Introduction
Marriage and migration defined the early Reformation and shaped the lives of the earliest Protestant pastors. Even before Martin Luther's own marriage in the summer of 1525, hundreds of priests, monks, and nuns had wed as an initial, personal act of church reform.Footnote 2 These pioneers of clerical marriage quickly learned that the ecclesiastical and secular authorities of the Holy Roman Empire did not share their understanding of reform, and the decision to marry could lead to imprisonment or even execution.Footnote 3 As the married Swabian priest Paul Speratus lamented, “[there are] persecutors who are always running ahead of us on both sides.”Footnote 4 Facing violent persecution, married priests fled their homelands with their families, bringing their ideas about religious reform (especially clerical marriage) with them into the territories where they found refuge.Footnote 5 Nowhere was this truer than the Duchy of Prussia, the first territory to embrace the Reformation. In Prussia, the leading reformers—parish priests, bishops, and even the duke himself—were men who had renounced clerical celibacy and abandoned their German homelands.
While the size and nature of the Protestant migration to Prussia cannot be precisely enumerated, an analysis of the personal details of all recorded Protestant pastors in Prussia suggests that most early pastors were migrants, and most came from German-speaking lands. Using Friedwald Moeller's expansive Altpreußisches evangelisches Pfarrerbuch—in which he compiled pastors’ names from church orders and visitation records—and supplementing it with a handful of additional names from the correspondence of the first duke of Prussia, I compiled a list of 592 Protestant pastors who ministered in the Duchy of Prussia up to and including the 1568, when the first duke died.Footnote 6 Of these 592, 168 have known places of origin. Of these, only thirty-eight (22.6%) hailed from the Duchy of Prussia. Ninety-two men (54.8%) came from German-speaking territories in the Holy Roman Empire, with Saxony, Silesia, and Franconia being the most common lands of origin. In most cases, the motives for migration are impossible to ascertain. But Moeller, and the editors who continued his work after he died, discovered the motives of twenty-seven migrant pastors, and I discovered those of one more, and of these twenty-eight, twenty-four described formal expulsions, escape from execution, or flight from possible persecution. For example, Michael Meurer, a Cistercian monk from Silesia, began to preach the Reformation in Danzig (Gdańsk) in 1525 before being arrested and expelled the following year.Footnote 7 In 1549, Mattheus Vogel fled his native city of Nuremberg because he refused to comply with the Augsburg Interim.Footnote 8 And Germany was not the only source of Prussia's pastors. The Polish Dominican Andrzej Samuel began to advocate for reform in Posen in 1525, and when this led to a heresy conviction and death sentence, he fled to Wittenberg and thence to Prussia.Footnote 9 While the majority of Prussia's first Protestant pastors remain hidden from our view, the substantial minority that we can see came mostly from outside the territory, mostly from German lands, and many—like Speratus, who called Prussia “my Egypt”—considered themselves exiles.Footnote 10
Historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ignored the role of migration in Prussia's reformation. German and Polish historians alike proudly depicted Protestantism as native to Prussia (though they depicted it as such for different reasons).Footnote 11 Starting in the 1960s, Prussia's reformation began to vanish from German and Polish scholarship altogether (again for different reasons).Footnote 12 English scholarship on the Reformation largely ignores Prussia.Footnote 13 One recent edited volume about Luther's context, which includes contributions from forty-eight of the world's leading Luther scholars, makes no mention of Prussia, despite the fact that Prussia was the first territory to implement Luther's reforms and the fact that Luther exchanged more letters with Prussia's duke than with any ruler besides his own in Saxony.Footnote 14 Setting out to rediscover and reevaluate the Reformation in Prussia, I learned that its early leaders were transplanted from the Holy Roman Empire, and via their stories I could probe the earliest Reformation impulse, which so captivated German priests and monks that they pursued it even into exile. This impulse, I contend, was the desire to marry.
To illuminate the intertwined phenomena of marriage, migration, and reformation, I compare the early lives of two of the most important Prussian reformers, both of whom were German clergymen who married: Speratus, the Swabian priest who became a bishop in Prussia, and Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, the grandmaster of the Teutonic Order who became duke of Prussia. Speratus's story makes clear the plight of common German priests who married during the early Reformation and faced persecution as a result. The choice of marriage necessitated flight from one's homeland, and in this respect clerical marriage in the early Reformation resembled conversion in later centuries.Footnote 15 Albrecht's story shines light on the impact of clerical marriage on the upper echelons of church and state. Unlike Speratus, Albrecht arrived in Prussia as the territory's elected ruler, not as a refugee.Footnote 16 Only after his arrival in Prussia, and after a series of strategic considerations and lengthy negotiations typical of princely betrothal, did Albrecht wed. Yet as we will see, Albrecht's support for clerical marriage could be traced back to the same urge for reform that had gripped Speratus and much of Germany in the years 1517–22. By juxtaposing the early lives of Speratus and Albrecht, we gain three historical insights: clerical marriage constituted the Reformation for many German priests and monks; clerical marriage resulted in forced migration; and Prussia's political geography made it the ideal destination for German priests who sought to transform Christendom, starting with their own households. Let us begin by entering the marshes and forests of Prussia to investigate why this territory became an attractive destination for married clergymen and an ideal laboratory for religious reform.
