Koenigsberg uprising

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The Königsberg uprising was led by the city's estates and pursued more vigorously from 1656 onwards. At this point in time, Elector Friedrich Wilhelm , who was also Duke of Prussia in personal union, began with a large amount of land taxation.

meaning

The position of the Duke of Prussia between the powers Sweden and Poland-Lithuania was weak in 1648 shortly after the end of the Thirty Years War . With the Königsberg Treaty of January 17, 1656, during the Second Northern War , he saved Königsberg from the Swedish siege, but the Polish fiefdom was exchanged for the stricter Swedish sovereignty , against which the estates protested.

In 1653 over 6,000 residents of Königsberg died of the plague . In late autumn 1656 a flooded Tartar invasion in Mazury a large number of refugees in the city. In the treaties of Labiau 1656 (with Sweden), Wehlau , Bromberg 1657 and Oliva 1660 (with Poland), Friedrich Wilhelm achieved the sovereignty of the Duchy of Prussia. He was actually supposed to receive 530,000 thalers from the estates in five annual installments, but he forced the estates to provide more funds and collected a total of 12.5 million thalers between 1655 and 1661. The Duchy of Prussia had to provide the largest part with 7 million thalers.

First the jury master Hieronymus Roth was active followed by his brother, a Jesuit . Roth saw the influence of the estates threatened, whose consent the elector no longer sought. In 1661/1662 Roth turned to the Polish King John II Casimir , whose intervention was demanded as the former sovereign of the duchy, which, in view of the fact that Prussia was no longer subject to the Polish king, amounted to high treason . When the citizens refused to excise Elector Friedrich Wilhelm in 1662 , he gave the order that the cannons of the fortress Groß Friedrichsburg (Königsberg) , which stood at the gates of the city, be aimed at Königsberg. He himself appeared on October 18, 1662 with 2,000 bodyguards in Pillau , the war port in Prussia. The Königsbergers could do nothing against the soldiers of the elector and finally submitted. Hieronymus Roth was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he had to serve in Peitz . With this, Duke Friedrich Wilhelm achieved the homage of the Prussian estates led by the Königsberg citizenry in the Königsberg Castle on 17th / 18th. October 1663. This was an important step towards centralizing the Brandenburg-Prussian administration in order to establish an absolutist rule .

literature

  • Fritz Gause : The history of the city of Königsberg in Preussen , vol. 1 (1965), p. 484 ff, Böhlau Cologne / Graz