Religious Mission of the Teutonic Order
The religious mission of the Teutonic Order was, at first, the charitable care of German-speaking pilgrims and crusaders in the Holy Land. The fraternity that took shape in the crusader camp before Acre in the autumn of 1190 was a hospital brotherhood, not a military order, and its early identity was defined by the works of mercy rather than by the sword. The Order’s mission expanded, however, in a quite unanticipated direction in the course of the thirteenth century, as the brethren were drawn, by a combination of papal invitation, imperial patronage, and local political opportunity, into the Christianisation of the pagan peoples of the south-eastern Baltic. The transformation of the Order from a Levantine hospital fraternity into a crusading order on the Baltic frontier is one of the most consequential shifts in the religious history of medieval Europe, and the religious mission that took shape on the Prussian and Lithuanian frontier was a quite different enterprise from the charitable mission that had defined the Order in its first decades.
The Charitable Origins
The hospital of the German fraternity in Acre was, in its earliest months, a small and improvised institution, sustained by donations from the German merchant community of the Levantine ports and by the surplus of the German crusading host. The brethren were laymen and clerics in roughly equal number, and the work of the hospital was generally the work of nursing — the binding of wounds, the preparation of food, the laundering of linen, the consolation of the dying. The religious life of the fraternity was structured by the canonical hours and by the celebration of the Mass, but the dominant practical identity of the brethren was that of the caregiver rather than that of the warrior.
The charitable mission of the Order was, in its first decades, the principal source of its appeal to potential donors in the German lands. The hospital at Acre was an object of substantial bequests from the Rhenish and Swabian cities, and the Order’s reputation for the conscientious care of the sick and the poor was a major element in the rapid growth of its endowments in the Empire. The Order’s earliest German houses — the commanderies of the bailiwicks of Thuringia, Franconia, Alsace, and the Rhineland — served mainly as support bases for the Levantine hospital rather than independent centres of religious life, and the brethren who staffed them were, generally lay brothers engaged in the management of the Order’s properties and the transmission of revenues to the East.
The charitable mission of the Order was, an integral part of the broader pattern of Latin charitable institutions in the crusader states. The Order was, in origin, a national fraternity — a German counterpart to the older international orders — and the national character of its charitable work was a substantial part of its appeal. The Order cared for Germans, in a Holy Land in which the German-speaking pilgrim was a particularly exposed figure, and the German donors who supported the Order expected, in return, that the Order would continue to prioritise the care of their compatriots.
The Expansion to the Baltic
The Order’s expansion to the Baltic began, in a formal sense, with the call of Duke Konrad I of Masovia to the Order in 1226. Konrad was under intense pressure from the pagan Prussian clans, who had been conducting destructive raids into his territories for several decades, and he offered the Order the Culmer Land (the Chełmno Land) in exchange for a crusade against the Prussians. The offer was accepted, in part because the Order had by then lost most of its Levantine possessions to the Muslim reconquest, and the Order’s centre of gravity was already beginning to shift northwards.
The Prussian mission of the Order was, however, quite different from the charitable mission of the Order in the Holy Land. The Prussian mission was a mission of conquest and conversion, in which the military and the religious vocations were inseparably combined. The Order built a chain of castles across the Prussian landscape, garrisoned by brother-knights and supplemented by lay brothers, mercenaries, and indigenous auxiliaries. The castles served as the nuclei of Christian settlement, the bases from which the surrounding countryside was brought under Order control, and the centres of the new ecclesiastical administration. The Order’s mission in Prussia was, a model of the medieval Christian frontier: a combination of military conquest, monastic colonisation, and pastoral care that the Order had learned, in part, from the Cistercian settlement of eastern Germany and the Iberian precedents of the Reconquista.
The expansion of the Order’s mission to the Baltic was accompanied, in the thirteenth century, by the parallel development of the Order’s mission in Livonia. The Order’s Livonian branch was constituted, in 1237, by the merger of the surviving Sword Brothers with the Teutonic Order, and the Order assumed responsibility for the Christianisation of the Livonian, Latgalian, Estonian, and (eventually) Lithuanian populations. The Livonian mission was, even more complex than the Prussian mission, because the populations to be Christianised were politically fragmented, linguistically diverse, and exposed to the pressure of the Russian principalities on the Order’s eastern frontier. The Order’s Livonian branch became, in time, a semi-autonomous component of the wider Order, with its own Landmeister, and the relations between the Livonian branch and the Prussian headquarters were a continual source of institutional tension.
