The ecclesiastical establishment known variously as the “Teutonic Knights,” “German Order,” or otherwise, was a remarkable medieval phenomenon, variously a hospital, religious order, military organization, and significant territorial state (Prussia) in northeastern Europe. Aleksander Pluskowski, Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Reading, has crafted a slim volume (214 pages including notes and bibliography) presenting the history of this institution from its formation during the Third Crusade to its loss of political power in the sixteenth century. Appearing in a series probably meant for an educated general anglophone audience with medieval and historical interests, the book provides a solid and up-to-date narrative of an important participant in late medieval eastern European affairs.
After a short introduction, the first three chapters trace the emergence of the Order prior to its arrival in the eastern Baltic lands. While the army of the Third Crusade (1188-93) besieged Muslim-held Acre, German-speaking crusaders established a field hospital. After the victory, the hospital was endowed with properties in the restored rump crusader kingdom of Jerusalem and then in 1198 encouraged to emulate the existing military religious orders of the Templars and Hospitallers and share in the defence of the kingdom. Without entirely abandoning their hospital function, especially under the 1210-39 leadership of Herman von Salza, a knight from Thuringia, they formed a military organization modeled on that of the Templars under a Grand Master and his subordinate officers. Brethren followed a monastic rule with an additional vow to defend Christendom. Endowments and incomes in the kingdom and donated lands in Europe supported noble knights and commoner “sergeants” who operated from the Christian cities and well-constructed castles inland from the coast of Palestine. A skilled politician and diplomat, Salza carefully kept his nascent order in balance with both popes and “Holy Roman” emperors, who were then often at odds. Still, by the 1250s the crusader presence in the Holy Land was plainly overextended and ousted in 1290. Meanwhile, an effort to defend and settle the Hungarian frontier in Transylvania failed after a decade, in part because the Hungarian king came to fear the Order meant to establish its own principality there. But already since 1230 a contingent of knights had been called by a Polish duke to his frontier with the pagan Prussian tribes.
Chapters 4 through 7 detail the Knights’ holy war, conquest, and rule in Prussia and Livonia (present-day Estonia and Latvia) during the thirteenth through early fifteenth centuries. Although prior ecclesiastical presence in Prussia took a while to be resolved, and indigenous societies both there and in Livonia maintained strong military resistance in sometimes difficult terrain, the Order’s incremental advances, supported by regular contingents of western crusaders, accomplished reasonably secure control of Prussia by 1282 and Livonia in 1290. By that time, aggressive policies with Christian neighbours had soured relations with Poland and others. The Knights ruled in their Baltic lands as an international religious corporation, with the Grand Master resident in Prussia from 1309 and a steady flow of resources and recruits from western properties and supporters. They organized their lands into regional provinces and commanderies headed by experienced brethren with some native vassals and, in Prussia, western settlers, who owed service and fiscal dues to the Order. Local indigenous people remained mostly rural, especially in Livonia where immigrant peasant settlers were few. The Order profited from various taxes and payments as well as an extensive network of their own resources and close commercial relations with merchants of the German Hanse. Pluskowski provides an exemplary description of the system of fortified “convents,” constructions of wood and earth plus some impressive masonry castles, which housed the brethren and displayed their power in the land. Decorations in these structures memorialized and reinforced the religious claims underlying the Order’s rule. But with the end of the Prussian and Livonian offensives, the Order turned to regular expeditions against Lithuania, the last significant non-Christian power in northern Europe. Strategies of border raiding pursued by both antagonists depopulated frontier areas into a “Great Wilderness” crossed summer and winter by war parties. While the Knights continued to rely on western recruitment and military methods drawn from their experience in the Holy Land, their rationale failed when the Lithuanian prince converted and became king of Poland in 1385. After 1409 support of western knights on “crusade” ceased.
The last three chapters treat the fifteenth-century defeat and decline of the Order, followed by the Protestant Reformation, which ended its presence in the Baltic, and its subsequent reversion to a chivalric but no longer military establishment in western and central continental Europe. Lithuanian conversion and creation of a Polish-Lithuanian political entity set the stage for dramatic military defeat in the 1410 battle of Tannenberg/Grunwald, followed by repeated losses in subsequent conflicts when Prussian towns and an emergent landed nobility turned against rule by the Order. Simultaneous secularization among the brethren resulted in declining membership, reliance on mercenary garrisons, and financial crisis. Disunity in Livonia meant the effective separation of two branches of the Order. Religious change and privatization of the Order’s offices enabled conversion of the last Grand Master in Prussia to Lutheranism and the creation of a secular principality as a Polish vassal state in 1525. In Livonia slow penetration of Lutheranism and secularization created an oligarchic regime even before Muscovite invasion in 1558 initiated the Livonian war. A new Catholic Grand Master moved his residence to Germany and the Order became once again a noble hospital corporation associated with the imperial Habsburg entourage but tolerant of religious duality among its members.
Overall, The Teutonic Knights provides solid scholarly value as a foundational overview for general medievalists and their students who lack familiarity with late medieval central Europe. Especially noteworthy are Pluskowski’s capable use of recent scholarship in Polish and German (despite thin direct use of written primary sources), a treatment of material (i.e., archaeological) evidence of the Order’s physical presence on the land that is broader than other works (and unprecedented in English), and generous provision of illustrations (contemporary images, maps, graphs, modern photographs).
Although The Teutonic Knights appears in the series “Medieval Lives,” it delivers much less of individual lives or experiences than what is essentially an institutional history. Were a more humanized perspective within the author’s remit, exploitation of records in surviving parts of the Order’s correspondence archive (Ordensbriefarchiv) and regional administrations (Ordensfolianten) currently housed in Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin-Dahlem as well as of the religious and ideological literary output of individual brethren would likely serve to enliven this.
I fear, however, that the targeted readership lacks the background in European and especially Prussian geographic, social, and cultural conditions of the thirteenth century needed to understand both protagonists in these wars of conquest and conversion. Readers are not told who and what Prussians were other than “pagans,” which may have been enough for crusaders to wage war but surely not enough to grasp the nature of native resistance and the contrast with prior crusader experience of the Levant. Likewise, some comparative reference to medieval Iberia would help make sense of, for instance, the whole idea of military religious orders and religious, but simultaneously political, warfare. At the other end of the book’s story we may ask whether the initial success and eventual failure of the Order’s state lay in changes to institutional structures or in a different quality of leadership.