Sarmatism, or, It seems we've been there before

One shouldn't copy whole chapters etc etc, but I found this one so interesting re our recurring conflicts on the same theme; it seems most of the theories thought up here have been in circulation for centuries.

Karin Friedeich
The Other Prussia, ch. 4

'History, myth and historical identity

Every time a society finds itself in crisis it instinctively turns its eyes towards its origins and looks there for a sign. (Octavio Paz)1

Since the revival of interest in national origins during the Renaissance, prompted by the rediscovery of Tacitus's history of the pagan tribes which challenged the decaying Roman Empire, history steadily gained respectability as an academic subject at schools and universities. The questioning of philosophical and theological certainties and authorities during the Renaissance and Reformation period engendered an identity crisis, when late medieval Christian societies were confronted with the un-Christian heritage of classical antiquity. Poland-Lithuania was no exception: Italian and German Humanism had reached Cracow, the old Polish capital, even before Bona Sforza (1494-1557), the daughter of Gian Galeazzo, duke of Milan, and Isabella of Aragon, married king Sigismund I in 1518 and brought Italian artists and scholars to the Polish court. A society as steeped in the culture of classical antiquity as that of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility took seriously Cicero's dictum that 'not to know what happened in the past, means ever to remain a child'.2 Its sense of the past was greatly enhanced by the accumulation of political, legal and economic privileges since the late fourteenth century, which prevented the Polish king from collecting taxes, declaring war or passing any new laws without the nobility's consent. For politically active citizens, the past provided a valuable set of examples and models for future action and political legitimacy, boosting their self-confidence.

The same was true for the citizens of Royal Prussia, who regarded themselves in historical, political and national terms as a distinct group within the Common wealth. For the burghers in particular, collective historical memory was patriotic scripture: being citizens of the fatherland - the city, the Prussian province or the wider Commonwealth - involved rights as well as responsibilities. History was a crucial instrument for the education and formation of loyal and able citizens, both burgher and noble. Since their incorporation into the Polish kingdom, the Prussian social and political elites had looked to Humanist Cracow and its university, compelled by the need to produce qualified councillors and burgomasters, secretaries and delegates to the Polish Sejm and the Prussian diets. The activities and influence of a large circle of international Humanist scholars at Cracow, many of South-German, Alsatian, Silesian or Hungarian origin, peaked in the 1520s.3 Between 1493 and 1517, until the Reformation shattered the link, eighty-eight students from Danzig alone studied at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, but student numbers from Royal Prussia dropped sharply after 1525 as the Prussians created their own, Protestant education system.4 Urban Latin schools were remodelled into institutions of higher learning; from the middle of the sixteenth century, the three academic Gymnasia in Danzig, Thorn and Elbing transformed Royal Prussia into a centre of classical studies. New curricula combined Protestant theology and the traditional Humanist disciplines of philosophy, poetry, grammar and rhetoric with an emphasis on new subjects such as law, political theory and history.5 From 1535, the Gymnasium in Elbing flourished under the leadership of the Dutch Humanist Wilhelm Gnapheus, who introduced Melanchthon's educational ideas. Danzig followed in 1558 with the foundation of a Humanist school which, in 1580, received the title of Academic Gymnasium, and became the most prominent Prussian school, particularly in the early 1600s when Barthel Keckermann, the Calvinist natural law thinker, taught there. After the decline in significance of the university of Cracow, a large number of Protestant and even Catholic nobles from all over the Commonwealth sent their children for a solid Humanist education to the Royal Prussian Gymnasia, whose attraction increased markedly until the success of Tridentine Catholicism depleted student numbers in the early seventeenth century.6

The Gymnasium in Thorn was reorganised in 1568, around the time when the first Jesuit schools were established in the province. Although the Protestant Gymnasia have been credited with higher educational standards than their rival Jesuit colleges, the school which the Jesuit Order opened in Thorn in 1605 enjoyed growing popularity, not only among the Polish-speaking Catholic population, but also among the families of Protestant craftsmen and day-labourers. The competition between the Society of Jesus and the Protestant schools for the hearts and minds of future citizens, especially those of Polish and Lithuanian noble extraction, became fiercer in the late seventeenth century. In 1684 the Thorn Jesuits compiled a curriculum which reveals heavy borrowing from their Protestant counterparts: Latin, Greek, rhetoric, poetry and metaphysics, as well as natural sciences and history. As a result, the Thorn Protestant Gymnasium increased its provision of Polish language classes to avoid alienating Polish-speaking Lutheran or Calvinist families. Thorn had a substantial Protestant Polish-speaking population among all groups of society, as evidenced in 1698 when the guild masters thanked the city council for cutting back the time allotted to sermons and organ-playing in the 'Polish church services for Polish Protestant servant folk', so that they could go back to work sooner rather than later.7

Preparation for political activity in the city and the Commonwealth included training in rhetoric and oratorical skills. As Joachim Pastorius, director of the Gymnasium in Elbing from 1651-4 and history professor in Danzig from 1654-67, recommended in his letter to the son of the Danzig burgrave Adrian von der Linde, Cicero's 'robust and accurate style' was best suited for political speeches.8 The core program of eruditio historica included the study of Pliny and Cassiodor, two of the most frequently quoted sources for sixteenth-century Polish and Prussian historians. Knowledge of heraldry, Kleinodia Polona Libertatis, for noble students was balanced with the writing of treatises on the usefulness of cities in Poland, designed for the sons of burghers.9 Following their Order's Ratio Studiorum of 1599, the Jesuits in Thorn echoed the patriotic tone of Protestant teaching and similarly stressed the future role of the students as citizens of the Commonwealth, in the diet or city council's public affairs. From the mid-seventeenth century, the Jesuits carried on training their students in law, rhetoric and public speaking, while Protestant curricula started to emphasise theology, literature and mathematics.10

Religious differences did not prevent the burghers in the Royal Prussian cities from sharing with the nobility views on the necessity of political education. Georg Wende, rector of the Thorn Gymnasium towards the end of the seventeenth century, compared the tasks fulfilled by city councillors with those of Chinese mandarins, whose high standards of education and their noble descent made them the most suitable for state service. Wende warned that political education for the common good should not be neglected even in schools where theological education (Confucianism in China - Lutheranism in Royal Prussia) was generally preferred.11 History and its great men were used as examples, while the knowledge of past constitutions, governments and kingdoms served as a treasure-trove of models, bad and good, for criticism and imitation.12 Public-spirited education, intended to fortify urban burghers' pride in their citizen status, was also valued by Michael Mylius, a history professor in Elbing, who in 1642 wrote on the occasion of the death of the royal envoy and palatine of Pernau in Livonia, Count Ernst Dönhoff, of the greatest achievements of the deceased nobleman: '[He] travelled all over Europe's regions and kingdoms, especially those whose languages he easily mastered, and after his return as a great citizen of this body politic he made use of [what he had learned] for the good of the republic.'13

