Teutonic Knights

by William Urban

  In the ensuing decades each time a Turkish leader arose who dared attack the crusader kingdoms, the West could react only slowly, raising ponderous armies that arrived too late to be fully effective. It was clear to all that some new kind of military organisation was needed, one that could provide experienced knights as garrisons for isolated and endangered castles; which could gather supplies and treasures in Europe and transport them to the Holy Land to feed and equip those garrisons; that understood local conditions and could explain them to newly-arrived crusaders; and was not involved in the dynastic ambitions of the great families. The Westerners found this organisation in the military orders.

  The first military order was the Knights Templar, probably founded in 1118 by a handful of visiting French knights whose religious fervour led them to leave their secular lives for one of worship and service to the Church. Technically the first Templars were probably closer to a lay confraternity than a monastic order, not unlike organisations one still finds in the Roman Catholic world today, performing useful services for their communities. King Baldwin II of Jerusalem gave them lodgings in his palace on the Dome of the Rock. Crusaders believed that this site was the location of Solomon’s Temple; hence the new organisation became known as the Templars.

  The Templars might have remained another obscure and short-lived noble confraternity had not the patriarch of Jerusalem enjoined them to employ their military talents in escorting pilgrims along a dangerous stretch of road from the coast to the holy city. For years the Templars performed their duties in remarkable obscurity and with only moderately notable success, but they took pride in their accomplishments; their grand masters later commemorated the early years of poverty by using a seal that depicted two knights riding on one horse (implying that they could not afford two mounts). In the course of time their talents and knowledge of the land won recognition, and rather than being undervalued their contributions to the defence of the Holy Land were somewhat exaggerated – this was good for recruiting new and more wealthy volunteers. By the 1130s the order was on its way to fame and prosperity. Recruits flooded in, usually bringing ‘dowries’ in the form of land and money that were necessary to support the order’s dedicated warriors in the Holy Land.

  The Knights of Saint John, better known as the Hospitallers, were the second military order. Their foundation was earlier than the Templars’, however, dating to about 1080, and papal recognition came sooner, too, in about 1113, but they assumed a military function only in the 1130s. As their name implies, their original purpose was to provide medical services to pilgrims and crusaders.

  There was considerable scepticism among traditional churchmen about permitting clerics to shed blood; the knights were merely friars, not priests, but they had taken vows and were therefore clerics. One of the oldest traditions of Christendom was non-resistance to evil – it took very little reflection for any Christian to remember that Christ had reproved Peter for raising his sword to defend his Lord from arrest and crucifixion. On the other hand, bishops and abbots had led armies since time immemorial, and numerous popes had blessed armies fighting enemies of the faith. St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153), one of the dominant personalities of his time, provided the ultimate rationale for the military orders in a treatise entitled De Laude Novae Militiae (‘In Praise of the New Knighthood’). He proclaimed, first, the importance of the holy places for reflection and inspiration. He wrote that such places were essential to the salvation of those pilgrims who travelled long distances and endured great hardships in order to pray at sites significant to the life of Christ and His saints. St Bernard attributed special significance to the Holy Sepulchre, Christ’s tomb, a place where all pilgrims longed to pray. Then he made the obvious connection to the importance of crusaders maintaining access to those sites, a task that Turkish rulers were already making more difficult. Of course, dynastic politics in the kingdom of Jerusalem were not helping the situation; the patriarch of Jerusalem lacked the means to support a conventional force of knights or mercenaries; and not even St Bernard had been able to persuade secular rulers to work together during the Second Crusade (1147 – 8). The military orders were the obvious best means of carrying out St Bernard’s perception of the crusaders’ mission – to make the land and sea routes safe for pilgrims.

  The military orders met practical, religious and psychological needs, and were perfectly suited to providing garrisons for the castles in the Holy Land during those long, boring and dangerous times between crusading expeditions. Eric Christensen, whose excellent book The Northern Crusades cannot be praised sufficiently, summarises this in a chapter entitled ‘The Armed Monks: Ideology and Efficiency’.2 Rulers learned that the military orders were willing to serve in places that secular knights would not, or could not. The military orders also responded to deeply felt needs of the human psyche – they reconciled the apparent contradictions between spiritual and earthly warfare. Christians did not have to remain passive when confronted by great evils; nor did they have to wait for a shift in public opinion or the presence of a great leader to raise an armed force. The military orders made the crusade an on-going operation, one that never ceased or rested.

  The armament of the knights of the military orders always remained essentially that current in Western and Central Europe, reflecting minor changes generation by generation. In general each warrior wore mail armour, a helmet and greaves, carried a spear and shield, used a heavy sword with great effectiveness, and rode a large war-horse that was trained to charge into bodies of armed men or against oncoming horses. The only major concessions to climate were the wearing of a light surcoat that protected the mail from the direct rays of the sun, and avoiding travel in the heat of the day. The harsh climate of the Holy Land was, of course, a distinct shock to visitors from Northern Europe, who were often quickly prostrated from the heat and local diseases. This made the presence of the military orders all the more important, in that they could provide advice and example to the newcomers, which, if taken, would convert such newly-arrived crusaders into effective warriors rather than invalids or easy victims of Turkish fighting skills.

