Religion, Ideology and the Long Legacy of the Teutonic Knights
The Teutonic Order is, at root, a religious institution. The Order was founded as a hospital brotherhood, placed under the Rule of St Augustine, and bound by the three monastic vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. The Order’s religious identity was, throughout its history, an essential part of its self-understanding, and the Order’s religious practices — the daily offices, the chapter of faults, the customary Masses, the charitable foundations — were a substantial part of the brethren’s daily life.
The Order’s religious identity was, however, complicated by the Order’s other identities. The Order was a military force, and the military vocation was a central part of the Order’s self-understanding. The Order was a territorial sovereign, and the political vocation of the Order was a substantial part of the Order’s relations with the surrounding princes and the papacy. The Order was, in time, a German-speaking institution in a region of mixed ethnic and confessional composition, and the Order’s role as a German agent in a non-German region was a substantial part of the Order’s political and cultural identity.
The interaction of these several identities — religious, military, territorial, German — is the principal subject of the religious and ideological history of the Order. The Order’s founders and the Order’s grand masters had to work out a religious and political ideology that could accommodate all of them, and the result was one of the most interesting and one of the most contested ideological formations in medieval Europe.
The Religious Mission
The Order’s religious mission was, at first, the charitable care of German pilgrims and crusaders in the Holy Land. The Order’s hospital at Acre was, in the late twelfth century, an important institution, and the Order’s reputation for the care of the sick and the poor was a substantial part of its early appeal. The Order’s religious mission expanded, in the thirteenth century, to include the conversion of the pagan Prussians and Lithuanians, and the Order’s crusading vocation was, in time, the most visible part of the Order’s religious identity.
The Order’s religious mission in the Baltic was more complicated than the Order’s religious mission in the Holy Land. The Order’s mission in the Baltic was a mission to a population that was linguistically, culturally and religiously distinct from the German-speaking, Catholic population of the Order’s recruiting base. The mission required the Order to develop a religious and political ideology that could justify the conquest and Christianisation of the pagan Baltic peoples, and the Order did so by adapting the established crusading theology of the Latin West to the new circumstances of the Baltic frontier.
The Order’s religious mission in the Baltic was a substantial success. The pagan Prussians were, by the end of the thirteenth century, almost entirely Christianised. The pagan Lithuanians were, by the end of the fourteenth century, Christianised as well. The conversion was, of course, accompanied by substantial violence, by the destruction of the old religious institutions, by the imposition of the Latin rite, and by a substantial transformation of the social and economic structures of the native populations. The Order’s religious mission was the single most consequential factor in the Christianisation of north-eastern Europe.
The Rule of St Augustine
The Order was placed under the Rule of St Augustine by the papacy under Innocent III, between 1198 and 1205, in the months following the bull of Celestine III of 1198 which had recognised the fraternity as a militaris religio. The Rule remained the constitutional foundation of the Order for the rest of its history.
The Rule of St Augustine is a short document, of fewer than a thousand words in the standard recension, and it was originally composed by St Augustine of Hippo in the late fourth or early fifth century for the use of a community of clergy living in common. The Rule sets out, in austere and unsystematic terms, the basic principles of the communal religious life: the love of God, the love of neighbour, the rejection of private property, the practice of prayer and meditation, the discipline of the common refectory and dormitory, and the obligation of mutual correction among the brethren.
The Rule of St Augustine was well suited to the requirements of a military-religious order. The Rule was less detailed than the Benedictine Rule, and it allowed a substantial degree of institutional flexibility. The Rule emphasised the communal character of religious life, but it did not specify the details of the daily offices, the chapter of faults, or the administration of the convent. The Order was, in consequence, free to develop its own customs and statutes to supplement the Rule, and the Order’s Statuten became, in time, a substantial body of customary law that governed the daily life of the brethren.
The Conflicts with the Papacy
The Order’s relations with the papacy were, for the greater part of the Order’s history, cordial and mutually supportive. The Order was, throughout its history, one of the principal instruments of papal policy in the Baltic, and the papacy was, throughout the Order’s history, one of the Order’s principal sources of political and financial support. The Order received, in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a substantial body of papal bulls that confirmed its privileges, granted it extensive rights of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and provided it with substantial revenues from the tithes and the indulgences of the Baltic region.