Patriotic behaviour was therefore measured by the use made of education for the common good of the state and the province: Dönhoff 'restored peace for God, the king and the people, for holiness, majesty and utility, publicae salutis summam'.14 Personal virtues and qualifications were not an end in themselves, but a means to serve - in Dönhoffs case - the city of Elbing and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1651, Gottfried Zamehl, from a prominent family of burgomasters and poets laureate in Elbing, whose father had collected the manuscripts of medieval Prussian chronicles, went on a study trip to Western Europe. After his return, he summed up the patriotic purpose of his experience abroad:

We travel to various nations and regions, but meanwhile we do not lose our love for our fatherland, nor shall we ever hold it in contempt;. . . it is not enough to live well abroad, but the motivation for all industrious activities [in foreign countries] is to come back with fame and honour to the fatherland.15

The hope that burghers would adopt the ideal of education recommended by the city authorities was also expressed in the appeal by the theology professor and senior pastor of Thorn, Jan Neunachbar, to appoint a local Thorunian or Prussian preacher to a vacant parish in the city: 'not only do locals know the nature of their fatherland, and what is good for it, better than foreigners: but also the citizenry will be encouraged to spend something on their children and educate them for the benefit of the fatherland'.16

Most historical works in Royal Prussia were written by burghers and disseminated from local printing presses, some of them attached to the schools. Jurisprudence ranked highly among the career choices of the urban elites, who wished to grasp the intricacies of their own constitutions and laws, the traditions of Kulm law and their ancient privileges granted by the Order and the Polish monarchy. But even law was approached from a historical angle. It was not merely historians who were sought, but lawyers who knew history, in the words of Pastorius 'the parent of all sciences'.17

Under the influence of the universities of the Empire and other European states, where the teaching of Roman law in the Renaissance had laid the foundations for the rationalist school of natural law, legal training at the Prussian Gymnasia adopted the focus on 'public law'. The academic preparation for public office was inspired and guided by the science of cameralism (Kameralmissenschaften) in the German universities of the late seventeenth century such as Jena, Halle, Frankfurt an der Oder, Helmstedt, Heidelberg and Leipzig, where many future burgomasters and councillors of Royal Prussian cities completed their studies.18 Prussian students and scholars who visited German universities followed the debates about Athenian democracy, the mixed constitution of Sparta and the advantages of aristocracy or monarchy; upon their return to Royal Prussia they applied what they had learnt to their domestic context, focusing on the dangers of tyranny, on the defence of their privileges and immunities inherited from previous generations, on the advantages of the aristocratic and democratic elements in the polity and on the prospects for reform of the practice of government in their own state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.19 German political science (Staatenkunde) appealed not only to Royal Prussian students: the idea that laws and constitutions had no power and meaning unless they were backed by true political power in the service of the common good held a strong attraction for seventeenth-century Polish constitulional thinking.20

In such an environment, the writing and teaching of history was central to contemporary political debate, which consciously used the past as an instrument for expressing present political needs. Poland and Royal Prussia were no exception. The Dutch republic used the republican myth of Venice in the same way.21 The Poles certainly seemed to know their origins. The mythical common descent of all nations of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the ancient Sarmatian warrior-heroes, who successfully resisted Roman attempts to conquer them, was fashioned into a statement of the Commonwealth's constitutional and political superiority over West European societies oppressed by absolute royal power. Szymon Starowolski founded his reputation as a patriotic historian early on by collecting a pantheon of Sarmatian heroes, of bellatores et scriptores, who included representatives of all nations of the Commonwealth, similar to the gallery of Swedish-Gothic heroes assembled by Johannes Magnus.22 References to great historical rulers and nations pointed at the imitation of past virtue. As the Goths were to the Swedes, or the Batavians to the Dutch, so were the Sarmatians to the Poles.23 Roger Mason exposed a very similar process in medieval Scottish mythology and chronicles, expressed politically in the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, where Sallust's idea of liberty stood godfather.24 History, applied as a political instrument, forged a community's sense of the past by several means, including a collective name, a myth of origin and descent, a shared history and a specific political culture based on the freedom of its citizens, within a limited territory.25

The degree to which thinking was guided by mythical analogies was expressed by the Italian Jesuit Possevino, a widely travelled expert on Poland: 'legends and fabulae, as hidden and obscure they may be, are more powerful than poems'. Mythology and miracles were accepted as long as they had a purpose. The Renaissance historian Scaliger confirmed this view: no mythology was created for its own sake, all myths pointed beyond themselves to some political or didactic purpose, helping nations to identify with their own past and to apply historic virtues and values to the improvement of their present situation.26 Although the Renaissance clearly popularised the genre of national history-writing, Kurt Johannesson has stressed that the creation of identity based on myths of the origin of peoples, cities, families or nations was not linked to one specific historical period but corresponded to a general human need to harmonise past and present.27

Under the influence of the Humanists, secular history was now commonly structured in historia locorum, temporum, familiarum et rerum gestarum - the study of an area or place, of chronological events, of dynastic and national descent, and finally of all events relating to a society and its institutions, the church, schools, governments and magistracies. Jean Bodin's attack on the German theory of translatio imperii, the idea of continuity between the ancient Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, sparked renewed interest in other themes of history: historia humana (the history of secular society), historia naturalis (including the laws of nature), and historia divina (on religion and revealed truth).28 Despite the unpopularity of Bodin's political theory, his historical methodology, focusing on historical particularia, suited the Prussian burghers. The historical tradition of cosmography and Sleidanus's theory of the four world monarchies, Babylon (or Egypt), Persia, Greece and Rome, had never put down strong roots in Prussia.29 Guided by patriotism, national and provincial history was much more popular.

In the sixteenth century Danzig secretary Caspar Schütz had stressed the need for historical education. He regretted that little knowledge of the Prussian past survived, due to ignorance and lack of learning not only among the pagans, but also among the Teutonic Knights. Historians of the following century wanted to remedy this situation.30 In De natura et proprietatibus historiae commentarius, published posthumously in 1613, Keckermann was one of the first Prussians to follow Bodin's history of particularia. In contrast to the usual Ciceronian approach, the Danzig professor did not accept rhetoric as the main instrument of history, but considered historical research a branch of philosophy and, more specifically, of logic: 'nobody can write history well who is not a good logician'.31 Throughout the seventeenth century, the Royal Prussian Gymnasia included Bodin's historical methodology in their curriculum, a fact mentioned in the 1676 lecture notes of the future burgomaster Johann Gottfried Rösner, who attended the lectures of the Thorn historian Ernst König on Bodin's Historia pragmatica. Rösner followed Bodin's subdivision of history into new subjects, as recommended by Keckermann: the history of ethics, political economy and history, and ecclesiastical history, as well as the history of scholarship (prudentia) and philosophy.32 These subjects were no longer inferior to Ciceronian rhetoric as they had been in the early sixteenth century. Not only biblical empires, but individual states, nations, peoples and even cities should be looked at from the angle of their universal significance, using the same tools and categories as ecclesiastical or world history in the past.33 Starowolski echoed this approach in his early seventeenth-century treatise on the utility of history aimed at students at Cracow University: history only makes sense when 'it reflects the deeds and events of all peoples of all times and all areas as in a great mirror'.34

