In 1230, the advance down the Vistula began. Over the next decade careful progress was made down river towards the Baltic and the Frisches Haff. Supported by regular and significant crusading armies from across eastern Europe, fortresses were built from Thorn (1231) to Marienwerder (1233) and Elbing (1237) on the shores of the Frisches Haff. Forts in the eastern hinterland of the Vistula were erected at Reden (1234) and Christburg (1237), a significantly chosen name. By using local forced labour, and attracting German colonists and Dominican missionaries, these centres became symbols of domination as well as military bases. In 1233 Silesian immigrants to Kulmerland were granted civic rights in Thorn and Chelmno according to the laws of Magdeburg. Rural estates along the Vistula began to be parcelled out to German lords. On its capture, Elbing was immediately colonized by citizens from Lübeck. From Elbing the invaders advanced north-east towards Samland, thereby cutting the Prussians off from the coast, encouraging some to come to terms with the new foreign power. In 1239, a castle was built at Balga on the Frisches Haff. Having assumed responsibility for Livonia along with the Swordbrother rump in 1237, the Teutonic Knights were well placed to complete the encirclement of the recalcitrant Prussians and link their two provinces to create a swathe of Latin Christian territory from Pomerania to Estonia.
The rapid success of the conquest produced a violent and effective backlash by the Prussian tribes of the interior. They allied with the severely discomposed Duke Swantopelk of Danzig, whose nose had been put well out of joint by the Knights and crusaders, who appeared happy to usurp his political and commercial ambitions in the Vistula valley and along the coast towards Samland. The order’s defeat by the Novgorodians at Lake Chud made them vulnerable. The Prussian revolt began in 1242 and lasted for more than a decade. Initially, the order lost most of the conquests of the 1230s. Only in Pomerania and a few outposts such as Elbing and Balga did the order hold on. The technological advantages in open battle, based on heavy cavalry and massed crossbow fire, and dominance of the waterways proved less decisive for the order than they may have hoped. The Prussians were able to use ambushes and the equivalent of guerrilla tactics to deny the order control of territory away from the fortresses, to launch successful ambushes and to achieve some significant victories. However, sieges tended to be beyond them.
Thus exposed, the fragility of the early conquests produced two complementary results. The order prepared for a long, stern war of repression, witnessed by Innocent IV’s 1245 grant allowing a more or less perpetual crusade. At the same time, a subtler policy of engagement with the native Prussians led to the peace of Christburg in 1249, under which Prussian converts were afforded civil liberties provided they adhered to Christian laws and customs administered by church courts, in practice under the thumb of the Teutonic Order. Faced with more severe native challenges after 1260, the policy of creating a specially privileged elite of Christianized Prussians became a lasting feature of the order’s Prussian polity, integrating the few, tolerating the traditional social structure of a complaisant local aristocracy, while discriminating against the many: pagans, the unfree and the recalcitrant, some of whom, if they had the means, emigrated to more sympathetic regimes beyond the Lithuanian border.
The decade after the treaty of Christburg saw the order outmanoeuvre its competitors. The conquest of Prussia was never simply a question of the Teutonic Knights and their German crusader allies against the rest. Crusading was not permitted to interfere with diplomacy, politics and the chance of lasting success, although it contributed to all three. Accommodation for control of the lower Vistula was reached with Duke Swantopelk in 1253 after he had been threatened by a crusade but, more importantly for the order, to pre-empt Polish designs on the area. The conquest of Samland (1254–6) with the help of the crusade of King Ottokar II of Bohemia prevented its annexation by Hakon IV of Norway, who had been offered the region by the pope. The conquest also allowed the order to trump the Lübeckers, who had begun to organize colonization of Samland in 1246. Russian pressure on the powerful east Prussian Yatwingian tribes induced the king of Lithuania, Mindaugas, to seek a rapprochement with the order and accept baptism. This, in turn, allowed for the peaceful building of two strongholds north of Samland and the Kurisches Haff, along the river Niemen, at Memel (1252) and Georgenburg (1259 – another significant name).
