Albrecht Giese
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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,[clarify] 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.