Prussian urban historians followed these recommendations. Unlike most histories of German Hanseatic cities in the Empire, Royal Prussian Particular-Historie never ignored the larger dimension of the wider commonwealth: 'nam pius est, patriae scribere facta, labor' - it is pious work to write the history of one's fatherland.35 Amor patriae, love of the fatherland, however, never entirely eclipsed the larger context. Walter Hubatsch observed that even sixteenth-century Prussian chronicles of monasteries and small towns never lost sight of the history of the whole Prussian province, in which such chronicles were embedded.36 This is an important point, as German historians, transfixed by the power of nineteenth-century Prussia, have often argued that Danzig, Thorn and Elbing were in fact 'city-states' which possessed quasi-independence from the Polish-Lithuanian state. The view behind this interpretation was that the Royal Prussian burghers were at odds with a foreign, hostile Polish environment, whose culture they never accepted. A closer look at the historical and political writing of several Prussian burghers, however, reveals, a rather different picture.

Keckermann's idea of a perfect education combined patriotic with cosmopolitan values and suggests that his definition of patria did not end on the ramparts of his city. The fatherland, whose history one knew best, was also the place where one developed talents useful for public service and the common good. Such an endeavour made the burgher a precious and honoured member of society - his own local community, as well as human society at large.37 The writing and teaching of history, especially at grammar school level, were therefore recognised public services for the good of the republic, and not merely an amateur's hobby-horse.

Two other historians of Royal Prussia in the later seventeenth century, Pastorius and Hartknoch, wrote comprehensive guides to the history of the Polish-Lithuanian state to instil patriotic sentiments and a sense of duty among the young.38 History-teaching had to focus on the need of young Prussians to acquaint themselves with the history and constitution not only of their cities but also of the Commonwealth. After their travels abroad, their peregrinatio, the young returned to the service of their patria as the new generation of their cities' political elite. This fatherland was the city, as referred to by fellow Danzigers or Torunians in Samuel Schönwald's travel album; but the patria nostra could also be the Commonwealth and Poland, whose historical greatness was felt to be at stake in 1655, the year of the Swedish invasion, when Schönwald and other youngsters studied abroad and discussed their anxiety about the fate of their various home provinces. Such diary entries from the 1650s demonstrate the similarity of attitudes of young burghers and nobles towards their Commonwealth, assuring mutual friendship and lamenting the war that was afflicting their common fatherland.39 Dedication to the respublica was the very essence of the Ciceronian idea of the active life, shared by the Polish nobility.

The intellectual life and high educational standards in the Prussian Gymnasia, as well as Keckermann's ideals, inspired one of the Polish szlachta's most outspoken supporters of noble patriotic duty, Andrzej Maksimilian Fredro. In his educational programme of 1666 he voiced the need not only for nobles, but also for Polish burghers to imitate the Prussian cities in regularly sending their sons to foreign countries to learn languages and observe foreign customs, although Fredro did not explore why educational standards were higher in the Prussian Protestant schools. Protestant preachers had to undergo an academic training which included theological studies at a university, while Catholic priests, with the rare exception of those who could afford to go to Rome, or who received an adequate stipend, launched their careers in one of the numerous local seminaries or Jesuit colleges in Poland.40 In many respects, however, the educational ideals of nobles shared similar requirements and a similar spirit of public duty as the education of the Prussian patriciate. Just as young burghers were prepared for public office, noble education was aimed at active participation in the political structure of the Commonwealth, as deputies to the Sejm, court officials, or even for a post as a senator. What Germany later called staatsbürgerliche Erziehung (civic education) was the most important element of the curriculum for a Polish or Lithuanian nobleman. History was central. A young nobleman had to be told of his origins so as to fill him with pride and a consciousness of the obligations connected with his role as a member of the noble Sarmatian nation.

Thus from the early seventeenth century the Humanist genre of history as descriptio orbis terrarum was replaced by a history of nations and fatherlands: the idea that the values of the past had an immediate impact on the present made anachronism a virtue. Changes in the patterns and contents of myths serve therefore as valuable tools for measuring alterations and shifts in a society's political culture. The economic and social crises in the Royal Prussian cities following the Swedish wars of the seventeenth century, the decline of their privileges and the political disappointment felt among the Prussian burghers about the behaviour of the nobility and the Polish king towards them - all this was reflected in the writing of history and in political publications. The period from early Humanism, when myths of origin were invented and first disseminated, to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which under the impact of the political and military crisis of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth discarded many old legends, is crucial for the development of historical writing in the Prussian cities. Its citizens never turned away from history; on the contrary, when old myths no longer rang true, new myths had to be developed to account for a change in political attitudes and mentalities.


TRADITIONS OF HISTORY-WRITING IN POLAND AND PRUSSIA

Despite the hostility of Royal Prussian historians towards the legacy of the Teutonic Order after 1454, chronicles from the Teutonic period still exerted considerable influence on the political and intellectual atmosphere of Royal Prussia and the view burghers and nobles held of their Prussian nation's past. The following three traditions formed the source base for Prussian historiography in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: chronicles commissioned and controlled by the Teutonic Order, a separate religious chronicle tradition, and secular provincial history or Landesgeschichte, based mainly in the Prussian cities.