The crisis of the Teutonic Knights’ rule in Prussia, in many ways the crisis of the whole Baltic crusade, came with the great revolt of 1260. A general rising of the Prussian tribes or nations almost reversed the tide completely. Aided by Swantopelk’s son Mestwin of Danzig and involving all the strongest Prussian nations, this time the rebellion was well organized and well equipped. The Prussians had learnt from their conquerors. They now possessed crossbows, knew how to construct siege engines and perfected tactics for open battle, no longer having to rely on furtive campaigning in the backwoods. Between 1260 and 1264, two Prussian Masters of the Teutonic Knights were killed, a crusading army annihilated at Pokarvis, south of Königsberg, colonists massacred and many of the order’s forts lost, including Marienwerder, which had been held since 1233. The savage nature of the war reflected the stakes. On both sides, atrocities in the name of faith punctuated campaigns of devastation and brutality. Whole regions were reduced to waste, whole peoples given a choice of death, slavery or emigration. Only with regular reinforcement of substantial crusade armies and the sustained support of the pope and church in preaching, raising men and funds were the Teutonic Knights able to claw back their position. By 1277, most of the Prussian tribes had submitted or had been destroyed. The Yatwingians surrendered in 1283, with many choosing to emigrate to Lithuania rather than bow to foreign rulers and a foreign god. The end to Prussian resistance brought with it the conquest of the Curonians and Letts. In 1290, the Semigallians were subdued. Failed revolts in 1286 and 1295 merely tightened the vice of the order’s rule. In Prussia and elsewhere, the cost of defeat was exile or enslavement, except for a few aristocratic loyalists and quislings. The price of victory was the creation of a confessional militarist state. Although most thirteenth-century states in western Christendom were to some degree confessional and militaristic, Prussia and its dependencies were unique in being so closely defined institutionally and socially by religion and war, the so-called Ordensstaat.45
The German crusades of the 1260s had saved the Teutonic Knights’ hold on Prussia. The status and resources of the crusaders who joined the Teutonic Knights gave them a clear advantage in comparison with the comparatively threadbare recruitment for the Livonian wars of the cross. The first decade of conquest had attracted important Polish nobles: Conrad of Masovia, his son and Duke Vladislav Odonicz; the German princes Duke Henry of Silesia and Cracow, Margrave Henry of Meissen and Duke Henry of Brunswick. With them came burghers from Silesia, Breslau and Magdeburg as well as Lübeck, and lesser lords in search of new lands, for example from Saxony and Hanover. In the following decades, Prussian crusaders included some of the most important figures in German politics, such as Rudolf of Habsburg (1254), Otto III of Brandenburg (1254 and 1266) and King Ottokar II of Bohemia (1254–5, when he lent his title to the new castle of Königsberg – i.e. King’s Mountain – in Samland, and 1267), Albert I of Brunswick and Albert of Thuringia (1264–5) and Dietrich of Landsberg (1272).46 This political weight of support was the more remarkable as it coincided with prolonged and damaging civil war in Germany from the late 1230s. Such foreign adventures may well have served German nobles well in avoiding awkward choices at home. Among recruits were some leading anti-Hohenstaufen figures, but equally the Teutonic Knights were careful not to sever relations with Frederick II and his family. The long struggle between the Hohenstaufen kings and the papacy allowed the order a measure of independence that otherwise would have been impossible. However, to an extent they made their own luck, diplomatic skill proving crucial in handling difficulties with popes occasionally uneasy at the order’s policies and powers. This task was rendered easier by the order’s good relati
ons with William of Savoy, cardinal of St Sabina (d. 1251), a regular and highly sympathetic legate in the Baltic (1225–6, 1228–30 and 1234–42). William generally promoted the order’s interests, in sharp contrast to his bullishly independent successor Albert Sürbeer, archbishop of Prussia 1246–53 and of Riga 1253–73.