  The contrast between the brute force of Western knights and the subtlety of the swift, lightly-armed Turkish and Arab warriors is part of what makes the crusades interesting from the intellectual point of view. There was never a question of two armies simply going at one another, with the stronger and more numerous prevailing. Instead, there was a complex interaction of strategy and tactics, each side possessing advantages and disadvantages, with the commanders weighing and calculating each move carefully before committing their forces to action. That is, weighing and calculating as much as was possible, always aware that the nature of warfare is to flout all plans and predictions. No general, no army, could forever impose order on the chaos of battle. Climate, geography, numbers, equipment and supplies all had their part in determining victory or defeat, but in the end much rested on individual and collective wills. Also, as both Christian and Moslem conceded, on the will of God.

  Other Crusades

  By the mid-eleventh century it was well recognised that enemies of Christianity and Christendom existed outside the Holy Land. Spaniards and Portuguese had no trouble identifying their long struggle against Moslem foes as analogous to the crusades, and soon they had persuaded the Church to offer volunteers similar spiritual benefits as were promised to those who went to defend Jerusalem. Germans and Danes, inspired by St Bernard of Clairvaux, attacked ancient enemies east of the Elbe River. This Wendish Crusade of 1147 overran a bastion of Slavic paganism and piracy and opened the way for eastward migration and expansion.

  Poles were soon aware of the potential of employing the crusading spirit in their own eastward and northward expansion. The Prussians, however, were more difficult to defeat than the Wends had been, and they had no leaders who could be persuaded of the benefits of conversion, as the dukes along the southern Baltic coastline in Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Pomerellia had been. Instead, after initial suc
cesses in the early thirteenth century, especially in Culm at the bend of the Vistula River, their garrisons fled before the pagan counterattacks.

  Technically speaking, the Polish invasions of Prussia were not crusades. They had not been authorised by the popes nor preached throughout Europe by the clergy. But that was a technicality that the Teutonic Knights would correct when, in the late 1220s, Duke Conrad of Masovia and his relatives invited Grand Master Hermann von Salza to send a contingent of his Teutonic Knights to assist in defending Polish lands against Prussian paganism. There was never much thought given to defence, of course. The Poles had planned all along to conquer Prussia. They only needed a little help. Temporarily, they thought.

  2

  The Foundation of the Teutonic Order

  The Third Crusade

  Germans had expected the Third Crusade (1189 – 91) to be the most glorious triumph that Christian arms had ever achieved. The indomitable red-bearded Hohenstaufen emperor, Friedrich Barbarossa (1152 – 90), had brought his immense army intact across the Balkans and Asia Minor, had smashed the Turkish forces that had blocked the land route east from Constantinople for a century, and had crossed the difficult Cilician mountain passes leading into Syria, whence his forces could pass easily into the Holy Land. There he was expected to lead the combined armies of the Holy Roman Empire, France and England to recover the lost ports on the Mediterranean Sea, opening the way for trade and reinforcements, after which he would lead the Christian host on to the liberation of Jerusalem. Instead, he drowned in a small mountain stream. His vassals dispersed, some hurrying back to Germany because their presence was required at the election of Friedrich’s successor, his son Heinrich VI; others because they anticipated a civil war in which they might lose their lands. Only a few great nobles and prelates honoured their vows by continuing their journey to Acre, which was under siege by crusader armies from France and England.

  The newly-arrived Germans suffered terrible agonies from heat and disease in Acre, but their psychological torment may have equalled their physical ailments. Richard the Lionheart (1189 – 99), the English king who was winning immortal fame by feats of valour, hated the Hohenstaufen vassals who had driven his Welf brother-in-law, Heinrich the Lion (1156 – 80), into exile a few years before; and he missed few opportunities to insult or humiliate his supposed allies. Eventually Richard recovered Acre, but he achieved little else. The French king, Phillip Augustus (1180 – 1223), furious at Richard’s repeated insults, went home in anger, and most Germans left too, determined to get revenge on Richard at the first opportunity – as the duke of Austria later did, by turning him over to the new Hohenstaufen emperor for ransom. All German nobles and prelates looked back on this crusading episode with bitter disappointment. Reflecting on the high hopes with which they had set out, they felt that they had been betrayed by everyone – by the English, by the Byzantines, by the Welfs, and by one another. They had but one worthwhile accomplishment to show for all their suffering, or so they thought later: the foundation of the Teutonic Order.

