Albert of Prussia
Albert of Prussia was the last Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in Prussia and the first Duke of Prussia, the Hohenzollern who on Luther's advice secularised the Order's state in 1525, made it a hereditary Lutheran duchy held as a fief of the Polish crown, knelt to Sigismund I in the market square of Cracow to receive it, and so created the territory that his cousins of Brandenburg inherited in 1618 and made into the kingdom of Prussia. He was a younger son of the Margrave of Ansbach, without land, and the Order's knights elected him Grand Master in 1511 in the hope that a Hohenzollern with a Polish mother would get them out of the homage to Poland that the peace of 1466 had imposed. He refused the homage and fought a war over it in 1519 that went badly and ended in a truce in 1521. He went to Germany to raise help and found the Reformation instead. At Wittenberg in 1523 Luther told him that the Order's rule was unchristian, that he should marry, and that he should turn Prussia into a secular principality, and Albert, who had already let Lutheran preachers into Konigsberg, agreed. The treaty of Cracow of April 1525 made him Duke of Prussia under the Polish crown, with the duchy heritable in his line and his brothers'. On 10 April he did homage to his uncle the king in the square, in the scene Matejko painted. The Order's remnant in Germany declared him deposed and the emperor put him under the ban, which meant nothing in Konigsberg. He married a Danish princess in 1526, made Lutheranism the religion of the duchy, gave the Prussian estates a church ordinance in 1525 and a Polish-language catechism for the Masurians, and founded the university of Konigsberg in 1544, the Albertina, which was Kant's. His court had the first printing presses in the Baltic and the first books in Lithuanian and Old Prussian. The last years were spent quarrelling with the estates and in the hands of a favourite, the adventurer Paul Skalich, whom the Polish commissioners drove out in 1566. He died at Tapiau in March 1568 on the same day as his wife, leaving a feeble-minded son whose death in 1618 gave the duchy to Brandenburg.
- Lived: 1490 CE – 1568 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: duke, ruler, grand master