In numerous chronicles the Teutonic Knights celebrated their conquest of the Prussian lands as a victory of Christianity over the heathens. Their chronicle tradition found its first and foremost exponent in Peter von Dusburg, whose 1326 history of the Teutonic Order, based on the Order's archival material in Marienburg as well as oral tradition, not only offers a vivid description of the life, wars and political organisation of the Knights, but also attempts to explain pagan Lithuanian and Prussian society and customs to a Christian audience.41 Preserved in several transcriptions, Dusburg's chronicle held great attraction for historians of the early modern era and was published in 1679 by the Prussian historian Christoph Hartknoch.42 Until this date, the more popular version of this chronicle was the translation into Latin verse by Nikolaus von Jeroschin, a chaplain with the Teutonic Knights, but not a member of the Order's hierarchy itself, a fact reflected by numerous departures from Dusburg's highly favourable account of the history of the Order. A contemporary of Jeroschin and a parish priest from Deutsch-Eylau, Johann von Posilge, left a chronicle of Prussia which also demonstrated its independence from the panegyrical school promoted by the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order. Posilge, who was not an immigrant from Germany but a native Prussian from nearby Marienburg,43 exerted great influence on later historians hostile to the Teutonic Order. In general, however, the majority of the Order chronicles presented a positive picture of the knights' activities in the Ordensland.44 After 1454, a secular branch of chronicle-writing emerged among laymen and clergy with an interest in the pagan and Teutonic past, albeit from an anti-Order point of view. This third tradition was located in Königsberg, the capital of Ducal Prussia after the secularisation of the Order in 1525, and in the three main Royal Prussian cities, who had headed the opposition movement against the Teutonic Knights alongside the Prussian nobility. The Prussian burghers, who started to compile the history of their cities and province, continued using the Grand Masters' chronicles alongside anti-Teutonic traditions, which had the greatest impact on the chroniclers of Danzig.45 Foreign sources, including the histories of the Livonian Order, German medieval chronicles, and ancient sources before and during the time of the migrations in Europe, were also consulted, especially on the pagan past. One of the most influential post-Reformation sources was Simon Grunau's strongly anti-Teutonic Prussian Chronicle.46 This work sparked controversy from the time of its composition in the early sixteenth century. The Teutonic Order, and subsequently historians from Ducal Prussia and Germany, accused its author, a Dominican from Tolkemit, not only of being uninformed and highly selective in his use of sources, but of maliciously distorting the history of the Order, dwelling on local customs and inventing sources that never existed. Grunau also attacked the Reformation, especially in the cities of Thorn and Danzig, and has therefore frequently been called anti-German. Remarks against 'die Deutzschen', however, are exclusively directed against the Teutonic Knights or against Lutheranism, not against Germans as a nation.47 It was precisely these features and the admittedly anti-Teutonic bias that made it popular reading among contemporaries to whom the account was accessible in manuscript form. It was not printed until the nineteenth century, but was frequently copied. In the eighteenth century, the canon of Heilsberg Adalbert Heide expressed his preference for Grunau, because 'Schütz, Dusburg and Jeroschin did not oppose the Teutonic Knights strongly enough'.48 Modern German historians, however, have not only shown little tolerance for Grunau's work, but have given little thought to the meaning of his much-criticised stories.

Although Grunau rejected the un-Christian, sinful heathens, his fantastical legends convey a more positive picture of the life and character of the Prussian tribes than of the Teutonic Knights, who are described as cruel and malicious. Overall, the image of the brutish pagan Prussians, in whose condemnation Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini had delighted in his influential chronicle of the Slavs in the fifteenth century, little by little began to change. Genuine interest in Prussian ancestry gradually replaced the horror felt towards non-Christian customs and idolatry. In 1584, Caspar Hennenberger described in great detail the pagans' gruesome life-style, their sacrifices of human beings to their gods, their fierceness in war and their brutishness, but continued with Helmoldus' reference to their talents, their patience and their friendliness towards anyone who was well-disposed towards them.49

Caspar Schütz, the first historian who systematically used the protocols of the Prussian estates before and after 1454, was critical of Grunau's fantastical stories and myths about the Prussians.50 His own details of Prussian customs and superstition, however, are surprisingly rich for somebody who rejected all fabulas. His emphasis on the kindness and hospitality of the pagan forefathers, who were, according to Helmoldus, 'men with numerous favourable natural dispositions, full of humanity and by necessity patient', once more paints a positive picture. For the Order Schütz had only disgust and contempt. The pagans were 'in their majority almost completely wiped out by the hand of the Order', and the Teutonic Knights continued to ravage the country even after the forcible conversion: the knights raped and killed wives, children and servants, abused the courts and hampered justice,'and let people rot in their prisons, while the emperor unjustly favoured the Order.51

Polish historiographical influences had already grown stronger during the alliance of Poles and Prussians in the last wars against the Teutonic Knights.52 From the time of Grunau and Schütz, Prussian chronicles started to depict the Teutonic Order in dark colours as the main foe of the cities and as a collective tyrant, composed of a power-hungry German immigrant nobility which was interested only in destroying the liberties of the country and its political elites: the Prussian Georg Kunheim, for example, wrote in his early sixteenth-century history of the Teutonic Order, 'Franconian, Swabian and Bavarian folk do no good to Prussian land'.53 Another anti-Teutonic chronicle in Danzig, the Ebert-Ferber-Buch, named not after its author, but after the Danzig burgomasters in whose ownership it was discovered, continued to influence Prussian history until the later seventeenth century.54 Historians in the Royal Prussian cities accurately caught the spirit of bitterness and rebellion which dominated the war against the Order. The fact that the eastern parts of Prussia were retained by the Knights in 1466 did not escape wry comment. The handwritten marginal notes by a sixteenth-century reader of the chronicle of Johann Lindau of Danzig, which recounts the recapture of Königsberg by the Teutonic Order, indignantly exclaim: 'Yes dear Königsberg, if you had just allowed it, you could now be as free as a bird . . . but you gave [the Order] a friendly kiss of Judas.'55

The 1520s, which saw the final victory of Poland and Royal Prussia over the Teutonic Knights and resulted in the secularisation of the Order by its last Grand Master, Albrecht of Hohenzollern, were an especially productive period for historiography in both Royal Prussia and in the newly established Duchy, from 1525 a vassal state under the Polish crown. Despite the political separation, early sixteenth-century chronicles reveal that both parts of Prussia remained intellectually very close. Grunau in Elbing and Oliwa, Hennenberger in Königsberg, and Schütz in Danzig - the three main chroniclers of the sixteenth century - all based their accounts of their pagan ancestors largely on one source: Erasmus Stella. The latter, who continued to exert a great influence on Prussian history-writing for the next 200 years, was no native Prussian. As burgomaster of Zwickau in Saxony, he was only linked to Prussia by his friendship with the bishop of Pomesania and the early sixteenth-century Grand Master of the Order Friedrich, duke of Saxony and count of Thüringen. Lacking access to the rich manuscript archives and chronicles in the possession of the Order and subsequently of the libraries in Königsberg, Danzig, Elbing and Thorn, Stella was the first historian to base his research on the Prussian past almost exclusively on the literary and historical sources of antiquity.56 He added a new element to Prussian historiography: his chronicle aimed at a comprehensive history of the province (Landesgeschichte) in the context of a world history of res gestae from biblical times, through the age of the four world empires and the migrations, and ending in his own period. In contrast to Humanist cosmographies, history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was expected to be nationally focused and complete. What could not be known had to be invented.57

