A Greenhill Book
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited
www.greenhillbooks.com
Reprinted in this format in 2011 by
Frontline Books
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
© William Urban, 2003
9781783031009
The right of William Urban to be identified as
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.
Printed and bound in England
by CPI
For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact
PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED
47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1 - The Military Orders
2 - The Foundation of the Teutonic Order
3 - War in the Holy Land
4 - The Transylvanian Experiment
5 - The War against Paganism in Prussia
6 - The Crusade in Livonia
7 - Territorial Rivalries with Poland
8 - The Lithuanian Challenge
9 - The Conversion of Lithuania
10 - The Battle of Tannenberg
11 - The Long Decline and the End in the Baltic
12 - The End in Livonia
13 - Summary
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
A grave marker at Holm. David Nicolle, National Latvian Museum, Riga
Charging German knights. Ian Peirce, Cathedral Treasury, Aachen
A manuscript illustration of crusaders in combat.
Jousting knights. David Nicolle, Malbork Castle Museum
Knights in combat. Malbork Castle Museum MZM/DA/5
Knights in combat. David Nicolle
Knights jousting, victory going to the rider with the griffon coat of arms.
The ruins of Doblen. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg 152 632
The ruins of Wenden. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg 153 194
Marienburg castle from the Nogat River. William Urban
Marienburg castle from the southeast.
Marienburg castle walls and warehouse façade. William Urban
The great hall in Marienburg Castle. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg 619 159
Marienburg castle’s middle courtyard. William Urban
Jan Matejko’s sketch for his large scale painting of the Battle of Tannenburg (1878). Warsaw National Museum
Werner Peiner: The Siege of Marienburg (1939)
The ruins of the castle at Wenden. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg 183 202
Banners hanging in Marienburg castle. William Urban
Endpapers: Crusaders in combat against eastern warriors.
Preface
My previous publications in Baltic history1 have been of four kinds: translations with Jerry C. Smith of important chronicles; articles attempting to correct factual errors or present new interpretations of events in the crusades in Prussia and Livonia; summaries of the crusades for various encyclopaedias; and five detailed histories of individual crusading eras – the thirteenth centuries in Prussia and Livonia, the later crusades in those regions, and the decisive events connected with the battle at Tannenberg and its aftermath. This volume is, therefore, the culmination of almost forty years of research and writing. It is the first survey of the military history of the Teutonic Order in English and the first lengthy one in any language in almost a century.
There are many people that any author can reasonably thank for contributing to his or her work. I am no different. At the beginning was Archie Lewis, who persuaded me to work on a subject that few in the United States knew much about at the time – the Baltic frontier between Roman Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy and paganism. The German-American Clubs and the Fulbright Commission financed a year in Hamburg, when I learned something about the subject and began to write. Several years later the Fulbright Commission gave me a grant to work at the Herder Institut in Marburg, a marvellous location for research that I subsequently visited many times. And so it went, right down to the publisher of my most recent books, John Rackauskas and the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago. All along the way I have met interesting and helpful people, visited places I will never forget, and made life-long friends.
William Urban, 2003
Introduction
Why a book on the military history of the Teutonic Knights now? Why not earlier? Good questions, and questions worth considering. One answer is that the best historians of the crusades have traditionally concentrated their attentions on the Holy Land; most medieval historians in recent decades have lacked much interest in military affairs; and amateur historians in the English-speaking world are not prepared to handle the many languages involved in studying Baltic and East Central European history. In addition, the Cold War made research in those regions difficult and, too often, also made people wonder if military history specialists were not politically suspect. Another good answer, perhaps more fundamental, is that the English-speaking public was generally unaware that there had been crusades in the Baltic, and, moreover, for many years also lost interest in the medieval efforts to recover Jerusalem. No demand, hence no response by authors and publishers.
However, public taste changes. Today books on the crusades are popular once again. Moreover, there is an interest in crusading activities on the periphery of Europe. Just as Chaucer’s knight understood that there were crusading efforts in Spain, Prussia, Asia Minor and the Balkans equal to those in the Holy Land, or almost so, now modern scholars and the general public recognise this as well.
