The Order’s newly acquired territories aroused the interest of both emperors and popes. In the Golden Bull of Rimini in 1226, the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II endowed the Grandmaster of the Order, Hermann von Salza, and all his successors as Princes of the Empire giving them feudal rights and legal authority over this new missionary territory. Hermann, renowned for his statesman-like qualities, remained on good terms with both the Emperor (despite his subsequent excommunication), and the Pope. He later mounted an honour guard of Teutonic Knights at the Holy Sepulchre proclaiming Emperor Friedrich II King of Jerusalem in 1229. In 1234, Pope Innocent IV took the territory controlled by the Order under his protection, giving them free reign in their territories. The document to this effect issued by the Pope stated, ‘The Order should possess Prussia in such a way so as it could not be overthrown by any other power.’(3) This effectively closed the door on claims to Prussia by either the Polish crown or the Holy Roman Emperor. The Teutonic Knights may never have been able to match the power of the Templars or the Hospitalers in Outremer (the Holy Land), but ultimately they achieved something that neither the Templars or Knights of St John ever managed; they established a lasting Knight’s state that was legitimised and sanctified by the Pope, in arguably the most successful crusade of them all.
Whilst the Teutonic Order consolidated its position along the southern Baltic, their brothers to the north — in the German Livonian Order (Schwertbrüder) — sought to capitalise on the defeat of Kievian Rus at the hands of the invading Mongols. The Mongols having razed Kiev and killed every living soul there in 1240, they then galloped on to destroy the Polish army of Boleslav the Chaste, in March 1241. One of the great unknowns of European history is what would have happened if the ruling Khan had not died and Genghis Khan’s all-conquering grandson, Batu the Splendid, had not, at this point, left the battlefields of Eastern Europe to throw his hat in the ring for succession as Khan.
The Schwertbrüder brethren, sensing an opportunity to advance their territory and Latin Catholic rite, crossed the Narva river with the wealthy Russian trading city of Novgorod firmly in their sights — the city was ruled by Prince Alexander Yaroslavovich who was given the additional sobiquet of Nevsky (after the battle of the river Neva) after he defeated the invading Swedes at the river Neva. The Order, which was heavily outnumbered, was defeated and had to retreat back across the Narva to their strongholds in Livonia. Alexander Nevsky dealt the Livonian knights another defeat at the lake Peipus in 1242. Eisenstein’s famous film Alexander Nevsky paints this as the epic ‘battle on the ice’ between Slavs and Teutons, the same way the Poles depict their victory over the Teutonic Order at Tannenberg. But these are mythical battles that are supposed to demonstrate the unbroken history of adversary between the Slavic and Germanic peoples; they neglect the fact that the Poles, Lithuanians and Russians slaughtered each other with equal abandon. Nevertheless, neither Nevsky Novgorod, nor Tannenberg, marked the end, but merely the beginning of a long tug of war for control of the Baltic between Germans, Scandinavians and Slavs.lxix
By 1283, the crusading Orders had come to control the whole Baltic coast, all the way up to Riga and Reval (in the modern day Baltic states), cutting off Poland’s access to the Baltic sea. The Knights were only supposed to help the Polish dukes kill or convert the Prussians and thereby help them secure the territory for the Polish crown. Instead, the Order decided to stay and enjoy the fruits of their own labours. The Order’s decision to remain began a long conflict, lasting for centuries, between Poles, Germans, Russians, Lithuanians and Scandinavians, as well as between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches for control of territory and the lucrative Baltic trade routes that the Order had done so much to establish.
In 1291, with the fall of the city of Acre (the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land), the Order decided to relocate their headquarters to Venice, where they awaited a renewed crusade to rescue the Holy Land. Yet this crusade never came. So in 1309, the Teutonic Knights moved to their new purpose-built, awe-inspiring crusader castle and fortress; the Marienburg on the Baltic. With Jerusalem and Acre gone, and the crusades to the Holy Land having effectively been rolled back, the Baltic became the new staging ground for knights from across Europe. With papal endorsement they readily joined this crusade to the East, with the promise of the remission of their sins and the added advantage of plunder much closer to home. The Order also attracted Knights by their extravagant hospitality, hosting tournaments and big game hunting. The Order advertised the annual ‘Reyse’ and achieved its aim of a general call to arms by Pope John XXII for another crusade in 1325. This papal encyclical elevated the Prussian wars to the level of those in the Holy Land and by the late 1300s, the knights were able to expand their territories to control an area from eastern Pomerania to the furthest eastern reaches of the Baltic in modern day Estonia.