One key to the order’s survival lay in its ability to retain control of its own destiny in the face of pressures from German kings, foreign crusaders, immigrant settlers, the papacy, native rebels and neighbouring powers. With their patron still in Prussian captivity, Bishop Christian’s Militia of Dobryzn was absorbed in 1235, possibly with the connivance of Conrad of Masovia, who wanted their property, certainly to the displeasure of some of its Knights. The Livonian Swordbrothers were taken over two years later. The disintegration of Hohenstaufen power after 1250 assisted the order’s legal autonomy and control over lay settlers. In common with contemporary rulers in France and England, the order, as a secular sovereign authority, brooked no unnecessary interference from the pope or local bishops. Even the aggressive papal legate Albert Sürbeer ended his career forced not to make any appeals to Rome against the Knights, having spent a brief period as the order’s captive after a failed coup in Livonia in 1267–8. The difficulty for advocates of papal or ecclesiastical power rested on the remoteness of the Baltic; the divisions and hostility generated by the wars against the Hohenstaufen; the privileges already granted to the Teutonic Knights; and the order’s undeniable military record. In 1243, the number of Prussian bishoprics, potential jurisdictional rivals, was limited and the order permitted to divide possessions two-thirds to one-third.47 The 1245 grant by Innocent IV, no natural ally, of Jerusalem indulgences to all recruits for the order’s wars who ‘without public preaching’ took the cross devolved on to the order the power to summon fully fledged crusades.48 This did not stop subsequent papal crusade appeals or the authorization of widespread preaching by the friars. However, Innocent’s grant established the mechanics of a permanent crusade run by and for the Teutonic Knights without constant recourse to specific papal approval. This was reinforced in 1260 by Alexander IV’s permission for the order’s priests to preach the cross on their own initiative on terms similar to those granted the Dominicans, Franciscans and local bishops.49 In the circumstances of the revolts of 1242–9 and 1260–83, and in the eternal crusade with Lithuania in the fourteenth century, this special status allowed the order to run its affairs as an autonomous business.
The Later Middle Ages
By 1300, the Teutonic Knights were secure in Prussia, Livonia and southern Estonia, over the following generation consolidating their rule through subjugation and selected favour of ‘Old Prussians’ and the sponsorship of trade and rural and urban immigration by German ‘New Prussians’. Eager to dominate as much of the southern and eastern Baltic as possible, the order annexed Danzig and eastern Pomerania in 1308–10. In 1337, the emperor Louis IV authorized the order to conquer the whole of eastern Europe, by which he meant primarily the growing power of pagan Lithuania and its regular allies in Poland, even though frequent attempts were made by successive popes to recruit the nobility in the latter, a Christian power, as crusaders themselves, against Mongols and, confusingly, Lithuania. In 1346, the order purchased northern Estonia from Valdemar IV of Denmark. The reasons for this expensive and sustained programme of expansion lay in the nature of Baltic politics and of the order itself. Expelled with the rest of the Latin Christians from the Holy Land after the fall of Acre to the Mamluks of Egypt in 1291, the Teutonic Knights relocated their headquarters to Venice. It says much for the respective status of the enterprises that, while it had entrenched itself as sole ruler of a large state in northern Europe, at the cost of unimaginable treasure and more blood, the High Masters, as they called themselves, remained in the Mediterranean. It took a crisis on three fronts to persuade the leadership to move north.50
In Livonia, challenges to the order’s rule by the archbishop and citizens of Riga led to a messy civil war in 1297–9 similar to the feuding that had marked the last decades of Christian rule in Acre. The Knights appeared willing to prosecute their rights even by physical violence against the clergy. The protagonists appealed to the pope. At least since the Second Lyons Council of 1274, the role of the Teutonic Knights had come in for critical scrutiny. While the order’s credentials and role as a bastion against the pagan Lithuanians was praised by Bishop Bruno of Olmütz in a memorandum written for Gregory X in 1272, others doubted the order’s methods and motives.51 Baltic crusade appeals petered out towards the end of the thirteenth century, only reviving in the fourteenth. The Livonian conflict added weight to charges against the order that rumbled on at the papal Curia for years. In 1310, Clement V ordered an inquiry into claims that the order was waging war ‘against Christ’.52 Such legal action coincided with concerted efforts by the powerful and still pagan Lithuanians under Grand Prince Vytenis to conquer Livonia and Prussia. Even more alarming was the arrest and trials of the Templars begun by Philip IV of France in 1307 and confirmed by Clement V a year later. For over a generation there had been serious talk about merging all military orders so as to more effectively defend or recover the Holy Land. With the Templars under the cosh, the Hospitallers established themselves in Rhodes (1306–10), moving their central convent there in 1309. The Teutonic Knights followed suit. In 1309, they moved their headquarters to Marienburg in the safety of their own realm, symbolizing their commitment to the continuing struggle against the infidel. Even then, their Christian enemies almost succeeded in their undoing, the Livonian brothers being excommunicated in 1312 for a year.
