The Monks of War

by Desmond Seward

  5. The commandery of the Teutonic Knights at Rheden in West Prussia as it must have appeared at the end of the thirteenth century. The four wings form chapel, dormitory, refectory and chapter house, fortified on the outside, while the cloisters are on an upper floor in case enemies should penetrate to the courtyard

  Triumph on the Baltic was offset by Outremer's collapse. In 1271 Starkenberg was lost, in 1291 the German Hospital vanished with Acre. Armenia was falling to the Mamelukes, Greece to the Byzantines. The Hochmeister waited in vain at Venice for a crusade to recover the Holy Land. In 1308 the Archbishop of Riga, hoping to regain control of the city, asked Pope Clement V to suppress the Teutonic Order because of its luxury, cruelty and injustice; accusations of sodomy and witchcraft followed. In 1309 Hochmeister Siegfried von Feuchtwangen moved the Grand Commandery to Marienburg, the Prussian Landmeister's post being merged with that of Hochmeister.

  6

  THE ORDENSLAND: AN ARMY WITH A COUNTRY

  Marienburg (known as 'Malbork' since 1945) was the symbol of the Order: a combination of fortress, palace, barracks and monastery. It dominated the Vistula, down which not only Prussian but Polish trade reached the Baltic. Like all military religious, the celibate brethren had a deep and tender devotion to the Virgin Mary, an enormous yet gracious statue of whom dominated the castle. None the less the splendour of their court was greater than that of many of the visiting European kings. It was presided over by the reigning Hochmeister, whose white habit was embroidered with a great black-and-gold cross, charged with the Hohenstaufen eagle and the lilies of St Louis. He was always escorted by four carefully chosen knights-in-waiting, the Hochmeister companiones who stood at his side to prevent a repetition of the tragedy of 1330. (That year Werner von Orselen, a demanding superior noted for piety, had severely punished a certain Johann von Biendorf for gross immorality; one dark November evening as the Hochmeister was attending Vespers in his private chapel the revengeful knight stabbed him to death.) Hochmeisters more than rated such semi-regal state; their Prussian and Livonian lands were outside the empire so they were real sovereigns. Under Hochmeister Luther, Duke of Brunswick, a talented musician, the great castle became another Wartburg, the setting of scenes worthy of Tannhäuser. There, were frequent song-contests and on one occasion a pathetic figure appeared from the past, a Prussian harpist who sang in his own almost forgotten tongue. Jeering, the knights awarded this ridiculous ghost a prize, a sack of rotten walnuts, before sending him back to the forest and his sacred oak trees. Marienburg was a truly Wagnerian capital and indeed the minnesinger Tannhäuser seems to have been a Deutschritter for a short period.

  A young knight might serve some years in a frontier blockhouse, but the greater part of his career was passed in the commanderies. He could be posted to the Levant – Greece or Armenia – while there were commanderies in Italy and even France, though after the thirteenth century few brethren lived outside Germany or the Baltic lands. It has been suggested that Hermann von Salza himself gave the Order a bureaucratic tradition derived from Norman Sicily, and certainly the administration followed a uniform pattern from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.1 Officials developed the art of scientific book-keeping; financial and legal experts were employed and archives meticulously kept, including a personal dossier on each brother. Chaplains and sisters ran sixty hospitals and refuges for the destitute. Each Landkomtur was responsible for his district's colonization, later tax collection and the maintenance of roads and schools, as well as defence, while he was also president of the provincial Landthing. The chief relaxation of all brethren was hunting; not for pleasure but the necessary extermination of primeval fauna – wolf, bear, lynx, elk, aurochs and bison – which terrorized the settlers or ruined their crops. If elderly or infirm, brothers retired to a kind of Chelsea Hospital at Marienburg. Most came from the Rhineland or Westphalia – Westphalians predominating in Livonia. The latter, more dour and reserved, disliked the Rhinelanders' noisy volatility and tended to think them frivolous. Celibacy did not seem so ghastly a privation to the medieval mind as it does to the modern, and the Order offered an adventurous career to landless younger sons; a fair number of ne'er-do-wells took the habit in order to avoid criminal proceedings. For fear of nepotism the brotherhood would not admit Prussians, whether German or Balt, after about 1400.

