Drama in Danzig

Royal Prussia was the most urbanized part of Sigismund I’s monarchy, its Hanseatic ports profoundly affected by Luther’s message from 1518. This chapter traces the Polish Crown’s responses to Reformation in this province—the Crown’s strange inaction in the face of Danzig’s radicalization and full-scale Lutheran revolt (1518–25), the King’s armed reversal of that Reformation in 1526, and his return to passivity thereafter as Royal Prussia’s social elites tacitly rolled out Lutheran reform in town and countryside. These events are analysed first through a geopolitical or ‘realpolitik’ lens, which stresses royal fears of a wholesale secession of Royal Prussia from Poland. Application of a religious lens shows, however, that the Crown read the revolt in ‘secular’ terms, avoided the language of heresy, and enacted only a minimal urban ‘re-Catholicization’ in 1526. It is argued that this was a pre-confessional anti-Reformation policy, reflecting late medieval perceptions of Lutheranism.