Teutonic Knights

by William Urban

  To reduce the Lithuanian ability to assist the Samogitians, the order’s Livonian branch built a great castle at Dünaburg in 1274, effectively cutting the most direct route to Pskov and Novgorod. The Lithuanian grand prince, Traidenis (? – 128 1/2), is supposed to have referred to it as ‘built in the middle of his heart’. He besieged the log and earth castle for four weeks, using every man and every weapon at his disposal. But he could neither take the fortress nor stop the devastating raids by its garrison. Soon a vast uninhabited zone existed in the region between Dünaburg and the highlands.

  The first offensive opened a secure shoreline route to Memel (Klaipėda), the crusader castle at the mouth of the Kurland bay that had been built in 1252 with the help of crusaders from Lübeck. Thence it was an easy ride north along the coast to Kurland or down the narrow, sandy peninsula to Prussia. To widen the land corridor and prepare the way for raids directly into central Samogitia, Master Conrad’s strategy was not that of direct assault, pushing east from Memel, but a flank movement up the Nemunas River. The Westerners were thereby able to use their technological advantages in transport and siege equipment and avoid the difficult problems of campaigning in the great forests and swamps of the interior.

  The first objective was the Scalovian fortress at Ragnit, which stood on a tall hill overlooking the great river. An impressive bastion, it had resisted many attacks over the decades, including one by a strong Rus’ian army. The log and earth fortifications could not be easily stormed, and there was a pond within the walls that provided water and fish for the garrison in case of siege. The natives considered it impregnable.

  In 1275 Master Conrad sent Theodoric of Samland by ship to Ragnit with a thousand men. The advocate debarked his men and equipment and moved them up the hill. When everyone was in place he ordered the troops to attack. The defenders massed their men along the rampart to resist the scaling attempt, providing a target that the crusader archers could hardly miss. After unrelenting missile fire forced the defenders back off the ramparts, the crusaders mounted ladders, poured over the wall and began the usual slaughter. The victors levelled the fortifications by fire and demolition. Then, in a campaign lasting only one additional day, Theodoric captured the fortress at Romige on the other side of the river.

  The Scalovians did not leave those deeds unavenged, but sailed down to Labiau, on the coast of the bay north of Königsberg, and attacked early one morning while the guards slept. They butchered the people and burned the castle. Master Conrad felt obliged to retaliate in turn. He called up his knights and native troops, then raided those parts of Scalovia that were nearest. Nicholas von Jeroschin wrote:

  They murdered so many of the unbaptised that many drowned in their own blood. They captured men and women in their hideouts and brought them back. And while they were there, preparing to retreat . . . the Scalovian chief, Stone God, brought a great army of his subjects together and pursued the brothers’ army. When the Master heard of this, he sent a strong force off to one side and it remained hidden until the Scalovians came up to attack him. Then the brothers sprang out of the ambush, cut down many, and drove the rest into flight.

  By now many Scalovian nobles were sending messengers to the Teutonic Knights with offers to surrender on terms. It was a difficult task even for the officers experienced in border warfare and knowledgeable in the language and customs of the enemy to tell which offers were genuine and which were lures to bring small bodies of crusaders to destruction. More than once the neighbouring Kurs had asked for garrisons for their border castles and had then ambushed the company that was sent. Now that the Scalovian nobles were making the same request, the Teutonic Knights responded cautiously.

  There were many minor combats which even the order’s chroniclers found too repetitious to record, but the result was the same as in Nadrovia – the majority of the Scalovians surrendered and a minority left their homes for Lithuania. In places, and especially along the frontier, which had been depopulated a great wilderness grew up. But the pagans, led by Scumand’s Sudovians, struck back ferociously, raiding as far west as Culm. They even besieged the bishop’s castle at Schönsee in 1273. Such attacks prompted the Teutonic Knights to replace ageing wooden fortifications with stone-walled castles.

