The brethren were dreaded by their adversaries. When in 1336 they besieged and stormed a fort at Pilenai on the Niemen, rather than be captured the Lithuanians burnt all their goods in a great funeral pyre, killed their women and children, and then beheaded each other. An old priestess decapitated more than 100 warriors with an axe before splitting her own head as the Knights broke into the stockade.
Samaiten, the Lithuanian seaboard, was inhabited by a ferocious tribe who prevented the union of Prussia and Livland. The Knights had a man equal to the task, Winrich von Kniprode, who had joined them as a boy of ten and was Hochmeister from 1351 to 1382.10 A jovial Rhinelander, he was elected after an already brilliant military career and soon introduced reforms which revitalized the entire Order. Imposing as Marienburg was, Winrich built a new palace, the superb Mittelschloss with its beautiful gardens. Here he presided with true south German gaiety over a splendid court, welcoming a never-ending stream of foreign visitors for whom he provided sumptuous banquets and entertainments, with music and jugglers. Among those who came were Knights of Rhodes, from their own Order's German commanderies. 11 Tournaments (in which, as religious, the brethren did not take part) were frequently arranged. However, there was wisdom in the Hochmeister's extravagant hospitality, for the papacy had promised the full spiritual privileges of a crusader to those who assisted the Order, and throughout the fourteenth century the princes and noblemen of Europe flocked to fight the Lithuanians. The blind king, John of Bohemia, who died at Crécy, had lost his eye in Samaiten; he was accompanied in Prussia by his secretary, the composer Guillaume de Machaut. Marshal Boucicault, the French paladin, fought at the brethren's side,12 while Henry of Derby, later Henry IV of England, paid two visits to the Hochmeister's court, though this was after Winrich's day.13 No doubt he was enrolled as a halbbruder, a confrere knight. A young Yorkshireman, the twenty-year-old Sir Geoffrey Scrope – brother of a future Archbishop of York – fell fighting at Winrich's side in 1362 and was buried in Königsberg cathedral, where for centuries a window commemorated him.14 Many English and Scots took part in the wars of 'the High Master of the Dutch Knights', while Chaucer's reference to such an episode in the career of his knight is well known:
Ful ofte time he hadde the bord bigonne
aboven alle naciouns in Pruce
In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce
No Cristen man so ofte of his degree.
The Ordensland's campaigns had the attraction of big-game hunting in the nineteenth century. The courtly, charming Hochmeister understood how to make the best use of such enthusiasm.
Winrich tried to raise the spiritual and educational level of the Order. There were to be two learned brethren in every komturei, a theologian and a lawyer. A law school was set up at Marienburg, and the Hochmeister at one time contemplated founding a University of Kulm. So many recruits joined the brethren that there were not enough posts for them; there were probably 700 knights in Prussia by the end of Winrich's reign. He solved the problem by setting up convent houses as well as commanderies. These consisted of twelve knights and six priest-brethren, emphasis being put on the Office and spiritual life. There were four such houses in Marienburg alone.
More junkers were employed in official posts and their levies organized into a formidable militia. However, Winrich protected the peasantry against them, and indeed earned the title of the peasants' friend.15 He was equally jealous of his burghers' privileges, defending them from foreign competition and issuing an excellent new coinage.
Winrich was determined to exterminate 'the skin-clad Samogitians' of Samaiten and their deities, to whom human sacrifice was far from unknown. Two extremely able grand dukes, Algirdas and Kestutis, led the enemy during thirty years of unbroken warfare, but the crisis came in 1370 when a vast army marched on Königsberg and was beaten back by the Hochmeister himself at Rhudav (Rudawa). He lost his Marshal16 with 26 komturs and 200 other brethren, but the Lithuanians, who had lost their standard, never dared face him again. He played off one grand duke against another and kept on friendly terms with Poland. Always an innovator, he introduced ship-borne cannon for the winter-reysa of 1381. By the time Winrich died in 1382 he had secured Samaiten and seized Trakai, a mere fourteen miles from Vilnius. It was the Ordensland's zenith.