The Black Death was a major interregnum, and the numbers of people moving east plummeted as the plague raged across Europe from France to Russia between 1348–52. As the Black Death took hold, it thinned the Order’s ranks and diminished its revenues, as demands for grain (its main export) fell. Consequently, at the turn of the fifteenth century their power began to wane. The Order had proved itself adept at surviving in contested territories by playing one tribe off against another and could endure, as long as it did not have to fight all its enemies at once. The Poles and Lithuanians had, to date, shown no less antipathy for one another than they had for the Order. But in 1385, when the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Władysław II Jagiello, united the royal houses of these former enemies by marrying the heiress to the Polish throne, the Order faced a dangerous new coalition.
By 1390 even the Lithuanian royal family had converted to Christianity; the papal mission to Christianise the ‘heathens’ had therefore, to all intents and purposes, been a success.(5) The Order’s role now became somewhat superfluous and the flow of knights began to dry up; subsequently they had to recruit less reliable mercenaries. Soon they began to see their predominant position threatened, not only by constant wars with their neighbours, but also by the growing power and resentment of the settlers, major landowners and Hanse merchants, whose settlement of the eastern Baltic the Order had facilitated. The resentments of the settlers were not dissimilar to those of the American colonists who would come to demand ‘no taxation without representation’.
In 1410, at the Battle of Tannenberg (known in Poland as the Battle of Grunwald), the Order finally experienced a disastrous defeat at the hands of an alliance of Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Tartars and other assorted mercenaries. Their best knights were cut down in battle and in the ensuing slaughter, their wealth and power was sapped and their reputation tarnished, which reduced their ability to gain willing and able new recruits even further. It was a defeat from which they never recovered, though not for want of trying. A small cohort of 3,000 knights managed to hold their fortress headquarters at Marienburg where the first Peace of Thorn was signed in 1411, and as a result, the Order lost only the relatively small area of the south-east of Kulmerland to Poland and Samaitia to Lithuania. However, it was only an interlude in the fighting, which did not end until 1466. More significantly, this defeat effectively marked the end of the Baltic crusades. The Order plotted its revenge on the twin kingdoms of Poland and Lithuania, relying increasingly on mercenaries who were paid for by imposing taxes on the landowners, towns and their merchants, thus alienating their natural support base — the very people that the Order had first encouraged to settle in these lands. These German settlers, along with the Germanised indigenous populations, began to look to the Polish crown to benefit from what one historian described as, ‘The practical liberty which Polish anarchy seemed to offer.’ Another suggested the desire of the settlers was, ‘To win the anarchic freedom possessed by the Polish upper classes.’(6) In other words the settlers’ descendents wanted to be left alone and not constantly be called upon for either military service for the Order’s never-ending adventures, or pressed for ever more taxe
s.
In 1440, the Junkers (Jung-herr or ‘young lords’) and burghers in Prussia established the Prussian League, an outright challenge to the authority of the Order within Prussia. One can argue this became a fifth column within the state that the Order had created; it was to become successful too. By 1454, the Prussian League had twenty-one towns under its control and felt strong enough to declare its independence from the Order. On 14th February that same year, the Order ignominiously rode out of its fortress headquarters in Königsberg without either giving or receiving any resistance. Hans von Baisen, a rebel knight and leader of the Prussian League’s revolt, rode to the Polish capital at Krakow and offered Prussia to the Polish king, Casimir IV. In effect, Poland was handed what it had long sought on a plate; a fortified landscape that was irrigated and tilled, together with prosperous German-speaking merchant trading cities; a state which Poland had done nothing to create and which contained virtually no Poles. The Polish king, then emboldened, declared war on the Order. He rode off to receive his tributes in Danzig and Elbing, two cities whose leading merchants had become increasingly antagonised by the Order’s interference in their internal affairs, and greater tax demands to fight its battles. Instead of receiving a welcome in most of the regions where he travelled, Casimir was confronted by a landscape that had disintegrated into a bitter civil war that lasted for thirteen years. At the ensuing Battle of Konitz, even though Casimir’s forces outnumbered the Order’s troops by four to one, he still barely escaped with his life, and his forces suffered defeat. Consequently, Casimir became increasingly reliant on the significant funds of the Prussian League, and the merchants of Danzig in particular, to continue his campaign. It was ironic that the League had to raise even more revenue from the very settlers who had betrayed the Order over taxation to help support a foreign crown to rid them of the Order, all in the hope that they might one day enjoy greater liberty. It was eventually the Danziger and Elbinger ships which destroyed the Order’s fleet at the Battle of Zarnowitz. This broke the back of the increasingly impoverished monastic forces.
