]

But his principal achievement in Brandenburg History is his recovery of the Province called the Neumark to that Electorate. In the thriftless Sigismund times, the Neumark had been pledged, had been sold; Teutsch Ritterdom, to whose dominions it lay contiguous, had purchased it with money down. The Teutsch Ritters were fallen moneyless enough since then; they offered to pledge the Neumark to Friedrich, who accepted, and advanced the sum: after a while the Teutsch Ritters, for a small farther sum, agreed to sell Neumark. [Michaelis, i. 301.] Into which Transaction, with its dates and circumstances, let us cast one glance, for our behoof afterwards. The Teutsch Ritters were an opulent domineering Body in Sigismund's early time; but they are now come well down in Friedrich II.'s! And are coming ever lower. Sinking steadily, or with desperate attempts to rise, which only increase the speed downwards, ever since that fatal Tannenberg Business, 15th July, 1410. Here is the sad progress of their descent to the bottom; divided into three stages or periods:—

"PERIOD FIRST is of Thirty years: 1410-1440. A peace with Poland soon followed that Defeat of Tannenberg; humiliating peace, with mulct in money, and slightly in territory, attached to it. Which again was soon followed by war, and ever again; each new peace more humiliating than its foregoer. Teutsch Order is steadily sinking,—into debt, among other things; driven to severe finance-measures (ultimately even to 'debase its coin'), which produce irritation enough. Poland is gradually edging itself into the territories and the interior troubles of Preussen; prefatory to greater operations that lie ahead there.

"SECOND PERIOD, of Fourteen years. So it had gone on, from bad to worse, till 1440; when the general population, through its Heads, the Landed Gentry and the Towns, wearied out with fiscal and other oppressions from its domineering Ritterdom brought now to such a pinch, began everywhere to stir themselves into vocal complaint. Complaint emphatic enough: 'Where will you find a man that has not suffered injury in his rights, perhaps in his person? Our friends they have invited as guests, and under show of hospitality have murdered them. Men, for the sake of their beautiful wives, have been thrown into the river like dogs,'—and enough of the like sort. [Voigt, vii. 747; quoting evidently, not an express manifesto, but one manufactured by the old Chroniclers.] No want of complaint, nor of complainants: Town of Thorn, Town of Dantzig, Kulm, all manner of Towns and Baronages, proceeded now to form a BUND, or general Covenant for complaining; to repugn, in hotter and hotter form, against a domineering Ritterdom with back so broken; in fine, to colleague with Poland,—what was most ominous of all. Baronage, Burgherage, they were German mostly by blood, and by culture were wholly German; but preferred Poland to a Teutsch Ritterdom of that nature. Nothing but brabblings, scufflings, objurgations; a great outbreak ripening itself. Teutsch Ritterdom has to hire soldiers; no money to pay them. It was in these sad years that the Teutsch Ritterdom, fallen moneyless, offered to pledge the Neumark to our Kurfurst; 1444, that operation was consummated. [Pauli, ii. 187,—does not name the sum.] All this goes on, in hotter and hotter form, for ten years longer.

"PERIOD THIRD begins, early in 1454, with an important special catastrophe; and ends, in the Thirteenth year after, with a still more important universal one of the same nature. Prussian BUND, or Anti-Oppression Covenant of the Towns and Landed Gentry, rising in temperature for fourteen years at this rate, reached at last the igniting point, and burst into fire. February 4th, 1454, the Town of Thorn, darling first-child of Teutsch Ritterdom,—child 223 years old at this time, ['Founded 1231, as a wooden Burg, just across the river, on the Heathen side, mainly round the stem of an immense old Oak that grew handy there,—Seven Barges always on the river (Weichsel), to fly to our own side if quite overwhelmed' Oak and Seven Barges is still the Town's-Arms of Thorn. See Kohler, Munzbelustigungen,xxii. 107; quoting Dusburg (a Priest of the Order) and his old Chronica Terrae Prusciae, written in 1326.] and grown very big, and now very angry,—suddenly took its old parent by the throat, so to speak, and hurled him out to the dogs; to the extraneous Polacks first of all. Town of Thorn, namely, sent that day its 'Letter of Renunciation' to the Hochmeister over at Marienburg; seized in a day or two more the Hochmeister's Official Envoys, Dignitaries of the Order; led them through the streets, amid universal storm of execrations, hootings and unclean projectiles, straight, to jail; and besieged the Hochmeister's Burg (BASTILLE of Thorn, with a few Ritters in it), all the artillery and all the throats and hearts of the place raging deliriously upon it. So that the poor Bitters, who had no chance in resisting, were in few days obliged to surrender; [8th February, 1454, says Voigt (viii. 361); 16th, says Kohler (Munzbelustigungen, xxii. 110).] had to come out in bare jerkin; and Thorn ignominiously dismissed them into space forevermore,—with actual 'kicks,' I have read in some Books, though others veil that sad feature. Thorn threw out its old parent in this manner; swore fealty to the King of Poland; and invited other Towns and Knightages to follow the example. To which all were willing, wherever able.