Nor does the Baltic seem as physically distant as it was only a few years ago. Tourists can now easily visit towns and castles built by the Teutonic Knights. Castle ruins are romantic, and ruins abound in what were once Prussia and Livonia. Poland has taken the lead in developing this theme: Malbork (Marienburg) is already a tourist centre, as is the battlefield of Grunwald (Tannenberg), with its disputed positioning of the opposing armies; and the historic centres of ancient towns such as Gdańsk (Danzig) have been restored. Latvia has Riga, Estonia the old city of Tallinn (Reval), completely surrounded by the original walls and towers, and Lithuania has the beautiful island castle at Trakai. People who have seen Eisenstein’s inaccurate but thrilling movie Alexander Nevsky can visit the shores of the lake where the real battle was fought, on its frozen surface, on 5 April 1242.
There are two sites in Central Europe which are also worth seeing – Bad Mergentheim in Germany, north-east of Stuttgart, which was the seat of the grand master of the Teutonic Order after the secularisation of the Prussian lands; and Vienna, where the modern headquarters sit one block from St Stephan’s cathedral. Both have attractive museums. There are also the order’s many surviving convents, churches and castles in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and even Italy.
There is much history t
o be learned here, or perhaps re-learned: the Teutonic Knights were once powerful and respected in Central Europe, but their reputation has suffered in medieval and modern times at the hands of propagandists, nationalists, Protestants and secularists. This drumbeat of condemnation was, of course, to some degree earned, but was exaggerated by the accompanying suggestions that their enemies were pure in heart, mind, and action. These perceptions are now being rethought.
Similarly, our understanding of Europe is being revised in countless ways. The frontiers of medieval Christendom are remarkably similar to those of the modern European Union, and wars on the periphery represent challenges for modern statesmen. Chamberlain could abandon Czechoslovakia to Hitler as a place far distant, about which Englishmen knew little; but today newspaper readers in the English-speaking world can talk knowledgeably about European conflicts much farther away and more difficult to understand. Even so, those of us who experienced the difficulties of travelling in East Central Europe before 1989, and who try to describe our experiences to students and younger colleagues, already encounter faces as uncomprehending as when we attempt to explain the complexities of medieval life and politics.
Hitler, by the way, mistrusted Roman Catholics and hated nobles, so he had nothing good to say about the Teutonic Order. As a lower-class Austrian he disliked the Prussian Junkers too (who, in any case, mostly came from Brandenburg, not East Prussia, were almost all Protestants, and only very rarely had ancestors who were members of the military order). So for understanding the military history of the Teutonic Order, it is best for us to drop the Hollywood stereotypes until the next Indiana Jones fantasy comes along. The true stories about the Teutonic Knights are sufficiently interesting (exciting, controversial, etc) that we do not have to distort them, and modern politics already contain sufficient misleading stereotypes without digging back into medieval history for more.
It is my hope that this volume will further our understanding of a very important era in military history, of the complexities of medieval politics, to a certain extent of human behaviour in general, and of the ways that modern societies think about their past. I find narrative history relaxing, especially when it is removed from the constraints of nationalism and politics. So settle back, and take a moment to enjoy an armchair time-travel back to the Middle Ages, back to a time when men and women were neither better nor worse, perhaps, than today, just somewhat different.
1
The Military Orders
Missionaries and Armed Missions
The medieval Roman Catholic Church was often of two minds about the use of force to carry out its various missions in secular society. Firstly, one must forgive the sinner without forgetting the need to protect those who are sinned against. Therefore to forgive the repentant robber is one thing, to ignore robbery is another. Similarly, it was important to enjoin priests from taking up weapons and to encourage believers to resolve their personal disputes peacefully; but it was also necessary to support those secular rulers who were responsible for protecting the priests and their congregations from outside attack and domestic violence.
No one can pretend that medieval society was peaceful, or that piety equalled pacifism. Yet monasteries and nunneries provided secure moral and physical refuge from the turmoil of daily politics, and most Roman Catholics who approved of using force in defending the realm and in arresting criminals were aware of the New Testament injunctions against killing and violence. This stood in sharp contrast to the blatant worship of strength and cunning that was central to Scandinavian paganism; the Viking sagas gloried in their heroes’ deeds in ways that Western epic poetry could hardly match. Yet even the most valiant Vikings came to understand, through stories such as the Njal Saga, that paganism was no foundation for a proper society; there had to be some underpinning for government other than rule by the strongest.
For the most part it was missionaries who persuaded the regional strongmen in Scandinavia that, for the good of their people and their own survival, they had to end the ancient way of life based on plunder and war. That is, before anything else, they had to become Christians. Once these newly baptised strongmen made themselves kings of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, they had clerical advice on how to collect taxes, enlist other powerful lords to serve them and enforce their edicts, and erect the foundations of a state government. Surprisingly quickly this brought an end to the Viking reign of terror across northern Europe.
