Teutonic Knights
The spiritual motive of the Teutonic Knights, and of all crusaders, was the desire for atonement through service. The method chosen may seem bizarre, especially when contrasted with the ministry of love carried on by the Franciscans for the same purpose, but the Teutonic Knights and the friars worked together, and had this in common: they were both trying to achieve redemption and holiness without cutting themselves off from the practical world. Their Orders expanded most vigorously at the same time, between 1220 and 1250, and were seen as complementary; they shared a monastic dedication to an unmonastic way of life. And, as long as most Latin Christians accepted the fight against the heathen as a laudable and holy enterprise, it made as much sense to become a knight-brother as to become a Friar.
While the knight-brothers were the dominant caste within the Order, they were not the only members. The task of running their parishes and hospitals was left to Priest-Brothers, Half-Brothers, and sisters, so that the ministries of charity, education and preaching were affiliated to the war machine. By 1400 the order ran one hospital at Elbing, where the duty of attending – but not treating – the indigent sick was performed in accordance with the regulations established by the Order of St John, which required hospitallers to treat the inmates as ‘our lords, the poor’. This meant providing alms, asylum and masses, rather than medicine, and in towns, hospitals were run by burghers, not Brothers. The success of this ministry may be judged by the fact that in 1229 the Order’s Rule was adopted by the English hospital of St Thomas of Canterbury at Acre, at the request of the bishop of Winchester.
Just as the Teutonic Order was able to exploit and adapt various strains of religious feeling, so its Northern crusade was greatly assisted by Germans who were drawn to the same region for purely secular reasons. The Gotland association of German merchants engaged in the Russia trade had led the way in the later twelfth century, and Bishop Albert of Livonia had made use of German emigrants to reinforce his see at Riga with a new borough, and to help hold down the country by accepting rural fiefs. This pattern of town-building and enfeoffment was followed by the Teutonic Knights from the beginning; each newly gained Prussian district was given a settlement of burghers and a sprinkling of knightly vassals, to act as a source of income and military service for the Order.
As early as 1233, in the charter issued for the settlements at Chelmno (Kulm) and Torun (Thorn) – the Kulmischer Handfest – Hermann of Salza laid down what he considered the right political conditions for his burghers. This charter granted a measure of independence to the townsmen, but reserved for the Order a share of the profits of justice, an annual rent, the right of coining money, military service, and ownership of the territory round the town. This ‘law’ – derived from the town-law of Magdeburg, and conceded by all colonizing princes – was less favourable to the townsmen than the Lübisches Recht granted to the coastal cities of Riga, Reval, and Elbing, which allowed them control of their own districts and an independent militia, and it was not until 1255 that the Order was strong enough to insist on Kulm Law for all future incorporations; but thereafter it provided an acceptable arrangement for co-operation between the Order and its towns, and encouraged further immigration. The alliance was crucial, because it linked the conquests of the Order to the most powerful social catalyst in the east Baltic region: the German borough. The wealth, industry and ingenuity of these new settlements made them the taches d’huile of Prussia and Livonia, from which trade, culture and technology seeped out into the forest and marsh and transformed the tribal societies round them more effectively than conquest and baptism.
During the conquest, both the Sword-Brothers and the Teutonic Knights had the advantage of innovations made available to them largely as a result of their close contact with the merchants, colonists and craftsmen of Germany. These men had been entering the Baltic world in increasing numbers since the chartering of Lübeck in 1158, and the destruction of Wendish sea-power by the Danes gave them free and profitable access to the Novgorod trade route in their own ships. The most important of these innovations was the bigger ship, whether the enlarged Scandinavian byrthing, quadrupled in capacity and fitted with inboard rudder and decks, or the well-rounded high-sided kogge. ‘Cog’ had originally been the name given to any ship with a straight stem and stern, set at an angle to the keel, but towards the end of the twelfth century the Germans appear to have discovered a way of using this shape for a pre-eminently capacious vessel, steered by a true rudder rather than a starboard oar. A cog could carry 500 passengers, or a town’s supplies for a whole winter; it could be used as a fighting ship, and outmatch the raiding-craft of the Balts and, in time, compete with the long-ship. It was the perfect transport for carrying reinforcements through pirate-infested waters, and the essential economic link between new merchant communities and well-established markets. In combination with the river-boat – the bolskip and other forms of lighter – it gave the knights a great logistical advantage, even if they had no cogs of their own until later.
Another innovation was the stone tower. The Teutonic Knights were experienced castle-builders in Palestine, but in the North they had to begin without labour, without local skills and with few deposits of workable stone; they had to make do with wooden blockhouses ringed by pallisades. Valdemar I had proved how effective brick towers could be as coastal defences, but the art of brickmaking was not yet widely known in the North outside Denmark, and, in any case, it needed manpower and settled conditions not available in the east Baltic. The alternative was masonry, a skill well established among the Saxons since counts began putting up stone castles in the early twelfth century; and it appears to have been emigrant masons from Germany who enabled the Knights to replace their first blockhouses with towers, and thus escape their enemies’ most dangerous weapon, fire. There were probably no more than five such towers in Prussia by the 1250s, and perhaps ten in Livonia, but their importance was crucial: they kept small garrisons alive when they would otherwise have been overwhelmed. In the fourteenth century brick would succeed stone as a cheaper and more readily available material.
And, finally, there was artillery – especially the crossbow, which had become a favourite weapon of the German merchant-venturer by 1200, and an indispensable arm of city militias. It was not a knightly instrument, and it was not the Sword-Brothers or Teutonic Knights who brought it to the North, but without it they would not have won their early struggle for survival; its accuracy and penetrating power shortened the odds considerably in the battle between many and few. Magnified into the ballista, or giant catapult, and mounted on a tower or wall, it became a weapon that could fell groups of men in close-packed assault, and deter attackers from otherwise flimsy defences.
These three examples are chosen for their immediate usefulness in the waging of war, but there were other innovations, in the fields of building, tool-making, ironwork, pottery, husbandry, fishery and carpentry, which gave material substance to the claim of the armed knights that they were making new societies out of barbarian lands. These changes did not come out of mass-books, or from Rules that bound their observers to lives of material austerity; they came from a necessary partnership with secular Germans obsessive in the pursuit of profit, land and lordship, and infectiously ingenious at getting what they wanted. North-East Europe was about to succumb to a combination of religious and economic forces which its home-grown civilizations had few means of resisting, but to which they adapted with variable success. By 1300, Low German, the language of Lübeck but not of the Prussian Knights, had become the common language of business throughout the region, from the North Sea to Novgorod, and all the peoples round the Baltic were competing for shares in the increasing wealth of the North. In this scramble, Teutonic Knights, crusaders, colonists and natives were competitors, unequally matched.