Stella examined the ancestry and lifestyle of the ancient Pruzzi, many of whom, according to Dusburg, 'had remained in the country'.58 Stella's De Borussiae Antiquitatibus libri duo, took ample evidence from a combination of several contradictory historical sources, such as Herodotus, Jordanes and Ptolemy, Tacitus, Pliny and Helmoldus, Aeneas Sylvius, Strabo and Otto Frisingensis. Although he did not invent the derivation of the ancestry of the Prussians from the Ulmigeri - so called by Jordanes - or Culmigeri (with etymological reference to the Prussian heartland of Kulm), he was an early and powerful propagator of this thesis. Thus he filled the much lamented historiographical gap between the origin of all European nations from Noah's son Japheth, a common feature of Humanist historiography,59 and the discovery of the Pruzzi by the first Christian missionaries of the ninth and tenth centuries. The 'dark age' of the migrations, known at the time only from very rare sources, was now enlivened with the mythology of the Prussian descent from king Waidewutus and his brother Prutenus. This king had three sons (later inflated to seven, then twelve in Grunau), who represented the Prussian provinces. As Prussians and Lithuanians were said to be brothers, Stella included one son with the name Litalanus, leader of the Alani, who broke away from the 'common mother Borussia' to found his own country and people in Lithuania.60 The idea that the Baltic peoples, including Lithuanians, Livonians, Samogitians (from z.mudz´) and Prussians, were all one nation (una gens), had already been a commonplace in Dusburg's work in the fourteenth century.

According to Stella, the ancient Prussians were a branch of the Sarmatian tribes described by Tacitus (Venedi, Daci, Alani). They had come to the lands east of the Vistula and the Baltic shore as immigrants and mixed with the remnants of the Gothic peoples.61 Impressed by Tacitus's description of the ancient Germanic tribes, who had no fortified houses, lived simply and worshipped nature, Stella attached the same attributes to the Baltic Prussians. The Saxon historian belonged to a generation of German scholars who had reacted to the Italian shunning of the Gothic-Germanic barbarians with a counter-attack: Tacitus was their weapon and proof that the Germans were not just cruel barbarians but possessed piety and a communal spirit, strength in war and nobility by merit. Rejecting the sophistication of high Roman culture as decadent, the 'noble barbarians' were part of the Humanist cult of ancestor-worship which Stella introduced to Prussia.62 Significantly, neither Stella nor his imitators in Prussia integrated the Prussians into Germanic culture, but into the Sarmatian world.


THE GOTHIC MYTH

Gothic mythology in Poland-Lithuania received a boost not only from Germany but also from Sweden, where it was even more powerfully propagated by the Magnus brothers, who used the history of the Goths by Jordanes to confirm the association of the Swedes with the Gothic tradition. The myth had expanded by the late sixteenth century, when Sigismund III, from the senior branch of the Swedish Vasa dynasty, was elected to the Polish throne. Hartknoch reports that from this time the Poles thought the Goths were in fact of Sarmatian origin like themselves. According to Hartknoch, this theory gained particular significance in 1622, when Adam Macovius, legate of the Polish king Sigismund III, was sent to the Spanish court in order to inquire about any remaining Gothic monuments and sources from which the Sarmatian-Gothic relationship could be deduced. Pawel/ Piasecki, Sigismund's court historian, was employed on a similar mission.63 The Gothic-Sarmatian myth was also meant to facilitate the task of Jesuits sent to Sweden from Poland in order to make proselytes among opponents of King Charles IX, Sigismund's uncle, who - in Polish opinion - had usurped the Swedish throne. Persecution of his opponents caused an exodus of about 400 Swedish Catholic emigrés to Poland, where the Jesuit college in Braniewo (Braunsberg) became the favourite place of education for young Swedish Catholics. Some of them found a cruel end after their return to Sweden under the rule of Gustav Adolf, while others joined the Polish court and fed the Sarmatian-Gothic myth with panegyrics to the Vasa king on the Polish throne.64

An appreciation of the foundations of Prussian mythology is vital for an understanding of the further development of Prussian historical identity. The most significant feature was not the fact that the Prussians invented their specific version of the past, but what was absent from it: the German element. There was no attempt to construct a bridge to the Holy Roman Empire, nor to the Germanic past of Tacitus's vision of Germania which was so valuable for German Lutheran reformers and Humanists.65 Despite the clear recollection by Prussian burghers that most of their families originated from Germany, they not only signed an act of political and administrative incorporation with the Polish crown in 1454; they also founded a historical association with the Poles, as their historiographical tradition had to find a new home in a Sarmatian environment. The result, the creation of a highly adaptable and complex mythology which combined the Gothic-Germanic with the Sarmatian-Polish traditions, suited the political needs of the Prussian nobles as well as the townspeople.

The main source for Gothic history was the adaptation by Jordanes, bishop of Ravenna, of Cassiodorus's twelve books on the history of the Goths from 551 and their victories in Italy under Theodoric's rule. The great warrior genealogy of the Goths had gained fame from the legend that the god Mars had been born among them, while several other Gothic heroes supposedly descended from Hercules.66 The strong emphasis on military skills and prowess, however, was not the only characteristic which endeared the Goths to later European historiography and national literature, most aptly expressed in baroque Germany in Lohenstein's and Gryphius's anti-French Arminius dramas. It was what Jordanes had written about the deep religiosity, the wisdom and the honest simplicity of their lifestyle, which made them superior to the 'corrupt Romans' who were identified in seventeenth-century Germany with the French enemy. In the forefront of the pro-Gothic literature that began to flourish in Europe during the Renaissance and the baroque periods were the Swedes, who exploited Jordanes's extravagant claim that Scanzia, the Gothic homeland, was the cradle of all nations: 'quasi officina gentium, aut certe velut vagina nationum'.67

The popularity of Gothic mythology reached its first climax during the Swedish Reformation in the debate between the Catholic Magnus brothers, the Lutheran Vasa dynasty and its court historians, each side trying to establish its politically and religiously correct descent from their Gothic forefathers.68 With the Reformation victorious, the independent Gothic heritage changed its connotations. As the Lutheran confessionalisation of the country progressed, the dynasty's historical legitimacy and power had to be asserted against rival aristocrats and a suspicious rural population. To overcome the internal and external reluctance to recognise Vasa monarchical rule, a Protestant version of the Gothic myth proved highly useful. It was no coincidence that Johannes Magnus's Latin History of All Goths and Vandals of 1554 was published in Swedish in 1611, the year when Gustav II Adolf became king of Sweden. The book not only provided the justification for a long genealogy of Vasa kings whose names were attached to high numerators of dubious validity, including Erik XIV and Charles IX, but enabled Gustav Adolf to identify with the expansionist designs of the mythical Gothic king Berik, who united his people behind him and conquered the Baltic regions.69 Although strict Lutheran ism rejected chiliastic ideas, seventeenth-century Pietism carried deterministic notions into Sweden. Gustav Adolf's sobriquet, the 'Lion of the North', was taken directly from the four books of Ezra, prophesying the coming of the end of the world in the time of the fourth world monarchy, the time of eternal peace.70 This image of the Swedish Lutheran saviour-liberator, aptly promoted by the Swedes during their involvement in the Thirty Years War but barely believed in the cities of Prussia targeted by Gustav Adolf's armies after 1626, struck a chord similar to the last-emperor ideology of Joachim of Fiore and other chiliastic thinkers.

