The Teutonic Order — Structure, Hierarchy, Brothers and Daily Life
The Teutonic Order was, at root, a religious community. The brethren lived under the Rule of St Augustine, took the three monastic vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, and were bound by a complex body of statutes and customary laws. The Order was also a military force. The knight-brothers were professional soldiers, recruited from the German aristocratic and ministerial classes, and trained in the use of sword, lance, mace and war-hammer. The Order was also a territorial sovereign, holding a substantial state in Prussia and Livonia, and governing that state through a hierarchy of commanders and officials.
The interaction of these three identities — the religious, the military, the sovereign — is the principal subject of the constitutional and cultural history of the Order. The Order’s founders and the Order’s early grand masters had to work out a constitutional structure that could accommodate all three. The result was one of the most successful and one of the most studied examples of a late-medieval composite religious-military-territorial institution.
The Founding Brotherhood
The Teutonic Order was founded in 1190 as a charitable fraternity (Brüderschaft) of German merchants and crusaders at the besieged port of Acre. The early brotherhood lived in a hospital compound on the Acre waterfront, served the sick and the poor, and was governed by a master elected from among the brethren. The fraternity was placed under the Rule of St Augustine between 1198 and 1205, by the papacy (with Pope Innocent III the pope most often associated with the confirmation of the Augustinian vocation of the Order), and it was given a white habit with a black cross — the emblem of the Order that has remained recognisable to the present day.
The transition from a charitable fraternity to a military order is conventionally dated to 1198, when the fraternity was recognised as a militaris religio by Pope Celestine III. The Order’s membership was reorganised, the first knight-brothers were admitted, and the Order’s statutes were redrafted to provide for the new military vocation. The reorganisation was completed under the fourth Hochmeister, Hermann von Salza, who took office in 1209 and who gave the Order the constitutional form that it retained, in essentials, for the rest of its history.
The Three Estates
The Order was divided, from the thirteenth century onward, into three estates of brethren: the knight-brothers (Ritterbrüder), the priestly brothers (Priesterbrüder), and the serving brothers (Graumäntel or “grey mantles”). The three estates were unequal in number, in social origin, and in political weight, but they were all bound by the same vows and the same basic constitutional framework.
The knight-brothers were the Order’s aristocracy. They were recruited from the German ministerial and lower aristocratic classes, and they were required to provide proof of free birth, of legitimate descent, and of a minimum of four generations of noble ancestry on both the paternal and the maternal sides. The candidates were typically young men in their late teens or early twenties, and the process of admission typically took two to three years. The knight-brothers served as the Order’s field commanders, garrison commanders, regional administrators, and ambassadors. They were the only estate entitled to hold the supreme magistracy of the Order, the office of Hochmeister.
The priestly brothers were ordained priests who served the Order’s chapels, heard the brethren’s confessions, preached to the brethren and to the lay population, managed the Order’s extensive charitable foundations, and performed a wide range of administrative and intellectual functions. The priestly brothers were eligible to hold any office of the Order except the supreme magistracy. Several of the most distinguished administrators of the Order were priestly brothers — most notably the chancellors of the Order, who were usually priestly brothers, and the bishops of the Order’s ecclesiastical foundations.
The serving brothers, or grey mantles, were lay brothers recruited from the burgher and peasant classes. They served the Order in a wide variety of capacities: as squires to the knight-brothers, as armourers, farriers, smiths, masons, carpenters, bakers, brewers, clerks, treasury officials, hospital attendants, agricultural workers, and so on. The serving brothers were not eligible to hold any of the senior offices of the Order, and they were excluded from the chapter general of the knight-brothers. The serving brothers wore a grey habit, rather than the white habit of the knight- and priestly brothers, and they were a substantial fraction of the Order’s total membership.
The Hierarchy of Offices
The Order’s constitutional structure was a remarkable combination of centralisation and devolution. The supreme magistrate was the Hochmeister (Grand Master), elected for life by the chapter general of the knight-brothers. The Grand Master was assisted by a council of the five Grossgebietiger: the Grand Commander, the Grand Marshal, the Grand Hospitaller, the Grand Trapier, and the Grand Chancellor.
