Still farther up were Marienwerder, Graudenz,
Kulm, and in the low lands of the Netze, Bromberg, the centre of the
German border colonies among a Polish population. Smaller German towns
and village communities were scattered through the whole territory,
and the rich Cistercian monasteries of Oliva and Peplin had been
zealous colonizers. But in the fifteenth century the tyrannical
severity of the Teutonic order had driven the German cities and
landowners of West Prussia to an alliance with Poland.
The Reformation of the sixteenth century won the submission not only
of the German colonists but of three-quarters of the nobility in the
great republic of Poland; and toward 1590 about seventy out of a
hundred parishes in the Slavic district of Pomerelia were Protestant.
It seemed for a short time as if a new commonwealth and a new culture
were about to develop in the Slavic East--a great Polish State with
German elements in the cities. But the introduction of the Jesuits
brought an unsalutary change. The Polish nobility returned to the
Catholic Church: in the Jesuit schools their sons were trained to
proselytizing fanaticism, and from that time on the Polish State
declined, conditions becoming worse and worse.
The attitude of the Germans in West Prussia was not uniform toward the
proselytizing Jesuits and Slavic tyranny. A large proportion of the
immigrant German nobles became Catholic and Polish; the townsmen and
peasants remained for the most part obstinately Protestant.
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