Prussia: A Land of Towering Castles and Empty Villages
At the start of the sixteenth century, Prussia was a coastal territory on the Baltic Sea, north of Poland, centered on the city of Königsberg (Kaliningrad). Today, this land is marked by a series of closely guarded national borders and military installations. At the start of the sixteenth century, it was a series of menacing red-brick castles and fortified cathedrals that dominated the Prussian landscape. Inside these monstrous structures lived the rulers of Prussia, warrior monks called the Brothers of St. Mary's Teutonic Hospital in Jerusalem or simply the Teutonic Knights or Teutonic Order.Footnote 17
Founded during the Third Crusade, the Teutonic Order conquered most of the eastern Baltic coastline in the thirteenth century, dominating native Prussians in the countryside as well as Germans in cities like Elbing (Elbląg).Footnote 18 The Order did not admit people from Prussia to its membership and instead maintained bailiwicks in the German-speaking lands of the empire, whence it recruited new members from the aristocracy, who made vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience upon joining.Footnote 19 The knights of the Order elected a grandmaster who ruled the Order's lands in conjunction with a chapter representing the members. The Order appointed Prussia's bishops, who were granted extensive tracts of ecclesiastical land.Footnote 20 Answering only to the pope, the Order justified its rule over the Baltic by claiming to Christianize the area. German merchants and mercenaries had assisted the Order in its crusade against Prussian pagans, yet the Order refused these people any role in governance, leading to simmering resentments.Footnote 21
By the fifteenth century, the expansion of Catholic Poland left the crusading monks without any justification for their rule over the Baltic coast.Footnote 22 Wars ensued, with Poland seizing the Order's largest and most important castle of Marienburg in 1457, forcing the knights to move their seat of government to a small, dark, and unspectacular castle in Königsberg. In 1466, Poland seized the western half of Prussia as well as Ermland, a prince-bishopric that bisected the eastern portion, shrinking the Teutonic state to a semi-circle of land that surrounded Ermland and stretched from Memel (Klaipėda) in the northeast to Marienwerder (Kwidzyn) in the southwest, with the capital of Königsberg about halfway between the two.Footnote 23 This rump state, shown in Figure 1, remained under the Order's control, but as a fief of Poland, with the Order's grandmaster required to swear fealty and provide military service to the Polish crown.
Map of Prussia, by Willem Blaeu (1645) based on the woodcut of Caspar Henneberg von Erlich. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
For the next sixty years, the Teutonic Knights bristled under Polish dominance, with grandmasters refusing to swear fealty to Poland. At the end of the fifteenth century, they concocted a plan to reform their lands and build an alliance with the most powerful princes of Germany to counterbalance Polish influence. In 1498, the knights elected as grandmaster Friedrich of Saxony, the youngest surviving son of the Duke of Saxony.Footnote 24 Previous grandmasters had been from less important noble families or urban patrician families.Footnote 25
Friedrich began modest reforms in Prussia, expanding his administrative bureaucracy and permitting the non-Order nobility some role in governance. Historians have argued that 1498, not 1517, was the start of systematic reform in Prussia, and while this seems an overstatement, it cannot be denied that the Order yearned for a reformatio in capite et membris before the Reformation.Footnote 26 Ultimately, though, it would be the Reformation that would bring political renewal to Prussia coupled with religious transformation. And clerical marriage was key to both.
Clerical Marriage and Forced Migration: Speratus's Path to Prussia
“We passed through fire and water. If this is not the hand of God, then I do not know what is.”Footnote 27 This was how Speratus described his path to Prussia, with words that allude to the persecution he faced and the faith he had that this was part of God's plan. To understand the nature of his persecution and why God moved him from city to city within the empire before finally placing him in Prussia, it is necessary to study Speratus's displacement through his own words—preserved in letters and printed tracts—and privilege his own sense of what really happened, in keeping with contemporary approaches to refugees.Footnote 28 Doing so reveals how marriage disrupted his life, and how it impelled him to travel to Prussia, which he considered utterly remote from his German homeland. Speratus's story also reveals how a young priest in the early sixteenth century—someone born the same year at Ulrich Zwingli and one year after Luther—conceptualized church reform.
Speratus came from the rolling hills of northern Swabia. He was born December 13, 1484, in the tiny hamlet of Rötlen near the city of Ellwangen. Rötlen had been acquired by the Benedictine abbey of Ellwangen in 1471 and was thereafter ruled by the abbey's chapter, which consisted of twelve noble canons and ten vicars, led by a provost who was the highest secular authority in Ellwangen. The bishop of Augsburg held religious jurisdiction over Rötlen and the cathedral of Augsburg was a two-day walk to the southeast. Speratus identified with Rötlen for his entire life, signing a letter a few months before his death at sixty-six, “Paulus Speratus à Rutilis.”Footnote 29 We do not know his original German surname, though historians have speculated that it was either Spretten/Spret/Sprätt or Hofer/Hoffer/Hofher.Footnote 30
We know that Speratus was not poor. Drawing on some source of wealth, he embarked on an ambitious course of education, enrolling at three universities in a row, according to his own account. Speratus studied at an unspecified German university in the Rhineland, the university of Paris, and a third university, possibly in Italy.Footnote 31 He earned degrees in philosophy, law, and theology before returning to the diocese of Augsburg, where he became a priest in 1506 at the age of twenty-two.Footnote 32
As a young priest, Speratus earned fame for his preaching and poetry. He also built relationships with the empire's most prominent clergymen. In Salzburg around the years 1511–17, Speratus published a Latin poem praising the humility of the famous theologian Johannes Eck, who later became an archenemy of the Reformation. “This Eck of ours insists that he understands nothing, though following Christ on the right path/ He understands many things […] how much less he wants to be than many […] there is nothing of insolence to him, but brilliant virtue, laying down pride with glory.”Footnote 33 Speratus's literary efforts earned him the honorific of Palatine Count (Pfalzgraf) from the pope and emperor, a distinction that conferred the right to create and display a personal coat of arms.Footnote 34 In Salzburg, Speratus also met and fell in love with a woman named Anna Fuchs, who became his life partner.
It seems that Anna and Paul married rather than living together unmarried as so many clerical couples did at the time. In 1524, Speratus insisted he was “in about the seventh year of being in […] the marital estate,” and circumstantial evidence suggests that Paul and Anna had indeed crossed the line separating priestly cohabitation—which was a fairly common practice—and clerical marriage—which was an extraordinary and scandalous act.Footnote 35 The couple left Salzburg sometime around 1517, and Paul struggled to find a stable position, despite his august title of Pfalzgraf and his previous renown. He accepted a series of jobs across southern Germany and enrolled at the University of Basel.Footnote 36 Finally in 1520, he secured a stable position in the ecclesiastical city of Würzburg, where Anna's brother Jacob Fuchs was a cathedral canon. Probably thanks to his brother-in-law's support, Speratus was appointed canon and cathedral preacher.Footnote 37 Speratus developed a close friendship with Jacob Fuchs, a man who shared a belief in clerical marriage. Many of Würzburg's cathedral canons lived openly with women, and the city must have been an enticing destination for priests interested in marrying.