  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. Cultivation spread inland from the Baltic and up the lower Vistula until the southern and southeastern borderlands came under the plough. German and Dutch peasants, led by a locator2 who combined the functions of immigration agent and village mayor, were given freeholdings in return for rent in kind. Marketplaces were set up. There were no labour dues, and peasants were not tied to the soil. Noblemen came too, and were granted estates, forming the new gentry.3 An alliance was forged with the Cistercians, the White Monks who had a genius for transforming forest and swamp into fertile farmland. Most Prussians were reduced to serfdom though steadily Germanized. Marshes were drained, sea walls built, forests cleared and the 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. In 1263, at the height of the Prussian rebellion, they obtained papal permission to trade, exporting grain in vast quantities from their estates. The Gross-Schaffer ('Grand Shepherd'), directly responsible to the Gross-Komtur at the Marienburg, was in effect a Minister of Trade; he managed the cornlands of West Prussia, employing salesmen to buy and sell grain. The Gross-Schaffer of the Grossmarschall at Königsberg supervised those of East Prussia and also the export of yellow amber, much prized for rosaries, of which the Order had a monopoly. In addition, the Ordensland exported silver, timber, salt, cloth, wax, furs, horses and falcons. It imported iron, copper and wine from western Germany, wool and, later, cloth from England. As a member of the Hanseatic League, the Hochmeister was well able to sympathize with the ambitions of his merchants, who grew rich and had every reason to be grateful to the Order. They belonged to 'weapon clubs', riding fully armed with the Knights in emergencies.

  Every landowner, whether German noble or Prussian chieftain, held his land from the Order in return for military service. He also had to pay annually a bushel of grain, with another bushel for every 'plough' of land. (A plough was four hides, a hide being the minimum needed to feed a family.) Immigrant smallholders paid tithes in grain and silver – as much as a mark of silver per hide. The annual levy on millers could be fifty marks of silver in addition to payments in grain. Innkeepers paid four marks. Even the poorest Prussian serf, farming a single hide, had to contribute two-thirds of a bushel of wheat, rye or oats and had to perform specified labour dues on the Order's land.

  When a Hochmeister died, the Gross-Komtur summoned the Land-Komturs (senior commanders) of Germany, Prussia and Apulia as the first stage in an electoral system designed to avoid lobbying. They nominated a president who selected twelve electors – seven knights, four sergeants and a priest – each one joining in the process of selection as soon as he was chosen. When the twelve were complete, they elected the new Hochmeister. He was a limited monarch, whose bailiffs comprised a council rather like a modern cabinet of ministers and whose household revenues were kept separate from those of the Ordensstaat. One law governed Prussia, that of the Hochmeister and his council, applying to laymen and clerics alike. The Church was very much the servant of the knights' state. There was no archbishop, and all four bishops were pries
t-brethren of the Order. It is this uniformity of law and administration, co-ordinating foreign policy, internal government, church affairs, trade and industry, which gives substance to the claim that Prussia was the first modern state.

  The Ordensland could boast a literature, although, like most contemporary princes, many of its rulers could neither read nor write.4 Several brethren wrote biblical commentaries, among them Heinrich von Hesler (fl. c. 1300) and the Ermeland canon Tilo von Kulm (fl. c. 1340). Heinrich's commentaries, Evangelium Nicodemi and Apocalypsis, are interesting for their criticism of the landowners' harsh treatment of the peasants. Hagiography was not neglected, and Hugo von Langenstein (fl. c. 1290) wrote a life of St Martina which was much admired in its day. He also compiled the Mainauer Naturlehre, a strange work which deals with geography, astronomy and medicine. The Order's mystics did not emerge until the end of the fourteenth century, though its first great historians were at work much earlier. The tradition begun by the Chronica Terre Prussie of Petrus von Dusburg – translated into rhyming German by Nikolaus von Jeroschin and continued up to 1394 by Wigand von Marburg, the Hochmeister's herald – would reach its height in the fifteenth century with the 'Annals' of Johann von Pusilge.5 The chronicle of Petrus (fl. c. 1330) has an introduction in which each weapon is sanctified by its scriptural precedents, giving holy war an almost sacramental quality. There were also various translations of the Old Testament, especially of Job and the Maccabees, which, like the chronicles, were read in the refectories.