In the fourteenth century the crusade against Lithuania served a variety of rather different purposes. It provided the Teutonic Knights, who never numbered more than about 1,000 to 1,200 unevenly split between Prussia and Livonia, with necessary reinforcements on the ground and political capital abroad. Crusades legitimized, at times to the scandal of observers, the order’s long struggle with Lithuania, which, in turn, assisted the maintenance of their grip on their own territories. The regular frozen winter and soggy summer raids, or reisen, provided a reassuring focus for Christendom’s longstanding self-image of religious mission. Until 1386, Lithuania remained a vigorous and aggressive pagan kingdom, although hostilities were not concerned with conversion so much as power and profit. More precisely, these campaigns offered adventurous nobles opportunities to show off. Glamorous in repute but difficult, dangerous and sordid in practice, the raids across the wildernesses that marked the Prussian/Livonian/Lithuanian border, were often run by the order as chivalrous package tours, complete with special feasts, displays of heraldry, souvenirs and even prizes. Perfected by Grand Master Winrich of Kniprode (1352–82), these festivals of knighthood became almost de rigueur for the chivalric classes of western Europe, a rather different clientele to the more habitual Baltic crusaders from Germany and central Europe.53 The dozen prize winners who dined at the Table of Honour after the 1375 reisa each received a badge bearing the motto ‘Honour conquers all’, a far cry from the Jerusalem decree of Clermont (‘Whoever for devotion alone, not for honour or money goes to Jerusalem…’). While remaining popular throughout the fourteenth century, especially during truces in the Hundred Years War in the 1360s and 1390s, the strategic significance of these crusading enterprises waned. Their ideological foundation collapsed after the conversion of Lithuania. Promoters and apologists increasingly fell back on what has been described as the language of illusion to justify what had become simply a matter of secular politics.
The longevity of crusading in the Baltic was impressive. From 1304 until 1423, repeated contingents of German recruits arrived. John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, campaigned three times, as did William IV count of Holland and the Frenchman Marshal Boucicaut. William I of Gelderland went on no fewer than seven reisen between 1383 and 1400. Armies could be substantial for summer campaigns (the winter reisen usually accommodating only a few hundred). Duke Albert III of Austria arrived in
1377 with 2,000 knights of his own. It has been calculated that at least 450 French and English nobles made the journey over this whole period, a habit recognized by Geoffrey Chaucer when giving his Knight a suitably grand chivalric pedigree:
Ful ofte time he hadde the bord bigonne
Aboven alle nacions in Pruce;
In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce,
No Cristen man so ofte of his degree.54
Evidence from England exposes networks of family involvement, wide social embrace and the relationship between the Baltic front and other wars for the faith.55 Between 1362 and 1368, during peace with France, knights and their retinues left England for the Baltic on an almost annual basis, reaching a crescendo of activity in the winter of 1367–8, when licences were granted to at least ninety-seven men to travel to Prussia. These ranged from the large and well-funded retinues of the sons of the earl of Warwick, himself a Baltic veteran from two years before, to an esquire, William Dalleson, who was apparently accompanied by a single yeoman, two hacks and thirty marks.56 The exercise could be expensive and dangerous. However packaged, the fighting was real enough. The Marienkirche at Königsberg became a mausoleum as well as monument to the international dimension of the Lithuanian wars; there John Loudeham, killed on a reisa to Vilnius, was buried with military honours in 1391. A number of those who joined the Teutonic Knights also saw service against the infidel in the Mediterranean. Thomas Beauchamp earl of Warwick’s vow of 1365 was regarded by the pope as interchangeable between Prussia and Palestine.57 Humphrey Bohun earl of Hereford was on the Vistula in 1363; he had also been with the king of Cyprus at the capture of Satalia in southern Turkey in 1361, as had one of his companions in Prussia, Richard Waldegrave from Bures in Suffolk, a future Speaker of the English House of Commons (1381).
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