Teutonic Knights

by William Urban

  The war in Livonia ended that same year with the surrender of Riga. Although the burghers expected brutal treatment, they were offered such unexpectedly fair terms that a complete reconciliation resulted. For decades to come the burghers abandoned their interference in foreign policy and confined their interests to trade. The Livonian Knights were as close to the Lithuanian fortresses of Vilnius and Kaunas as were the Prussian Knights, and from Dünaburg they could raid regions inaccessible from Prussia. Within a short time they contributed an important reinforcement to the expeditions into Samogitia.

  War with Ladislas

  In Ladislas’ mind the situation was becoming intolerable. The crusaders were simply making too much progress. Urged on by Ladislas of Masovia to recapture Dobrin, he turned to his allies, the rulers of Lithuania and Hungary. Gediminas, eager to reopen the communication route to Poland, agreed to a joint campaign in the late summer; he would cross the wilderness at Wizna and meet Ladislas’ army in Dobrin or Culm. Ladislas sought to make good his shortage of experienced knights by sending Prince Casimir to Hungary. In a triumph of personal diplomacy, Casimir persuaded his brother-in-law, Charles Robert, to send knights in the spring of 1331 to assist in fighting a common enemy, John of Bohemia.

  Before the reinforcements arrived, however, the grand master sent a large army to a large castle that had harassed ships along the Vistula. The besiegers moved up stone-throwers and towers, working so quickly that after three days little remained of the castle walls. Assault followed assault, and finally the besiegers built a great fire, incinerating many defenders and driving others to attempt a hopeless sally. The Teutonic Knights went on to capture Brzesc and Nakel, two fortresses shielding northern Kujavia. The king despaired, having lacked sufficient troops to attempt a rescue.

  At that moment Casimir arrived with the Hungarian reinforcements. The nineteen-year-old prince had been fascinated by the informal but courtly life at the Visegrad palace in Hungary. With his sister’s approval and aid, the blond prince had begun an affair with one of the royal ladies-in-waiting, Clara of Zać. Had Casimir been an eligible bachelor or had the affair been more discrete, the story might have had a romantic ending. As it was, on 17 April the Croatian lady’s father stormed into court, swinging his sword; he wounded the king, cut four fingers off the queen’s right hand, and was barely frustrated in his efforts to kill the young princes, Andreas and Louis. Royal vengeance was swift: the assailant’s body was quartered and the parts displayed throughout the countryside, his son was dragged to death behind a horse and the corpse given to dogs, and Clara was hounded from place to place. The Zać relatives were exiled from the kingdom. Even so, Casimir was urged to leave the country quickly, lest revenge be taken on him.

  Once Casimir brought the Hungarian reinforcements, Ladislas was ready to strike. With large numbers of knights at his command, and many mercenaries as well, he decided not to waste his army in sieges of well-defended castles, but to invade Culm, join forces with Gediminas, and either force the grand master to a pitched battle or overwhelm the cities there. The campaign began well. In September he misled the grand master as to his intentions by invading West Prussia, then cleverly crossing to the east bank of the Vistula. The timing was wrong, however. He arrived too late to join the Lithuanians. Gediminas knew that his army was being shadowed by a small force of Teutonic Knights, and when Gediminas’ scouts were unable to locate the Polish forces at the agreed time and place the grand prince had prudently gone home. Ladislas was thus in East Prussia with a superiority in troops, but his advantage was not so great as to allow him to besiege cities. Moreover, with the grand master’s army so close he could not send out many foragers, which caused him to be short of fodder and provisions for his forces. The king did not want to make a humiliating retreat, but he could not stay in Culm indefinitely. Werner, in spite of having both the German and Livonian masters present, was unwilling to offer battle, but he did not want the Poles and Hungarians to continue ravaging his most valuable province. Consequently when someone suggested a truce, both Ladislas and Werner were eager to accept. Werner agreed to restore the Kujavian cities to the king after having razed the fortifications and castles and promised to give Dobrin back to Ladislas of Masovia.

