The 1190 Founding and the Acre Treaty
The conventional founding date of the Teutonic Order is 19 November 1190. On or about that day, in the crusader camp outside the besieged port of Acre, a community of German-speaking merchants and crusaders constituted themselves into a hospital brotherhood under the patronage of the Virgin Mary. The fraternity was given the title Brüderschaft des Hospitals Sankt Marien der Deutschen zu Jerusalem — Brotherhood of the Hospital of Saint Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem — and was placed, in the following year, under the protection of the papal legate. The foundation was modest in its circumstances, and the institution to which it gave rise was, in its first decade, a minor actor in the politics of the Latin East. But the foundation of 1190 was, in retrospect, the moment at which one of the most consequential military-religious institutions of medieval Europe came into existence.
The Siege of Acre, 1189–1191
The port of Acre had become, since the reconquest of the coastal cities of the Latin Kingdom by the armies of the Third Crusade in the summer of 1191, the de facto capital of what remained of the crusader states. The city had been besieged by King Guy of Jerusalem, with the residual forces of the Latin Kingdom, since August 1189. The German contingent of the Third Crusade arrived in two main waves. The first, under Duke Frederick VI of Swabia, reached Acre in October 1189. The second, comprising elements of the Saxon, Frisian, and Lower Rhenish contingents, arrived in the spring of 1190.
The conditions inside the German sector of the crusader camp were, however, conducive to the establishment of a new institution. The German crusaders had no hospital of their own. The two established military orders, the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar, maintained hospitals in the Latin Kingdom, but their capacity was strained by the demands of the siege. The German-speaking crusaders were effectively second-class patients older orders, and the improvisations of 1190 must be read against this background.
The German Merchants of Bremen and Lübeck
The fraternity of 1190 was not, in any simple sense, a creation of the German crusaders. It was, in significant part, a creation of the German merchants of the maritime cities of the North Sea and the Baltic — particularly of Bremen and Lübeck — who had established trading posts in the major ports of the Latin Kingdom. These merchants had been supplying the crusading armies with provisions, arms, and shipping, and they had built, in the German quarter of Acre, a warehouse and a small chapel.
The fraternity of 1190 was, accordingly, a hybrid institution: a hospital brotherhood, a corporate framework for the German merchants, and a religious foundation dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The first grand master, Heinrich Walpot von Bassenheim, was a Rhenish ministerialis with crusading experience; the first substantial endowment was a tract of land in the German quarter of Acre, donated by the merchants; the first liturgical customs were derived from the Augustinian rule and the Cistercian observances of contemporary Western monasticism.
The Foundation Charter
The instrument by which the fraternity was constituted has not survived in its original form. The text conventionally cited as the foundation charter is, in fact, a confirmation by the papal legate, dated 6 February 1191, of a foundation that had already taken place. The confirmation is a brief Latin document, witnessed by the surviving commanders of the German crusading host and by the bishops in attendance on the papal legate. It places the new fraternity under the protection of the Holy See, gives it the right to elect its own master, and assigns to it the income from a number of German benefices.
The foundation of 1190 must, however, be distinguished from the Order’s later claim to be a military order in the full sense. The fraternity of 1190 was a hospital brotherhood, not a military order. The right to bear arms in defence of Christendom was not granted to the fraternity until 1198, by the bull of Pope Celestine III.
The Hospital at Acre
The hospital that the fraternity established at Acre was, in the first years of its existence, a small and modest establishment. It was located in the German quarter of the city, near the harbour. The hospital was, however, rapidly expanded in the course of the 1190s. The fall of the city to the crusaders in July 1191 gave the fraternity a much larger endowment: the German quarter was considerably enlarged, and the fraternity received a number of additional holdings in the city and its hinterland.
The Order’s relationship with the older military orders, in this period, was delicate. The Order was, in the first years of its existence, a satellite of the Hospitallers, sharing their compound in the Montmusard suburb of Acre. The formal separation of the two orders was not completed until the bull of Celestine III in 1198.
The First Decade, 1190–1200
The first decade of the Teutonic Order’s existence was a period of consolidation rather than expansion. The Order received, in 1198, the formal recognition of its military vocation; the Order’s principal seat at Acre was, by 1200, a well-established institution. The Order had, however, by 1200, neither the territorial base, the military capability, nor the political standing that it was to acquire in the following century.
The first decade was also a period of considerable demographic difficulty. The mortality among the knight-brothers and the priest-brothers of the new Order was high: the climate of the Latin East, the rigours of the military life, and the endemic diseases of the crusader camps all took a heavy toll. The Order’s expansion in the thirteenth century must be understood in the context of the recruitment difficulties of the founding decade.
The Place of 1190 in the Order’s Later Self-Understanding
The Order’s chancery, from the late thirteenth century onwards, consistently dated its institutional history from 1190. The Order’s liturgical calendar included 19 November as the feast of the foundation, celebrated in the chapels of the Order’s convent castles with great solemnity. The Order’s later claim to a continuous institutional existence from 1190 was, accordingly, a claim that was constructed in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and that was, in significant part, the product of the Order’s need to establish a clear institutional identity in the context of the Prussian mission.
Sources
- Boockmann, Hartmut. Der Deutsche Orden: Zwölf Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte. Munich: Beck, 1981.
- Schmieder, Felicitas, and Wolfgang Woellert, eds. Die Chronik des Bischofs Peter von Dusburg. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2006.
- Strehlke, Ernst, ed. Tabulae ordinis Theutonici. Berlin: Weidmann, 1869.
Related Reading
For the long-term consequences of the foundation, see the article on the founding and origins of the Teutonic Order and the article on Hermann von Salza and the rise of the Order. For the wider context of the Order’s Levantine career, see the article on the Order’s crusades in the Holy Land. The symbol of the white mantle with the black cross, adopted in the founding period, is examined under the Black Cross of the Teutonic Order. For the parent context, see the History of the Teutonic Knights.