  The Foundation Era 1190-8

  The establishment of the Teutonic Order was an act of desperation – desperation based not on a lack of fighting men, but on ineffective medical care. The crusading army besieging Acre in 1190 had been more than decimated by illness. The soldiers from Northern Europe were not accustomed to the heat, the water, or the food, and the sanitary conditions were completely unsatisfactory. Unable to bury their dead properly, they threw the bodies into the moat opposite the Accursed Tower with the rubble they were using to fill the obstacle. The stink from the corpses hung over the camp like a fog. Once taken by fever, the soldiers died like flies, their agony made worse by the innumerable insects that buzzed around them or swarmed over their bodies. The regular hospital units were overburdened and, moreover, the Hospitallers favoured their own nationals, the French and English (a distinction that few could make easily at the time, since King Richard possessed half of France and lusted after the rest). The Germans were left to their own devices.

  The situation was intolerable and it appeared that it would last indefinitely – the siege showed no sign of ending soon, and no German monarch was coming east to demand that his subjects be better cared for by the established hospitals. Consequently some middle-class crusaders from Bremen and Lübeck decided to found a hospital order that would care for the German sick. This initiative was warmly seconded by the most prominent of the German nobles, Duke Friedrich of Hohenstaufen. He wrote to his brother, Heinrich VI, and also won over the patriarch of Jerusalem, the Hospitallers and the Templars to the idea. When they asked Pope Celestine III to approve the new monastic order, he did so quickly. The brothers were to do hospital work like the Hospitallers and to live under the Templar rule. The new foundation was to be named the Order of the Hospital of St Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem. Its shorter, more popular name, the German Order, implied a connection with an older establishment, one practically defunct. Later the members of the order avoided mentioning this possible connection, lest they fall under the control of the Hospitallers, who held supervisory rights over the older German hospital. Nevertheless, the new order does not seem to have discouraged visitors and crusaders from believing that their organisation had a more ancient lineage. Everyone valued tradition and antiquity. Since many religious houses indulged in pious frauds to assert a claim to a more illustrious foundation, it is easy to understand that the members of this new hospital order were tempted to do the same.

  In 1197, when the next German crusading army arrived in the Holy Land, it found the hospital flourishing and rendering invaluable service to its fellow-countrymen. Not only did the brothers care for the ill, but they provided hostels for the new arrivals, and money and food for those whose resources had become exhausted, or who had been robbed, or who had lost everything in battle. A significant contingent of the new army came from Bremen, a swiftly growing port city on the North Sea that would soon be a founding member of the Hanseatic League. Those burghers lavished gifts upon the hospital they had helped to establish. As the visitors observed the relatively large number of brothers who had been trained as knights but who had been converted to a religious life while on crusade, they concluded that the hospital order could take on military duties similar to those of the Templars and Hospitallers.

  The narrow strip of land that formed the crusader kingdom in the Holy Land was protected by a string of castles, but these were so weakly garrisoned that Christian leaders feared a sudden Turkish onslaught might overrun them before relief could be brought from Europe. The local knights supported by fiefs were far too few for effective defence, and the Italian merchants (the only significant middle-class residents committed to the Western Church) were fully occupied by the need to patrol the sealanes against Moslem piracy or blockade; the most they could do was assist in garrisoning the seaports. Consequently the defence of the country had come to rely on the Templars and the Hospitallers, who had a formidable reputation as cruel and relentless warriors but whose numbers were insufficient to the task after the defeats which had led to the loss of Jerusalem in 1187. Moreover, the two orders frequently quarrelled with one another. The Germans who came to Acre in 1197 decided that their hospital order could provide garrisons for some frontier castles, and they requested Pope Celestine to reincorporate it as a military order. He agreed, issuing a new charter in 1198. The English-speaking world eventually came to call this German order the Teutonic Knights.3

  Technically, the knights in this new military order were friars, not monks. That is, they lived in the world, not in a cloister. But that is merely a technicality, important in their era but hardly significant for ours. What is important is that their organisation was a recognised and respected part of the Roman Catholic Church, under the protection of the popes and with easy access to the papal court. This court, the curia, under papal supervision appointed officers to conduct the final hearings on all disputes involving members of the Church and assigned legates to conduct on-the
-spot investigations of significant crises. In practice, of course, the pope and the curia were too busy to inquire closely into the daily practices of religious orders. Although they could react swiftly when reports of irregular practices came to their ears, it was more efficient to require each order to write out its rules and regulations, then periodically review its actual practices against the precepts of its founders.

  Laws and Customs

  Because the character of the Teutonic Knights reflected its charter, its rules, its legislation, and that body of laws known as the customs, it is important to look at these documents in detail. They were written down in German so that every member could understand them easily, and they were short and clear, so that they could be easily memorised. Each member took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. From the moment the knights entered into the religious life as monks they owned nothing personally; everything was owned in common. In theory they were obliged to tend the sick and thus honour their original purpose for existence. To a certain extent this was compatible with their military duties and their religious devotions, but where it was not such hospital duties were passed on to a special non-noble branch of the membership. The knights attended services at regular intervals throughout the day and night. They were to wear clothes of a ‘priestly colour’ and cover them with a white mantle bearing a black cross that gave them an additional nickname, the Knights of the Cross.