  Werner’s Assassination

  A short time later Grand Master Werner met his death at the hands of an assassin. The circumstances provide some rare insights into the process of justice among the Teutonic Knights. It appears that the assassin, a knight from the convent at Memel, had been reprimanded for violent and unpredictable behaviour which had culminated with his threatening the castellan with a knife. He had come to Marienburg in hope of obtaining a pardon but had simply been ordered back to Memel. The disappointed knight left the audience room but not the castle. He had little to look forward to. Light punishment was a year in which one was forbidden to associate with one’s fellow knights and was stripped of honourable clothing and made to subsist on bread and water three days of the week; his would have been a heavy punishment, probably including both imprisonment and irons. Lurking in the corridor until Werner went to Vespers, he stepped out and dealt the grand master two deadly wounds. Apparently having made no plans for escape, he was promptly captured by a notary.

  The officers who judged the assassin ruled that he was insane and not responsible for his actions, but they were unsure about the punishment they could inflict. The statutes provided the death penalty for the crimes of apostasy, cowardice, and sodomy, but not for murder. Consequently they wrote to the papacy for instructions, and when the answer arrived they followed the wisdom of the pope: life imprisonment.

  Luther von Braunschweig

  Werner’s successor was Luther von Braunschweig, the youngest of the six sons of Duke Albrecht the Great. The other two youngest sons entered the Templars and the Hospitallers. Luther had become the order’s master of the robes, with responsibility for settling German peasants in Prussia. He was very successful, recruiting many of the immigrants from his brothers’ domains in what had once been called Lower Saxony. (It helped that pagan raiders rarely penetrated into the heart of Prussia now.) He maintained his family ties carefully, so that two nephews later joined the Teutonic Order.

  Luther was a gifted poet who used his patronage to encourage religious and historical compositions relating to the Teutonic Order. While most of his own works have been lost, his Life of Saint Barbara has been preserved because of the close connection of this saint with the order’s conquest of Prussia, and because Luther’s own grandfather had been on crusade in 1242 when the knights captured the reliquary containing Barbara’s head and enshrined it in Culm.

  Luther linked poetry with successful wars in Poland and Samogitia. Consequently a special lustre attached itself to his gracious and noble personality, a lustre that was enhanced by his exalted birth. Four years sufficed to make his memory bright a century later, when grand masters were neither especially gifted nor much admired.

  Luther was determined to press the war against Ladislas even if it meant suspending the crusade until he had struck the king such blows as would eliminate him as a threat to the order’s rear. In this he depended upon John of Bohemia to pin down Ladislas in Silesia. Both princes claimed lordship over that province and, divided as it was among insignificant Piast princelings, Ladislas would not abandon Silesia to fight in the north. If he did, a victory for King John in Silesia was almost as good as a victory for the Teutonic Knights in Kujavia or Great Poland. War on Poland was beyond the resources of Prussia alone: the Poles were highly respected warriors, well armed, and fighting in defence of their homes. Therefore Luther hired mercenaries from Germany and Bohemia to augment his forces, accepted the services of rebel Polish nobles, and prepared to conduct warfare on the scale of a great prince. As operations commenced in July of 1331, English crusaders hastened to join the expedition. For them one fight was as good as another, and there would be more booty in Poland than in Samogitia.

  The mercenary troops were commanded by Otto
von Bergau, the son-in-law of the marshal of Bohemia, and a close friend of King John. He led 500 knights, who were not only well paid but also shared the spiritual privileges of crusaders, the most important being an indulgence remitting the sins of all those who participated in this holy work. However, their conduct and that of the Prussian army in general was anything but holy. Widespread reports of rape accompanied the usual lists of burnings, murders, and kidnappings. The worst aspects of the conduct of war in Samogitia combined with mercenary habits in general to wreak havoc throughout northern Masovia and Kujavia. The use of mercenaries disguised as crusaders was a propaganda disaster for the Teutonic Knights and was skilfully exploited by the Poles at later papal hearings.

