(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

to i 510, managed to evade paying homage completely. The Grand Masters’ support for the fractious bishops of Warmia brought about the short-lived conflict of 1478-9 known as ‘the padres’ war’, wojna popia or Pfaffenkneg. Only the death of king John Albert in 1501 prevented military reassertion of its sovereignty by Poland. The continued refusal to do homage by Frederick of Saxony’s successor, Albrecht of Hohenzollern-Ansbach, finally led to a resumption of open conflict in 1519, ending in an inconclusive truce in April 1 521. That Deus ex macbina, Martin Luther, helped resolve the situation. In March 1525, Grand Master Albrecht proposed to King Sigismund I the secularization of the Order in its Prussian lands. He had been openly backing the Reformation in Konigsberg since at least 1523. He was also bankrupt: the secularization of the Order’s lands would enable him to claw his way out of a financial hole. The few remaining members of the Order were content to share in the spoils. The treaty of Krakow on 8 April 1525 reaffirmed that of Thorn of 1.466, but delivered eastern, now ‘Ducal’, Prussia to the Grand Master as his hereditary possession and a fief of the Polish Crown. Two days later, outside the Krakow cloth-hall, Albrecht of Hohenzollern, the first territorial Lutheran ruler, swore his oath of fealty. The duchy was to revert to Poland on the extinction of his line. Contemporaries criticized Sigismund for not embarking on outright annexation. Experience showed, however, that such a course might well have led to more prolonged warfare - and Poland and Lithuania had to face up to the constant prospect of fighting elsewhere on their far-flung borders. A secularized, Lutheran Ducal Prussia would be utterly reliant on the Crown and might yet revert to it.

The difficulties in the north seemed to be counterbalanced by advances in the south. In Hungary and Bohemia at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, royal authority crumbled. The Jagiellonians sought to acquire these lands because that was what kings were supposed to do, and because they wished to prevent them from falling into the hands of hostile rulers. The memory of the machinations of the Luxemburg dynasty, and even of Angevin collaboration with the Teutonic Knights, spurred the Poles to extend their own influence into these lands. But the regency council which ruled Poland after Jagiello’s death in 1434 gravely miscalculated in trying to foist young Wladyslaw III on Hungary in 1440. The civil war which erupted between his supporters and opponents was provisionally resolved in a misguided crusade against the Turks. At the battle of Varna in November T444, Wladyslaw was among the dead. Only John Hunyadi’s generalship prevented the total destruction of the Christian army.

The tortuous road to Hungary turned out to lie through Bohemia. There, the chronic feuds between nobles and magnates, between Hussites and Catholics, their jockeyings for outside support, led, in 1469, to the election of Casimir IV’s eldest son, Wladyslaw, as king-designate. He ascended the throne two years later, on the death of George of Podebrad. However, his elevation brought him into conflict with the energetic king Matthias Cor-vinus of Hungary, who, by 1474, succeeded in wresting Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia from him. Casimir IV’s efforts to support his son foundered on lack of money.

Matthias died without a legitimate heir in April 1490. Wladyslaw/Vladislav/Ulaszlo, the notoriously easy-going King ‘Bene’, King ‘Fine’ (reputedly, his stock response to any request) was just what the Hungarian nobility wanted after the late king’s harsh rule. They chose him as king in February 1491. Casimir IV had hoped they would choose his second, favourite son, John Albert. He even undertook a disastrous military intervention, which ended in John’s defeat at Eperves in January 1492. But it was John Albert, not Wladyslaw, who secured election to the Polish throne on Casimir’s death in June of that year. A younger brother, Alexander, was recognized as separate hospudar by the Lithuanian nobility: partly in deference to the old king’s wishes to provide for his youngest son; partly out of concern to block Polish annexationist hopes.

The Jagiellonian family firm had made its greatest gains, but emphatically by invitation only. The separate successions of John Albert in the Crown and Alexander in the Grand Duchy showed that it was a highly fractured dynastic enterprise. Their rule in Bohemia and Hungary was faced with continuous internal opposition, much of it encouraged by the Austrian Habsburgs who, especially under that most elastic of politicians, Maximilian I, had their own designs on those territories. Maximilian stirred up trouble for the Polish Jagiellonians wherever and whenever he could: he encouraged the Teutonic Knights 111 their refusal to abide by the treaty of Thorn. He even gave encouragement to the tsars of Muscovy in their conflicts against Lithuania.