  Chroniclers also flourished in Livland. Conquest and settlement, the union of the Schwertbrüder with the Teutonic Knights and the early years of 'Marienland' were vigorously recorded as the Chronicon Livonicum Vetus by Heinrich von Lettland (d. 1259). In the next century the story was continued by Hermann von Wartberge. One should also mention a short chronicle in German, Die Riterlichen Meister und Brüder zu Lieflant, by Dietleb von Alnpeke. These early Livonian chronicles strike a noticeably grim note, compounded of savagery and anxiety, even when compared with those of Prussia, which are harsh enough. The German presence on the shores of the northern Baltic was far more precarious than in Prussia – at times the 'Crusaders', both brethren and colonists, saw themselves as a beleaguered garrison.

  The Teutonic Knights' one real aesthetic achievement was their architecture. A typical 'domus conventualis' was a combination of austerity and strategic necessity. By 1300 there were twenty-three of them in Prussia alone. At first these houses consisted of a strong watch tower on the Rhineland pattern, with curtain-walls enclosing wooden conventual buildings, the whole surrounded by moats and earthworks. However, towards the end of the thirteenth century they began to build commanderies of a specific design. Chapel, dormitory, refectory and chapter house formed four bulky wings, fortified on the outside, often with a freestanding watch tower. There were cloisters, but these were on an upper floor in case enemies should enter the courtyard. The brethren's architects evolved a style which, although borrowing from Syrian, Italian, French and even English sources, remained their own.

  6. Brass of the Teutonic Knight Kuno von Liebenstein, c. 1396

  Marienburg was the outstanding example. Here, the original fortified monastery grew into four great wings of several storeys enclosing a courtyard with arcaded galleries on two storeys against such rooms as chapel, chapter house, dormitory, kitchen and armoury. Square towers at the corners were linked by a crenellated rampart along the roof. In the days of the Prussian Landmeisters, the Hochschloss followed the basic pattern: a quadrangle with cloisters enclosing a courtyard, strengthened by towers at each angle. The Marienburg one was built in stone, but the later outworks, the Mittelschloss and the west wing, were of brick. The Mittelschloss contained the great refectory with star-shaped vaulting resting on delicate, attenuated, granite pillars. The Hochmeister's apartments were in the west wing and his personal dining-room, the charming 'summer refectory', centred round a single pillar whose stem supported a mass of decorative brick vaulting. This graceful mingling of brick and stone produced an ethereal, almost mystical effect. The nineteenth-century Romantic poet Eichendorff was so moved by its 'light diaphanous quality' that, standing in the summer refectory, he coined the phrase 'music turned to stone'. There were other great castle-commanderies at Thorun, Rheden, Mewe, Königsberg and Heilsberg. At Marienwerder the bishop's palace was both castle and fortified cathedral in one vast, yet undeniably elegant, red-brick building. The Ordensburgen's sombre history was relieved by the gaiety of their exquisite architecture.

  The commanderies dominated the landscape of the Ordensland. However, there were other buildings in the brethren's distinctive style: walled towns and churches such as the Marienkirche at Danzig with its fantastic red gables. In Livonia, stone was plentiful, and brick was seldom used, but otherwise its architecture was very similar to that of Prussia. Towns were strengthened with massive citadels. At Reval and Narva there were tall towers named Langer Hermann, perhaps to commemorate the brave Landpfleger. The independent-minded Livonian bishops built castles in emulation of their Prussian colleagues, similar to the domi conventuales of the brethren, as the requirements of a dean and chapter were very like those of a Haus-Komtur and his twelve brother-knights. (The twentieth-century SS named their own fortresses Ordensburgen.*)

