soon followed that Defeat of Tannenberg; humiliating peace, with
mulct in money, and slightly in territory, attached to it.
Which again was soon followed by war, and ever again; each new
peace more humiliating than its foregoer. Teutsch Order is
steadily sinking,--into debt, among other things; driven to severe
finance-measures (ultimately even to 'debase its coin'), which
produce irritation enough. Poland is gradually edging itself into
the territories and the interior troubles of Preussen; prefatory
to greater operations that lie ahead there.

"SECOND PERIOD, of Fourteen years. So it had gone on, from bad to
worse, till 1440; when the general population, through its Heads,
the Landed Gentry and the Towns, wearied out with fiscal and other
oppressions from its domineering Ritterdom brought now to such a
pinch, began everywhere to stir themselves into vocal complaint.
Complaint emphatic enough: 'Where will you find a man that has not
suffered injury in his rights, perhaps in his person? Our friends
they have invited as guests, and under show of hospitality have
murdered them. Men, for the sake of their beautiful wives, have
been thrown into the river like dogs,'--and enough of the like
sort. [Voigt, vii. 747; quoting evidently, not an express
manifesto, but one manufactured by the old Chroniclers.] No want
of complaint, nor of complainants: Town of Thorn, Town of Dantzig,
Kulm, all manner of Towns and Baronages, proceeded now to form a
BUND, or general Covenant for complaining; to repugn, in hotter
and hotter form, against a domineering Ritterdom with back so
broken; in fine, to colleague with Poland,--what was most ominous
of all. Baronage, Burgherage, they were German mostly by blood,
and by culture were wholly German; but preferred Poland to a
Teutsch Ritterdom of that nature. Nothing but brabblings,