Würzburg had been abuzz with ideas of church reform since the start of the century. Until 1519, the prince-bishop of Würzburg had been Lorenz von Bibra, a friend of Emperor Maximilian and an advocate for reform, both political and ecclesiastical.Footnote 38 Bibra had taken a keen interest in Luther when the latter's criticisms of indulgences began circulating throughout the empire. He had even met with Luther in April 1518. Bibra emerged from their meeting a critic of monasticism and, according to Georg Spalatin, told any noble who sought to commit a daughter to a convent: “give your daughter a husband, do not give her to a convent.”Footnote 39
Emulating Bibra, Speratus began to advocate for clerical marriage in Würzburg. Unfortunately, he had arrived one year after Bibra had died, and while Fuchs and other cathedral canons maintained Bibra's support for reform, the new prince-bishop, Konrad von Thüngen, opposed clerical marriage and began to take seriously complaints about Speratus's marriage. The chapter heard a complaint in October 1521 that Speratus was “behaving wickedly and offering a bad example” (böslich halte und bös exempel gebe).Footnote 40 Thüngen demanded Speratus renounce his marriage, and when Speratus refused, Thüngen expelled him from Würzburg in November 1521.Footnote 41 In 1522, Luther described Speratus as “a preacher expelled from Würzburg” in a letter to Spalatin. In 1524, Duke Georg of Saxony wrote to Margrave Kasimir of Brandenburg-Kulmbach (the eldest brother of Grandmaster Albrecht) to express dismay that there were Lutheran preachers in Prussia, including “a doctor whom the bishop of Würzburg expelled [vorjagt] because he was a clergyman [ein geistlich man] but took a wife.”Footnote 42
This was the first expulsion in Speratus's life, and it resulted from crossing the line dividing cohabitation from marriage. In Speratus's eyes, this step toward marriage constituted the Reformation. As he phrased it on his seventh wedding anniversary: “I am now in about the seventh year of being in the Christian and evangelical estate, in which every bishop may and should be, if he has not been drawn out of it by God alone (I will say nothing of the others who the Antichrist has forbidden via devilish teaching to enter into it) namely the holy marital estate.”Footnote 43 To be evangelical was to be married, unless of course God selected one for a truly extraordinary life. Beyond his advocacy for clerical marriage, Speratus was a traditionalist, clinging throughout his life to traditional elements of the liturgy that Luther would discard, like elevating the host. But on the issue of marriage, Speratus was adamant. With his wife Anna (and possibly their first child), he “shook off the dust from my feet” and set out for Buda in Hungary via Vienna, determined more than ever to preach against clerical celibacy.Footnote 44
During his stopover in Vienna, Speratus launched into a new, lifelong effort to end clerical celibacy, denouncing the tradition from the pulpit and publicly delighting in his own marriage. By his own admission, Speratus sought to be a provocateur, seeking to “scream in the ears” of the imperial church, “the cruel behemoth and wide-eyed Leviathan.”Footnote 45 On the Sunday after Epiphany 1522, Speratus took to the pulpit of St. Stephen's Cathedral and delivered the only Protestant sermon ever delivered in the cavernous building. He described clerical celibacy as a devastating symptom of a much larger affliction, namely the “devil made” distinction between clergy and laity.Footnote 46 Analyzing Romans 12, Speratus argued that Paul did not divide Christians into two classes but rather called for all Christians to offer themselves as a “holy sacrifice.” Footnote 47 Speratus then focused on the word “holy” (geistlich) for what must have been more than ten minutes. “Geistlich” to him did not mean the clerical estate but rather something deeper and broader, namely those who follow Christ's example. All those who are baptized are geistlich, or as he summarized: “All the baptized are just and true priests.”Footnote 48
Since baptism made people geistlich, it rendered clerical vows worthless, according to Speratus. Clerical vows corrupted Christian sensibilities about morality. The clerical vow of chastity (Keuschheit) deceived Christians into thinking that chastity was synonymous with clerical celibacy.Footnote 49 Keuschheit signified much more to Speratus than clerical celibacy—Keuschheit was a universally applicable condition of sexual propriety. All Christians should strive for Keuschheit, especially married men. “If someone is still a virgin, he keeps his Keuschheit as long as he does not enter marriage. If somebody is married, he should keep his Keuschheit in such a way that he knows well to keep his vessel in holiness and honor [sein faß zu behalten in heyligung und in ehren].”Footnote 50 Speratus elaborated, “God will judge whores and adulterers, as everyone may become towards his own wife when he approaches this creature to use her sinfully, whom he should use well and rightly.”Footnote 51 The clerical vow of chastity was a grand distraction that enabled the clergy to “carry out the greatest fornication under this cover […] and lead lazy, fat, greedy, idle lives, which all their teachings and trickery serve. In this and other respects, the world is duped. Oh horror. These are their vows.”Footnote 52 Speratus included a personal anecdote to demonstrate that vows of chastity were not only wrongheaded but also dangerous: “I knew a woman in Würzburg—by the name of Regina—who made a vow of virginal chastity [jungkfreuliche keuescheit] yet burned [with lust] so hard that she had no peace or rest and finally fell into such a melancholy […] that she began to believe she had broken her vow with the devil himself, and (you do not want to say or even guess that happened then) she finally despaired and hanged herself.”Footnote 53
There were clergymen in Speratus's audience that January morning, and his attack on celibacy provoked immediate reaction from theological faculty at the University of Vienna. They summoned Speratus two days after his sermon and again four days later, but he did not appear before them. The faculty excommunicated him with nine articles focused on the twin issues of celibacy and monasticism. They claimed that Speratus had said that “cloistered people should, if they care to, reach for marriage.”Footnote 54 He had suggested that only “eunuchs” could be celibate and ordinary men and women should “jump out of the cloister” [Spring herauß auß dem closter].Footnote 55 Many reform-minded Germans, including Luther, had misgivings about monks and nuns marrying, but Speratus did not.Footnote 56 He denounced both celibacy and the cloister. Ultimately, though, it was not his sermon that enraged the Viennese but rather the fact “that I was taking my married bride around with me in hardship, as the apostles also did” [das ich mein ehelich gemahel mit mir im ellend umbher fueret, wie die aposteln auch haben gethon].Footnote 57
As Speratus played the provocateur in Vienna, in Nuremberg the imperial diet gathered to address the unsanctioned reforms emerging across the empire. The pope's representative at the diet along with Duke Georg insisted that action be taken against priests and monks who had married. Grandmaster Albrecht participated in the diet and defanged its edicts by exempting marryied clergymen from temporal sanction. But the proceedings still made one thing abundantly clear: the pope and the imperial church did not approve of clerical marriage.Footnote 58
Speratus fled Vienna. In May 1522, Luther wrote to Spalatin saying, “the Viennese theologians have embraced tragedy with the case of Paul Speratus […who] now leads [the church] in Iglau in Moravia.”Footnote 59 With little hope for peace in Buda, Speratus had traveled north to Iglau (Jihlava) where a sympathetic city council helped him gain the position of city preacher. Convinced that his marriage had forced him to flee Vienna, Speratus became more circumspect and now introduced Anna as his sister. He later attempted to justify this ruse to the people of Iglau, “I hid and denied this [marriage] from the weak as I also did from you, however since the matter now stands between me and you […] I cannot and do not want to behave this way any further, the whole world is already angered about this matter.”Footnote 60 Speratus quickly learned that his reputation preceded him, and he could not hide his marriage. The “cruel behemoth,” of the imperial church continued “unleashing its poison on me yearly and daily, though I was already expelled [vertrieben] and in a different land.”Footnote 61 The abbot of the nearby Premonstratensian abbey in Seelau (Želiv) wrote to King Louis of Bohemia demanding action be taken against the city preacher in Iglau. Louis issued three decrees calling for the arrest of Speratus, and in early 1523, the city council of Iglau relented, sending Speratus to the Bishop of Olmütz (Olomouc). When Louis arrived in Olmütz in April, he condemned Speratus to be burned at the stake and ordered Iglau to burn all of Luther's texts, making clear that Speratus was condemned for his association with Luther. Speratus spent twelve weeks in prison awaiting his grisly fate.