It was not just Sweden which was affected by the Gothic myth, which travelled in the baggage of the invading Swedish armies that spread Swedish domination across the Baltic after 1621. In particular Livonia, conquered by Sweden in the 1620s and Pomerania, which was partitioned in 1648 at the peace of Westphalia between Sweden and Brandenburg, became outposts of Gothic mythology. Jordanes's theory that the Goths came from Scandinavia and settled on the mainland, subjugated the Germanic Vandals and drove a conquering path eastward into the territories of the Scyths and Sarmatians, was eagerly picked up by Swedish historians but just as strenuously rejected by Polish and Prussian authors.

As Erasmus Stella had done for Prussian history, so the German chronicler Albert Krantz, who was influenced by Tacitus and the new 1515 edition of Jordanes, effectively rehabilitated the Goths in Germany. His Vandalia, published in 1518, became the German historiographical credo of the century. This work considered the barbaric Germanic peoples to be the root of all Gothic-Germanic and Slavonic nations, descending from Noah as a big family of gentes who all originated from continental Europe. For Krantz, the Gothic-Germanic Vandals and Slavonic-Sarmatian Venedi were the same people. Krantz based his idea of Germanic Vandal-Goth unity on the old idea of a universal German monarchy the fourth and last empire according to the biblical prophecies. This monarchy was based on 'communis ditio (power or law) a Germania', which implies that German law (Magdeburg and Lübeck law) spread widely in central and east central Europe. This legal concept, rather than culture or language - 'from the river Don to the Rhine, there are many different languages' - was central to Krantz's definition of Germanic-Vandal hegemony.71

Stella published too early on Prussia to adopt any of these new theories concerning the Goths, but they proved highly influential in Poland. The most intriguing document is the history written by the Alsatian Humanist Jodocus Ludwik Decius, a Habsburg diplomat at the court of Sigismund I, who tried to prove the common descent of Poles and Germanic Vandals, making the German king Tuisco the ruler of both the Poles and the Germans over an empire which stretched from the Don to the Rhine. He interpreted the wars between both peoples as a conflict between equal brother-nations, whose sense of honour did not aim at one-sided domination; they fought 'for the dignity of political power and the freedom to rule . . . and not to eliminate each other's cultures and languages'.72 Few Polish and Lithuanian writers sympathised with this line of interpretation. In open defiance of this Gothic-Slavic myth of cohabitation and friendship, Jan Dl/ugosz traced the Prussians back to the Romans, the ancient enemies of the Germanic and barbarian Goths, while historians of Lithuania, like Augustin Rotundus, increased the Lithuanians' fame by assigning them a descent from Roman senatorial families, to the extent that the Latin language became an integral part of the cultural identity of the szlachta of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.73 With the chances of the Polish Vasas regaining the Swedish throne steadily diminishing, the Gothic mythology receded and the Sarmatian ideology gained ground, particularly during the Polish-Swedish wars from 1600 to 1660.

Starowolski repudiated Decius's harmonising approach and fiercely rebutted condescending German criticism of the Commonwealth's military power and political constitution. He wrote in his Declamatio contra obtrectatores Poloniae in 1631 that it was not the Goths or Vandals, but the Sarmatians who had dominated Europe for centuries. In a Europe that barely took Swedish power seriously until the early seventeenth century the Swedes had formulated their own myth of Gothic greatness against all odds and found unexpected ideological support from German writers after the success of their arms in the Thirty Years War, while Polish prestige had suffered from the Swedish invasion. In a counterattack against the Tübingen professor Thomas Lansius, Starowolski therefore placed the Sarmatians as rulers over Asia, Europe and Africa. With undisguised sarcasm he asked how anyone could nowadays call those powerful tribes 'non-militaristic, cowardly and ignorant of the art of war.'74


THE SARMATIAN COUNTER-MYTH

The Sarmatian mythological reversal turned out to be powerful. Ulewicz discovered a copy of Schedel's Chronicon in the Jagiellonian University Library bearing the marginal remark by a sixteenth-century hand that the Bavarians, as a Slavonic-Sarmatian people ('because their name derives from boyars'), were part of a Slavic realm stretching as far as the Rhine.75 But early modern Polish authors were not content with merely turning the Gothic theory on its head. It was easy enough to replace the Goths with the Sarmatians as the great family of nations between the Don and the Vistula, Oder or Rhine - wherever the taste for expansion found its limits. The Sarmatian myth, however, was not an ad-hoc invention to counter Gothic-German or Swedish historical theories accompanying diplomatic or military warfare, but had deep roots, like Gothic mythology, in ancient and medieval chronicle literature.76

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on the basis of works by Herodotus, Juvenal, Ptolemy, Pomponius Mela and the Anonymous Gaul, the Sarmatians were identified in early Humanist sources as Slavonic tribes which had migrated from the Balkans or Asia Minor.77 By the second half of the sixteenth century, the historical canon of the great Slavic-Sarmatian family which included the Poles and their brothers, the Czechs, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Mazovians, Prussians, Pomeranians, and even the Croats and the Dalmatians, was firmly established. The ground had been laid by the Polish histories of Kadl/ubek, bishop of Cracow, and Jan Dl/ugosz (1475), and by Maciej Miechowita's history of Sarmatia (1521) and the works of his followers.

Dl/ugosz placed greatest emphasis on the biblical formulation of the Sarmatians; the story of Babylon and the descent of the Sarmatians from Japheth, who lived in Pannonia and the Carpathian mountains, continued to influence most chronicles over the following two centuries.78 The legendary founder of the Polish nation was Lech, which explained why many foreigners called the Poles Lechitae. Maciej Miechowita's main merit was to transfer the notion of a faraway country called Sarmatia to Poland-Lithuania and to give it a fixed place on the central European map. His concept of a European and an Asian Sarmatia established great-power status for the Poles' mythical homeland and their historical identity, overcoming - as the Germans did with the help of Tacitus - the stigma of obscurity and barbarity. Still a vague concept during the first half of the sixteenth century, by the first interregnum in 1572-3 the Sarmatian theory was already influencing the Polish-Lithuanian nobility's political agenda. The expressions Polonus, Poloni were frequently replaced by Sarmata, Sarmatae. Outside Poland, foreigners started to acknowledge the identity of the Sarmatian Poles, like Melanchthon in his 1558 letter De ongine gentis Henetae, Polonicae seu Sarmaticae.

