A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Teutonic Order had met increasing reverses in its long struggle with Poland-Lithuania (see pp. 516–17), and demoralized by major defeats in 1519–21, many of the Grand Master’s knights had turned to evangelical religion, quitting the order. To save himself from ruin, he begged another cousin, King Sigismund I of Poland, to remodel the order’s Polish territories in east Prussia into a secular fief of the Polish kingdom, with the Grand Master himself as its first hereditary duke; he did his first act of fealty to a gratified Sigismund in Cracow in April 1525. Naturally such a radical step as secularizing the territory of a religious order needed a formal act of rebellion against the old Church, and Albrecht of newly ‘ducal’ Prussia, who had already sounded