Joachim II, known as Hector or Hektor in German, was born on 13 January 1505 in Cölln, on the banks of the Spree. He was the eldest son of Joachim I Nestor, Elector of Brandenburg, and his wife Elizabeth of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The cognomen Hector was drawn from the great Trojan prince and warrior of classical antiquity, bestowed on him in recognition of his martial qualities and physical prowess. He would become the sixth member of the House of Hohenzollern to hold the Margraviate of Brandenburg, ruling from 1535 to 1571 through one of the most religiously turbulent periods in German history.
Joachim II received his education at the imperial court, a formation that equipped him for the complex political landscape of the Holy Roman Empire. His father Joachim I Nestor was deeply invested in the ecclesiastical politics of the Hohenzollern family and required his son to sign an inheritance contract pledging to remain Roman Catholic. This promise was intimately connected to the financial and political architecture of the family's power. Joachim I's younger brother, Archbishop-Elector Albert of Mainz, had borrowed enormous sums from the banking house of Fugger in order to pay the Holy See for elevation to the Prince-Bishopric of Halberstadt, as well as for a dispensation allowing him to simultaneously hold both the Archbishopric of Magdeburg and the Archbishopric of Mainz. This arrangement gave the Hohenzollerns control over two of the seven electoral votes in imperial elections and influence over numerous suffragan dioceses. To service his debt to the Fugger, Albert was permitted to sell indulgences to believers in Brandenburg. Joachim I had co-financed Albert's accumulation of offices and stood to benefit from this arrangement, which depended on the indulgence trade continuing undisturbed.
The trade in indulgences, of course, was precisely what had ignited Martin Luther's rebellion against the Roman church. John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony, forbade the sale of indulgences in his territory, partly because Albert had outbid his own candidate for the see of Mainz, and partly because he had been persuaded by his subject Luther that the practice was spiritually and theologically indefensible. The Hohenzollern debt to the Fugger therefore depended on Catholic believers in Brandenburg continuing to purchase indulgences, a situation that made Joachim II's inherited promise of Catholic loyalty a matter of family finance as well as personal faith. Had he not agreed to these terms, he would likely have been passed over in the line of inheritance altogether.
His first marriage was to Magdalena of Saxony, from the ducal Albertine branch of the House of Wettin. She died in 1534. The following year, after his father's death placed him in power, Joachim married Hedwig, a daughter of King Sigismund I the Old of Poland. Because the Jagiellonian dynasty was Catholic, Joachim promised Sigismund that he would not compel Hedwig to change her religious affiliation, a promise that would acquire additional resonance as his own relationship with Lutheranism evolved.
The deaths of both his father Joachim I in 1535 and his father-in-law Sigismund in 1548 loosened the institutional and personal constraints that had kept Joachim nominally in the Catholic camp. His movement toward the Reformation was gradual and carefully managed. On 1 November 1539, he received communion under both kinds in St. Nicholas' Church in Spandau, a symbolic act that signaled his sympathy with Lutheran practice without constituting a formal declaration. Full explicit adoption of Lutheranism did not come until 1555, timed to avoid open confrontation with his ally Emperor Charles V. In the intervening years, he promulgated a conservative church order that was Lutheran in doctrine but retained many traditional forms, including the episcopate, much of the Latin mass, religious plays, and feast days.
In early 1539, at the diet of princes of the Holy Roman Empire in Frankfurt, the Lutheran spokesman Philipp Melanchthon revealed to the assembled princes that the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1510 in Brandenburg had been based on a fabricated host desecration. This disclosure put the original expulsion of Jews from Brandenburg in a new light. The Jewish advocate Josel von Rosheim was present at Frankfurt and used the occasion to plead privately with Joachim for permission to allow Jews to settle in Brandenburg again. Joachim agreed to this request on 25 June 1539, a decision that stood as one of the more humane acts of his reign.
Joachim's personal extravagances, however, placed severe strain on the territory's finances. He was a passionate hunter who spent lavishly on live lions, bears, wolves, and other animals, which he set against one another in organized combats. He also maintained no fewer than eleven alchemists at court over a ten-year period alone. His father had left Brandenburg in reasonable financial order, but by 1540 Joachim II had accumulated debts exceeding 600,000 thalers. He attempted to address this crisis by confiscating church property and raising taxes, measures that relieved pressure in the short term while generating lasting resentment. His wife Hedwig's mother Barbara Zapolya was a sister of John Zapolya, who had contested the vacant throne of Hungary following the death of King Louis II at the Battle of Mohacs, a connection that drew Joachim into the tangled Jagiellonian and Habsburg struggles over the Hungarian succession. Joachim II died on 3 January 1571, having spent thirty-six years navigating the religious, political, and financial pressures of a reign that opened in the shadow of the Reformation and closed in its complicated aftermath.
