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 relations 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).
Such recruits saw themselves as answering a higher calling. Sympathetic observers described these recruits as pilgrims. Many of them visited the various shrines dotted around Prussia that offered indulgences to visitors. Even though it is difficult to be sure whether or not those who fought with the Teutonic Knights had actually taken the cross in a formal ceremony, traditional language was still applied, one contemporary depicting Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV of England, as going to Prussia in 1390 ‘against the enemies of Christ’s cross’ to ‘avenge the Crucified’.58 Whatever the precise legal niceties, foreign participation in these Baltic campaigns can only be understood in the context of the crusade and its continuing tradition. This did not mean that the displays of piety and chivalry necessarily transformed behaviour. Henry Bolingbroke in 1390–91 spent £69 on gambling debts and only £12 on alms.59 Secular considerations abided. The order was sensitive lest their commercial rights were compromised by foreign infiltration arriving in the wake of foreign armies. Concerted efforts were made to try to break into the Baltic trade in the teeth of opposition from the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights. Fish wars broke out in the North Sea. In 1373, Edward III of England’s government encouraged a York bowyer to establish a bow-making factory in Prussia. The following year, a Norwich vintner was allowed to try to dump vinegar on the Prussian market, fourteen tuns of Spanish plonk that because of ‘its weakness and age… may not be advantageously sold in England’.60 English merchants settled in Danzig and Königsberg. Lord Bourgchier owned a house in Danzig. This did not make for harmonious relations despite all the free military assistance the Teutonic Knights received. By the early years of the fifteenth century, the English exchequer was paying substantial damages to the Prussian authorities to compensate for trading irregularities. The warriors were not immune. Bolingbroke became involved in a dispute over herring traders in 1391. The same year his uncle, the duke of Gloucester, was authorized to negotiate with the Teutonic Knights, probably over the failed trade agreement of 1388, as well as joining the reisa. In the event, bad weather put paid to both.61
The conflation of the material and the idealistic that patterned the whole tapestry of crusading and holy war could lead to its unravelling. The decades of war in the Baltic had created no lasting advantage to either side. Lithuania had not driven the Germans into the sea; the Teutonic Knights, despite some notable triumphs, failed to restrain the rise of Lithuania or prevent its union with Poland and consequent conversion in 1386. Once their main adversary had abandoned paganism, t
he raison d’être of the crusades and, some argued, of the Teutonic Knights’ rule in Prussia and Livonia itself was called into question. Despite the rhetoric of holy war against a now non-pagan ‘infidel’, the political battle lacked any obvious religious element, as the order jockeyed for position and control by trying to set Lithuania and Poland against each other. With each, the order achieved some successes in the 1390s, coinciding with a revival of foreign military aid, on occasion with larger armies even than those of the 1360s and 1370s. Dobryzn was briefly annexed in the 1390s and Samogitia occupied between 1398 and 1406. Yet the strategy of divide and rule collapsed when Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen, almost all the upper hierarchy and 400 brothers were killed at the battle of Tannenberg (or Grünwald) on 15 July 1410 by a much larger Lithuanian-Polish army.62
The defeat at Tannenberg did not end the Teutonic Knights’ rule in Prussia. Marienberg held out against the Lithuanians and the final territorial losses were minimal. It did not end the Baltic crusade. There had been a significant number of crusaders from across Germany and possibly even a few Frenchmen at the battle, and further reinforcements arrived over the next three years from Germany and Burgundy. But there is no hard evidence that non-Germans campaigned after 1413, perhaps because of the renewal of the Hundred Years War in 1415 following a quarter of a century’s interlude. Already before Tannenberg, there had been a decline in non-German crusades. After, traditional wells of support such as England seemed to have dried completely. From 1423, even the Germans stayed away. It was difficult to persuade onlookers to regard Tannenberg as a Hattin-like defeat for Christendom, not least because it was not. The Council of Constance (1414–18), which healed the great papal schism (1378–1417), witnessed a violent debate between the order’s apologists, eager to gain conciliar approval for a condemnation and crusade against Poland, and the Polish advocate Paul Vladimiri, who with conviction but unsound canon law attempted to cast the Teutonic Knights as unchristian in their wars and alliances and illegitimate as rulers of Prussia.63 Although Vladimiri’s case, including a radical assault on non-Holy Land crusades, gained few adherents, the council effectively conducted a trial of the order’s methods and mission. In 1418, the order escaped censure, but it failed to gain support for a crusade against its enemies. Instead, the rulers of Poland and Lithuania were appointed papal vicars-general in their promised war against the schismatic Russians. Any suggestion that, as some of the order’s more extreme partisans tried to insist, the Poles were unchristian was thereby decisively repudiated. The proceedings at Constance left a stain on the order’s reputation of hypocrisy, tyranny and making war on Christians which proved indelible.
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