The Fall of the Livonian Order
The fall of the Livonian Order — or, more precisely, the secularisation of the Order’s remaining territories — was the final act of the dissolution of the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order. The fall was a process rather than a single event, and it extended from the battle of Erömäe in 1560 to the Treaty of Vilnius of 28 November 1561, by which the last Master of the Livonian branch, Gotthard Kettler, secularised the Order’s remaining territories and held them as the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, a secular principality in vassalage to the Polish-Lithuanian crown.
The Background to the Fall
The background to the fall was the long crisis of the Livonian Confederation in the face of the Russian invasion of 1558. The invasion had stripped the Livonian branch of its eastern territories, including Dorpat, Narva, and Wesenberg. The Order’s remaining territories — in southern Livonia, in Courland, and in Semigallia — had been exposed both to Russian attack and to the encroachment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The Order’s response had been, a desperate one. The Order had attempted to negotiate separate truces with the various powers — with Russia, with Poland-Lithuania, with Sweden — an approach that simply invited the Russian exploitation of the resulting divisions. The Order had attempted, in 1560, to mount a major field engagement against the Russian forces in the eastern Baltic, an attempt that had been decisively defeated at Erömäe. The Order’s field army had been destroyed, and the Order’s remaining territories could now be defended, if at all, only by the political and military support of one of the great powers.
The remaining members of the Confederation had, in 1560 and 1561, begun to seek the protection of the great powers. The archbishop of Riga had entered into a secret treaty with Poland-Lithuania. The bishopric of Ösel-Wiek had been sold to Denmark. The city of Reval and the Estonian nobility had submitted to Sweden. The Order itself had been left as the only remaining member of the Confederation that had not yet secured the protection of one of the great powers.
The Election of Gotthard Kettler
The last Master of the Livonian branch was Gotthard Kettler, a member of a Westphalian noble family who had entered the Order in 1540 and had served, for the previous ten years, as the Komtur of several important Livonian commanderies. Kettler was elected Master in 1559, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian occupation of most of the Order’s eastern territories and of the battle of Erömäe.
Kettler inherited, in effect, a principality in the process of dissolution. The Order’s remaining territories were small and exposed, the Order’s financial resources were exhausted, the Order’s allies in the Holy Roman Empire had been slow to provide the military support that the Order required, and the Order’s political position was, desperate. Kettler’s principal political task, on his election, was the negotiation of an arrangement by which the remaining Order territories could be preserved from Russian conquest.
The Treaty of Vilnius
The arrangement that Kettler negotiated was the Treaty of Vilnius, signed on 28 November 1561 with King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland-Lithuania. The terms of the treaty were:
The Order’s remaining territories were secularised and incorporated into a new duchy, the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, to be held by Kettler as a hereditary fief of the Polish-Lithuanian crown.
Kettler was confirmed as a vassal of the Polish crown and was granted the honours and privileges of a Polish senator. The duchy was to have its own Diet, its own chancery, its own coinage, and its own courts. The duchy was, in the constitutional sense, a sovereign principality within the larger Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The Teutonic Order, as a corporate body, was dissolved in the territories of the duchy. The remaining knight-brothers of the Livonian branch were given the choice of secularisation or transfer to one of the surviving houses of the Teutonic Order in the German or Habsburg lands. Most of the senior knight-brothers chose to take their pensions and to be incorporated into the German-speaking ruling class of the new duchy.
The Treaty of Vilnius was, in effect, the final act of the dissolution of the Livonian branch. The duchy that it created was a much smaller and a much weaker entity than the Livonian branch had been. The duchy was, however, also a much more durable one. The duchy survived, in essentially the same form, for more than two centuries, and its history is, the final chapter of the Livonian story.
The Consequences of the Fall
The fall of the Livonian Order had profound consequences for the history of the Teutonic Order and for the history of the eastern Baltic. The most immediate consequence was the dissolution of the Livonian branch as a corporate body. The Livonian branch had existed, in one form or another, since the merger of the Brotherhood of the Sword with the Teutonic Order in 1237, and its dissolution in 1561 was the working out of the constitutional crisis that the Livonian branch had been unable to resolve.
The fall was also a turning point in the wider history of the Teutonic Order. The Order’s two great territorial formations had now both been dissolved: the Prussian branch in 1525, the Livonian branch in 1561. The Order survived, in the German and Habsburg lands, as a small ecclesiastical body without territorial sovereignty — a body that would, in the centuries that followed, devote itself to the pastoral care of the German-speaking Catholic nobility and to the management of its surviving commanderies.
The fall was also a turning point in the history of the eastern Baltic. The Livonian Confederation, which had been the principal political form of the Latin church in the eastern Baltic, was dissolved with it. The German-speaking ruling class of the old Confederation, although deprived of its political independence, persisted as a social and cultural elite under Swedish, Polish, and Russian rule.
Sources
- Frost, Robert I. The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721. Harlow: Longman, 2000.
- Kirchmayer, Josef. Der Untergang des Deutschen Ordens in Livland. Hildesheim: Olms, 2001.
- Urban, William. The Livonian Crusade. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981.
Related Reading
For the military turning point that made the fall possible, see the article on the battle of Erömäe 1560. For the duchy’s history, see the article on the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia and the cluster on Courland and the legacy of Livonia. For the broader context of the war in which the fall occurred, see the parent overview of the Livonian branch and the cluster on the Livonian War of 1558–1583. The Livonian Confederation that the fall destroyed is treated in the cluster on the Livonian Confederation. The wider history of the Teutonic Order’s decline, of which the fall was a part, is examined in the history of the Teutonic Knights.