  Ladislas did not offer serious resistance. He left Casimir in charge of a small force while he lay in wait for the Bohemian king with most of his knights. His plan worked well enough. The crusader assault passed through Kujavia without achieving much of military significance. The king did not concern himself about the destruction of homes, churches, and mills, and the mistreatment of the commoners. In a war based on plundering, atrocities were common. What was important was that no castles were lost. Casimir had defended them well.

  The Battle of Plowce, 1331

  Like all contemporary military figures, Luther understood that the destruction of property was an effective means of warfare against an obstinate enemy. His orders to do as much damage as possible were interpreted by the mercenaries, auxiliaries, and knights as a licence to terrorise and impoverish the king’s taxpayers. However, his forces were not achieving any truly significant successes.

  King John, for his part, had been frustrated in his attempt to crush his opponent. Therefore he proposed that he meet the grand master at Kalish in September and force a decisive battle. Luther, agreeing, sent Marshal Dietrich von Altenburg to lead the Prussian army to the rendezvous. Dietrich crossed Kujavia, sending his forces along several routes to plunder and burn, but did not find the Bohemians at Kalish. This was not unusual. Communications being poor, most joint ventures like this one failed because one party was unexpectedly delayed or could not come at all. John, as a matter of fact, had just returned from an expedition to Italy and was unable to start his march on time. Dietrich, seeing the Polish army beginning to come together from all directions and not knowing that John was only a few days march away, began a slow retreat, plundering along the way. He was thus moving away from John, who himself turned about when he heard of Dietrich’s retreat. As Dietrich marched away, Ladislas and Casimir trailed behind with ‘40,000’ men. The royal levy was numerous, but less well armed than the crusading host, and the king was therefore unwilling to offer battle. However, when Dietrich divided his force into three parties, Ladislas swept down on the weakest division at Plowce.

  Marshal Dietrich did not realise that he was so heavily outnumbered. Over the past days his Polish scouts had misinformed him about the size of the royal levy, causing him to think he was facing a small force, and now a heavy fog hindered efforts at reconnaissance. Dietrich aligned his men under five banners and faced the royal array. The king likewise formed his army in five units. The battle was cruelly contested, unusually so in an era when major encounters were rare and brief. The decisive moment came when the horse carrying the marshal’s banner was pierced by a spear, perhaps by Polish knights among the crusaders who changed sides without warning, creating disorder in the German and Bohemian ranks. The flagbearer had nailed the banner to his saddle, and once the steed fell, he could not raise it again. Consternation among the crusaders was great, because they could not see their commander, and Polish knights seemed to be everywhere. Soon the combat was over. Ladislas’ men, having smashed three units of enemy cavalry, captured fifty-six brothers and held them prisoner in a trench. When the king arrived, he asked who they were. Told they were Teutonic Knights, he ordered the ordinary knights killed and the officers held for ransom.

  Ladislas’ action was based on his fear that the other two divisions of the Teutonic Knights were on the way. In fact, the castellan of Culm did arrive that afternoon and drove the exhausted Polish knights from the field, capturing 600 prisoners. Finding Marshal Dietrich chained to a wagon, he released him, then rode over to the area where the naked, dead knights lay piled high. Trembling, he climbed down from his horse, wept, and gave orders to slaughter everyone they had captured. The native Prussians tried to stop him, saying that they wanted to keep the captives to exchange for their own people who had been taken prisoner. Dietrich told them not to worry, that God would still give them many good prisoners that day, and he watched as they slaughtered the men in chains. Pressing the pursuit hard, he did take another hundred prisoners before nightfall, but Ladislas and Casimir rode even faster – they understood well the consequences of falling into the marshal’s hands at this time. They had fought well and bravely, and they considered it no disgrace to flee when continuing the fight with broken and exhausted units would be useless. Possession of the battlefield was not as important as the victory they had already won.

