History of the Teutonic Knights
The Teutonic Order — Latin Ordo domus Sanctae Mariae Theutonicorum Hierosolymitanorum, German Deutscher Orden — emerged in the closing days of the Third Crusade as a small hospital brotherhood at Acre. Within four centuries it had become a sovereign monastic state ruling an arc of territory from the Vistula to the Gulf of Finland, and a fixture in the political life of the Baltic. Its history falls into four overlapping phases: a Levantine apprenticeship (1190–1291), a Prussian conquest (1226–1283), the golden age of the sovereign monastic state (1309–1382), and a long fifteenth-century decline that ended with the secularisation of 1525.
Origins at Acre, 1190
The Order’s foundation date is conventionally given as 19 November 1190, when a community of German merchants from Bremen and Lübeck, together with the remnants of the German crusading host outside the besieged port of Acre, constituted themselves into a Brüderschaft — a religious fraternity — dedicated to the care of sick and wounded German pilgrims and crusaders. The fraternity was placed under the patronage of the Virgin Mary, given a hospital in the German quarter of the crusader camp, and confirmed within a year by the papal legate.
For its first decade the fraternity was a minor institution. Its resources were modest: small donations from German donors, a few properties within Acre, and the part-time service of a handful of brethren. Its membership was tiny. Its political standing was negligible. The transition to a military order is conventionally dated to 1198, when the bull of Pope Celestine III recognised the fraternity as a militaris religio — a knighthood bound by religious vows, authorised to bear arms in defence of Christendom.
The Order’s transformation from hospital brotherhood to military order is the work of Hermann von Salza (in office 1209–1239), a Thuringian ministerialis who combined the patience of a chancery clerk with the strategic vision of a field commander. Hermann secured for the Order the imperialis immedietas — direct imperial protection, exempting it from the jurisdiction of the German bishops. He obtained from the papacy the privilege of holding conquered territory in perpetual tenure. He established the constitutional framework — chapter general, regional Komtureien, the three estates of knight-brothers, priest-brothers, and serving brothers — that the Order would carry, with relatively modest modifications, for the rest of its history.
The Northern Crusades
In 1226, Duke Conrad of Masovia appealed to the Order for help against the pagan Prussian tribes, who had been raiding his duchy for two generations. The Golden Bull of Rimini, issued by Emperor Frederick II in that year, transferred to the Order the ius conquerendi — the right to conquer, to Christianise, and to hold in perpetual tenure any territory taken from the pagans. The first Teutonic knight-brothers entered Prussia in the late 1220s, and the conquest that followed lasted, with interruptions, until 1283.
The Prussian campaign was fought in three principal theatres. In the western Prussian lands, the Order completed the conquest of the Pomesanians, Pogesanians, Warmians, Natangians, and Bartians by the early 1250s, founding the principal commanderies of Marienwerder, Elbing, and Balga. The great Prussian uprising of 1260–1274 nearly destroyed the Order’s position: the Order’s armies suffered catastrophic defeats at the Battle of Durbe in 1260 and at the Battle of Karuse in 1270, and the Order was forced to rely on a slow strategy of attrition until the uprising was suppressed in 1274. The Order’s Lithuanian campaign, in the meantime, continued with varying intensity until the conversion of the Lithuanian grand duke Jogaila in 1386.
The Northern Crusades transformed the Baltic. By 1300 the Order had created a substantial sovereign state in Prussia, had absorbed the surviving Sword Brothers of Livonia (1237) to form the Livonian branch, and had presided over a German colonisation of the region that was, in demographic terms, one of the largest medieval colonising movements north of the Alps. The native Prussian population was Christianised, German towns were founded under the Kulm law, and the chain of brick convent castles that the Order built — Marienburg above all — became the architectural signature of the Order.
The Golden Age, 1309–1382
The Order’s golden age opened in 1309, when Grand Master Siegfried von Feuchtwangen transferred the headquarters from Venice (Italy) to Marienburg on the right bank of the Nogat. The transfer followed the Order’s acquisition of Pomerelia in 1309 by purchase from Brandenburg and from the Samborides heirs. Marienburg was, by the standards of the early fourteenth century, an extraordinary building complex — and the construction that followed under Werner von Orseln, Dietrich von Altenburg, and above all Winrich von Kniprode (1351–1382) turned it into the largest brick building in medieval Europe.
The Order’s golden age is conventionally dated to the period of Winrich von Kniprode’s grand mastership, a thirty-one-year reign in which the Order’s chancery produced some of the most elegant diplomatic documents of the period, the Order’s army won a series of substantial victories against the Lithuanian grand dukes, and the Order’s revenues from the Baltic grain trade — routed through Danzig to England, the Netherlands, and the Iberian kingdoms — made the Order one of the wealthiest principalities in central Europe. The Order’s chancery, the Order’s scriptoria, the Order’s great convent castles, and the Order’s network of more than a hundred commanderies across the German lands together constituted, by the late fourteenth century, a sophisticated institutional achievement.