The Theology of the Northern Crusades
The Order’s mission in the Baltic required the development of a religious and political ideology that could justify the conquest and Christianisation of the pagan Prussian and Lithuanian populations. The Order and its apologists drew on the established crusading theology of the Latin West. The crusade was, in the papal doctrine of the high Middle Ages, an armed pilgrimage, undertaken in defence of the Christian people and in support of the Christianisation of the infidel. The Baltic crusade was, an extension of the crusading movement to a new theatre of operations, and the papal grants of indulgences to the participants in the Prussian and Livonian crusades placed the Baltic enterprise on the same theological footing as the crusades to the Holy Land.
The Baltic crusade was, however, contested in its own time. The legitimacy of crusading against the pagan peoples of the Baltic was challenged by a number of medieval theologians, on the grounds that the Prussians and Lithuanians were peaceful populations who had not attacked Christendom and who were, in consequence, not legitimate objects of a crusade. The Order and its apologists responded to this criticism by drawing a distinction between the actual and the potential threat posed by the pagan populations, and by emphasising the religious obligation of the Christian ruler to bring the gospel to the infidel. The Order’s most articulate defender in this controversy was the Dominican William of Modena, who served as papal legate to the Baltic in the 1220s and 1230s, and whose treatise on the legitimacy of the Prussian crusade became the principal text of the Order’s crusading ideology.
The theology of the Baltic crusade was, in the longer term, complicated by the conversion of Lithuania. The Christianisation of the Lithuanian grand dukes, in 1386, removed the principal theological justification for the Order’s continuing crusading activity, and the Order’s continuing military operations against the Christian rulers of Poland-Lithuania became, many contemporaries, a war of aggression rather than a crusade. The Order’s response to this development — the construction of an alternative ideology in which the Order’s mission was understood as the defence of the Christian frontier against the Orthodox and the schismatic — was not, in the end, successful, and the Order’s loss of legitimacy was a substantial factor in the political isolation of the Order on the eve of Grunwald.
The Conversion of the Pagans
The conversion of the pagan Prussians was, in its outcome, a substantial success. The Prussian clans were, by the end of the thirteenth century, almost entirely Christianised, and the Prussian language survived only as a substrate beneath the German and Polish-speaking populations of the Order’s territories. The conversion was, however, accompanied by extensive violence, by the destruction of the old Prussian sacred sites, by the imposition of the Latin rite, and by a substantial transformation of the social and economic structures of the native populations. The Prussian peasantry was, in time, reduced to a serf-like status, and the old Prussian aristocracy was, for the most part, exterminated, displaced, or absorbed into the new German-speaking ruling class.
The conversion of Lithuania was, in the end, accomplished by a quite different route. The Lithuanian grand dukes, under Jogaila (Władysław II Jagiełło), accepted baptism in 1386 as part of a dynastic union with the Kingdom of Poland, and the Christianisation of Lithuania proceeded, generally as a top-down process of dynastic conversion rather than as a bottom-up process of pastoral evangelisation. The Order’s continuing military campaigns against Lithuania were, the new Christian rulers, an unwarranted aggression, and the Order’s claim to a continuing crusading vocation in Lithuania was, in effect, extinguished by the conversion of 1386.
The conversion of the Prussians and the Lithuanians was, one of the most consequential episodes in the Christianisation of the European continent. The Order’s religious mission in the Baltic brought the Latin rite, the Roman ecclesiastical organisation, the institutions of Latin Christian monarchy, and the monastic and mendicant orders into a vast region of north-eastern Europe, and the Order’s legacy is, the foundation of the Christian civilisation of the modern Baltic region.
Sources
- Biskup, Marian, and Gerard Labuda. Dzieje zakonu krzyżackiego w Prusach. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1986.
- Boockmann, Hartmut. Der Deutsche Orden: Zwölf Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte. Munich: Beck, 1981.
- Christiansen, Eric. The Northern Crusades. 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 1997.
- Housley, Norman. Contesting the Crusades. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Related Reading
For the Levantine origins of the Order, see the article on the founding at Acre. For the Baltic theatre of the crusading movement, see the cluster on the Northern Crusades. For the Prussian mission, see the article on the Baltic mission. For the Christianisation of the Prussian clans, see the article on the conversion of the pagans. For the Augustinian framework of the Order’s religious life, see the cluster on the Rule of St Augustine. For the Livonian branch of the Order, see the pillar on Livonia.