1883. Prowe's Life of Copernicus. 301
and smiling cornfields. Forests were eradicated ; low-lying lands protected against inundation ; sandy hillocks were planted with the vine,[1] and the exiled fruit of the South was persuaded to swell and sweeten under the reluctant rays of a northern sun ; bees were taught to labour disinterestedly ; even the sea yielded its precious tribute of amber, and its scarcely less precious tribute of herrings and sturgeon. The prosperitv of the Order culminated about the close of the fourteenth century. Its territory then extended from the mouth of the Oder to the Gulf of Finland ; its net revenue amounted to 800,000 Rhenish florins; 55 towns, 48 fortified castles, and numerous villages had sprung up on Prussian soil.
But its fall was already at hand. The spirit of its original foundation waned with the waxing of its fortunes. The straw pallet and bread and water of the first knights were replaced by luxurious living, and all the splendours that pride could devise or power compass. The white mantle and black cross gradually came to be associated no longer with heroic abnegation, but with insolent self-indulgence, not untainted with debauchery. The Galahads and Godfreys of the Order, in short, became few and fewer ; the Bois-Guilberts and De Bracys crept into the ascendant.
To internal degeneracy was added external disaster. The bloody defeat of Tannenberg in 1410 brought in its train all the circumstances which accompany and precipitate the fall of a State — financial collapse, disaffection of mercenaries, infatuated counsels, rejection of timely reform. Rebellion ensued, and was successful. The Prussian 'Bund,' in which cities and nobles for once sank their differences under the influence of a common detestation, invoked the aid of Poland in 1453. The resulting war lasted thirteen years, and cost the lives, it is said, of 350,000 men. It issued in a treaty signed at Thorn, October 19, 1466, according to the provisions of which the tract watered by the Vistula and its tributaries, thenceforward known as ' Royal ' or ' West Prussia,' became incorporated with the Polish kingdom, though retaining local independence; while for the eastward-lying remnant of its ancient possessions the Order was compelled to do homage to the triumphant Slav power.
In one of the earlier years of this long struggle, a merchant
- ↑ Prowe, ' Westpreussen in seiner geschichtlichen Stellung zu Deutschland und zu Polen,' p. 9. Dr. Hirsch tells us (' Danzigs Handelsgeschichte,' p. 262) that all the Prussian vines perished in the cold winter of 1436-7; and were replanted only at Thorn.
