Teutonic Knights

by William Urban

  Thus there was nothing odd in Henry of Derby coming to Prussia in January of 1352 and challenging Casimir of Poland to combat. Henry had brought an army to fight the pagans, but had been told that there could be no expedition because the king was making trouble over the boundary markings between Prussia and Poland. So he decided to put an end to this interference. His bravado may have helped hasten a compromise, but the English nobleman was delayed in reaching Königsberg in time to join the winter expedition.

  Nor was there anything particularly unusual in Louis of Hungary sitting through an elaborate pagan ceremony in 1351, the sacrifice of a red bull to sanctify the agreement with the Lithuanian prince, Kęstutis (pronounced Kenstutis, 1297 – 1382), regarding the ransom of Kęstutis’ brother, who had been taken prisoner by Casimir that summer. The Polish and Hungarian crusaders soon regretted their naive trust, because Kęstutis slipped away with his brother, then attacked the camp so fiercely that the Połish and Hungarian monarchs barely escaped with their lives, and Boleslas of Masovia was slain.

  In 1352 Louis was wounded in fierce fighting in Volhynia, and Casimir mortgaged Dobrin to the Teutonic Order to raise money for his campaign against the Tatars. In short, the crusades in East Central Europe were more complex than simply campaigns of Teutonic Knights against pagans in Samogitia and Lithuania. They also included wars against Orthodox princes and Moslem Tatars; and not far from everyone’s mind were the Turks, camped on the doorsteps of Constantinople.

  The Teutonic Order publicised its holy mission in every way imaginable to the era. Its architecture, for example, emphasised the ways that military and religious obligations intertwined; and every detail underscored the order’s solidity and power. They succeeded so well that we rarely think of the more important expeditions by Poles and Hungarians in Galicia, Volhynia, and Ukraine.

  Hopes of Lithuanian Conversion

  Every so often the Lithuanian dukes offered to discuss their accepting Roman Christianity. This was not always due to the steadily increasing pressure of the crusaders from Prussia and Livonia, and certainly not to a fear that the crusaders would conquer Lithuania, even though that pressure was important in the dukes’ calculations of profit and loss. It was to eliminate the annoyance of crusader attacks. The grand masters’ offensives had long hindered the grand prince from responding to other threats and opportunities to the south. Gediminas, and later his sons, especially Algirdas (1296 – 1377) and Kęstutis, observed with great interest the declining fortunes of the Tatar Golden Horde, and they extended their power and influence over nearby Rus’ian states whenever possible. However, their efforts to occupy southern Rus’ completely, especially Galicia, were contested after 1370 by the king of united Hungary and Poland, Louis the Great. Upon Gediminas’ death Algirdas had taken the title of grand prince and responsibility for most Rus’ian affairs, while Kęstutis defended the eastern and northern frontiers. They were among the most gifted and inventive diplomats in medieval history, making the most of their lands’ slender population and economic base. They were talented leaders in war as well, but they were too astute to take great risks. Whenever the odds were against them, they did not hesitate to retreat or seek a truce. This was most frustrating to the grand masters, who had learned through hard experience that Algirdas and Kęstutis would honour an agreement only as long as it was clearly in their best interest.

  While it is true that most political leaders will back out of a treaty or understanding when violating their promises will bring sufficient benefits, few have pledged their word with as much cold-blooded forethought as these two brothers and their offspring. The grand masters found it most frustrating to have churchmen and other well-meaning individuals crying for them to stop the holy war because the Lithuanian rulers were saying that they were sincerely contemplating conversion to Roman Catholicism, but that the crusader attacks made such a move politically impossible. The Lithuanian rulers were so skilled at exploiting the Christians’ desire to think well of their enemies that it eventually became difficult for the Teutonic Order to believe that the Gediminid dynasty was ever sincere, even later when conversion was clearly in the princes’ interest. But that is a long and confusing story that contemporaries found even more difficult to follow than do modern historians, for whom it is no easy task.

  At one point in the spring of 1361 it appeared that Kęstutis might be persuaded to undergo baptism. Algirdas and Kęstutis had led a large raiding party through Galindia into central Prussia at a time when English and Saxon crusaders were present in Samland. The marshal, whose base was at Königsberg, proposed to Thomas Spencer and the duke of Saxony that they all make a forced march across Prussia and catch the raiders before they could escape back into the wilderness. The crusaders enthusiastically assented. Indeed, they succeeded beyond their greatest hopes, catching the raiders completely by surprise, killing 130 of them and capturing Kęstutis.