  Some Prussians fled to Traidenis, who proposed settling them on the border of Volhynia, probably at Gardinas (Grodno). This came to the attention of the Galician-Volhynian duke, who then ordered a new frontier settlement built at Kamenec on a tributary of the Bug River to protect his lands from attacks coming out of Gardinas and to solidify his control of the trade route north of the Pripet marshes, from Pinsk to Brest and on to Drohiczyn.

  There is little doubt that Master Conrad would have attacked Samogitia next if circumstances had permitted. That land of strong pagans lay just to the north, and raids could be co-ordinated with the order’s Livonian branch. But Master Conrad was not able to move north. He was required to turn his attention to Pogesania, where the Third Prussian Insurrection had begun.

  The Third Prussian Insurrection 1275-83

  The uprising seems to have been provoked by Scumand, whose recent raids had been so devastating that the order’s chief castellan in Pogesania had been sacked in 1276 and replaced by a more daring official. Perhaps angered by subsequent defeats that several of his smaller raiding parties suffered that year, Scumand asked the Lithuanians to help him. They agreed, and in 1277 he led them and 4,000 of his own tribesmen through the wilderness into Culm, where he captured one small castle on the Ossa River, then passed by Rehden, Marienwerder, Zantir, and Christburg, burning all the villages near them and the small forts that lay along his route. Peter von Dusburg described a pitiful scene, one confirmed by the Polish chronicler, Długosz:

  They drove home an indescribable amount of booty and Christians, who were set to eternal serfdom. May God have pity on them! What lamentation there was, when friend wept with friend and people were separated, and it was a trial when children were taken from mothers who were still carefully nursing them; and when daughters were taken from mothers as the pagans parcelled out the prisoners among themselves and handled them shamefully. Oh, how horrible it was, and what a terrible sight some were when their friends saw them. No one could look on their plight without crying.

  Meanwhile, Lithuanian armies following the wilderness paths from Gardinas down the Narew River into Masovia were continuing west, plundering Polish villages and crossing the Vistula River into Kujavia. This was the very situation that had brought the Teutonic Knights into Prussia in the first place – the Piast dukes’ inability to protect the northern frontiers of Poland. It was not just that the raids were terrible, because the crusader raids were terrible too, and probably some of these people had been recent victims of the latest campaign of the Teutonic Knights, resettled in these supposedly safe regions; but the fate that awaited the Polish prisoners was believed to be much worse.

  Although the Christian raids lacked none of the initial terror and frightfulness, there was a somewhat different attitude between Christians and pagans. The Christians resettled most of their prisoners as farm labourers, often as serfs; in short, many such captives continued life much as before. The Christians ransomed some captives and exchanged others, but they rarely sold them on the international slave market. The pagans, being more economically backward, needed fewer serfs and therefore often sold their prisoners into foreign slavery, used them in human sacrifices, or made them into concubines and household slaves. According to the crusaders, prisoners taken by the barbarians were no longer treated as human beings, but rather like human cattle. We know of uprisings among the prisoners, throwing themselves unarmed on the backs of their captors when the pagans halted the slow progress of the line of captives in order to face a pursuing column of Teutonic Knights and militiamen. Desperate times, desperate measures.

  Presumably both sides recognised that some of their prisoners had been taken captive previously, and, acknowledging that these captives had been unwillingly in ene
my hands, allowed those unfortunates to return to their own people. In meetings held before combat to discuss tactics and the division of the booty, native tribesmen insisted that released captives not count as their share of the loot, should the army succeed in overhauling and destroying a raiding party.

  Both sides must have made efforts to provide relief for the victims of raids. However, not even the Teutonic Knights and the bishops were rich enough to provide new homes and lands for every family made destitute, nor had they the bureaucracy to keep detailed records such as would be necessary to reunite scattered families or establish proof of identity, past services, and so forth. This had to be done by personal knowledge and memory, and all the inefficiency which that entails. The Teutonic Knights often resettled their captives in villages under their ancestral leadership and allowed them to retain their arms. Although this policy was often successful in winning over many natives, it worked best when the war was going well for the crusaders. When military operations went wrong, it was a different story. These tribesmen still had the capacity to organise and to fight; and since both nobles and commoners had reasons to revolt, all they needed was encouragement and some prospect of success. When Scumand demonstrated that the Teutonic Knights were impotent to protect their more secure provinces, even the Pogesanians rebelled. The uprising in this long pacified district north of Culm came an as a nasty surprise to the Prussian master.