Anna Speratus remained in Iglau, where Paul still had allies. The city council, nearby noblemen, and Grandmaster Albrecht beseeched King Louis to spare Speratus, and their advocacy saved him. Speratus later thanked Albrecht for interceding with Louis “in the most Christian way, both verbally and in writing, on behalf of me, and indeed on behalf of the Gospel.”Footnote 62 Louis commuted Speratus's sentence and banished him from the royal lands. In September 1523, Speratus returned to Iglau to collect his family and belongings. He found that Iglau had been devastated by a fire that had consumed his own library. Without a home once more, Speratus set out to find a new refuge, traveling through Prague and into Saxony. He headed to Wittenberg.
Historians have puzzled over the nature of Speratus's pre-1523 relationship with Luther. On the one hand, Speratus publicly advocated for clerical marriage before Luther published “The Estate of Marriage” in 1522, which suggests that Speratus was a likeminded colleague rather than an Anhänger.Footnote 63 Indeed, he may have even inspired Luther's own position on clerical marriage. The Viennese articles of excommunication focus on Speratus's “lustful” statements about clerical marriage and do not look like contemporaneous condemnations of Luther or the Reformation as a whole.Footnote 64 On the other hand, King Louis's condemnation of Speratus treated him as a follower of Luther. And Speratus's preaching conformed so perfectly to Luther's early reforming message that he probably took inspiration from Luther. Consider Speratus's most famous composition, a hymn titled “Salvation unto Us Has Come,” which he composed while in the Olmütz jail: “Salvation unto us has come by God's free grace and favor/ Good works cannot avert our doom, they help and save us never/ Faith looks to Jesus Christ alone, who did for all the world atone/ He is our mediator.”Footnote 65 These lyrics encapsulate Luther's theological breakthrough. Irrespective of Speratus's originality vis-à-vis Luther, the two men were fond of each other. Luther followed Speratus's career and lamented Speratus's various expulsions. In November 1523, he welcomed the exiled priest and his family to Wittenberg.
In Wittenberg, Speratus helped Luther publish the first Protestant hymnal, the Book of Eight Songs, which included: “Salvation unto Us Has Come”; two other songs by Speratus; four by Luther; and one by Justus Jonas. Speratus also translated three of Luther's Latin texts into German, including Luther's new liturgy. Speratus worked with Luther to spread the idea of religious reform throughout the empire. In early 1524, when Luther published a rebuttal to the “wretchedly shameful” University of Ingolstadt, which had condemned Luther, Speratus appended his own rebuttal to the Viennese articles of excommunication against Speratus.Footnote 66
Through Luther, Speratus met Grandmaster Albrecht on November 29, 1523 in Wittenberg. Albrecht was traveling the empire in the years 1522–24, seeking allies to help the Teutonic Knights in their interminable struggle against Poland. Albrecht attended imperial diets and met with numerous German princes, but ultimately it was Luther who became his most intriguing ally, as we will see below. At Luther's suggestion, Albrecht had started sending German pastors to Prussia, starting with Johann Brießmann, a former Franciscan from Cottbus and Johann Amandus, a married priest from Holstein.Footnote 67 In Königsberg, these two men delivered the first Reformation sermons in Prussia in the autumn of 1523. Brießmann denounced monastic vows, and while this may seem audacious considering he was in a territory ruled by monks, he had powerful supporters, including the Bishop of Samland (Samland was the first of Prussia's two dioceses), Georg von Polentz, in whose cathedral Brießmann preached. Brießmann had won Polentz over to the side of reform. The bishop had begun offering his own sermons against monastic vows, thus becoming the first bishop to embrace the Reformation. On Pentecost 1524, Polentz preached “On Evangelical Freedom and the Renunciation of Monastic Vows.”Footnote 68 In Prussia, the first territory to embrace the Reformation, reform meant an end to monastic vows and the start of clerical marriage. Prussia was the perfect destination for Speratus.
Albrecht offered Speratus the post of court preacher in Königsberg, and Speratus eagerly accepted. He had learned from his time in Iglau that there were few safe places or jobs for a married priest like him. The eagerness with which he accepted Albrecht's offer did not escape the notice of his former congregants in Iglau, who resented his decision to accept a princely post rather than returning to their humble town. In 1524, Speratus wrote to Iglau to defend his actions: “Dear sirs, what do you think I am looking for? […] I am ready to rejoin you again at any hour.”Footnote 69 Clearly, some in Iglau thought otherwise. In a second letter, Speratus explained, “I had to leave the territory for many reasons […] so that I would be free of my cause against the king [of Bohemia].”Footnote 70 In a third letter, Speratus started with “I do not hold anything against you” before asking the rhetorical question, “If I wanted to reject you for the sake of the prince [of Prussia], why did I want to write to you?”Footnote 71 Speratus insisted that Albrecht “did not want to do anything against you, and if I were in his principality and you wanted me back, he would grant me to you.”Footnote 72 Speratus's epistolary rejoinders suggest that he had been accused of abandoning Iglau for professional advancement, an accusation that his modern biographers have refuted by noting that his correspondence with Iglau remained cordial, and Prussia's obscurity and poverty did not make it an auspicious destination for the ambitiousFootnote 73 But we only have Speratus's letters as evidence of the tone of the correspondence, and I reject the dichotomy between migration for professional advancement and migration for personal safety. Prussia afforded Speratus the opportunity for both.
