About this site
This site is a single-author reference on the history of the Teutonic Order — the military-religious brotherhood that was founded in the crusader camp outside Acre in 1190 and that, for the next three and a half centuries, was a major political, military and cultural force on the Baltic littoral.
Who writes this site
The site is the work of a small editorial team based in Europe, the members of which have, between them, several decades of reading in the Baltic secondary literature and in the principal archives of the Order's territories. The team's particular interests are the constitutional history of the Order, the Order's chancery, the political theology of the crusading movement, and the Order's reception in the German Romantic and Polish national traditions. The team members are not professional academic historians. They are careful readers of the work of the professional academic historians: Boockmann, Urban, Biskup, Labuda, Ekdahl, Favreau-Lilie, Forey, Housley, Riley-Smith, Militzer, Arnold, and many others.
The team identifies itself here, by name, in a deliberate departure from the convention of unsigned reference work. The team's name appears at the foot of every content page, alongside the date of the most recent editorial review of that page. The team is the only body that has written or substantially edited any part of the site.
What this site is
This site is, in the first place, a reference. It is intended to give a careful reader a clear, accurate, and reasonably complete account of the history of the Teutonic Order, in a form that is convenient to read on the web and that is honest about its sources. The site is built on the standard scholarly literature. Every page cites the standard scholarly literature in a Sources section at the end. The site is not a primary source, and it is not a substitute for primary source research. The site is a guide to the secondary literature, and to the primary sources for which the standard secondary literature is the best introduction.
This site is, in the second place, a piece of writing. The team has a point of view. The point of view is that the history of the Teutonic Order is a substantial piece of European history, of the first importance for the modern Baltic region, and that the Order's reputation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — as the embodiment either of German colonial virtue or of German colonial vice — was a distortion of the Order's medieval character. The site tries, throughout, to recover the medieval character of the Order, and to resist the romantic and nationalist narratives of the Order that have shaped its modern reputation.
What this site is not
This site is not a primary source. The team does not reproduce primary sources in their original languages, with the apparatus of diplomatic editing. The team does, in some places, mention the principal primary sources — Peter of Dusburg's Chronica terrae Prussiae, the Cronica conflictus of the Battle of Grunwald, the Chronicon Lyvoniae of Henry of Livonia, the Statuten of the Order — and the site tells the reader where to find them. The team does not, however, provide its own critical editions of these sources.
This site is not a comprehensive academic history. The site is a reference work, not a monograph. The team does not address every scholarly controversy, and the team does not engage in the detail of the historiographical debates that the scholarly literature has produced. The team does cite the standard works in which those debates are conducted, and the team does, in some places, summarise the principal positions in those debates. The team does not pretend to be the last word on any of them.
This site is not, primarily, a German, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian national site. The site is in English, and the site is written from a position of detachment from any of the national traditions that have, at different times, claimed the Order as a symbol of their own national history. The team tries to give a fair account of the German, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian historiographical traditions, and to engage with the Order's complex legacy in all of them.
How to use this site
The site is built as a topical cluster architecture, with seven pillars covering the principal dimensions of the Order's history. Each pillar is divided into several topics, and each topic is divided into a small number of in-depth articles. The site is designed to be read in any order, but a reader who is new to the Order may find it useful to start with the history pillar and to work through the chronological narrative before exploring the more specialised pillars.
The site is also designed to be searched. The site's sitemap is available at sitemap-index.xml. The site does not, at present, offer full-text search; the site is small enough that the topical navigation should be sufficient.
Contact
Suggestions, corrections, and pointers to relevant scholarship are welcome. The site is updated on a regular basis, and corrections are made openly. The corrections are recorded in the QA log, which is a public document.