  Grand Master Winrich von Kniprode kept his prisoner in honourable captivity in Marienburg, far from any possible attempt at rescue. In mid-November, however, the sixty-five-year-old prince made a daring escape. Aided by a Lithuanian servant who worked in the castle, Kęstutis slipped out of his cell, slithered up a chimney, stole a white cloak and walked unrecognised across the courtyard until he found the grand master’s horse saddled and waiting. Climbing aboard the steed, he rode out the gate unhindered. Kęstutis later abandoned the horse on the road east toward Lithuania and headed off south on foot toward Masovia, where his daughter was the duchess of Płock. He was soon home, making fierce war and mocking his enemies. Such feats made him beloved in western Lithuania and Samogitia.

  Algirdas, meanwhile, was expanding to the east, defeating the Tatars in 1363 at the battle of Blue Waters near the Black Sea and occupying Kiev; in 1368 and 1370 he reached the Kremlin in Moscow.

  The crisis of the wars came in February of 1370, when Algirdas and Kęstutis brought their Lithuanian and Rus’ian armies into Samland. Winrich von Kniprode reacted swiftly, summoning units from as far away as Culm and ordering them to march swiftly to join the marshal’s army. Kęstutis was supervising the burning of farms and villages around Rudau when the crusader force approached. Recognising the banners of his opponents, he fled the field immediately. Algirdas, in contrast, ordered his men to hurry to a wooded hill where they could fight for their booty and prisoners. The ensuing combat was among the bloodiest in memory. By nightfall the Teutonic Knights had routed the last pagan resistance, bringing the total of slain foemen to a thousand, but at the cost of twenty-six knights and 100 men. Algirdas, as usual, escaped, but it was the last time he sent troops into Prussia.

  After Algirdas’ death in 1377, Kęstutis insisted that the many Lithuanian territorial dukes follow his instructions and thereby avoid working at cross purposes to one another, or even beginning a civil war. This reflected the complex reality of the loose Lithuanian system of governance – already some of the dynasty’s numerous progeny had understood that there were insufficient lands to satisfy all their ambitions, and none of the princes was noted for patience and self-sacrifice; moreover, some of their Rus’ian possessions were beginning to seek independence – even seeking help from Moscow, whose prince saw himself as the natural leader of all the Rus’ian states. The Gediminid dynasty had always highly prized courage, initiative, and cunning; it never taught or practised the so-called ‘Christian’ virtues, not even those dukes who had converted to Orthodoxy; and its tradition of family solidarity worked well only when everyone was threatened by a foreign power. As the Polish chronicler, Długosz, put it: ‘Neque enim inter barbaros tuta et sincera possunt durare foedera, inter quos verus ignoratur Deus: nulla quoque viget fides, nullum sacrosanctum insiurandum, nulla legitima religio.’ Translation: don’t trust the pagans. Now it was payback time for encouraging those traits, unless Kęstutis could keep his numerous nephews and sons in line.

  Kęstutis did not adopt the title grand prince, but he might as well have. Still, his policies angered Algirdas’ eldest son by
his second marriage, Jogaila, and his full brothers, who were already feuding with their half-brothers from Algirdas’ first marriage. Jogaila (1354 – 1434) had a somewhat better claim on the title of grand prince than did the eldest half-brother, Andreas (1342 – 99), because – in a practice widely observed in the Middle Ages – sons inherited a claim to the office held by the father at the time of their birth. Thus, Andreas was merely the son of a duke, while Jogaila was the son of the grand prince. In addition, Algirdas had recognised the superior talents of his son by Juliana, his second wife; and Juliana had become a powerful figure in her own right after being widowed. Formerly excluded from influence over her sons’ upbringing because she was an Orthodox Christian and Algirdas had insisted on his sons being reared as pagans, she was now willing to use every means available to advance the interests of her eldest son against those of her predecessor’s offspring. To make him more acceptable to potential Rus’ian subjects, she persuaded him to be baptised as an Orthodox Christian.

