Hierarchy and Leadership of the Teutonic Order
The Teutonic Order was governed by an elaborate hierarchy of offices that had been refined, by the middle of the thirteenth century, into one of the most articulate administrative systems of the Latin medieval world. At the head of the Order stood the Hochmeister, or Grand Master, elected for life by the chapter general of the knight-brothers. Beneath him sat the five Grossgebietiger, each of whom held a defined territorial command and a defined functional portfolio. Beneath them, in turn, stood the regional Komture, the house commanders, the advocates, the caretakers of granges, and a long tail of lesser officials. The system was designed to combine, in a single constitution, the centralised discipline of a monastic order, the operational flexibility of a military command, and the administrative reach of a territorial sovereign.
The hierarchy of the Order is the subject of the present article. The detailed treatment of the election of the Grand Master and of the five Grossgebietiger is given in the related pages. The present article situates those offices within the wider constitutional structure of the Order, and traces the way in which that structure evolved from the simple fraternity of the founding brotherhood at Acre to the elaborate conventual state of the late medieval Prussian branch.
The Grand Master
The supreme magistrate of the Order was the Hochmeister, or Grand Master. From 1209, when Hermann von Salza was elevated to the office, until 1525, when the last Prussian Grand Master, Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach, secularised the Prussian branch of the Order, the Grand Master was elected for life by the chapter general of the knight-brothers. The office was, in constitutional theory, a moderatorship rather than a sovereignty: the Grand Master presided over the chapter general, executed its decisions, and served as the public representative of the Order, but he did not rule by personal right and could be deposed by a majority vote of the chapter.
In practice the office carried very substantial authority. The Grand Master was the commander-in-chief of the Order’s armed forces in time of war; he was the principal diplomatic representative of the Order in its dealings with the pope, the emperor, the kings of France and England, the kings of Poland and Hungary, the Hanseatic League, and the princes of the German lands; he was the supreme judge of appeal within the Order’s jurisdiction; and he was the custodian of the Order’s seal, archives, and regalia. From 1309, after the fall of Acre and the loss of the Order’s Syrian headquarters, the Grand Master resided at the Marienburg in Prussia, and the Prussian convent castle became the effective capital of the whole Order.
Twenty-four Grand Masters held the office in the four centuries between 1209 and 1525. The most distinguished of them — Hermann von Salza, the architect of the Prussian state; Winrich von Kniprode, under whom the Order reached the summit of its power in the late fourteenth century; and Heinrich von Plauen, who held Marienburg against the Poles after the disaster of Grunwald in 1410 — each served for more than a decade, and each gave the office a distinctive cast. Several Grand Masters were deposed, including Heinrich von Plauen in 1413, and the constitutional procedure of deposition, rare as it was, demonstrates the limited and conditional nature of the supreme magistracy of the Order.
The Chapter General
The Grand Master was, constitutionally, no more than the presiding officer of the chapter general. The chapter general was the supreme constitutional body of the Order: a deliberative assembly of the senior knight-brothers, meeting (in theory) once a year in the chapel of the Order’s headquarters, and empowered to elect the Grand Master, to admit new knight-brothers to the profession of vows, to dispose of the Order’s major fiefs, to declare war, to make peace, to conclude alliances, and to pass binding statutes.
The chapter general had its origin in the customary chapter of faults (capitulum culparum) of the monastic tradition, in which the brethren assembled daily to confess their faults of the previous day. The Teutonic chapter general retained the ritual form of the older monastic chapter, but its constitutional competence was very much larger. By the thirteenth century the chapter general was a substantial assembly, attended not only by the Grand Master and the five Grossgebietiger but also by the regional Komture and by all knight-brothers resident at the headquarters. Quorum requirements varied by period and by the business in hand, but for the election of the Grand Master a quorum of some twelve senior knight-brothers was customary.
In practice the chapter general met less often than its constitutional schedule prescribed, and the chapter general might meet only two or three times in a decade in the late medieval period. The Grand Master and the five Grossgebietiger conducted the routine business of the Order between chapters, and the chapter general reserved itself for the major constitutional decisions.
The Five Grossgebietiger
The five Grossgebietiger, or “great officers of the realm”, were the Grand Commander (Grosskomtur), the Grand Marshal (Grossmarschall), the Grand Hospitaller (Grossspittler), the Grand Trapier (Gross-trappier) and the Grand Chancellor (Grosskanzler). Each held a defined territorial command, a defined functional portfolio, and a defined seat at the chapter general. The five officers were, in the full form of the constitution, the heads of the five territorial divisions of the Prussian state of the Order, and they stood in an intermediate position between the Grand Master at the summit of the hierarchy and the regional Komture at the base.
The office of Grand Commander was the senior of the five. The Grand Commander was the lieutenant of the Grand Master, the deputy presiding officer of the chapter general, the head of the central commandery of Christburg, and the commander of the Order’s forces in the Grand Master’s absence. The Grand Marshal was the commander of the eastern Prussian commandery of Königsberg, the principal base for the Order’s Lithuanian campaigns, and the marshal of the Order’s field army. The Grand Hospitaller held the commandery of Elbing and was responsible for the Order’s hospitals, its charitable foundations, and the estates that financed them. The Grand Trapier held the wardrobe and was responsible for the Order’s heraldic and ceremonial regalia, the manufacture of the brethren’s habits, and the storage of arms and armour. The Grand Chancellor held the chancery, the archives, the diplomatic correspondence, and the secretariat of the chapter general.
