Everything about Albrecht Giese totally explained
Albrecht Giese (
February 10,
1524 –
August 1,
1580) was a councilman and diplomat of the city of
Danzig (Gdańsk).
Giese was born in Danzig, then
Royal Prussia,
Poland, to the influential and wealthy merchant
Patrician family Giese. Relatives of him included the bishop
Tiedemann Giese, and the merchant
Georg Giese, who also worked in the
Hanse base in
London, the
Steelyard.
Albrecht studied at the Universities of
Greifswald,
Wittenberg and
Heidelberg. As was the custom of the time for Hanseatic merchants, he toured
Europe for several years to learn different languages after his formal studies, as was necessary for a long-distance trader. In the meantime, Giese had married in Danzig and returned there from his travels in
1564 and became a councilman. Over the next six years, he took part as a city delegate at several Hanse meetings in
Lübeck.
Since 1454, the city of Danzig had been in a personal union with the
king of Poland.
Sigismund II Augustus,
the last of the Jagiellons, remained without heirs and thus planned to introduce
elective monarchy by the
Union of Lublin. Danzig and others feared a loss of rights.
In the
1560s, king Sigismund II Augustus instituted a Maritime Commission to oversee the creation of a royal fleet which would have its main base at Danzig. Sigismund sought to have the old statutes of the cities of Danzig and
Elbing (Elbląg) revoked and replaced by his own
Statua Karnkowiana, which considerably limited the authority of the city council. The authorities of Danzig considered these initiatives a curtailing of their privileges, as the members of the commission as well as the
privateers forming the nucleus of this Navy were exempt from the city's jurisdiction even in criminal cases.
Open conflict between the Polish king and the city council broke out when the city council was arrested and sentenced to death for opposing the loss of certain privileges according to the terms of the
Union of Lublin. Negotiations between the city and the king took place in
1568/
69, initially at
Piotrków Trybunalski. Giese was a member of the delegation, led by the mayor of the city,
Johann Brandes. Despite being subjected to severe pressure and incarceration for a year at
Cracow (Kraków), the delegation refused to submit to the king's terms, and Giese and Councilor
Georg Kleefeld were eventually released in
1570 against a ransom of 100,000
guilders.
In
1579, Giese was named royal
burgrave of Danzig by the Polish king, a position that entailed the supervision of the judiciaries of the city. He died in 1580.
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