To a lesser degree (or a greater, depending on one’s point of view), the Western military response to the Northmen’s raids aided in this conversion process. The development of feudal institutions created a warrior class in North-Western Europe that was better trained and equipped than Vikings were, with peasants who provided them with the means of buying weapons and horses, building castles and supplying garrisons. Also, as some Viking leaders took over Western lands it became in their interest to defend their new properties against relatives who still saw French, English, Scottish and Irish farmers as their natural prey.
Although many missionaries entered pagan lands without armed guards, they were courting martyrdom; and in truth, some of those priests and monks would have welcomed the opportunity to die for their faith and thereby earn a prominent place among the elect in heaven. But there were relatively few trained churchmen, and the rulers of Western states needed them at home even more than the Church needed martyrs. Consequently, many years before, when Irish priests first began to work among the pagan Germans, Frankish rulers sent armed guards to accompany them. This established the practice of sending along skilled warriors to protect the missionaries, a practice that ultimately lead to the crusade in Livonia. Such guards did not save St Boniface from Frisian assassins, but for other missionaries – those who did not insist on cutting down holy woods for lumber to build their churches – their presence was sufficient warning that open resistance would not be tolerated.
The combination of preaching even at the risk of the missionary’s life, of encouraging non-Christian rulers to emulate successful Christian monarchs, and of threats to use force, was not a strategy that could work against Moslems. Although we do not remember the Islamic invasions of Europe – they lack the glamour and flair of the Northmen, and their ships were standard Mediterranean galleys – Moslems pushed into northern Spain, sacked many Italian cities, set up bases in the Alps, and regarded southern France as a good place to take a vacation.
Frankish volunteers in the Spanish wars against the Moors and Islamic volunteers from North Africa long predated the crusades. Similarly, Western mercenaries were fighting for the Byzantines against the Turks before Pope Urban II issued his call in late 1095 for the Franks to retake the Holy Land from an enemy of Christianity, which was oppressing believers and preventing pilgrims from worshipping at the holy places in and around Jerusalem.
Careful listeners caught papal references to the benefits that would accrue to local societies if all the riffraff and thugs put their energies and talents into fighting the enemies of Christendom rather than beating up on one another and on their innocent fellow-citizens. Just getting unruly nobles and their followers out of the country for a while would, he intimated, bring peace at home. This is an often-forgotten aspect of military service that is worth remembering – it was not long ago that Western judicial systems, faced with the problem of deciding what to do with wayward young males, gave them the choice of jail time or enlisting in the armed forces. It was hoped that a little discipline, a glimmering vision of having a larger purpose in life, and just growing up would change a juvenile delinquent into a useful citizen.
Finding a place to serve society effectively was one of the roles performed by monastic orders, but a life of celibacy and fasting, reading and hoeing, was not attractive to youths trained as warriors, who saw fast horses and sharp swords as more exciting than long prayers and hymns in Latin. The military orders, however, were just what the church doctors ordered – and they were accepting recruits even in years when no crusade was in sight.
Lessons of the Early Crusades
The capture of Jerusalem by the Franks in the first crusade (1095 – 9) demonstrated the great strength of that combination of religious enthusiasm, military technology and expertise, growing population and economic vitality, and the new confidence of secular and ecclesiastical elites which characterised Western Europe by the end of the eleventh century. The floods of Western warriors that had set out on the great adventure had been reduced to a thin trickle of hungry, exhausted men by disease, desertion and death in battle by the time they reached the Holy Land. But those few survivors were still able to overwhelm some of the new and fragile Turkish states that ruled over sullen and angry Arabs, some of whom were Christians. Then, as was only partly anticipated, once the crusaders’ immediate task was crowned with success most of the knights and clerics wanted to return home. Too few warriors remained to complete the conquest, and barely enough reinforcements arrived to hold what had been won. The peasants who had set out on the great pilgrimage to Jerusalem had been massacred not far from Constantinople, and the Italian merchant communities that had rejoiced at the opening of the eastern markets were soon quarrelling over the right to exploit them. It appeared that the crusader states would be short-lived phenomena, destined to survive only until the Turks found a leader who could organise local resources and imbue his followers with a religious passion equal to that of the Western newcomers.
Teutonic Knights Page 1