"War hereupon, which blazed up over Preussen at large,—Prussian Covenant and King of Poland VERSUS Teutsch Ritterdom,—and lasted into the thirteenth year, before it could go out again; out by lack of fuel mainly. One of the fellest wars on record, especially for burning and ruining; above '300,000 fighting-men' are calculated to have perished in it; and of towns, villages, farmsteads, a cipher which makes the fancy, as it were, black and ashy altogether. Ritterdom showed no lack of fighting energy; but that could not save it, in the pass things were got to. Enormous lack of wisdom, of reality and human veracity, there had long been; and the hour was now come. Finance went out, to the last coin. Large mercenary armies all along; and in the end not the color of money to pay them with; mercenaries became desperate; 'besieged the Hochmeister and his Ritters in Marienburg;'—finally sold the Country they held; formally made it over to the King of Poland, to get their pay out of it. Hochmeister had to see such things, and say little. Peace, or extinction for want of fuel, came in the year 1466. Poland got to itself the whole of that fine German Country, henceforth called 'WEST Preussen' to distinguish it, which goes from the left bank of the Weichsel to the borders of Brandenburg and Neumark;—would have got Neumark too, had not Kurfurst Friedrich been there to save it. The Teutsch Order had to go across the Weichsel, ignominiously driven; to content itself with 'EAST Preussen,' the Konigsberg-Memel country, and even to do homage to Poland for that. Which latter was the bitterest clause of all: but it could not be helped, more than the others. In this manner did its revolted children fling out Teutsch Ritterdom ignominiously to the dogs, to the Polacks, first of all,—Thorn, the eldest child, leading off or setting the example."

And so the Teutsch Ritters are sunk beyond retrieval; and West Preussen, called subsequently "Royal Preussen," NOT having homage to pay as the "Ducal" or East Preussen had, is German no longer, but Polish, Sclavic; not prospering by the change. [What Thorn had sunk to, out of its palmy state, see in Nanke's Wanderungen durch Preussen (Hamburg & Altona, 1800), ii. 177-200:—a pleasant little Rook, treating mainly of Natural History; but drawing you, by its innocent simplicity and geniality, to read with thanks whatever is in it.] And all that fine German country, reduced to rebel against its unwise parent, was cut away by the Polish sword, and remained with Poland, which did not prove very wise either; till—till, in the Year 1773, it was cut back by the German sword! All readers have heard of the Partition of Poland: but of the Partition of Preussen, 307 years before, all have not heard.

It was in the second year of that final tribulation, marked above as Period Third, that the Teutsch Ritters, famishing for money, completed the Neumark transaction with Kurfurst Friedrich; Neumark, already pawned to him ten years before, they in 1455, for a small farther sum, agreed to sell; and he, long carefully steering towards such an issue, and dexterously keeping out of the main broil, failed not to buy. Friedrich could thenceforth, on his own score, protect the Neumark; keep up an invisible but impenetrable wall between it and the neighboring anarchic conflagrations of thirteen years; and the Neumark has ever since remained with Brandenburg, its original owner.

As to Friedrich's Pomeranian quarrel, this is the figure of it. Here is a scene from Rentsch, which falls out in Friedrich's time; and which brought much battling and broiling to him and his. Symbolical withal of much that befell in Brandenburg, from first to last. Under the Hohenzollerns as before, Brandenburg grew by aggregation, by assimilation; and we see here how difficult the process often was.