But in 1386 Grand Duke Iogaila became a Catholic, married the Polish Queen Jadwiga, and was crowned King Wladyslaw II of Poland and Lithuania. The holy fire at Vilnius was extinguished for ever, and next year Iogaila set about converting his subjects. However, the Order claimed, with some justice, that many were still heathen or Orthodox schismatics. Only recently, in 1377, Grand Duke Algirdas had been cremated with his horses in the forest. As late as 1413 a French visitor, Guillebert de Lanoy, noted that some tribesmen still burnt their dead, splendidly dressed, on oak pyres within the sacred groves.17
The Ordensstaat was strong enough to defy Iogaila's vast empire, as his viceroy in Lithuania, Grand Duke Vitautas, took an independent line and even allied with the brethren, abandoning Samaiten, though the natives still held out in their swamps and forests. Konrad von Juningen, Hochmeister from 1394 to 1407, was an able statesman. He saw clearly that the Polish–Lithuanian Empire would only be united by opposition from the Order, and encouraged Vitautas to expand eastwards. In 1399 the grand duke rode against the Golden Horde, over the Russian plains, with a great army of Lithuanian and Ruthenian boyars. Amongst them, oddly assorted, were the exiled Tartar Khan, Toktamish, and a detachment of 500 men from the Teutonic Order. Tamberlane's lieutenant, Edegey Khan, met them on the river Vorskla, a tributary of the Dnieper. He used the tactics employed at Liegnitz and slaughtered two-thirds of Vitautas's army, pursuing him mercilessly over the steppes. This ended 'Mad Witold's' hopes of conquering the lands of the Golden Horde. He turned on the Ordensstaat. Desperately Konrad tried to keep the peace, besides attempting to secure an alliance with the Khan of Kazan. The brethren possessed fifty-five towns and forty-eight fortresses, and their subjects were prosperous and contented. The Ordenstaat could triumph, so long as it avoided a general conflict with all its enemies. But the peace-loving Konrad died in 1407, his death from gall-stones supposedly hastened by spurning his doctor's remedy – to sleep with a woman.
The untameable Samogitians overran Memel in 1397, occupying the fortress-town which linked the Ordensstaat's two halves, but the brethren recaptured it in 1406. This was the limit of their territorial expansion. They had purchased the Neumark of Brandenburg from Emperor Sigismund in 1402, and their control of the Baltic coastline was not to be equalled until the Swedish empire of the seventeenth century. In 1398 the brethren had landed an army on the island of Gotland, occupied by Swedish pirates, the 'Sea Victuallers', who preyed on the Hansa ships. These were driven out and the seas patrolled. The island was then seized by the Danes, and so the knights returned in 1404 with 15,000 troops and retook it, as well as 200 Danish ships, installing the Hansa in Visby, the capital. Finally, in 1407, the new Hochmeister, Ulrich von Juningen, gave it back to Margaret of Denmark in return for a guarantee to protect the Hansa.
King Wladyslaw did his best to provoke the Order. Polish merchants were forbidden to trade with the burghers of Prussia and Livland, who were already made restive by the Hansa's decline and resented the Order's private trading ventures. At Wladyslaw's request, the Duke of Pomerania blockaded the roads from Germany. Wladyslaw also fanned discontent among the Prussian junkers, resentful of komturs most of whom came from the Rhineland, besides persuading the Samogitians to rebel. Konrad's dying words had been a plea not to elect his brother in his place, since Ulrich was notoriously proud and foolhardy. In 1409 the smouldering border disputes broke into open war. Wladyslaw and Vitautas assembled 150,000 troops, every man they could muster, together with large contingents of Tartars and Cossacks, and also of Czech, Vlach and Hungarian mercenaries under Jan Zizka (the future military genius of the Hussite wars). The Order's entire force – Knights, mercenaries and volunteers – totalled 80,000. Apart from his Polish chivalry,
Wladyslaw's army consisted chiefly of light horse, while the Order's was mainly heavy cavalry save for a few arbalestiers with the new steel crossbows and some artillery brought from Tannenberg. The Livland brethren could not come in time, but the Knights seem to have been confident of victory.
The two armies met at Tannenberg in Prussia, among the Mazurian marshes, on 15 July 1410. True to his role as God's champion, the Hochmeister scorned the suggestion of a surprise attack. The Poles sang the battle-hymn of St Adalbert, whereupon the brethren replied with the Easter song, 'Crist ist enstandin',18 the guns spoke briefly, then the heavy Ordensland cavalry, in plate armour and hounskull helmets, attacked, roaring the old war cry, 'Gott mit uns', a hammer-like mass of gleaming steel. It shattered the left wing of Czechs and Lithuanians, nearly smashing the right. However, the Poles held stubbornly in the centre and their allies rallied. His left wing had not yet reformed, but Ulrich charged with the entire reserve, weakened by the treacherous desertion of Kulmerland junkers. The Poles still held. After many more charges, at the end of a long day, the knights were outflanked, and the battle degenerated into a sword and axe melee while Tartars surrounded the brethren. Their grim and stubborn Hochmeister refused to leave the 'Götterdämmerung' he had brought about, fighting on in his gilt armour and white cloak beneath the great battle banner, white and gold with its black cross and eagle,19 till he was cut down (when found, his body had been mutilated almost beyond recognition).20 18,000 of the Ordensland's army were said to have been killed, including the Grosskomtur, the Ordensmarschall and many komturs, 205 Knights in all. It was claimed that 14,000 of their host were taken prisoner, including a large number of Knights – most of whom were tortured or beheaded – while fifty of their standards were hung up as trophies in Cracow cathedral. Whatever the exact figures for casualties, the battle of Tannenberg was indisputably the Teutonic Order's Hattin.
