Major Battles of the Teutonic Order
The Teutonic Order fought a great many engagements in the course of its two and a half centuries of active campaigning in the Baltic, but only a small number of these were decisive field battles in the conventional military sense. The Order’s preferred mode of operation was the Reise — the seasonal raid into enemy territory — and the Order’s preferred means of territorial consolidation was the brick-built fortress, the slow patient conquest of a forest or a river-line, and the gradual reduction of hostile populations through a mixture of conversion, displacement and supervised colonisation. Major field battles were, in this operational pattern, comparatively rare, and the Order’s reputation in the Latin West was, in significant part, built on the difficulty of forcing the Order to fight a major battle at all.
When the Order did fight a major field battle, however, the results tended to be of considerable strategic importance. The battle of Durbe in 1260 was a near-catastrophic defeat in the early stages of the Prussian uprising. The battle of Tannenberg, fought on 15 July 1410, is the central event of the Order’s late military history. The battle of Wilkomierz in 1435 is the most striking example of a mid-fifteenth century recovery. Each of these engagements, in its own way, illustrates a different aspect of the Order’s military practice.
The Pattern of the Order’s Battles
The Order’s field battles fell into two broad categories. The first category comprised battles forced on the Order by hostile coalitions: Durbe, the first battle of Tannenberg in 1410, the various engagements of the Thirteen Years’ War, and the war of 1519–1521. These were battles in which the Order was the defender, in a strategic sense, and they were, the battles the Order lost. The second category comprised battles that the Order fought on its own initiative, against adversaries it believed it could defeat in open combat: the great Prussian campaign of the 1270s, the Lithuanian Reisen of the 14th century, the campaign of 1414 in Samogitia, the Polish-Teutonic War of 1431–1435 in which Wilkomierz was fought.
The difference between the two categories was, very important. The Order’s army was, throughout its history, a small, professional, heavily armoured force. It was designed to fight short, sharp engagements in which the Order’s superior training, equipment and command would prevail. It was not designed to fight long, attritional wars in which the Order’s small force was gradually worn down by a coalition of greater resources. The Order’s great victories — Pabaiske 1236, the Prussian campaign of the 1270s, the Lithuanian Reisen of the 1330s, the campaign of 1414, the recovery of the 1420s and 1430s — were all won against adversaries the Order had deliberately chosen to engage. The Order’s great defeats — Durbe 1260, Tannenberg 1410, the wars of 1454–1466 and 1519–1521 — were all suffered against adversaries the Order could not avoid engaging.
Durbe 1260: The First Catastrophe
The battle of Durbe was fought on 13 July 1260, on the shore of the Durbe Lake in western Courland, between a combined Prussian-Curonian force and a Teutonic army reinforced by crusaders from Livonia. The Order’s army is conventionally estimated at about 150 knight-brothers, with a substantial force of crusader infantry and Livonian auxiliaries. The Prussian-Curonian army, under the leadership of the Prussian chieftain Herkus Mantas and the Curonian chief of Warbe, attacked the Order’s army while it was in the process of deploying for battle and before its crusader contingents had come up.
The result was a disaster. The Order’s van was overrun in the early stages of the engagement; the Livonian auxiliary cavalry on the Order’s right wing was broken by a Prussian feint and counter-charge; the Order’s knight-brothers were surrounded and cut down. The casualties included the Livonian Master, the Prussian commander, the Margrave of Brandenburg and a number of senior crusaders. The total losses of knight-brothers have been estimated at 100 to 150, a very high proportion of the Order’s available strength in the Baltic.
The battle of Durbe was the worst defeat the Order had suffered in the Baltic up to that point, and it triggered a long period of crisis. The Prussian uprising of 1260–1274 that followed Durbe was the most serious threat the Order faced in its early history. The Order was saved, by the strategic patience of the Grand Masters of the period — Poppo von Osterna, Anno von Sangershausen, Hartmann von Heldrungen — and by the loyalty of the German settlers. The Order’s response to Durbe, however, set the pattern for the Order’s recovery: a refusal to fight major field engagements until the adversary had been forced to fight on the Order’s terms.
The Open-Field Victories of the Fourteenth Century
The Order’s response to the crisis of the 1260s was a long, slow process of attrition that culminated in the conquest of Prussia by 1283. The Order’s response was, in the strategic sense, a defensive one: the Order avoided major field battles, fortified its positions, and waited for the Prussian tribes to exhaust themselves. The Order’s great open-field victories of the fourteenth century — the long Lithuanian Reisen, the campaigns of 1343–1345, 1362, 1370 — were fought on the Order’s initiative, against adversaries the Order believed it could defeat in a single decisive engagement.
The most successful of these campaigns was the great Lithuanian Reise of 1343–1345, in which the Order’s army, reinforced by crusaders from the German lands, campaigned deep into Lithuanian territory. The campaign culminated, in the winter of 1344–1345, in a series of engagements in which the Order’s army defeated a number of Lithuanian forces in open combat. The campaign was, however, also a vivid illustration of the limits of the Order’s strategic reach: the Order’s army was unable to occupy the Lithuanian heartland, and the campaign ended, in 1345, with a Lithuanian counter-attack that recovered much of the ground the Order had gained.
The pattern of the Order’s fourteenth-century warfare was, in this sense, an unvarying one: a major field victory followed by a strategic withdrawal, a renewal of campaigning a few years later, another major field victory, another strategic withdrawal. The Order’s army was, in this period, operating at the outer limit of its strategic reach, and the Order’s victories were, in significant part, exercises in prestige and recruitment rather than in conquest.