Speratus, his wife, and their two children arrived in Königsberg in the summer of 1524, a tumultuous time when unrest plagued all of Prussia, including the Polish-controlled portion. The previous year, a revolt had broken out in Thorn (Toruń), which would soon inspire similar revolts in Danzig and Elbing.Footnote 74 In 1525, the peasantry revolted in the countryside around Königsberg. Amandus, Luther's chosen preacher for the old town church, condemned monasticism violently and encouraged his parishioners to destroy a convent in the city. The city authorities expelled him, and Speratus took over his preaching duties in the old town church until the following year, when a permanent replacement arrived. The permanent replacement was a Franconian priest named Johann Poliander (born Johann Gramann), who had been Speratus's successor as cathedral preacher in Würzburg and had followed Speratus's lead in attacking clerical celibacy from the pulpit before fleeing to Prussia.Footnote 75 Speratus's life achieved some degree of stability over the course of 1525, when Albrecht returned to Prussia and reestablished order. Now, Speratus and his likeminded fellow clerics began implementing the Reformation in earnest, under the watchful and approving eye of Albrecht.
Clerical marriage had led Speratus to Prussia, via expulsions from Würzburg, Vienna, and Iglau, and a brief sojourn in Wittenberg. He was not alone in his trajectory. On his winding path to Königsberg, he encountered other priests who had decided to marry in the years 1522–24, some of whom also relocated to Albrecht's Prussia. In Würzburg, several of his fellow canons embraced marriage including his brother-in-law Fuchs and two canons named Johann Apel and Friedrich Fischer. Apel and Fischer were imprisoned and banished for their marriages.Footnote 76 They fled to Nuremberg and, soon thereafter, Prussia, where Fischer served as Albrecht's chancellor.Footnote 77 Apel and his wife ultimately returned to Nuremberg, but he remained close friends with Speratus and wrote to him often, always including some word about his wife. When Apel heard that Anna Speratus had died in 1531, he wrote with condolences before Speratus replied with reassurance, “my wife lives, she lives, and there is nothing at home that could displease me.”Footnote 78
As Speratus's story shows, marriage could mean exile for those who had vowed chastity. Yet thousands of priests, monks, and nuns across Germany—as well as the Polish controlled part of Prussia—embraced marriage and accepted its consequences.Footnote 79 Historians like Marjorie Plummer have established that marriage was a major feature of German clerical life in the years 1520–40.Footnote 80 And it was not just ordinary, secular clergymen like Speratus who married. Spiritual princes and leaders of monastic orders abandoned celibacy in the 1520s. We now turn now to the story of Albrecht, head of a monastic order which Luther called “truly strange” and uniquely “great, outstanding, and strong” with respect to its potential to transform Western monasticism.Footnote 81
Princely Ambition and Marriage: Albrecht's Path to Prussia
Albrecht was born May 17, 1490 in Ansbach to one of the empire's most influential, well-connected princely families.Footnote 82 As he later explained, he was “a born prince of the house of Brandenburg […] a prince of the Holy Roman Empire.”Footnote 83 But young Albrecht was not rich. His father, Margrave Friedrich V of Brandenburg-Ansbach and his mother Sophia of Poland had thirteen children and struggled to pay for their tutoring.Footnote 84 Albrecht, the third son, was sent to live at the court of the prince-archbishop of Cologne, where he imbibed court culture and gained financial security as a cathedral canon. At eighteen he joined Emperor Maximilian's march into northern Italy, taking part with his eldest brother Kasimir in the unsuccessful siege of Roveredo in the Venetian Republic. Albrecht returned to Ansbach after the siege, to the court of his father Friedrich, a man obsessed with securing princely positions or ecclesiastical benefices for his many children.Footnote 85
In January 1509, Albrecht's older brother Georg married a Croatian noblewoman. In September of the following year, his younger sister Elizabeth married a German margrave. But for Albrecht, marriage was not an option. In 1510, Teutonic Grandmaster Friedrich died, and Albrecht's father worked with Duke Georg, the late grandmaster's brother, to secure the election of Albrecht as the next grandmaster in February 1511. The Teutonic Knights were eager to bolster their alliance with the princes of Germany, and Albrecht had the added blessing of being the maternal nephew of Sigismund I, the king of Poland since 1506. Perhaps this grandmaster could refuse to swear fealty to Poland without provoking retribution.
Albrecht departed for Prussia in October 1512. His six-week journey to Königsberg took him past deserted villages and overgrown fields. The Thirteen Years’ War (1454–66) had devastated the Prussian countryside and left much of it under the control of ruthless mercenaries whom the Order had hired but never paid. These mercenaries established themselves as a new, draconian nobility who drove away most of the peasantry.Footnote 86 Now, Prussia was returning to nature, and something would have to be done or else Prussia would become “more of a desert [noch wuster],” as Albrecht would later write to Luther.Footnote 87
After making his monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the twenty-two-year-old grandmaster followed his predecessor's example and began instituting modest land reforms, confirming the new nobility's control over land in exchange for loyalty and claiming the revenues of several church lands for himself.Footnote 88 The traditional commandaries (Komturen) were replaced by new Ämter presided over by Teutonic Knights or new nobles. Historians have fit Albrecht's efforts into a broader, European-wide effort by rulers to build new “estate states” (Ständestaaten).Footnote 89 It is unclear whether Albrecht actually desired a new ruling nobility or simply recognized the fragility of the Teutonic structure of governance, in which the first and second estate were coterminous. He must have appreciated that his knights numbered fewer than one hundred members and could more easily be blended into a new ruling nobility than vice-versa.