A full account of the five offices, of the territorial seats that supported them, and of the personnel who held them, is given in the related article on the five Grossgebietiger. The five officers were an important innovation of the Teutonic Order, and the equivalent officers of the Hospitallers and Templars were neither as numerous nor as clearly defined. The Teutonic Grand Hospitaller, was a more substantial figure than his counterparts in the other two great military orders.
The Regional Komture
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 state: 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 Komture were appointed by the Grand Master, on the nomination of the relevant Grossgebietiger, and they held office at the Grand Master’s pleasure. A Komtur might be transferred from one Komturei to another after a term of years, and the Grand Master used the appointment and transfer of Komture as a principal instrument of central control. The Komture of the more substantial Komtureien were among the most powerful territorial officials of the Order, and several of them went on to hold the highest offices of the state.
The Komtur presided over the Konvent, the local chapter of the Komturei. The Konvent had a more limited competence than the chapter general of the Order, but it was the day-to-day constitutional body of the local community, and it elected certain local officials, admitted candidates to the novitiate, and disposed of minor judicial and disciplinary matters.
The Lesser Offices
Beneath the Komtur stood a long tail of lesser officials, who carried the routine administration of the Order down to the village and the grange. The Vogt (advocate) represented the Order in the dependent towns and held the lower jurisdiction on the Komtur’s behalf. The Pfleger (caretaker) administered the dependent granges and accounted for the agricultural revenues. The Hauskomtur (house-commander) commanded the smaller castles and the outlying posts of the Order’s frontier. The Schäffer (bailiff) collected the rents and dues. Beneath these officials stood the serving brothers and the lay associates and confraters, who were bound to the Order by a special form of contract.
The Provincial Masters
The Order was a transnational body, with substantial territorial possessions in the Holy Land, in Sicily and Apulia, in the German lands, in the Austrian lands, in Bohemia, in Moravia, in Pomerania, in Livonia, and in Prussia. The head of each national or regional branch was the Landmeister (provincial master), who held office under the Grand Master and was responsible for the conduct of the Order’s business in his province.
The Landmeister of Prussia was, by the late medieval period, the most powerful of the provincial masters, since the Prussian state was the Order’s largest territorial possession and the principal base of the Order’s military operations. The Landmeister of Livonia commanded the Order’s Livonian branch, which held the territories of modern Latvia and Estonia under a separate but parallel hierarchy. The Landmeister of Germany (Landmeister von Deutschland) governed the Order’s possessions in the German lands. The Landmeister of Apulia, of Sicily, of Bohemia, of Austria, of Lorraine, and of various other regions completed the network.
The Landmeister were appointed by the Grand Master, on the nomination of the chapter general, and they held office at the Grand Master’s pleasure. The Landmeister were members of the chapter general of the Order when it met at the headquarters, and they represented their provinces in the supreme constitutional body of the Order. The relationship between the Grand Master and the Landmeister was a constant source of constitutional tension, particularly in the late medieval period.
The Constitutional Significance of the Hierarchy
The hierarchy of the Teutonic Order was, in its full form, a remarkable constitutional achievement. It combined, in a single administrative system, the centralised discipline of a monastic order, the operational flexibility of a military command, and the territorial reach of a sovereign state. It was, by the standards of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a remarkably meritocratic system: a serving brother of the right qualities could rise, by a combination of talent and patronage, to senior office, and several of the Order’s most distinguished administrators began their careers in relatively humble positions.
The hierarchy was also, by the standards of its time, an unusually well-documented system. The Order’s chancery kept detailed records of appointments, transfers, and dismissals; the chapter general kept minutes of its proceedings; the Komture kept account books of their revenues and expenditures; and the Order’s statutes — the Statuten — were redacted at several points in the Order’s history to incorporate the constitutional practice. The historian of the Order is therefore able to reconstruct the hierarchy, in considerable detail, from the Order’s own archives.
The hierarchy was, in the end, the source of the Order’s strength and the source of its vulnerability. The elaborate structure of offices gave the Order a stability and a continuity that was rare in the medieval world, and it allowed the Order to survive the loss of the Holy Land, the loss of the Prussian state after 1525, and the loss of the Livonian state in 1561. The same structure, however, was difficult to adapt to changing circumstances, and the Order’s slowness to respond to the military revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was in part a consequence of the rigidity of its constitutional hierarchy.
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.
- Urban, William. The Teutonic Knights: A Military History. London: Greenhill, 2003.
Related Reading
For the constitutional context, see the parent pillar on the structure and daily life of the Order and the pillar on the Teutonic state in Prussia. For the supreme magistracy, see the article on the election of the Grand Master and the article on the five Grossgebietiger. For the local command, see the article on convent castles. For the early grand masters, see the biography of Hermann von Salza. For the Order’s other provincial branches, see the pillar on the Livonian state.