  Livland differed from Prussia in many ways. The Archbishop of Riga arid his four bishops disputed power with the Order, frequently appealing to the pope and sometimes even to the heathen Lithuanians. So independent of Prussia was the Hochmeister's viceroy, the Landmeister, that some historians do not appreciate that he and his thirteen komturs were no longer Sword Brethren but Teutonic Knights. (He was appointed from two names submitted to the Hochmeister by the Livonian komturs.) His authority was far from absolute and often he had to seek approval from the province's landtag (assembly). However, the settlers were well aware that they depended on the Order for their survival. Largely confined to the towns, they formed a tiny percentage of the Livonian population, being always overwhelmingly outnumbered by the Baltic and Finno-Ugarian inhabitants.6 Riga and the great commanderies of Dunamunde, Uskull, Lennewarden, Ascherade, Dunaberg, Wenden and Fellin were linked by water so that reinforcements could be rushed in should the natives rebel. During the night of 22 April 1343 the Estonians murdered 1,800 German men, women and children before attacking Reval. There they were routed by Landmeister von Dreileve, who swiftly restored order.7

  The Teutonic Order's inspiration has been mistakenly seen as German nationalism by Slav, Balt and German historians alike. If Latin or German were used exclusively in administration, it was because the Baltic languages were unwritten. Prussians were forbidden to live in German villages because they were bad farmers who did not use the heavy German plough. Intermarriage was prohibited because too many natives remained pagan, not in order to avoid diluting German blood. In Samland, Christianized Prussian chiefs were thoroughly assimilated, becoming indistinguishable from the German nobles whose daughters they married, building manor houses and adopting coats of arms. By the end of the thirteenth century, Prussians and Pomeranian Slavs were being admitted into the Order, some becoming komturs. The brethren's prejudices were religious and economic, not racial. They were Catholic Christians first and Germans second. The Ordensstaat's, primary purpose was the extirpation of paganism. The Knights could be ruthless enough when their interests were at stake. In 1331 King Wladyslaw the Dwarf of Poland called them in to repress a rebellion at Danzig, whereupon they kept the town for themselves. The Poles routed the Knights at Plowce the following year, but proved unable to defeat them decisively. Casimir III abandoned the struggle in 1343, ceding Danzig and Pomerania to the Order by the Treaty of Kalisz.

  The paganism of Lithuania was the Teutonic Order's raison d'être. Under Grand Duke Gediminas (1315–41), secure in his forests, the Lithuanians absorbed the Ukraine as far as Kiev, creating the largest state in Europe. Their Ruthenian neighbours began to civilize them, some becoming Orthodox Christians,8 while Gediminas encouraged
Polish merchants and artisans to settle in Lithuania. He began to build a more centralized government and his warriors acquired cannon. Nevertheless, as high priest of such deities as Percunos the Fire God, Potrempa the Water God and, most sinister of all, Dverkos the Hare God, the Grand Duke continued to serve the sacred green snakes and the holy fire of sweet-smelling amber in the magic oak-grove next to his palace at Vilnius.

  There was unending war between the Order and the subjects of Lithuanian Grand Dukes. Its terrain was the 'Wiltnisse' or Wilderness: primeval forest, heath and scrubland with innumerable lakes and marshes. The Knights attacked from the sea, sailing up the rivers; their clinker-built cogs were bigger than any Lithuanian boat and could carry 500 troops. Alternatively they raided through the dense woods and fens after being trained in woodcraft by Prussian trackers. They took their armour and provisions with them on pack-horses; the armour, heavier now with plates for limbs and shoulders, could be worn only when they reached the banks of the Niemen. Besides all the hazards of ambush, they sometimes lost their way beneath the pine trees which hid the sun and the stars, and died from starvation; it was not unknown for brethren to go mad from forest 'cafard'. If taken prisoner, they were sacrificed to the Lithuanian gods, captured komturs being invariably burnt alive in the sacred oak-groves – like Markward von Raschau in 1389. Seventy expeditions were launched from Prussia between 1345 and 1377, and another thirty from Livland.9

  The most important were in the summer, the 'sommer-reysa', waged jointly by the Hochmeister from Prussia and the Landmeister from Livland, synchronized by the Ordensmarschall's careful staffwork – which included scouting, establishing supply depots and assembling ships. The 'winter-reysa' in December and January was a much smaller affair, seldom involving more than 2,000 horsemen who made quick raids from a makeshift camp in enemy territory; there was always the danger of blizzards, which could be even more dangerous than Lithuanians. Summer or winter, if successful, the Knights would return with cattle and prisoners.