In August 1518, Albrecht's eldest brother Kasimir married a Bavarian duchess. In November, his older sister Sophie married a Silesian duke. In December, his older sister Anna also married a Silesian duke. The following June, his younger brother Johann married the widow of Ferdinand of Aragon. Albrecht and two other brothers remained destined for careers in the church, though Albrecht's position granted him substantial political authority, which he took seriously.
Like his predecessors, Albrecht quested after two elusive objects: a new source of wealth to enrich Prussia and a means of freeing it from the rule of Poland. The former seemed unattainable considering that the Thirteen Years’ War had left the Order with only one major city, Königsberg, and a ruined agricultural sector. But perhaps the latter could realistically be hoped for if the Teutonic Order found powerful allies. Albrecht began negotiating with the Muscovite ruler Vasili III, among others, for an alliance against Poland that would allow Albrecht to reclaim much of neighboring Royal Prussia.Footnote 90 Poland began mustering troops, and war commenced two days after Christmas, 1519.
Albrecht's biographers have depicted the young grandmaster as a genius of statecraft with the sagacity of a much older ruler.Footnote 91 One biographer praised Albrecht's “statecraft wisdom” before noting—in the immediately following sentence—that Albrecht's decision to provoke war with Poland in 1519 devastated Prussia.Footnote 92 Polish forces besieged Marienwerder and blockaded the coast while the Teutonic Knights and mercenary allies captured several cities in Ermland. In 1521, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V negotiated a four-year truce, but there was little hope for Prussia to win the conflict once it resumed.
Albrecht faced a quagmire: how could he reform Prussia while preparing for renewed hostilities with Poland? He needed allies, but efforts to recruit troops remotely “through the help of the German Order in German lands” failed.Footnote 93 He needed to return to his homeland and did so for the imperial diet in Nuremberg in 1522. As he later recalled: “After that same ongoing truce [with Poland], following the advice of the members of the Order in Prussia, we submitted ourselves, in my own person, to the Holy Romen Empire of the German Nation and presented ourselves with the utmost diligence at the common imperial diets and to various imperial representatives, electors, princes, and the common nobility and urgently sought and requested that the matter [with Poland] would be settled by these arbitrators before the end of the truce.”Footnote 94 Albrecht failed to garner any support. He later described how, “many people treated us wrongly and contemptuously” and the Teutonic Order was refused “consolatory, helpful resources.”Footnote 95
Albrecht's bitter account of what happened in Nuremberg appeared in four printed apologias he authored later in life to justify the actions he took after 1522. Ignored by the princes of the empire, he was left at the mercy of the king of Poland, whom he would ultimately embrace rather than shun. In 1531, Albrecht insisted it had been the “ungraciousness, unfriendliness, and disfavor” of the emperor that had pushed him into the Polish fold after he had tried in vain to “bring Prussia into the secular as a principality of the empire [das landt Preussen in weltigkait getzogen und als ein furstenthumb des heylgen reychs].”Footnote 96 Beyond any unfriendliness or neglect that Albrecht experienced in Nuremberg, the religious changes of the Reformation began to separate him from the central organs of the empire. Indeed, the matter of the Reformation consumed all the energies of the imperial diet in Nuremberg, leading to the neglect of the Prussian issue that Albrecht so resented. The diet was fixated on the issue of religious changes, including clerical marriage.
Albrecht participated in the diet as the representative of his cousin the archbishop-elector of Mainz, and in this role, he demonstrated his support for the religious reforms sweeping the empire, including the introduction of clerical marriage.Footnote 97 He amended a proposal for an edict demanding that preachers “teach the holy gospel according to proven writings and according to the interpretations of the four teachers, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, and Ambrose” by shortening it to “according to proven writings and Christian interpretations.”Footnote 98 Albrecht then worked to exempt married clergymen from the punishments of temporal rulers like Duke Georg. The Diet of Nuremberg, which ultimately rebuffed Pope Adrian's demand for more strict enforcement of the anti-reform Edict of Worms, provided an opportunity for Albrecht to demonstrate his sympathy for the religious reforms gripping Germany. This budding sympathy blossomed into a commitment to reform when Albrecht witnessed the sermons of a Nuremberg preacher named Andreas Osiander.Footnote 99
Perhaps because both men stemmed from Ansbach, a bond formed between Albrecht and Osiander, and soon the Nuremberg preacher had convinced the grandmaster of the necessity of reforming the Teutonic Order. More broadly, Osiander extolled the virtues of marriage and denounced the corruption of the clergy. In April 1523, he encouraged his listeners to, “Consider carefully the great honor of the marital bond and keep yourselves honorably and Christianly therein […] but look at what kind of life exists among them [the monks and priests] and with what mockery and bad example they stand in their sins before God and the world.”Footnote 100 Clerical reform was overdue and should commence with or without the approval of the pope, cardinals, or bishops, whom Osiander called “antichrist, anti-Christians, soul-murderers, and children of the devil” [antichrist, widerchristen, seelmörder und des teufels kinder].Footnote 101 Albrecht was entranced. The pope had previously rejected any reform of the Teutonic Order, but here was a preacher denouncing the authority of the pope from the pulpit of one of the grandest cathedrals in Nuremberg, the center of Franconia and the German Renaissance. For the rest of his life, Albrecht called Osiander his “spiritual father.”Footnote 102
Inspired by Osiander's fiery attack on clerical celibacy, Albrecht wrote to Luther in the summer of 1523. He sent a secret courier to Wittenberg with a note that explained “we feel that our order needs a reformation tam in capite, quam in membris.”Footnote 103 The courier presented Luther with a copy of the Teutonic Order's rule book for Luther to “amend with God's help.”Footnote 104 But Albrecht's ambitions for reform went beyond his own order. He reminded Luther that the Teutonic Order ruled over a territory with “a number of bishops, prelates, and priests who are free from our rule,” and asked Luther to suggest a way to “bring these people into an honest Christian undertaking and practice.”Footnote 105 Luther was delighted by Albrecht's queries. He realized that the frustrated grandmaster stood somewhat outside the bounds of the imperial church, immune from the recent imperial decrees suppressing church reform. Albrecht answered only to the pope—whom Albrecht had openly criticized at the Nuremberg diet—and the king of Poland—whose control over Albrecht was tenuous at best.Footnote 106 Perhaps Albrecht could be a powerful ally and advocate. A meeting was arranged.