The Grandmaster finally surrendered in 1466 and signed the second Peace of Thorn. This time the Order lost all of West Prussia and Danzig to Poland, only retaining East Prussia. The Peace of Thorn stated that half of the future Order’s knights must be Poles, and that the Grandmaster had to pay homage to the King of Poland at the Guildhall in Thorn (Torun), for his remaining Prussian possessions. Poland in turn began its own process of colonisation, bringing in settlers to colonise West Prussia. Meanwhile, the decline in the fortunes of the Order meant the rise in the fortunes of those who had wanted to be free of them. For example, the Junkers who were a special class of settlers and whose title became synonymous with Prussia. Like the settlers who colonised the vast open spaces of the Americas, they came to regard their hard won gains on the frontiers of the wild East as their own. The Junkers had been the Order’s warrior tenants who were given leases on the land for their services in battle. However, as the Order’s influence and wealth declined after the colossal defeat at Tannenberg, these leases became mortgages and titles granted for cash. The Junkers were military men who had won their land by the sword and had turned it from swamp or forest into workable arable land. They were disciplined, organised, thrifty, spartan, hard-working and tough as old boots. This frontier class came to embody the spirit and character that turned one of the poorest backwaters in Europe into a place worthy of settling. The flat open plains of the Baltic had no natural defences; they were always open to attack by neighbouring powers who sought to control the Baltic trade routes. In time, a new kingdom emerged in Prussia, and these hardy settlers formed the backbone of its military caste.lxx
But the final acts of the crusader state still had to be played out. Conflict between the Order and Poland never lay far below the surface, and in 1498 trouble began to simmer again when the Order elected a wealthy new patron, Friedrich of Saxony, the brother of the Elector of Saxony, as its head. Friedrich refused to pay homage to the Polish crown demanding the return of West Prussia. After Friedrich’s death in 1512, the Order, in the tradition of electing ever-wealthier patrons to fill its coffers and finance its military adventures, elected Albrecht von Hohenzollern, the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. Albrecht allied himself with the King of Denmark in 1517, refusing to admit any more Poles to the Order and again demanding the return of West Prussia, this time adding that compensation was due for its fifty-year occupation. In 1519, Albrecht launched a damaging but inconclusive war for Prussia against King Sigesmund of Poland (who was incidentally also his uncle), which ended in 1521 with an agreed four-year truce. At this stage, Martin Luther played an important role in bringing the 300-year history of the Order and its hold on East Prussia to an end. After going to hear Luther speak at Nuremberg, Grandmaster Albrecht formed a close association with the preacher who told him to take a wife (the Order had been celibate) and make Prussia a bulwark of the Protestant Reformation by turning her territory into a worldly power. Luther’s aim was to create a Protestant bastion outside the confines of the Holy Roman Empire, which had condemned him as a heretic.lxxi
In 1525, Albrecht converted to Lutheranism and became the first European ruler to seize the chance to confiscate much of the land and wealth of the Catholic Church, as well as that of the Order in East Prussia. His aim was to establish his own dynasty and strengthen his hand against his uncle, the Polish king. The Emperor and the Pope protested, but the Holy Roman Empire had greater concerns within its own borders; a major peasant uprising, inspired by Luther’s teachings, had broken out across swathes of the German states.lxxii Albrecht used his new-found wealth and power to negotiate a compromise with his Polish uncle, whereby he and his successors were henceforth granted East Prussia as a hereditary duchy by the Polish crown.lxxiii
The Order, or what was left of it after Albrecht’s expropriations, first retreated to Courland-Livonia before later moving its administrative headquarters to distant Mergentheim (in Franconia in modern day Western Germany). Increasingly it came to align itself with the royal house that had become the defender of the Catholic faith — the Habsburgs. But without a state, and with its wealth and power gone, it remained a largely symbolic institution, one that amazingly, like the Order of Malta, continues to exist to this day.