  When the fighting came to an end, all that remained was to bury the dead. The bishop of Kujavia sent men to put the corpses into mass graves, during which process his workers counted 4,187 bodies. Immediately thereafter he built a chapel where visitors could pray for the souls of those who had fallen. The battlefield became a pilgrimage site for patriotic Poles, a shameful memory for Germans. One crusader poet ended his history at this point in the narrative without describing the battle.

  It was Easter of 1332 before Luther was ready to seek revenge, but by that time his preparations were awesome. He not only had many mercenaries, but he had also recruited crusaders, some of whom came from England to participate in this war. After two weeks of siege he captured Brzesc, then Inowrocław, and finally all of northern Kujavia. Ladislas struck back in August but without effect. Then he sued for a truce to last until mid – 1333, by which time Ladislas was dead.

  Peace Talks

  Casimir was hurriedly crowned in Gniezno before the pope could raise objections to the coronation. Trouble came not from the papacy, but from Casimir’s mother, who was unwilling to relinquish her royal honours to Aldona, Casimir’s popular Lithuanian wife. Casimir, however, was firm – this was a matter of a royal prerogative. Aldona was crowned beside him and his mother withdrew to a convent.

  With Ladislas no longer a factor, Casimir was able to open peace talks. He and the grand master agreed to ask Charles Robert of Hungary and John of Bohemia to arbitrate their differences, the former being favourable to Polish interests, the latter to Prussian. It was at this time that Casimir displayed fully those diplomatic talents whereby he later earned the title ‘the Great’. First, he shrewdly worked on the mutual jealousies of the Wittelsbachs in Brandenburg and the Luxemburgs in Bohemia, promising Louis of Brandenburg his young daughter in marriage. Then he broke up strong domestic resistance to his ‘pro-German’ policies. He did not find it difficult to persuade the capricious John of Bohemia to abandon his Silesian wars and take up new adventures.

  In the autumn of 1335 Casimir, John, and Charles Robert met in Visegrad in Hungary, a magnificent palace overlooking the Danube, for one of the most famous conferences of the middle ages. For weeks they mixed memorable spectacle with hard negotiating. In November a delegation of the Teutonic Knights arrived to present demands that Casimir renounce his claims to West Prussia. Since Luther of Braunschweig had died on a journey to dedicate the new cathedral in Königsberg, this delegation had been sent by the new grand master, Dietrich von Altenburg. Dietrich’s Saxon ancestry was almost as illustrious as Luther’s. A youngest son having to choose among the various careers available in the church, he selected one with a military order. Castellan at Ragnit, then advocate of Samland, and finally marshal, he was a capable commander with only one blot on his record, the battle at Plowce, and he wanted revenge for that defeat.

  Neither side yielded much during the talks. Although the Teutonic Knights made significant concessi
ons, exceeding their instructions, the mediators were unimaginative: they proposed a return to the status quo ante belIum. King John abandoned his claims to the Polish throne, thus invalidating his grants of West Prussia to the Teutonic Knights. Casimir, who wanted peace in the north so that he could concentrate on other frontiers, offered one significant two-edged concession: he offered to grant West Prussia to the grand master as a gift from the Polish crown, implying that the territory was still his to give away. This was at least a step toward an agreement. The two parties were ready to stop hostilities, but the talks went no further than Dietrich’s promise to leave Kujavia and Casimir’s promise to obtain his subjects’ renunciation of West Prussia.

  Casimir found he could not carry out his promises. First the dukes of Masovia advocated rejecting the settlement. Then Casimir’s nobles refused to ratify the treaty, and finally the pope insisted that legatine rulings giving West Prussia and Culm to Poland be honoured. The grand master doubted that this had all happened without Casimir having exercised some influence. So he contacted King John, who revived certain Silesian issues that had been left unresolved. For the meantime, Dietrich garrisoned the castles in Kujavia, but he left the Polish administrators in place, since he had no plans to occupy that province permanently. In contrast, he garrisoned the castles in Dobrin and Płock more securely, since this was the best way to keep Polish raiders distant from Culm.