The attitude of the West Prussian cities toward the Reformation exerted a strong influence on the Duchy of East Prussia, since 1466 a vassal principality of Poland.[62] In 1525, the year when the Reformation resulted in most far-reaching changes in Danzig, Albert Hohenzollern, Grand Master of the Order of the Teutonic Knights, left the Roman Church, accepted Lutheranism, secularized the possessions of the Order with the consent of the Polish king, and by the Treaty of Cracow of the same year became the secular hereditary ruler of the vassal Duchy of East Prussia with a right to the first seat in the Polish Senate.[63] The Pope and the German emperor naturally protested against this arrangement, but without any effect. Owing to the popularity of the Reformation in West Prussia and the revolution it caused in the city of Danzig, and fearing that a refusal to grant Albert’s request might lead him to bring to a head the reform movement in the whole of Prussia and possibly tear the whole Prussian territory away from the kingdom, Sigismund I preferred to sanction the arrangement described above even at the risk of being suspected of disloyalty to the Church of Rome.[64] In accordance with the agreement made with the Polish crown, Duke Albert commanded, by an edict issued July 6, 1525, that the Holy Gospel, the word of Christ, pure and simple, be preached in his possessions “under the penalty of exile.”[65] At the same time he made every effort to evangelize the population of the Duchy. For this purpose he secured through Bishop Speratus of Pomerania the publication at Wittenberg of Luther’s Shorter Catechism. A copy of this catechism he sent in 1531 by Nipczyc to Chojnicki, archdeacon of Cracow, who read it eagerly.[66] The introduction and legalization of the Reformation in East Prussia, one of Poland’s autonomous provinces, exerted a potent influence in favor of the movement’s spread in other parts of the country. Duke Albert became a patron and promoter of the new movement. He established in Königsberg a press, from which thousands of Polish religious pamphlets and books were issued, and a university, in which several generations of Polish Protestant ministers received their education. Thus East Prussia became a place of refuge for reformers and adherents of the new faith, persecuted in other parts of Poland, as well as a training ground for Polish Protestant clergy, and a source of Polish Protestant literature.[67] In the neighboring Duchy of Mazovia the Reformation did not make much progress. Yet even here it evidently met with some success; for Duke Janusz of Mazovia felt it to be necessary to issue in 1525 at a council assembled in Warsaw an edict, forbidding, under penalty of death and confiscation of all property for the benefit of the ducal treasury, the possession and reading of Luther’s writings in whatever language, the teaching of his doctrines, or any discussion of them with anyone.[68]