The way the Order is presented in modern Poland is something akin to a satanic cult. The true legacy of the Order, and the role it played in moulding Prussia, is better summarised by Desmond Seward:
The settlement of Prussia was the outstanding colonial achievement of the Middle Ages, the most successful economically. Nearly a hundred towns and a thousand villages were established under the brethren’s auspices… Most Prussians were reduced to serfdom, though steadily Germanised. Marshes were drained, sea walls built, forests cleared and sandy soil conquered by the heavy German plough. Customs duty was levied, but there were no inland tolls on the well kept roads or the rivers, which were patrolled by the brethren. Understandably, there was little brigandage. By the fourteenth century, Prussia had the most contented peasant freeholders in Europe… The knights had learnt the value of commerce in the Levant and kept a fleet of merchantmen. They copied Templar banking methods, bills of exchange being accepted at larger commanderies. They enforced a uniform system of weights and measures and minted their own coinage… they obtained papal permission to trade, exporting grain in vast quantities … and also yellow amber, much prized for rosaries, of which the Order had a monopoly. In addition the Order exported silver, timber, salt, cloth, wax, furs, horses and falcons… Every landowner, whether German noble or Prussian chieftain, held his land from the Order in return for military service. They also all had to pay annually with a bushel of grain, with another for every ‘plough’ of land… It is this uniformity of law and administration, coordinating foreign policy, internal government, church affairs, trade and industry, which gives substance to the claim that Prussia was the first modern state.(7)
If ever there was a Camelot it w
as the knights’ imposing palace-fortress of the Marienburglxxiv and if ever there was a true knights’ state then it was Prussia. It is claimed that Wagner’s hero, the Minnesänger Tannhäuser, was based on a character from the Order. The Ordenstaat (Teutonic Order’s state), has been described with some justification as medieval Germany’s ‘greatest achievement’, which considering the German Reformation, and Enlightenment, is no small claim.(8)
THE COMING OF THE PRUSSIAN STATE
In 1417, Friedrich Hohenzollern, the Burgrave of the small but wealthy territory of Nuremburg, purchased Brandenburg for 400,000 Hungarian golden guilders.(10) His reason for this was that Brandenburg was one of the seven states that elected the Holy Roman Emperor. He made a shrewd investment, as this electoral vote could be used to bargain political concessions, territories and gifts from prospective new emperors. The fact that the Hohenzollern family, whose origins were in Franconia and who held disparate possessions across the empire, came to inherit the lands of the Teutonic Order was an accident of history. The Order elected its Grandmasters and it was simply the luck of the Hohenzollerns that the last one they chose was of their clan. Despite the sought-after addition of East Prussia, Brandenburg remained the most important of their possessions, and as with all royal houses, they continued to add to their holdings by a series of dynastic marriages between 1525–1618.lxxv From the mid 1500s the House of Hohenzollern began to amass more power and influence both within and beyond the Holy Roman Empire. This brought them into conflict, first with Poland and then with Habsburg Austria. The House of Hohenzollern’s main objectives during this period were to consolidate the disparate domains they had acquired and, most importantly, to gain an extensive coastline with greater access to the sea,lxxvi so as to exercise more control over lucrative Baltic trade routes. In 1619, at a time when the Continent was wracked with religious and dynastic conflict, Georg Wilhelm, the first Hohenzollern ruler in whose person the dynastic houses of Brandenburg-Prussia were unified, succeeded his father as ruler over the Duchy of East Prussia. (For more information on the complex dynastic history of the House of Hohenzollern’s claim to Brandenburg-Prussia see the footnote lxxvi).
Death of a Nation Page 21