The Order’s relations with the papacy were, however, not without tension. The Order’s exempt status — its status as a religious order directly subject to the Holy See, without the intermediary jurisdiction of the local bishops — was a continual source of friction with the local episcopate. The Order’s continuing military operations against Lithuania after the conversion of 1386 were, in the view of the papacy, a substantial embarrassment, and the papacy was, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, increasingly reluctant to support the Order’s claim to a continuing crusading vocation in the Baltic.
The Romantic and Nationalist Legacy
The Teutonic Order became, in the nineteenth century, an object of intense literary and political attention in both the German and the Polish national traditions. The German Romantics of the early nineteenth century treated the Order as a noble Christian frontier, a forerunner of the German national mission in the east, and a symbol of the German imperial tradition. The Polish Romantic writers of the same period treated the Order as a colonial aggressor, a brutal suppressor of the Polish and Lithuanian national traditions, and a symbol of the German oppression of the Slavic peoples.
The principal literary monument of the Polish Romantic tradition on the Teutonic Order is Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Krzyżacy (The Teutonic Knights), first published in 1900. Sienkiewicz was, by the time of the novel’s composition, the most popular Polish novelist of his generation, and the Nobel Prize that he received in 1905 was, in part, a recognition of the novel’s success. The novel is set in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, in the period leading up to the battle of Grunwald, and it is, in form, a historical romance in the manner of Sir Walter Scott.
The German Romantic treatment of the Order was, in the Nazi period, brought to a kind of culmination. The Nazi appropriation of the Order’s heritage was an extreme form of the German national-mission rhetoric of the previous century, and the Order was, in the Nazi propaganda, a symbol of the German racial and imperial mission in the east. The Nazi appropriation of the Order’s heritage was, in the long run, a substantial embarrassment for the German national tradition, and the postwar German historiography has distanced itself from the national-mission rhetoric of the previous century.
The Modern Perception
The modern perception of the Teutonic Order is, in significant part, a product of the long disputes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The modern historiography of the Order is a transnational and comparative enterprise. The Order is studied, in the modern historiography, in the context of the broader history of the military-religious orders — the Templars, the Hospitallers, the Calatrava, the Santiago, the Aviz, the Sword Brothers — and in the context of the broader history of the European frontier societies — the Iberian frontier, the Baltic frontier, the crusader states of the Levant.
The modern historiography is also interested in the Order’s role in the development of the European state system, in the Order’s contribution to the Christianisation of north-eastern Europe, in the Order’s architectural legacy, in the Order’s legal traditions, and in the Order’s contribution to the cultural and economic development of the Baltic region. The modern perception of the Order is, in short, more nuanced and more balanced than the perception of the Order in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Continuing Institutional Presence
The Order continues to exist, in the present day, as a small Catholic religious order, with its headquarters in Vienna. The modern Order is dedicated to charitable works, including the care of the sick, the education of the young, and the support of the poor. The modern Order has a few hundred members, a handful of houses in Austria, Germany, Italy and the Czech Republic, and a substantial archival and historical apparatus.
The modern Order is, in its self-understanding, a continuation of the medieval Order, and the modern Order is committed to the religious vocation of the medieval Order. The modern Order’s archives in Vienna are the principal repository of the Order’s medieval records, and the archives are open to qualified researchers.
Related Reading
For the religious mission, see the article on the Baltic mission and the article on the conversion of the pagans. For the Rule of St Augustine, see the article on Augustinian customs and the article on the three vows. For the conflicts with the papacy, see the article on Pope Gregory IX and the article on the conflict with Pope John XXII. For the romantic and nationalist legacy, see the article on the Grunwald narrative in Polish literature and the article on German Romanticism and the Order. For the modern perception, see the article on the Nazi appropriation of the Order and the article on modern historiography.
Sources
- Boockmann, Hartmut. Der Deutsche Orden: Zwölf Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte. Munich: Beck, 1981.
- Biskup, Marian. Der Deutsche Orden im Zeitalter der Reformation. Marburg: Elwert, 1989.
- Housley, Norman. Contesting the Crusades. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
- Urban, William. The Teutonic Knights: A Military History. London: Greenhill, 2003.