  For a moment, therefore, it seemed highly likely that the Gediminid family, long loyal to its pagan roots, would cast its lot with Orthodoxy. If that was the only way for the ambitious dukes to become rulers of Rus’, few doubted that they would allow any religious or moral sentiment to hinder their clambering up the ladder of fortune.

  Jogaila, however, was not content to rule those portions of his father’s eastern lands that had been bequeathed to him. He was determined first to gather all the eastern lands into his hands. That meant eliminating Andreas, whose northern lands abutted the Livonian Order’s territories. Then he would acquire Kęstutis’ western territories. Once all Lithuania was under his control – ruled by those brothers and half-brothers he could trust – he would then resume the policy of expansion that had been so successful earlier in the century.

  9

  The Conversion of Lithuania

  The Feud Among the Lithuanian Dukes

  The death of Algirdas in 1377 had led to civil war among his many sons, several of whom saw themselves as his potential heir. The one with the best claim to rule his lands in eastern Lithuania was Andreas, his eldest son by his first wife. But the one to triumph was Jogaila, the eldest son by his second wife. Jogaila drove his rival into exile, then withstood his efforts to return in alliance with the Livonian Knights. Although successful in that war, Jogaila discovered that his eighty-year-old uncle, Kęstutis, now demanded that all members of the family defer to his decisions on everything. Jogaila was furious. He wanted to rule, and he was too impatient to wait for nature to take its course.

  Jogaila soon thought of a way to triumph over Kęstutis, as well as to eliminate permanently the chance that Andreas could prevail militarily. Through his younger brother Skirgaila (Skirgiełło) he made a secret alliance with the hated Teutonic Knights, promising to become a Roman Christian at some future date, and then sent Skirgaila to speak to Louis the Great of Hungary, Wenceslas of Bohemia (who was Holy Roman emperor), and perhaps even to Pope Urban VI. The Western monarchs and prelates who met Skirgaila persuaded the aged grand master, Winrich von Kniprode, to drop his support of Andreas and make a secret alliance with Jogaila.

  A consummate actor and brilliant schemer, Jogaila made Kęstutis’ son Vytautas (1350 – 1430) his closest friend. As a result, when Kęstutis became suspicious of the crusaders’ improved knowledge of his military plans and Jogaila’s tendency to bring his troops onto the field just a little too slowly to trap the German armies, Jogaila had Vytautas to plead his case. Kęstutis was by no means persuaded, but he had his son’s own wild nature to worry about – Vytautas was at an age at which he should have been given lands and responsibilities of his own, but he still seemed unready. Kęstutis understood that an unsubstantiated accusation against Jogaila would only harden Vytautas’ belief that his cousin and friend was being abused. Therefore Kęstutis made concessions to Jogaila in order to keep Vytautas at his side a little longer. There was so much he needed to teach him. Not just of military matters, but also of men. Of course, treason on Jogaila’s scale could not be concealed forever – not in a society of nobles who were often bored, who worried greatly about status and rank, who lived in close quarters with little privacy, and who fed on gossip and intrigue.27 Nor could the policy disagreements be reconciled. Jogaila wanted to concentrate on the east, moving further into Rus’, even at the price of surrendering lands to the crusaders; Kęstutis disagreed totally.

  When Jogaila realised that Kęstutis would not attempt to discipline him, he became ever more independent, arranging for the marriage of his sister Alexandra to a Masovian duke without asking permission, conducting joint military operations with the Livonian Order, and driving his half-brothers Andreas and Kaributas (1342? – 99) from their lands. In 1381 Kęstutis ended the problem, he thought, by arresting Jogaila (and perhaps Jogaila’s mother), assuming control of his lands, and adopting the title of grand prince. However, at Vytautas’ urging he released Jogaila and allowed him to return to his possessions in the east.