The culture of Sarmatism has usually been accused of breeding xenophobia, narrow-minded chauvinism or plain expansionism. The development of a Polish-Sarmatian superiority-complex has been blamed for the decline or even collapse of Polish culture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.7' One of the voices considered representative of this megalomania belonged to the republican writer Stanisl/aw Orzechowski, himself of Ruthenian origin and a convert to Catholicism from Protestantism: 'Let it be known that Lithuania cannot be equal to the Polish crown, nor can any Lithuanian, be he the most important and famous, equal the most lowly Pole - Lithuanian-born, you spend your life under the yoke - but I, as a Pole, like an eagle unbound under my king, fly freely.'80

Although Polish and Sarmatian have frequently been used synonymously, the question is how other nations within the Commonwealth dealt with this ideology. If Orzechowski excluded the Lithuanians - officially the second nation in the republic - from the Sarmatian concept, then what degradation was in store for the Prussians? Not all Polish writers, however, agreed with Orzechowski. Aware of the discrepancies between social reality and the Sarmatian noble utopia, the Warmian bishop Marcin Kromer, like Starowolski, rejected the socially exclusive version of the Sarmatian myth, preferring to use it as a geographical demarcation between the ancestral tribes. According to Kromer, Sarmatians already lived between the Oder and the Don when Tacitus was taking great pains to decide whether the tribes between the Oder and the Vistula were Germanic or Slavonic-Sarmatian.81 Forgiving Tacitus for his ignorance, Kromer drew a sharp line between the Germanic tribes and the Slavonic peoples at the Vistula river: the Sarmatian Slavs, settling east of it, descended from a different branch of Noah's large family, and therefore had no historical or cultural link with the Germanic Vandals or other Germanic tribes.82 Kromer also turned Jordanes's account of the Gothic immigration from Scandinavia on its head: it was not the Germanic Goths, who, according to Tacitus, were autochthonous peoples, but the Sarmatians who came from the North. With this reinterpretation he reconciled the Sarmatian origin with the Swedish descent of the Vasa dynasty on the Polish throne and set an agenda which was respected not only by historians for two centuries to come, but also by the contemporary political establishment, as was first demonstrated in the official recognition he received as Poland's foremost historian by the Sejm.

Whether because of his commoner background or his involvement in Royal Prussian political life, Kromer exerted great influence on urban Prussian historiography, and his Sarmatian theories gained general recognition in Royal Prussia. Although he was appointed bishop of Warmia against the wishes of the majority of the Prussian estates, who rejected him as an aliengena83 and as an outspoken supporter of the heavily contested incorporation of the Royal Prussian diet into the ranks of the Polish Sejm in 1569, Prussian burgher historians frequently and affirmatively referred to his work. Throughout the seventeenth century, he was approvingly quoted as one of the best and most reliable historians and Polish sources, while Joachim Pastorius recommended his Polonia in a manual for the education of young noblemen as the most essential Polish history textbook.84 Even foreign authors who were highly critical of the Polish point of view and the Sarmatian mythology, such as Hermann Conring and the Saxon professor Samuel Schurtzfleisch, knew and quoted the Warmian bishop. As a Royal Prussian senator, Kromer knew that the Prussian nobility would never have consented to being called Poles, but that as nobles they accepted the Sarmatian myth and the political privileges connected with it, the diets and noble courts, the free election of the king, and the mixed form of government. This was possible because the Sarmatian mythology was not one uniform, stereotypical concept, even though it was sometimes used to cover up the extreme differences that distinguished noblemen from each other in the multinational Commonwealth.


SARMATIA'S BORDERS: THE POMERANIAN-PRUSSIAN DIVIDE

In the political environment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the myth of the Gothic-Sarmatian family of nations must have appeared an ideal compromise which equally reflected both the older German identity of the Prussian estates and their new allegiance to the Sarmatian world. Indeed, Matthaeus Praetorius, a historian from Memel (1630-1704) who left the Duchy of Prussia to convert to Catholicism, constructed a suitable Gothic-Slavic identity for Prussia on the basis of the similarities between the Gothic, old Prussian and Slavonic languages. His Sarmatian Goths included the Bohemians, the Mecklenburgers, Cashubians, Prussians and the Pomeranians. For his work he was rewarded in Poland with the title historicus Serenissimae Majestatis Regiae.85

Praetorius was the only historian to distinguish between Germania and Teutonia, a division often assumed but rarely explained by seventeenth-century historians of Germany. Germania, according to Praetorius, stretched across all areas and countries between the Vistula, the Oder and the Weser (Visurgis), including many regions where Slavs and Germans had lived together, such as Magdeburg, Brandenburg, Lüneburg and Brunswick, while Teutonia was the name for Germany west of the Weser up to the Rhine. This distinction reflects the habit of calling the Knights of the Prussian and Livonian order Teutonic, since they came mainly from upper German or southwest German territories (Swabia et Allemania). The heartland of the Sarmato-Goths, however, was in Germania, with Prussia and Pomerania in the centre.

What was the purpose of Praetorius's efforts to set clear geographical and historical boundaries? Did he have a political claim in mind? His mythology provides the answer. Referring to the fake stone inscription in honour of Bolesl/aw Chrobry which hailed the Polish king as 'athleta Christi, regnum Slavorum, Gothorum seu Polonorum', Praetorius credited the Polish crown with the power of ruling over the Goths, the Prussians and the Pomeranians, i.e. over Germania.86 He did not go as far as Decius, however, who extended Sarmatian rule to the Rhine. This Orbis Gothicus was fiercely contested by historians outside the Commonwealth, who did not pledge their loyalty to the Polish king. The most outspoken opponents of this thesis were Pomeranian historians whose allegiances lay either with the Holy Roman Empire or with the Swedes, who had occupied and successfully retained parts of Pomerania by 1648. Pomeranian historians insisted on the clear distinction between the Germanic Goths or Vandals and the Sarmatian Vends (Wenden, Venedi) who had both settled in Pomerania, although at different times: Germanic Vandals had left these lands before the Slavic Vends invaded them, which meant that the most ancient origins of Pomerania belonged to autochthonous Germanic tribes, the same tribes that Erasmus Stella had discovered in Tacitus.

The endeavours of Praetorius and like-minded Prussian and Polish historians to create a locus for Prussian historical identity in the borderlands between the Slavs and the Teutons, between the Sarmatians and the Goths, found an echo in Micraelius's Pomeranian chronicles. Although Micraelius rejected Polish claims that the Pomeranian territories had rightfully belonged to the Slavs since the time of their mythical Slavic-Vendish king Wissimirus, he accepted that the languages and the nations of Germanic Vandals and Sarmatian immigrants had mixed and assimilated with each other, creating a specific new people and culture in Pomerania.87 The longing to find an explanation for this past harmony in a historical synthesis between Slavs and Germanic peoples emanates strongly from Micraelius's treatise. At the same time he made clear where the Sarmatian roof ended. In his first and third books on Pomerania, he showed that the Sarmatian-Slavonic immigration was just a phase in Pomerania's history, which passed without leaving deep traces, as the German Saxons returned and reversed the Sarmatian fortunes in the province. Pomerania became German again.