Pommern (POMERANIA), long Wendish, but peaceably so since the time of Albert the Bear, and growing ever more German, had, in good part, according to Friedrich's notion, if there were force in human Treaties and Imperial Laws, fallen fairly to Brandenburg,—that is to say, the half of it, Stettin-Pommern had fairly fallen,—in the year 1464, when Duke Otto of Stettin, the last Wendish Duke, died without heirs. In that case by many bargains, some with bloody crowns, it had been settled, If the Wendish Dukes died out, the country was to fall to Brandenburg;—and here they were dead. "At Duke Otto's burial, accordingly, in the High Church of Stettin, when the coffin was lowered into its place, the Stettin Burgermeister, Albrecht Glinde, took sword and helmet, and threw the same into the grave, in token that the Line was extinct. But Franz von Eichsted," apparently another Burgher instructed for the nonce, "jumped into the grave, and picked them out again; alleging, No, the Dukes of WOLGAST-Pommern were of kin; these tokens we must send to his Grace at Wolgast, with offer of our homage, said Franz von Eichsted." [Rentsch, p. 110 (whose printer has put his date awry); Stenzel (i. 233) calls the man "LORENZ Eikstetten, a resolute Gentleman."]—And sent they were, and accepted by his Grace. And perhaps half-a-score of bargains, with bloody crowns to some of them; and yet other chances, and centuries, with the extinction of new Lines,—had to supervene, before even Stettin-Pommern, and that in no complete state, could be got. [1648, by Treaty of Westphalia.] As to Pommern at large, Pommern not denied to be due, after such extinction and re-extinction of native Ducal Lines, did not fall home for centuries more; and what struggles and inextricable armed-litigations there were for it, readers of Brandenburg-History too wearisomely know. The process of assimilation not the least of an easy one!—

This Friedrich was second son: his Father's outlook for him had, at first, been towards a Polish Princess and the crown of Poland, which was not then so elective as afterwards: and with such view his early breeding had been chiefly in Poland; Johann, the eldest son and heir-apparent, helping his Father at home in the mean while. But these Polish outlooks went to nothing, the young Princess having died; so that Friedrich came home; possessed merely of the Polish language, and of what talents the gods had given him, which were considerable. And now, in the mean while, Johann, who at one time promised well in practical life, had taken to Alchemy; and was busy with crucibles and speculations, to a degree that seemed questionable. Father Friedrich, therefore, had to interfere, and deal with this "Johann the Alchemist" (JOHANNES ALCHEMISTA, so the Books still name him); who loyally renounced the Electorship, at his Father's bidding, in favor of Friedrich; accepted Baireuth (better half of the Culmbach Territory) for apanage; and there peacefully distilled and sublimated at discretion; the government there being an easier task, and fitter for a soft speculative Herr. A third Brother, Albert by name, got Anspach, on the Father's decease; very capable to do any fighting there might be occasion for, in Culmbach.

As to the Burggrafship, it was now done, all but the Title. The First Friedrich, once he was got to be Elector, wisely parted with it. The First Friedrich found his Electorship had dreadfully real duties for him, and that this of the Burggrafship had fallen mostly obsolete; so he sold it to the Nurnbergers for a round sum: only the Principalities and Territories are retained in that quarter. About which too, and their feudal duties, boundaries and tolls, with a jealous litigious Nurnberg for neighbor, there at length came quarrelling enough. But Albert the third Brother, over at Anspach, took charge of all that; and nothing of it fell in Johann's way.

The good Alchemist died,—performed his last sublimation, poor man,—six or seven years before his Brother Friedrich; age then sixty-three. [14th November, 1464.] Friedrich, with his Iron Teeth and faculties, only held out till fifty-eight,—10th February, 1471. The manner of his end was peculiar. In that War with Pommern, he sat besieging a Pomeranian town, Uckermunde the name of it: when at dinner one day, a cannon-ball plunged down upon the table, [Michaelis, i. 303.] with such a crash as we can fancy;—which greatly confused the nerves of Friedrich; much injured his hearing, and even his memory thenceforth. In a few months afterwards he resigned, in favor of his Successor; retired to Plassenburg, and there died in about a year more.

Chapter IV. — KURFURST ALBERT ACHILLES, AND HIS SUCCESSOR

Neither Friedrich nor Johann left other than daughters: so that the united Heritage, Brandenburg and Culmbach both, came now to the third Brother, Albert; who has been in Culmbath these many years already. A tall, fiery, tough old gentleman, of formidable talent for fighting, who was called the "ACHILLES OF GERMANY" in his day; being then a very blazing far-seen character, dim as he has now grown. [Born 1414; Kurfurst, 1471-1486.] This Albert Achilles was the Third Elector; Ancestor he of all the Brandenburg and Culmbach Hohenzollern Princes that have since figured in the world. After him there is no break or shift in the succession, down to the little Friedrich now born;—Friedrich the old Grandfather, First KING, was the Twelfth KURFURST.