  The rebels had an immediate and surprising local success. Under the leadership of a Bartian chief they captured the castellans of Elbing and Christburg, probably by a ruse. This Bartian noble, who earned a reputation for cruelty far above the other rebel leaders, hanged a priest and killed a squire in an attempt to terrorise his prisoners; he probably would have caused the officers to perish, too, if a loyal native had not freed them from their chains and helped them to escape.

  That the rebellion failed to spread was partly due to the caution that tempered native hatred and partly to the work of Theodoric, the advocate of Samland, who hurried back from Germany when he heard the news. As the probably biased report of Dusburg put it:

  The Samlanders loved him, and he brought them all together, spoke to all the people, and won them away from the evil error that they had already begun through the devil’s activity. And when this was made known to the Nattangians and Warmians, they turned away from their first evil acts and took a powerful oath that they would remain loyal to the brothers.

  There was only one execution, that of a polygamist whose wives testified against him. Because the frightened Teutonic Knights saw a self-confessed conspirator in any native who continued pagan practices such as having plural wives or cremating the dead, there must have been great opportunities for individuals to turn in personal enemies as traitors. But there was no persecution that we know of. Perhaps there was a deliberate policy of turning a blind eye toward the native sins at this moment. The execution of the bigamist proved that the order would not tolerate open disobedience, but also that the master would not seek out secret sins. More repression might have caused other nobles to revolt while they still could. (Who might have a secret concubine? Did ancient oaths not come to lips anymore?) The master certainly did not want to encourage other tribes to join the Pogesanian rebels. This was a policy of which Machiavelli would have approved. On the other hand, the Pogesanians who had already taken up arms gave the Prussian master no alternative to crushing them by force. Conrad von Thierberg led an army there in the summer of 1277 and returned in the autumn, killing and capturing, and resettling so many of the people that vast stretches of land remained empty thereafter. Many Pogesanians abandoned their homes, fled through Galindia and Sudovia, and were eventually given homes by the Lithuanian grand prince around Gardinas, where they resumed their fight against the Teutonic Knights. The grand prince, by putting confirmed enemies of the crusaders at that dangerous and important place, demonstrated that he, too, was a shrewd politician.

  Master Conrad presumably settled the Pogesanian captives around his new castle at Marienburg, where he could watch them more carefully. He had begun this castle to supersede Zantir, an outdated fort on the Vistula estuary, as the order’s regional centre. In the next century it became the seat of the grand master and one of the largest and finest castles in the world, but at the moment it was simply a stronghold that formed a rough triangle with Elbing and Christburg, enabling the order to watch the former rebels more closely. Like other castles being built at this time and later, it was constructed of brick. There was practically no stone in coastal Prussia, and it was too expensive to import except for use in architectural features such as lintels and capitals. As soon as a brick industry had been developed, all important buildings in Prussia, whether castles, churches, storehouses, or palatial homes, were built of that sturdy material.

  Following the Third Prussian Insurrection, the Teutonic Knights took the Sudovian problem more seriously. Although the tribe had been battered by the Teutonic Knights, the Volhynians, and the Poles, and even by the Nattangians in recent years, it was clearly still dangerous and capable of carrying the war deep into the order’s territories. When Lithuanians came to their aid, the Sudovians were particularly fearsome – but that was only on the offensive, since Lithuania was too far away to assist in repelling attacks unless reliable information gave the anticipated date of a raid. Nobody could afford to have troops sit around and wait for invaders to appear. Alone, the Sudovians were not strong enough to turn back incursions from the German, Rus’ian, and Polish armies.

  In the first major raid the crusaders scored an outstanding success, gathering up cattle, horses, and captives in tremendous numbers. Then, as they retreated, they laid an ambush for the 3,000 angry Sudovians who pursued them. At the cost of six men the Christians killed many of the pagan warriors who clumsily fell into the trap, and routed the rest.