There was even neighbourly hostility felt between Pomeranians and Prussians. The chronicler Matthias Waissel from Ducal Prussia, whose compilation of sixleenth-century sources and ancient literature on the Goths and the Sarmatians contains a useful collection of historical references, pointed to the conflict that arose from the annexation of Pomerelia (Eastern Pomerania) by the Teutonic Knights, a province originally independent of Prussia.88 Reinhold Curicke from Danzig expressed his pride in his descent from Pomerelia, not from Prussia, and boasted that the Pomerelians were more peaceful and cultured than the savage pagan Prussians, who took so much military persuasion to be converted to Christianity, unlike the Pomerelians, who became Christians more quickly.89 The clearest reference to this rivalry is made by Egidius van der Mylen, who alludes to the 'hatred which was caused by the oppression inflicted on the neighbouring Vends by the German nation'. According to this author, the nobility of Pomerania was mostly of Saxon-German origin, although some Slavic families remained. Among the Pomeranian chroniclers only Martin Rango adopts a conciliatory tone in referring to the identical origin of Vandals and Vends, who had overcome their hatred for each other by unanimously accepting German (Vandal) culture and language.90

Historians in Swedish pay took a different view. Samuel Schurtzfleisch considered the Swedes the 'Greeks of the North', who joined the Germanic battle against Sarmatians (Catholic Poles) and the corrupt Romans (the emperor, the Pope, and the Catholic princes during the Thirty Years War).91 While recognising the Prussian claim to be a separate nation ('vetus natio, orti sunt ex Slavis'), Schurtzfleisch denied this status to the Pomeranians, who descended 'ex Vandalis', from the Germanic Goths. Like Micraelius, Schurtzfleisch agrees that the Pomeranians turned German again after a Slavonic intermezzo; they stopped speaking a Slavonic language after 1404.92 The fact that the last duke of Pomerania, Bogusl/aw XIV, had died only three years before Micraelius's publication, leaving Pomerania to the fortunes of war, was probably the decisive influence behind this insistence on the German historical link. Micraelius emphasised strongly that the recently extinct Pomeranian dynasty had never had blood relatives among the Polish kings, despite close cultural and linguistic ties with Poland. These Slavic links were now broken, and the Pomeranians had 'rejected the Slavic language entirely, declaring themselves Saxons under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire'.93 This statement provides the key to Micraelius's idea of the Pomeranian nation. Not part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and no longer under their own dynasty, Pomerania must fall back on the Holy Roman Empire. German traditions returned, and together with them came the political allegiance to the emperor. There was a need, therefore, for the Pomeranians to call themselves German or Saxon again, a condition that did not apply to the Prussians, who were members of the Sarmatian nation under the umbrella of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Polish crown. They had no reason to identify with Germans. Ethnic origins yielded to political allegiance: the Sarmatian roof ended where German imperial power started.

The Pomeranian nobleman van der Mylen was even more explicit: after forsaking its political independence and its past glory with the death of the last hereditary ruler of the Pomeranian dynasty, Pomerania had to suffer renewed subjection to the Saxons and the Empire, as well as partition by Sweden and Brandenburg in 1648.94 Rejecting Schurtzfleisch's view of Pomerania's purely German character, van der Mylen asserts that the noble families (many of whom were of Slavic origin) and the mixed form of government with its privileges for the estates had once formed the essence of the Pomeranian nation. His description of such a political nation is very reminiscent of the Polish-Sarmatian mythology of noble freedoms, and it comes therefore closest to the idea of the nation that we find among Prussians and other nations (including the Polish) in the Commonwealth.95

The core of the disagreement between Pomeranians and Prussians concerned their differing attitude towards the Holy Roman Empire. Pomeranian historians accepted and identified with imperial rule, whereas the Prussians rejected it. While Pomeranians, Brandenburgers, Lusatians, Saxons and other peoples in the Empire divided their national consciousness into a German (and imperial) identity on the one hand, and an identification with their own territory (Landesbewußtsein) on the other, the Prussians had no reason to assume a German identity.96 Although they would not deny their ancestors' descent from German families, who had either immigrated or mixed with pagan Prussian families, they, unlike the Pomeranians, identified neither with the German nation nor with the Empire. Instead, in accommodating the Sarmatian myth with their own historical identity, the Prussians accepted Sarmatian citizenship not by becoming Poles but by associating themselves with the constitution and the political system of the Commonwealth. This construction produced a rhetorical tool actively used by Prussian burghers and urban elites in particular in their fight for recognition as fully-privileged citizens under the power of the Polish crown. Historical mythology therefore became the powerful basis of a Prussian burgher vision of Sarmatian history and self-definition, often used to counter their exclusion from citizenship, which the majority of the Polish nobility interpreted against them. Anyone who would listen, particularly other nations represented in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, received this message: we are Sarmatian Prussians, not subjects but free men and citizens.
...

1 Quoted by Harold Berman, Law and Revolution. The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass : Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 558.
2 'Nescire autem, quid antequam natus sis, acciderit; id est semper esse puerum', quoted by the Polish historian Szymon Starowolski, Simonis Starovolsci Penu Historicum seu de dextra et fructuosa ratione Historians legendi Commentarius (Venice: Zenarii Haeredes, 1620), p 19.
3 Jacqueline Glomski, 'Erasmus and Cracow, 1510-1530', Yearbook of the Erasmus of Rotterdam Society 17(1997), 1-18.
4 Wl/adysl/aw Pniewski, Je,zyk polski w dawnych szkol/ach gdan´skich (Gdan´sk: Towarzystwo Przyjaciól/ Nauki i Sztuki, 1938), p. 14; Pawlak, Studia uniwersyteckie, table 6.
5 For example the curriculum of 1688, Catalogus Lectionum et Operarum Publicarum in Athenaeo Gedanensi hoc cursu annuo expendiendarum proposito Januario ineunte (Danzig: in Atheneo), which offered a course by Joachim Hoppe, history professor in Danzig, on 'Historiam nonnullorum Regnorum publice in Jure Institutiones Juris Civilis & Canonici' (paragr. 2).
6 Janina Freilichówna, Ideal/ wychowawczy Szlachty Polskiej w XVI i XVII wieku (Warsaw: Nakl/adem Naukowego Towarzystwa Pedagogicznego, 1938), p. 68; Stanisl/aw Tync, Dzieje Gimnazjum Torun´skiego, 2 vols, vol. II: 1600-1660, Roczniki TNT no. 53 (Torun´: TNT, 1949), pp. 82-3.
7 Ephraim Praetorius, 'Kirchen-Sachen', KM 130, p. 272.
8 Pastorius started his career as a Calvinist with Arian sympathies, but ended his life a canon at Frauenburg (Fro<br/><br/>(Message over 64 KB, truncated)