Dantzic,--the Venice of the Baltic, the great sea-mart of the Sclavonian countries, with its rich Marien-church and the palaces of its merchants; behind it, on the other arm of the Vistula, its modest rival Elbing; further upwards, the stately towers and broad arcades of Marienburg, where is the great princely castle of the Teutonic Knights, the most beautiful edifice in the north of Germany; and in the luxurious low-countries, in the valley of the Vistula, were the old prosperous colonial properties, one of the most favoured districts of the world, and defended by powerful dikes against the devastations of the Vistula. Still further upwards, Marienwerder, Graudenz, Kulm, and in the low countries, Netzebromberg, the centre of a strip of Polish frontier. Smaller German cities and village communities were scattered through the whole territory, which had been energetically colonised by the rich Cistercian monasteries of Oliva and Pelplin. But the tyrannical severity of this order drove the German cities and landed proprietors of West Prussia, in the fifteenth century, to annex themselves to Poland. The Reformation of the sixteenth century subdued not only the souls of the German colonists, but also those of the Poles. In the great Polish Republic, three-fourths of the nobility became Protestants, and in the Sclavonian districts of Pommerellen, seventy out of one hundred parishes, did the same. But the introduction of the Jesuits brought an unhealthy change. The Polish nobles fell back to the Roman Catholic Church, their sons were brought up in the Jesuits' schools as converting fanatics. From that time the Polish State began to decline; its condition became constantly more hopeless.