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Among others, or as chief oracle of all, Luther was consulted. "What would you have me do towards reforming the Teutsch Order?" inquired Albert of his oracle. Luther's answer was, as may be guessed, emphatic. This I imagine to have been, in modern language, the purport of Dr. Luther's advice to Hochmeister Albrecht on the present interesting occasion.
Her first husband was the Duke of Courland; to him she brought an heir, who became Duke in his turn, and was the final Duke, LAST of the "Kettler" or native Line of Dukes there. The Kettlers had been Teutsch Ritters, Commandants in Courland; they picked up that Country, for their own behoof, when the Ritterdom went down; and this was the last of them.
The Teutsch Ritters, after infinite travail, have subdued heathen Preussen; colonized the country with industrious German immigrants; banked the Weichsel and the Nogat, subduing their quagmires into meadows, and their waste streams into deep ship-courses. But along with riches and the ease of victory, the common bad consequences had ensued.
What the Teutsch Ritters strove for in vain, and lost their existence in striving for, the shifty Kurfuerst has now got: Ducal Prussia, which is also called East Prussia, is now a free sovereignty, and will become as "Royal" as the other Polish part, or perhaps even more so, in the course of time Karl Gustav, in a high frame of mind, informs the Kurfuerst that he has him on his books, and will pay the debt one day.
They had also fallen into the habit of borrowing money; pawning, redeeming, a good deal, with Teutsch Ritters and others. Then they puddled considerably, and to their loss, seldom choosing the side that proved winner, in the general broils of the Reich, which at that time, as we have seen, was unusually anarchic. None of the successfulest of Markgraves latterly.
If the Teutsch Ritterdom was actually at this time DEAD, actually stumbling about as a mere galvanized Lie beginning to be putrid, then, sure enough, it behooved that somebody should bury it, to avoid pestilential effects in the neighborhood. Somebody or other; first flaying the skin off, as was natural, and taking that for his trouble. All turns, in substance, on this latter question!
The Teutsch Order had to go across the Weichsel, ignominiously driven; to content itself with 'EAST Preussen, the Konigsberg-Memel country, and even to do homage to Poland for that. Which latter was the bitterest clause of all: but it could not be helped, more than the others.
Nothing but brabblings, scufflings, objurgations; a great outbreak ripening itself. Teutsch Ritterdom has to hire soldiers; no money to pay them. "PERIOD THIRD begins, early in 1454, with an important special catastrophe; and ends, in the Thirteenth year after, with a still more important universal one of the same nature.
One thing not suspected by the Teutsch Ritters, and least of all by their young Hochmeister, was, That the Teutsch Ritters had well deserved that terrible down-come at Tannenberg, that ignominious dismissal out of West-Preussen with kicks. Their insolence, luxury, degeneracy had gone to great lengths. Nor did that humiliation mend them at all; the reverse rather.
That is now, 26th July, 1743, King Louis's story for himself to the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, Teutsch by Nation, sitting at Frankfurt in rather disconsolate circumstances. The Diet naturally answered, "JA WOHL, JA WOHL," in intricate official language, nobody need know what the Diet answered.
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