The Reformation in Europe, which had officially begun in 1517 with Martin Luther and his Ninety-five Theses, greatly changes the Baltic region.

Its ideas had come quickly to the Livonian Confederation and by the 1520s are widespread.

Language, education, religion and politics are transformed.

Church services are now conducted in the vernacular instead of the Latin previously used.

After the Teutonic Knights’ grand master, the thirty-five-year-old Albert of Brandenburg, converts in 1525 to Lutheranism and declares Prussia a secular hereditary duchy under Polish suzerainty, the Livonian Knights resume their independence.

The Teutonic Knights had dissolved their organization in 1525 when Albert, Margrave of Brandenburg and grand master of the Teutonic Knights, converted to Lutheranism and declared Prussia a hereditary secular duchy.

Sigismund I Jagiello had incorporated the Knightly lands into his Polish kingdom.

Walter von Cronberg, a knight from Frankfurt who under Albert had been legate to Sigismund, had in 1517  founded the Brotherhood of St. Sebastian and in 1526 had been chosen Deutschmeister, the Master of the German branch of the Order.

Von Cronberg has declared himself the next Grand Master, basing his claim on a fourteenth-century statute of Werner von Orseln stating that in the case of the absence of the Grand Master, the Master of one of the other branches of the Order would resume the position.

This position has been met with some resistance from the Master of the Livonian branch, Wolter von Plettenberg, who also lays a claim to this function.

Emperor Charles V in 1527 settles the matter in favor of von Cronberg, declaring him "Administrator of the Office of Grand Master".

Also, the claim of the Grand Master to the excommunicated Albert's Duchy of Prussia is renewed.

As no control can be exercised there, the Grand Master's seat is moved from Königsberg to the seat of the Deutschmeister in southern Germany, Mergentheim near Würzburg.

Elblag has become the chief East Prussian port for trade with England by 1580.

Lying along the Elblag River near the Nogat River, which is the eastern mouth of the Vistula River, Elblag had been founded in 1237 by the Teutonic Knights; the castle and settlement were granted town rights in 1246 and joined the Hanseatic League in the late thirteenth century.

The secession of Utrecht from the Spanish Netherlands means the loss of the Teutonic Knights’ territory in the Low Countries in 1580.

Mergentheim had become the residence of the grand master of the Knights on the secularization of the Teutonic Order in Prussia in 1525.

Maximilian's army is soundly defeated on January 24, 1588, at the Battle of Byczyna by the supporters of Sigismund III (who had since been formally crowned), under the command of Jan Zamojski, Grand Hetman of the Crown since 1581, after a failed attempt to storm Kraków with his magnate supporters in late 1587.

Maximilian is taken captive at the battle and is only released after the intervention of Pope Sixtus V.

The fourth son of the emperor Maximilian II and Maria of Spain, he is a grandson of Anna of Bohemia and Hungary, daughter and heiress of Ladislaus II of Bohemia and Hungary, who himself was the eldest son of Casimir IV of Poland.

He thus descends from the ancient Piast kings of Poland, and from Jogaila and his forefathers, Grand Dukes of Lithuania.

The late Sigismund I the Old, himself a younger son, was Maximilian's great-great-uncle, and Maximilian descends from Sigismund's eldest brother.

Having become the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in 1585, he will be known by the epithet 'der Deutschmeister' for much of his later life.

Maximilian had stood as a candidate for the throne of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1587, following the death of the previous king, Stefan Batory.

A portion of the Polish nobility had elected Maximilian king, but, as a result of the rather chaotic nature of the election process, another candidate, Sigismund III Vasa, prince of Sweden, grandson of Sigismund I the Old, had also been elected.

Maximilian had attempted to resolve the dispute by bringing a military force to Poland—thereby starting the war of the Polish Succession.

His cause has considerable support in Poland, but fewer Poles have flocked to his army than to that of his rival.

The Royal Military Order of Saint George for the Defense of the Faith and the Immaculate Conception had been established by Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, in 1726 to provide for a means of honoring the nobility and recognizing distinguished civil military service.

The tradition of loyalty to Saint George, the patron saint of chivalry, has been long established in Germany and the various Bavarian Princes who had made pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulcher where they were invested as knights in the fifteenth century had all made a promise to Saint George

The decision to found the order may have been in part the consequence of the failed attempt by the Wittelsbachs to acquire the Grand Magistery of the Constantinian Order of Saint George, which by decision of the Holy See in 1701 had been recognized as pertaining to the Farnese.

Karl-Albrecht, Maximilian’s son, gives the new Order its title of Order of the Holy Knight and Martyr Saint George and the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin Mary and its statutes on March 28, 1729, as a Military Order of Chivalry for Roman Catholic noblemen.

Its status as a Catholic order had been confirmed in a Papal Bull of 15 March, 1728, specifically comparing the Order with the Teutonic Order, which had likewise been transformed from a crusading order to an exclusive chivalric religious institution for the nobility.