7. Hochmeister Ulrich von Juningen, killed at Tannenberg, 1410
Heinrich von Plauen, Komtur of Schwetz, galloped from Pomerania to Marienburg with 3,000 men, and, to prevent it affording cover, burnt the beautiful town to the ground. A vast army surrounded him, the captured guns of Marienburg battered the walls and, worst of all, the Order's subjects, even the bishops, gave the Poles a triumphant welcome while Kulmerland gentry sent him insulting messages.21 Yet Plauen held on with cold courage. His brethren's morale had collapsed but was miraculously restored by a vision of Our Lady. After two months Wladyslaw raised the siege and at the First Peace of Thorn in 1411 the Order lost only the Dobrzyn land (south-east of the Kulmerland) to Poland and Samaiten to Lithuania. But it was the end of the Baltic crusade.
7
THE CRUSADERS WITHOUT A CAUSE
Tannenberg marked the end of the belief that 'who fights the Order fights Jesus Christ'. No longer could Teutonic Knights count on a martyr's crown if they fell in battle, since their Lithuanian enemies were no longer pagan. The consequences of their defeat were compounded by severe economic troubles. Depopulation resulting from recurrent outbreaks of plague throughout Europe had steadily reduced the demand for wheat which had been the bedrock of the Ordensland's prosperity.
In The Crutched Knights, the Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz imagines a Polish nobleman's visit to Marienburg in the fourteenth century and his horror at the local Prussian peasantry's down-trodden appearance. In reality they enjoyed better conditions than Polish serfs, many of whom fled to the Ordensland where lords were not allowed to flog them. But by 1410 many Prussian land-holdings were deserted and, because of an increasing shortage of labour, the Knights and the Prussian gentry had difficulty in cultivating their estates. Only the brethren could resort to forced labour, which made the gentry resentful. As early as 1397, those in the Kulmerland had formed 'The League of the Lizard' (Eidechsenbund) to express their grievances.
Just when its revenues were ruinously depleted, the Teutonic Order found itself with insufficient money to meet the indemnity demanded by the Poles at the Peace of Thorun. In 1412 Heinrich von Plauen, who had become Hochmeister, established a Landesrat (general assembly) of the Estates of Prussia, composed of twenty noblemen and twenty-seven burghers. Hoping to persuade them to pay higher taxes, he promised that in future no taxes would be imposed or wars declared without their agreement. But neither nobles nor burghers supported him.
More than a few Knights were angered by the establishment of a Landesrat and resented the way in which brethren who had taken refuge in Germany were brought back to Prussia in chains. Plauen had many enemies within the Order. He also had enemies outside it, especially in Danzig where he had beheaded the leading burghers for welcoming the Poles after Tannenberg.
King Wladyslaw sent a stream of raiding parties into Prussia, and eventually the young Hochmeister, goaded beyond endurance, instructed the Grossmarschall to attack the Poles, but consulted none of his great officers, as he was bound by the constitutions. The Grossmarschall refused to march, forcing Plauen to summon a chapter. This met in October 1413 and deposed the tyrannical Hochmeister.1 During his brief rule he antagonized all his subjects, knights and laymen. He saw his role as that of a visionary prince, not as the governor of an ecclesiastical corporation, and his arrogance cut at the roots of the Order's discipline. It is significant that his supporters were mainly Rhine-landers, his opponents north Germans. Regional prejudices were already sapping the Order's vitality.