We have to say, they followed generally in their Ancestors' steps, and had success of the like kind, more or less; Hohenzollerns all of them, by character and behavior as well as by descent. No lack of quiet energy, of thrift, sound sense. There was likewise solid fair-play in general, no founding of yourself on ground that will not carry;—and there was instant, gentle but inexorable, crushing of mutiny, if it showed itself; which, after the Second Elector, or at most the Third, it had altogether ceased to do. Young Friedrich II., upon whom those Berlin Burghers had tried to close their gates, till he should sign some "Capitulation" to their mind, got from them, and not quite in ill-humor, that name IRONTEETH:—"Not the least a Nose-of-wax, this one! No use trying here, then!"—which, with the humor attached to it, is itself symbolical of Friedrich and these Hohenzollern Sovereigns. Albert, his Brother, had plenty of fighting in his time: but it was in the Nurnberg and other distant regions; no fighting, or hardly any, needed in Brandenburg henceforth.

With Nurnberg, and the Ex-Burggrafship there, now when a new generation began to tug at the loose clauses of that Bargain with Friedrich I., and all Free-Towns were going high upon their privileges, Albert had at one time much trouble, and at length actual furious War;—other Free-Towns countenancing and assisting Nurnberg in the affair; numerous petty Princes, feudal Lords of the vicinity, doing the like by Albert. Twenty years ago, all this; and it did not last, so furious was it. "Eight victories," they count on Albert's part,—furious successful skirmishes, call them;—in one of which, I remember, Albert plunged in alone, his Ritters being rather shy; and laid about him hugely, hanging by a standard he had taken, till his life was nearly beaten out. [1449 (Rentsch, p. 399).] Eight victories; and also one defeat, wherein Albert got captured, and had to ransom himself. The captor was one Kunz of Kauffungen, the Nurnberg hired General at the time: a man known to some readers for his Stealing of the Saxon Princes (PRINZENRAUB, they call it); a feat which cost Kunz his head. [Carlyle's Miscellanies (London, 1869), vi. ? PRINZENRAUB.] Albert, however, prevailed in the end, as he was apt to do; and got his Nurnbergers fixed to clauses satisfactory to him.

In his early days he had fought against Poles, Bohemians and others, as Imperial general. He was much concerned, all along, in those abstruse armed-litigations of the Austrian House with its dependencies; and diligently helped the Kaiser,—Friedrich III., rather a weakish, but an eager and greedy Kaiser,—through most of them. That inextricable Hungarian-Bohemian-Polish DONNYBROOK (so we may call it) which Austria had on hand, one of Sigismund's bequests to Austria; distressingly tumultuous Donnybrook, which goes from 1440 to 1471, fighting in a fierce confused manner;—the Anti-Turk Hunniades, the Anti-Austrian Corvinus, the royal Majesties George Podiebrad, Ladislaus POSTHUMUS, Ludwig OHNE HAUT (Ludwig NO-SKIN), and other Ludwigs, Ladislauses and Vladislauses, striking and getting struck at such a rate:—Albert was generally what we may call chief-constable in all that; giving a knock here and then one there, in the Kaiser's name. [Hormayr, ii. 138, 140 (? HUNYADY CORVIN); Rentsch, pp. 389-422; Michaelis, i. 304-313.] Almost from boyhood, he had learned soldiering, which he had never afterwards leisure to forget. Great store of fighting he had,—say half a century of it, off and on, during the seventy and odd years he lasted in this world. With the Donnybrook we spoke of; with the Nurnbergers; with the Dukes of Bavaria (endless bickerings with these Dukes, Ludwig BEARDY, Ludwig SUPERBUS, Ludwig GIBBOSUS or Hunchback, against them and about them, on his own and the Kaiser's score); also with the French, already clutching at Lorraine; also with Charles the Rash of Burgundy;—lastly with the Bishop of Bamberg, who got him excommunicated and would not bury the dead.