Albrecht traveled to Wittenberg and met with Luther on the first Sunday of Advent, 1523, an encounter which Luther later described in a letter to Brießmann in Prussia: “The first time I spoke with Prince Albrecht, the grandmaster, he asked my opinion of his order's rule. I advised him to drop this foolish and confused rule and instead to marry and to give Prussia the political format of either a principality or duchy. […] I see that this advice pleased him and that he desires to carry it out as soon as possible.”Footnote 107 Proper governance was tied to proper sex (Keuschheit), according to Luther, and Albrecht desired both. And he was not alone in his yearning for a wife and legitimate family.
Marriage tantalized German clergymen in the early 1520s. Across the empire they encountered printed pamphlets encouraging them to marry, and while some pamphlets were anonymous, others were authored by respected celebrities like the reforming knight Ulrich von Hutten and the poet laureate Urbanus Rhegius.Footnote 108 In 1522, Luther joined the chorus extolling marriage. In a tract titled “On the Estate of Marriage,” Luther reasoned that because sex was a bodily function “more necessary than eating and drinking, urinating and defecating, sleeping and waking,” it should be embraced and channeled, productively, into marriage.Footnote 109 “Priests monks and nuns are obligated to abandon their vows [of chastity] once they discover that God's command to be fruitful and multiply is strong and sound within them.”Footnote 110 A priest could be forgiven for imagining that perhaps now—three centuries after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) had forbidden clerical marriage—priests would once again be able to enjoy the full fruits of marriage.
Perhaps Albrecht could reform his territory in a way that both emulated Luther's religious reforms and satisfied Albrecht's desire for a hereditary land, a land like the one inherited by his eldest brother in Brandenburg, a land which he could one day bequeath to a legitimate heir. To encourage Albrecht further, Luther published a formal letter to the Teutonic Knights explaining that marriage would enable them to be a vanguard of monastic reform and a powerful force for the Reformation.Footnote 111 “I have already written enough […] about the abomination of clerical celibacy […] and have not forgotten on the way, to admonish the people of your order in particular, out of strong respect and great hope, that your order can be a great, outstanding, and strong example, above all other orders if it were to lead the way, and false celibacy would be diminished in other places, and the fruits of the Gospel would increase.”Footnote 112 Once they embraced marriage, the Teutonic Knights could easily transform into a traditional nobility because they had the means to do so. As Luther explained, “your order has an advantage in that it is provided with temporal sustenance, and one can distribute the property among the lords and make fellow countrymen, officials, or others, useful people out of it. And there is no miserable need to care for the stomach, which keeps some mendicant monks and other monks in the monastery.” While praising the Order's potential, Luther criticized its current, monastic state, “it is now of almost no use to God or the world. Moreover [the knights] are suspicious and disagreeable, because it is known how rare chastity is among them.”Footnote 113 The monastic vow of chastity had corrupted the Teutonic Knights.
The meeting between Luther and Albrecht had enormous consequences for Prussia. Following it, Albrecht took steps to end clerical celibacy in Prussia, transform his order into a hereditary nobility, and reform the church throughout his territory. At Luther's suggestion, he sent Brießmann and Speratus ahead of him to Königsberg. In January 1524, his regent in Prussia, Bishop Georg von Polentz, denounced monastic vows, encouraged the clergy to marry, and ordered baptisms to be simplified and conducted “in the people's language.”Footnote 114 In January 1525, Erhard von Queiß, the bishop of Pomesania (Prussia's second diocese), issued the first reformed church order, which specified in its final article that “All priests and monks and nuns are no longer forbidden to leave their orders and join the married estate.”Footnote 115 This marked the formal legalization of priestly marriage in Prussia.
Albrecht remained away from Prussia, searching for political legitimation for his plan to end monasticism in the territory and transform it into a duchy ruled by him and his heirs. Since the pope and emperor remained steadfastly opposed to clerical marriage, Albrecht decided to abandon the Teutonic Order's traditional antagonism towards Poland and approach his uncle King Sigismund I, who maintained a broader understanding of the universal church that permitted reformers to contest certain doctrines, as Albrecht now did.Footnote 116 On April 8, 1525, Sigismund and Albrecht concluded a treaty in Krakow that made permanent the armistice of 1521 as well as the 1466 partition of Prussian into a royal (Polish) portion and a semi-autonomous Teutonic portion. Albrecht became the duke of this semi-autonomous portion, the new Duchy of Prussia. Two days later in the main square of Krakow, Albrecht and his knights paid homage to Sigismund, and Sigismund invested Albrecht with his ducal robes, which bore a black Prussian eagle with an “S” for Sigismund. As Sigismund later explained in a letter to Apel in Königsberg, this homage in Krakow brought Albrecht out from under the “judgement of the imperial chamber” and protected “the law and dominion, which his majesty has had in those lands of Prussia since ancient times, from foreign jurisdiction,” by which he meant the jurisdiction of the empire.Footnote 117 Sigismund made it clear that Prussia belonged to Poland—though nineteenth- and twentieth-century Polish historians lamented that Sigismund did not establish this fact by crushing Albrecht and his knights on the battlefield.Footnote 118 For his part, Albrecht now had the political support necessary to marry and begin his own dynasty.