Grunwald and the Long Decline
The Order’s golden age ended with the conversion of Lithuania in 1386, which removed the principal strategic rationale for the Order’s continuing crusading activity. The Order’s response — the Pact of the Bears of 1398 and a series of aggressive campaigns against the now-Christian Jagiellonian dynasty — was a strategic miscalculation. The catastrophe came on 15 July 1410 at the Battle of Grunwald (Tannenberg), in which the Polish-Lithuanian army under King Władysław II Jagiełło and Grand Duke Vytautas destroyed the Order’s field army. Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen was killed, together with the Grand Marshal, the Grand Hospitaller Kuno von Lichtenhain, the Grand Trapier, and a great number of knight-brothers; the Order’s great seal was captured; the Order’s army was effectively destroyed.
The Order recovered. Heinrich von Plauen held Marienburg against the Polish siege that followed. The First Peace of Thorn of 1411 preserved the Order’s territorial integrity. The Order rebuilt its army, re-fortified its castles, and fought a series of successful defensive actions in the 1410s and 1420s. The Order’s most striking recovery was the Battle of Wilkomierz in 1435, in which the Order defeated the Polish-Lithuanian army and captured the Polish Grand Hetman.
The recovery was a postponement, not a reversal. The Order’s recruitment of knight-brothers from the German lands was permanently impaired. The Order’s political position in the Empire was weakened. The Order’s Prussian subjects — the towns, the gentry, the ecclesiastical foundations — grew increasingly restive, and in 1440 the Prussian Confederation was formed at Kwidzyn to defend their privileges against the Order. The Confederation appealed to the Polish crown in 1454; the Polish king, Casimir IV Jagiellonian, accepted the appeal and declared war. The result was the Thirteen Years’ War of 1454–1466, a long attritional conflict that ended with the Second Peace of Thorn of 1466, by which the Order ceded western Prussia — Danzig, Thorn, Elbing, Marienburg — to the Polish crown and retained eastern Prussia as a Polish fief.
The Secularisation of 1525
The last fifty years of the Order as a territorial prince were an extended epilogue. The Order rebuilt its forces, re-fortified its castles, and fought a series of small unsuccessful wars with Poland. The Order’s recruitment of knight-brothers from the western German lands was increasingly difficult; the Order’s revenues were reduced; the Order’s strategic position was compromised by the loss of western Prussia and the obligation of homage to the Polish crown.
The Order’s end came in 1525. Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach, a Hohenzollern prince of the Franconian branch who had been elected to the supreme magistracy in 1511, concluded in 1525 that the Order could not, on the existing constitutional basis, maintain its position in Prussia. He negotiated with King Sigismund I of Poland for the dissolution of the Order in Prussia and the conversion of the territories into a secular duchy, to be held as a Polish fief in Albert’s own family. The Treaty of Kraków of 8 April 1525 gave effect to this arrangement. The Order in Prussia was secularised. The duchy of Prussia was, in due course, the basis of the Brandenburg-Prussian state that would dominate north-eastern Europe until the twentieth century.
The Order survived, in the Catholic parts of the Empire, in the Habsburg lands, in the bailiwicks of Alsace-Burgundy and of the Bohemian Crown, and in the Mediterranean commanderies, as a small ecclesiastical body. The Order’s master in Livonia, Wolter von Plettenberg, repudiated Albert’s action and continued to govern the Livonian territories in the name of the Order. The Livonian branch survived, in various forms, until 1561, when the Livonian War of 1558–1583 brought about its dissolution and the secularisation of the last of the Order’s territorial possessions into the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia.
The Order’s headquarters moved, by way of Königsberg, Danzig, and various intermediate residences, to Vienna, where it has remained to the present day. The modern Teutonic Order is a small Catholic religious order dedicated to charitable works, with no territorial sovereignty but with a continuous institutional existence that stretches back, through the centuries, to the foundation of 1190.
A Note on Periodisation
The history of the Order divides naturally into four periods. The first, from 1190 to 1226, is the Levantine period, when the Order was a small community in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The second, from 1226 to 1309, is the Prussian Crusade proper, in which the Order gradually acquired a territorial base in the lower Vistula. The third, from 1309 to 1466, is the period of the sovereign monastic state, the golden age and the long decline. The fourth, from 1466 to 1525, is the period of dependence on the Polish crown, ending in the secularisation of 1525. After 1525 the Order survives as an ecclesiastical body without territorial sovereignty.
The four Orders — of 1190, 1300, 1400, and 1525 — were very different institutions. The 1190 fraternity was a charitable brotherhood. The 1300 Order was a crusading army. The 1400 Order was a sovereign prince. The 1525 Order was a territorial magnate in vassalage to a foreign crown. The institutional continuity that links them is real, but the political projects they pursued were quite different.
Related Reading
For the founding period, see the article on the 1190 founding at Acre and on Hermann von Salza. For the Levantine period, see the Order’s crusades in the Holy Land and the fall of Acre in 1291. For the Prussian Crusade, see the Northern Crusades, the Battle of Durbe in 1260, and the establishment of the Teutonic state in Prussia. For the later period, see the decline and dissolution of the Order, the Thirteen Years’ War, and the secularisation of 1525.
Sources
- Biskup, Marian, and Gerard Labuda. Dzieje zakonu krzyżackiego w Prusach. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1986.
- Boockmann, Hartmut. Der Deutsche Orden: Zwölf Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte. Munich: Beck, 1981.
- Biskup, Marian. Der Deutsche Orden im Zeitalter der Reformation. Marburg: Elwert, 1989.
- Ekdahl, Sven. Die Schlacht bei Tannenberg 1410. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2010.
- Urban, William. The Teutonic Knights: A Military History. London: Greenhill, 2003.