Beneath the five Grossgebietiger stood the regional Komture (commanders) of the Komtureien (commanderies). The Komturei was the basic administrative unit of the Order’s Prussian and Livonian provinces: a substantial territorial district, usually containing a convent castle, several dependent granges, a small town or two, and a substantial peasant population. The Komtur was responsible for the administration of justice within the Komturei, the maintenance of the convent castle, the receipt of the Komturei’s revenues, the recruitment and quartering of the Order’s knight-brothers, and the conduct of the small-scale warfare of the Prussian frontier.
The Election of the Grand Master
The Grand Master was elected for life by the chapter general of the knight-brothers. The procedure for the election was set out in detail in the Statuten of the Order, and the procedure was one of the most carefully regulated constitutional processes of the medieval Latin Church. The Grand Master was, constitutionally, the creature of the chapter general, and the chapter general could depose a Grand Master who had been duly elected. Several Grand Masters were deposed — most notably Heinrich von Plauen, who was deposed in 1413 for his conduct during the aftermath of Grunwald — but the deposed Grand Master was always replaced by a successor elected in the constitutional manner.
The Daily Life of the Brethren
The daily life of the brethren was regulated by a complex body of statutes and customary laws. The principal sources are the Statuten — the formal statutes of the Order, redacted at several points in the Order’s history — and the Gewohnheiten (customaries), which recorded the unwritten rules of the convent castle.
The day of the brethren was structured by the eight canonical hours of the Roman liturgy: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. The full office was sung, in choir, in the chapel of the convent castle, and the brethren were expected to attend in person unless excused. A typical day included some five to seven hours of formal liturgical recitation. The brethren sang the psalter in the course of the week, the office of the dead was sung at the customary times, and the brethren were required to be present at the daily Mass and at the principal commemorations of the year.
The brethren’s meals were taken in the refectory of the convent castle. The customary diet of the brethren was simple: bread, beer, fish or salted meat, vegetables in season, cheese, and porridge. The beer was brewed in the convent brewhouse, the bread was baked in the convent bakery, the fish was caught in the local rivers and lakes or was salted for the winter, and the salted meat was supplied from the Order’s own flocks and herds. The brethren ate in silence, while one of the priestly brothers read aloud from a devotional book.
The brethren’s sleep was in the dormitory of the convent castle, a large communal chamber on the upper floor of the convent castle. The dormitory was furnished with a row of narrow beds, separated by curtains, and each bed was provided with a straw mattress, a woollen blanket, and a pillow. The brethren slept in their habits, and the constitutions of the Order forbade the brethren from having any private property in the dormitory.
The Rules and the Statuten
The Order’s internal discipline was regulated by a body of statutes and customary laws, of which the Statuten was the principal source. The earliest surviving complete redaction of the Statuten is the Statuten of 1260, a compilation of older rules and customs. The Statuten was redacted again in 1330, in 1357, and at several other points in the Order’s history. Each new redaction incorporated the accumulated customary laws of the Order and the constitutional practice of the chapter general.
The Statuten dealt with the admission of candidates, the duties of the brethren, the organisation of the convent, the conduct of the daily offices, the administration of the Komtureien, the conduct of war, the relations with the laity, and the procedures for the trial of brethren. The Statuten was supplemented, in the practical details of the daily life, by a substantial body of customary laws, recorded in the Gewohnheiten of the various Komtureien.
Related Reading
For the hierarchy of the Order, see the article on the election of the Grand Master and the article on the five Grossgebietiger. For the brothers and sisters, see the article on becoming a Teutonic knight and the article on priestly brothers. For the daily rules, see the article on the Statuten and the article on meals and prayers. For the symbols and habit, see the article on the black cross of the Order and the article on the Grand Master’s coat of arms.
Sources
- Boockmann, Hartmut. Der Deutsche Orden: Zwölf Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte. Munich: Beck, 1981.
- Favreau-Lilie, Marie-Luise. Die Ritterbrüder im livländischen Zweig des Deutschen Ordens. Cologne: Böhlau, 2003.
- Strehlke, Ernst, ed. Tabulae ordinis Theutonici. Berlin: Weidmann, 1869. Reprinted Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975.
- Urban, William. The Teutonic Knights: A Military History. London: Greenhill, 2003.