Tannenberg 1410: The Decisive Defeat
The battle of Tannenberg, fought on 15 July 1410, is the central event of the Order’s late military history. The battle is conventionally known in Polish historiography as the battle of Grunwald, after the village of Grunwald on the western edge of the field; the German and English-language names derive from the village of Tannenberg to the east. The two names refer to the same engagement, and the battle is variously known in the literature as Tannenberg, Grunwald, Grünfelde or, occasionally, the battle of the Tannenberg forest.
The battle was fought on a broad plain between the villages of Grünfelde, Tannenberg and Ludwigsdorf, on the road between Marienburg and the Lithuanian frontier. The Polish-Lithuanian army, under the personal command of King Władysław II Jagiełło, deployed about 30,000 men. The Order’s army, under the Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen, deployed about 27,000 men, of whom about 270 were knight-brothers. The Order’s army was, in conventional terms, the smaller of the two forces, and the Order’s decision to engage was, in retrospect, a serious strategic error.
The battle was decided, in the conventional accounts, by the failure of the Order’s left wing, which was driven from the field by the Lithuanian light horse under Vytautas. The collapse of the Order’s left exposed the centre, where the Grand Master and the bulk of the Order’s knight-brothers were fighting, to a decisive counter-attack. The Grand Master was killed; the Grand Marshal Friedrich von Wallenrode was killed; the Grand Hospitaller was killed; the great seal of the Order was captured; and a large fraction of the Order’s field army was destroyed. The battle was a military catastrophe of the first order, and it was followed, in the succeeding months, by a series of sieges, raids and political reversals that reduced the Order’s strategic position in the region.
The battle of Tannenberg is, in the long historical perspective, the most important engagement in the entire history of the Baltic region in the high and late middle ages. The battle marked the end of the Order’s military ascendancy in the Baltic. The Order was, after 1410, a smaller and a less confident corporation than it had been before. The Order’s recruitment of knight-brothers from the German lands was permanently impaired. The Order’s long fifteenth-century decline, which was to culminate in the Thirteen Years’ War and the secularisation of 1525, had its beginning, in significant part, in the catastrophe of Tannenberg.
The Recovery of the 1420s and 1430s
The Order’s recovery from Tannenberg was, by any reasonable historical standard, a remarkable achievement. The Order rebuilt its field army within a few years of the defeat, re-fortified its principal castles, and fought a number of successful defensive actions in the 1410s and 1420s. The Order’s chancery, under the leadership of Heinrich von Plauen and his successors, conducted a sophisticated diplomatic campaign to limit the political consequences of the defeat. By the mid-1420s the Order was, militarily, a much smaller force than it had been in 1410, but it was still a serious one.
The Order’s most striking recovery was in the war of 1431–1435 with Poland, which culminated in the battle of Wilkomierz on 1 September 1435. The battle of Wilkomierz was, the last great field battle fought by the Order in the Baltic. The Order’s army, although smaller than the Polish-Lithuanian force it faced, fought the engagement to a successful conclusion, capturing the Polish Grand Hetman and inflicting heavy casualties on the Polish-Lithuanian army. The battle of Wilkomierz was, however, also a strategic failure: the Order was unable to translate the victory into territorial gain, and the war was concluded, in 1435, by the Peace of Brześć Kujawski, by which the Order recognised the Polish-Lithuanian possession of the contested borderlands.
The battle of Wilkomierz is, in this sense, an instructive case study. The Order’s army, in 1435, was still a competent field force. The Order’s command, however, was no longer able to integrate a major field victory into a coherent strategic plan. The Order was, in the 1430s, a corporation that was fighting a defensive war on too many fronts, and the Order’s resources were no longer adequate to the strategic demands placed upon them.
The Last Field Battles
The Order’s last field battles, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, were a long series of small, unsuccessful engagements: the campaigns of the Thirteen Years’ War of 1454–1466, the Polish-Teutonic War of 1478–1479, the campaign of 1499–1500, the Polish-Teutonic War of 1519–1521. None of these campaigns produced a major field battle on the scale of Durbe, Tannenberg or Wilkomierz. The Order’s army, in this period, was a defensive force of considerable local competence but limited strategic reach. The Order was, by 1520, no longer capable of fighting a major field battle against a coalition of adversaries.
The Order’s last major field engagement was the campaign of 1519–1521, in which the Order’s army, under Grand Master Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, was decisively defeated in the field by the Polish forces under Hetman Jan Tarnowski. The defeat was followed, in 1525, by the secularisation of the Order’s Prussian territories, and the Order ceased to be a military power in the Baltic.
The Significance of the Order’s Battles
The Order’s great battles, taken together, illustrate the long-term trajectory of the Order’s military history. The Order’s great victories, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were won by a small, professional, heavily armoured force operating in a strategic environment that suited the Order’s strengths. The Order’s great defeats, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were suffered when the Order was forced to fight on ground, or against adversaries, that did not suit the Order’s strengths. The Order was, throughout its history, a force of considerable quality; the Order was, a force that could not adapt quickly enough to the changed strategic environment of the late medieval Baltic.
Sources
- Boockmann, Hartmut. Der Deutsche Orden: Zwölf Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte. Munich: Beck, 1981.
- Ekdahl, Sven. Die Schlacht bei Tannenberg 1410. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2010.
- Ekdahl, Sven. Die “Banderia Prutenorum” des Jan Długosz. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976.
- Kuczyński, Stefan Maria. Wielka Wojna z Zakonem Krzyżackim w latach 1409–1411. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1980.
- Urban, William. The Teutonic Knights: A Military History. London: Greenhill, 2003.
Related Reading
For the longer context of the Order’s military history, see the pillar on military campaigns and the history of the Teutonic Order. For individual engagements, see the articles on the battle of Tannenberg 1410 and the battle of Wilkomierz 1435. For the broader strategic context, see the Thirteen Years’ War and the secularisation of 1525.