114 JOGALIAmotto was 'U nas mnogo ludei' (We have a lot of people). Glinski took Smolensk
by treachery, and held on to it. The third campaign, of 1534-7, started by
Sigismund during the minority of Ivan IV, ended indecisively with a third truce.
This same Muscovite embroilment also lay behind the last Teutonic war.
Albrecht von Hohenzollern had been persuaded by the Tsar to demand changes
in the Treaty of Thorn of 1466; and in 1519, border skirmishes turned suddenly
into war. Konigsberg was attacked and the Grand Master only escaped from a
humiliating capitulation by the timely arrival of Danish and German mercenar-
ies. Yet the truce of 1521 coincided with the advent of the Reformation. In the
space of a few months, the Grand Master saw the ranks of his Catholic crusad-
ing Order decimated by mass conversions to Lutheranism. His army melted
away. In 1525, to save his livelihood, he begged Sigismund to turn Prussia into
a secular fief of the Polish Kingdom, and to accept him as its hereditary duke.
The first act of Prussian homage was performed on 10 April 1525 in the Market
Square at Cracow. Henceforth, Albrecht von Hohenzollern remained a loyal
subject of Poland, and an active participant in Polish affairs.*
Meanwhile, the south-eastern borders seethed in constant commotion. The
preoccupations of the Jagiellons in Muscovy and Prussia were interpreted by the
Ottomans' dependants as a licence to plunder the Polish lands. As early as 1412,
the Grand Duke Witold had begun to build a chain of forts on the right bank of
the Dnieper, and to garrison them with Tartar mercenaries known as Kazaks or
'free adventurers'. These frontier communities attracted a growing number of
fugitive Slav peasants and outlaws, and formed the core of the later Cossack set-
tlements. But the Cossacks soon adopted the marauding life-style of the Tartars,
and by the end of the fifteenth century were capable on their own of raiding deep
into Poland. In 1498, they reached Jaroslaw, west of Lwow, and in 1502 the
bend of the Vistula near Sandomierz. This was exactly the kind of threat which
the obrona potoczna was designed to parry. But neither Cossacks nor Tartars
could be persuaded to mend their ways for any length of time. What is more,
* Although it is widely assumed that the Teutonic Order was dissolved after the seculariza-
tion of Prussia in 152.5, and of Livonia in 1561, it has survived to the present day. In 1527,
the few remaining Catholic knights who had not left Prussia for Livonia, established them-
selves at Marienthal (Mergentheim) in Wurttemburg, and proceeded to elect the first of a
new and unbroken series of Grand Masters, Walter von Cronberg. Thereafter, as from
Archduke Maximilian of Austria, the titular King of Poland, who was Grand Master from
1595 to 1618, the Order gradually fell into the orbit of the Habsburgs; and eventually its
headquarters were transferred to Vienna. Commanderies were set up in many parts of
Germany and Austria, and impressive architectural evidence of the Order's activities can
still be seen, among other places, at Mergentheim, at Marburg, and at Rykhoven in
Belgium. The present Grand Master, Dom Ildefons Pauler, resides at Vienna, Singerstrasse
7, in a house once inhabited by Mozart, and rules over three provinces centred on Passau,
Freisag, and Lana in Italy. Despite the romantic legend, which in 1813 inspired the founda-
tion of the Order of the Iron Cross in Prussia and later, in the writings of Alfred Rosenberg,
some of the grosser fantasies of Nazi ideology, the modern Teutonic Order has confined
itself to practical religious and charitable work, and has remained a loyal if obscure instru-
ment of the Vatican in central Europe.