When Albrecht finally returned to Königsberg on May 9, 1525, church reforms were well underway, led by the bishops Polentz and Queiß (the latter of whom had married a former nun).Footnote 119 But there had been no territory-wide decree on the nature or extent of Prussia's church reform. While Brießmann, Speratus, and Poliander preached in Königsberg against clerical celibacy, the cult of saints, and the cult of Mary, no plan had been established for spreading the Reformation into the countryside. Now, Albrecht summoned together the estates of his new duchy, and in December, they promulgated a new constitution (Landesordnung) and church order (Kirchenordnung). The church order called for scripture readings, communion in both kinds, and the use of the vernacular in church services, among many other changes. Focusing on rituals, the church order left intact Queiß's order permitting priest, monks, and nuns to marry. Much more attention was paid—in this church order, subsequent visitation orders, and even an episcopal mandate in 1539 that addressed marriage in detail—to the legality of cousins marrying than to the assumed fact that priests could marry. Speratus and a former Teutonic Knight named Adrian von Waiblingen were deputized to visit rural parishes to implement and enforce conformity with the new church order.Footnote 120
Albrecht's personal reformation culminated in 1526 when he married Dorothea, his second cousin and the daughter of the king of Denmark. Albrecht had arranged the marriage the previous year—after a failed attempt to marry King Sigismund's eldest daughter—and he had already begun a loving correspondence with Dorothea, whom he had never met.Footnote 121 The thirty-five-year-old former grandmaster wrote to the twenty-one-year-old princess in October 1525 saying, “I praise and thank divine omnipotence, that God in heaven graciously decided and ordered, that you dear princess and I, by divine bestowal, should look upon each other, and end life together.”Footnote 122 Albrecht and Dorothea finally met in Königsberg on July 1, 1526. They hosted a two-day wedding celebration that included processions, jousting, dancing, and a simplified church service stripped of ornaments that the celebrant, Bishop Queiß, deemed too popish.Footnote 123 Eleven months later, Dorothea gave birth to a daughter, Anna Sophia. By all accounts, including Dorothea's own, she and Albrecht had a loving marriage— “when I awaken and find you, my heart's most beloved, not beside me and that I have the pillow in my arms, oh God, what do I have other than enormous pain in my miserable heart.”Footnote 124
More than a mere symbol of the duke's personal reformation, Dorothea became a force for religious and administrative reform in Prussia, and she deserves more extensive analysis. She was not only the first duchess in Prussia but also the first woman to occupy Prussia's ruling halls, which had previously been reserved for monks. She had the important task of establishing a Prussian court and Prussian court culture.Footnote 125 She served as regent whenever Albrecht was absent, and as such she answered numerous complaints from Speratus and other clerics. Dorothea worked alongside Albrecht and Speratus to implement the Reformation in Prussia, a land to which none of them were native.
Conclusion
Over the next three decades, Dorothea, Albrecht, and Speratus—whom Albrecht made bishop of Pomesania when Queiß died of the English sweating sickness in 1529—reformed Prussia's church in capite et in membris. Foreigners fleeing persecution became essential to their reforms because Prussia lacked sufficient native pastors to teach and reform the populace. It was a vineyard with too few workers, Speratus believed.Footnote 126 He began inviting persecuted Protestants from Bohemia, Poland, and German-speaking lands to join him in Prussia, and circumstantial evidence suggests they responded to his call. Only thirty-eight (22.6%) of Prussia's pastors were natives of the territory; the majority came from elsewhere. And while many of these clergymen were probably not forcibly displaced, many were, and further research is warranted on the long-term effort by Protestant leaders to resettle forced migrants in Prussia. For now, the journeys of Speratus and Albrecht to Prussia reveal three historical facts about marriage, migration, and the Reformation in Prussia.
First, Speratus, Albrecht, and many of their fellow reform-minded German clergymen considered marriage the essential first step toward church reform. Already in January 1522, Speratus explained in his Viennese sermon that marital sex helped men avoid “gluttony, whoring, and all other bodily sins.”Footnote 127 Later that year, Albrecht contrived to have the Diet of Nuremberg exempt married clergymen from the wrath of temporal rulers like Duke Georg. In 1523, Albrecht intervened with the king of Bohemia to spare Speratus, who had been condemned to death for his preaching on clerical marriage and his own marriage. When Albrecht returned to Königsberg in May 1525, Speratus offered a welcoming speech to the new duke, “in the name of the women and virgins of the Old City of Königsberg.”Footnote 128 Albrecht had made his intentions clear—he wanted to marry and start a new dynasty, which he did the following year with Dorothea. Most of the remaining Teutonic Knights married too, with Dorothea often serving as matchmaker.Footnote 129 In the coming years, Albrecht and Speratus would infuriate the neighboring prince-bishop of Ermland by enticing his priests to Ducal Prussia by advertising the permissibility of clerical marriage there.Footnote 130
Second, marriage often resulted in forced migration for priests living in parts of the empire ruled by princes unwilling to embrace local church reform. Prince-Bishop Konrad von Thüngen of Würzburg, for example, expelled cathedral canons who married. Duke Georg of Saxony and King Louis of Bohemia condemned clerical marriage and threatened priests who refused to leave their wives with death. Poliander could not safely travel to Leipzig, where he had worked before his time in Würzburg, and Speratus could not safely stay in Iglau. Speratus lived out his days in Prussia, a land he never loved and continued to call “deserted.”Footnote 131 Even someone as powerful as Duke Albrecht found that his marriage endangered his standing in the empire (though his situation was not as dire as Speratus's). Charles V stripped Albrecht of his princely status and threatened him with more serious penalties for having secularized Prussia. Years later, when Albrecht yearned to see his ancestral lands in Franconia, meet his nephews, and visit with one of his brothers (seven had already died), he reached out to Charles to negotiate a compromise that would allow him to return to Germany, but negotiations led nowhere.Footnote 132 Albrecht's marriage had, in a sense, bound him to Prussia, a land he disparagingly called “totally bare” [gantz entplost], but a land that gave him the opportunity to build his own dynasty.Footnote 133
Finally, the stories of Speratus and Albrecht demonstrate how Prussia became a refuge for married priests and a laboratory for religious and political reforms.Footnote 134 Outside of the empire, the grandmaster-turned-duke could institute reforms by fiat, without the interference of any imperial assembly. His clergymen conducted the first Protestant visitation of parishes in 1526, two years before Luther and Melanchthon organized one in Saxony. Even earlier, in 1525, Albrecht and his bishops debuted a new relationship between church and state that became a hallmark of the Reformation. Albrecht and his Teutonic Knights relinquished their control over the church to the newly arrived pastors from Germany.Footnote 135 These pastors reciprocated by relinquishing huge tracts of church land to their new secular lords.Footnote 136 Historians have credited this type of reorganization of spiritual and temporal jurisdictions with the birth of the modern state, though they usually date this transformation to the mid- or late sixteenth century.Footnote 137 In Prussia, the first Protestant land, this began in the 1520s. Reform-minded priests resettling in Prussia inaugurated a new era of religious and political reform that would soon sweep across Europe.
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was generously funded by the American Philosophical Society, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. I would like to thank the following people for spending their time helping me with this article: Bryan Kozik, Andrew Thomas, Benjamin Marschke, Christopher Close, Natalia Nowakowska, Johannes Götz, and especially Alexander Schunka.
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