Kurfurst Albert's Letter on this last emergency, to his Viceregent in Culmbach, is a famed Piece still extant (date 1481); [Rentsch, p. 409.] and his plan in such emergency, is a simple and likely one: "Carry the dead bodies to the Parson's house; let him see whether he will not bury them by and by!—One must fence off the Devil by the Holy Cross," says Albert,—appeal to Heaven with what honest mother-wit Heaven has vouchsafed one, means Albert. "These fellows" (the Priests), continues he, "would fain have the temporal sword as well as the spiritual. Had God wished there should be only one sword, he could have contrived that as well as the two. He surely did not want for intellect (Er war gar ein weiser Mann),"—want of intellect it clearly was not!—In short, they had to bury the dead, and do reason; and Albert hustled himself well clear of this broil, as he had done of many.

Battle enough, poor man, with steel and other weapons:—and we see he did it with sharp insight, good forecast; now and then in a wildly leonine or AQUILINE manner. A tall hook-nosed man, of lean, sharp, rather taciturn aspect; nose and look are very aquiline; and there is a cloudy sorrow in those old eyes, which seems capable of sudden effulgence to a dangerous extent. He was a considerable, diplomatist too: very great with the Kaiser, Old Friedrich III. (Max's father, Charles V.'s Great-Grandfather); [How admirable Albert is, not to say "almost divine," to the Kaiser's then Secretary, oily-mouthed AEneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope, Rentsch can testify (pp. 401, 586); quoting AEneas's eulogies and gossipries (Historia Rerum Frederici Imperatoris, I conclude, though no book is named). Oily diligent AEneas, in his own young years and in Albert's prime, had of course seen much of this "miracle" of Arms and Art,—"miracle" and "almost divine," so to speak.] and managed many things for him. Managed to get the thrice-lovely Heiress of the Netherlands and Burgundy, Daughter of that Charles the Rash, with her Seventeen Provinces, for Max, (1477) who was thought thereupon by everybody to be the luckiest man alive; though the issue contradicted it before long.

Kurfurst Albert died in 1486, March 11, aged seventy-two. It was some months after Bosworth Fight, where our Crooked Richard got his quietus here in England and brought the Wars of the Roses to their finale:—a little chubby Boy, the son of poor parents at Eisleben in Saxony, Martin Luther the name of him, was looking into this abtruse Universe, with those strange eyes of his, in what rough woollen or linsey-woolsey short-clothes we do not know. [Born 10th November, 1483]

Albert's funeral was very grand; the Kaiser himself, and all the Magnates of the Diet and Reich attending him from Frankfurt to his last resting-place, many miles of road. For he died at the Diet, in Frankfurt-on-Mayn; having fallen ill there while busy,—perhaps too busy for that age, in the harsh spring weather,—electing Prince Maximilian ("lucky Max,") who will be Kaiser too before long, and is already deep in ILL-luck, tragical and other to be King of the Romans. The old Kaiser had "looked in on him at Onolzbach" (Anspach), and brought him along; such a man could not be wanting on such an occasion. A man who "perhaps did more for the German Empire than for the Electorate of Brandenburg," hint some. The Kaiser himself, Friedrich III., was now getting old; anxious to see Max secure, and to set his house in order. A somewhat anxious, creaky, close-fisted, ineffectual old Kaiser; [See Kohler (Munzbelustigungen, vi. 393-401; ii. 89-96, &c.) for a vivid account of him.] distinguished by his luck in getting Max so provided for, and bringing the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands to his House. He is the first of the Hapsburg Kaisers who had what has since been called the "Austrian lip"—protrusive under-jaw, with heavy lip disinclined to shut. He got it from his Mother, and bequeathed it in a marked manner; his posterity to this day bearing traces of it. Mother's name was Cimburgis, a Polish Princess, "Duke of Masovia's daughter;" a lady who had something of the MAULTASCHE in her, in character as well as mouth.—In old Albert, the poor old Kaiser has lost his right hand; and no doubt muses sadly as he rides in the funeral procession.

Albert is buried at Heilsbronn in Frankenland, among his Ancestors,—burial in Brandenburg not yet common for these new Kurfursts:—his skull, in an after-time, used to be shown there, laid on the lid of the tomb; skull marvellous for strength, and for "having no visible sutures," says Rentsch. Pious Brandenburg Officiality at length put an end to that profanation, and restored the skull to its place,—marvellous enough, with what had once dwelt in it, whether it had sutures or not.