  In 1382 Kęstutis marched to Novgorod-Seversk to deal with Kaributas, who had organised another rebellion. Jogaila, seeing his opportunity to strike, hurried to Vilnius, called for his supporters to join him there, and, sending a message to the grand master to march into Lithuania with all speed, then besieged Kęstutis’ island castle at Trakai. When Kęstutis and Vytautas arrived to lift the siege they found themselves trapped between Jogaila’s forces and the crusader army. Jogaila invited Kęstutis and Vytautas to a discussion that, he intimated, would resolve their differences, and there seized them. He imprisoned them in the fortress at Krivias (Krewo), then allowed Skirgaila, perhaps at his mother’s urging, to murder Kęstutis and assume responsibility for ruling the western lands; then he did away with Kęstutis’ powerful and famously beautiful Samogitian wife, Birutė; lastly, he signed treaties with the new grand master, Conrad Zöllner von Rotenstein, promising to become a Christian within four years and ceding western Samogitia to the Teutonic Order as soon as the crusaders could conquer it.

  Vytautas escaped from prison through a ruse: the short, slight, beardless prince donned his wife Anna’s clothing after an overnight stay and was out of the castle before the exchange was noticed. By early November he had made his way to a sister who had married Duke Janusz of Masovia. However, he could not stay there – Jogaila was already on his trail. Soon Vytautas appeared before the grand master in Marienburg, offering to become a Roman Christian and to join him in war against the usurper. Vytautas was at least safe in Prussia, though he was in the hands of his father’s enemies. Would Vytautas, like Kęstutis some years before, have to find some way to escape from the grand master’s fortress? And if he did, where would he go?

  Conrad Zöllner was uncertain as to the best policy to follow. He had little experience in diplomacy, and he had never met either Vytautas or Jogaila personally. The policy he eventually decided upon was too delicately balanced to remain upright long – he baptised Vytautas (under the name of his sponsor, Wigand) and his wife and daughter (both generously released by Jogaila), then established them in western Samogitia, to rule the pagans who had surrendered; however, he carefully kept Vytautas under close supervision and assured Jogaila that he would prevent Vytautas from causing any trouble to the Lithuanian grand duchy. Neither Vytautas nor Jogaila were amused.

  When Vytautas had appeared in Samogitia numerous warriors had hurried to his side. As much as they hated his Christian allies, they hated the murderers of Kęstutis and Birutė more. To have their prince back, they willingly co-operated in removing the pagan priests and desecrating the holy woods. They assisted in building primitive castles along the Nemunas River, and when Jogaila and Skirgaila declared war on Vytautas they fought against them enthusiastically. Vytautas possessed all the virtues of a great pagan prince, and it did not matter to them that he was nominally a Christian. To paraphrase the Polish chronicler Długosz, Vytautas was of all of Gediminas’ descendants the greatest in the manly virtues and, for the most part, honest,
civil, and humane.

  Długosz was prejudiced, of course, since he was the court historian of Jogaila’s heirs, the Jagiellonian dynasty. Długosz was the most widely read chronicler of the era, partly because he was a good writer. His Latin was solid, his anecdotes pithy, and he understood how to move a good story along. But his subject was also very important – the rise of Poland from obscurity and confusion to regional hegemony. One of his major themes was the conversion of Jogaila. Another was the evil nature of the Teutonic Knights.

  Lithuania Becomes a Christian State

  Jogaila did not become a Roman Catholic out of conviction. It was a business arrangement. For Lithuanian dukes, almost everything was business. Even Jogaila’s great passion, hunting, was partly business.

  Jogaila converted in order to marry the heiress to the Polish crown. She was the younger daughter of Louis the Great, who had ruled Hungary and Poland from 1370 to 1382. The nobles and clergy of Poland had chaffed during this unwelcome union, and after Louis’ death they insisted that the kingdoms be separated again. The younger daughter, Jadwiga, who was originally awarded Hungary, ended up in Cracow after Polish patriots refused to accede to the arrangements to marry the elder sister to Sigismund of Luxemburg (1368 – 1437), who had just become duke of Brandenburg. Sigismund, the brother of the Holy Roman emperor, Wenceslas (1361 – 1414), was just too German.28 However, that was the problem with Jadwiga’s proposed groom as well. A minor Habsburg prince, without many lands or promise of more, he was still a German. Then, once the Polish nobles and clergy broke the engagement, they found the number of potential bridegrooms limited; as a result they turned to Jogaila, who responded favourably to the suggestion that he could become the real ruler of Poland if he were willing to make Lithuania a Christian state. Inquiries to Pope Urban VI received a favourable response. The Polish nobles and clergy were also attracted by the fact that Jogaila and they had a common enemy – the Teutonic Order.