His destroyer and successor, the elderly Grossmarschall, Michael Kuchmeister von Sternberg, who led the brethren in the war of 1414–22, knew the Order could not risk a pitched battle. The knights stayed in the impregnable Ordensburgen, riding forth on vicious raids by night. The Poles counter-attacked, entire districts of the Ordensland being depopulated by massacre or famine.2 The pope even listened favourably to complaints by the Poles at the Council of Constance, though the Order's spokesman managed to avert condemnation. The war culminated with a full-scale Polish invasion of Prussia in 1422. Hochmeister Paul Bellizer von Rusdorf made peace, ceding Samaiten and also Nieszawa – the first town given to the Order by the Poles in the thirteenth century. The Deutschmeister (Landmeister of Germany) reproached him bitterly.
In 1430 Hochmeister Bellizer made a final attempt to break the Polish–Lithuanian alliance. There were two claimants to the Lithuanian throne: Svitrigaila, supported by the Orthodox boyars of the east, and Zigmantas, backed by the Poles who led the Catholic magnates of the west. Paul allied with Svitrigaila and in 1431 attacked Poland. In 1433 the Livonian Landmeister and his new friends carried all before them, only to be destroyed by plague,3 while in 1455 the supporters of Zigmantas wiped out Svitrigaila's army, together with most of the Livonian brethren. It took years for the Order to recover its strength in the north.
Bohemia, convulsed by religious war, was not the ally against Poland she had been in the previous century. The Hussites were angered by the brethren's part in Emperor Sigismund's disastrous crusade against them. Hussite armies raided the Ordensland from Bohemia, their strange battle-wagons rolling deep into Prussia. They sang a grim war song, 'We, warriors of God', which ended 'slay, slay, slay, slay them every one' – perhaps they also brought their war drum whose skin was the skin of their blind and terrible leader, the dead Zizka. In 1433 Jan Czapko sacked Dirschau and Oliva.4 The wagenburgs, laagers of armoured farm carts linked by chains, from behind which the peasant brigands shot with small hand-guns before sallying out with flails and scythes, proved as effective as modern tanks. Taborite heretics, the Bohemian scourge, enjoyed ravaging this clerical state, laying waste, torturing priests and junkers to death, and carrying the common people away to captivity. Then came plague, bad harvests and famine. The roads were left to brigands. In any case trade was dying, for the Hansa was already in decline when the Scanian herring fisheries failed in 1425. Medieval currency was based on a bi-metallic standard, and a growing scarcity of silver brought about a steady debasement of the coinage. The Livonian staple in Novgorod was undermined, while Prussian towns were ruined by imports. Restriction
s imposed by the brethren, customs dues and a monopoly of the grain trade infuriated the bankrupt burghers of the Ordensland. Flat, sandy Prussia with its mournful mists had always been a gloomy land, but now it was becoming a desert.*
By 1450 the Teutonic Order's membership had dropped by a third. Men of inferior quality were being admitted. In at least one commandery anybody coming to complain would have his face slapped by the komtur and be told, 'Get out, son of a bitch. So far as you're concerned, I'm the Hochmeister.' Yet there were still Knights who lived their calling. In the fifteenth century an anonymous priest of the Frankfurt house wrote the Theologica Germanica, a handbook of mysticism based on Meister Eckhart, which enjoyed great popularity.† Even in the bewildering days of the Reformation, brethren were to remain faithful to their vows. It is probable that in most commanderies the rule was kept with a fair degree of regularity and much respect for tradition.
By 1430 the Emperor Sigismund II, whose domains included Hungary and Croatia, was increasingly alarmed by Osmanli attacks. He therefore proposed to Hochmeister Bellizer that the brethren transfer their headquarters to Transylvania. A komturei was set up at Severin (on the Yugoslav border of modern Romania) under Klaus von Redwitz to defend the Danube. Unfortunately Sigismund then killed a project which might have revitalized the Order, by foolishly suggesting that its Prussian lands be shared out among neighbouring princes. Immediately the whole plan became suspect, and after a few years the brethren abandoned Severin.5
The foreign policy of Livonian Landmeisters had always differed from that of Prussia, as their opponents were the Russian princes rather than the Lithuanians. During two centuries they fought no fewer than thirty wars with the land of Russ. The Order had never ceased to covet Pskov and Novgorod the Great, especially the latter's vast commercial empire. In 1444, Livonian brethren began a skilful campaign against the republics. Small raids whose primary purpose was psychological were launched across the river Narva. In 1445 able diplomacy nearly succeeded in bringing the Danish king into the war to overawe Novgorod. The merchant state was blockaded, cut off from its trade with the Livonian towns. The Order made use of its monopoly to forbid the import of grain to Novgorod. However, though well conceived, the campaign failed and in 1448 the knights made peace with the Russians. The war had disastrous consequences, ruining the Livonian staple and harming the Prussian ports.
The Monks of War Page 11