  There were defeats as well as triumphs, though some could be seen as moral victories. A Polish chronicler wrote this in 1279:

  In this year the House of the Teutonic Order fought against the Lithuanians. Two knights of the Order were captured by the Lithuanians, who suspended one from a large tree, then placed his war-horse beneath him and built a huge fire with the intent of cremating them both. But as the horse was being consumed the heavens opened up and a great light descended on the crusader and dispersed the fire in all directions. Then the light ascended into the heavens with the body of the crusader, not leaving behind a vestige or sign of him. Then the watching Lithuanians saw a beautiful maiden ascend into heaven. Believing this to be magic rather than an act of divine goodness, they wanted to suspend the crusader’s associate. This time they built a huge fire of logs. But God did not leave his knight helpless: immediately the heavens opened up and a giant white bird such as no one had ever seen flew down into the midst of the flames and carried the body of the knight back into heaven. The watching pagans cried, ‘Truly powerful is the God of the Christians who thus protects his followers’.

  Problems in Poland and Pomerellia

  The Poles rendered some indirect help in these conflicts, but not as much as they could have had they been united. The Piast dukes had first been fascinated by the fast-changing situation in the Holy Roman Empire, where Rudolf von Habsburg had killed King Ottokar in battle in 1278, and then they watched the Habsburg emperor wrestle with Duke Otto of Brandenburg for influence in Bohemia and Silesia. The Piast dukes were also jealous of one another. After years of dividing the kingdom into smaller and smaller duchies for the many heirs, there had been a sudden series of consolidations. Several dukes died without direct heirs, and their relatives quarrelled over the inheritances. Kujavia was divided among five brothers, but three were childless as of that date, and the family stood united against all outsiders. Silesia was cut into four pieces, each so under foreign domination that the dukes were unimportant outside their tiny possessions. Following the death of Boleslaw the Pious (1226 – 79) there was a struggle for his Cracovian duchy; the eldest son of Casimir of Kujavia (1211 �
�� 67), Leszek the Black (1240 – 88), was the victor.

  The Lithuanians and Sudovians had meanwhile taken the offensive in 1277 and 1278, ravaging vast regions of Volhynia. This lasted until the terrible famine of 1279 brought the pagans to Volhynia to beg for grain. When the grain was sent down the Bug River and up the Narew River, Conrad of Masovia-Czerski (Warsaw) set an ambush, stole the grain, and destroyed the ships.

  Duke Leszek took seriously his obligation to defend the eastern frontier of Poland. Although he did nothing so dramatic as the 1273 invasion of Sudovia that had persuaded the tribes to pay tribute, he defeated an army of Rus’ians and Lithuanians that the Mongols had sent into Sandomir in 1280, and he was personally present to guard against Sudovian and Lithuanian raids in Masovia and Volhynia; in one pursuit of Prussians across the Narew’s swamps he learned the raiders’ hiding place from the howl of dogs who had recognised their owners – this allowed him to rescue all the captives without the loss of a single man. The other Piast dukes, however, did nothing beyond watch one another for signs of ambition or illness; they were unwilling to leave their provinces to fight against the pagans for fear their lands would be attacked in their absence. Leszek the Black did what he could to defend his lands against attacks from the east, but he had little authority in the west, where the bulk of the Polish population and wealth was located.

  This situation fed anti-German sentiment in Poland; patriots found it easier to blame foreigners than themselves for their nation’s difficulties. While this sentiment was mainly directed against the rulers of Bohemia and Brandenburg, who were rightly suspected of seeking their own aggrandisement from Polish troubles, the Piasts and their nobles and knights were suspicious of everyone; without making the Teutonic Knights prominent among their list of dangerous neighbours, they did not exclude them from that number. The political tensions created a climate of distrust of all things foreign, so that eventually Poles saw dangers everywhere. Strong states and confident cultures do not fear for themselves. But Poland at this time was weak and, except for Leszek’s energy in the east, leaderless.