German Particularism

By 1249 the German priory had been divided

Into two. Upper and Lower Germany, and a Grand Commander governed all the lands that were to be included in the German Langue; yet the prioral structure was perhaps less important than the division of the country among a few head preceptories which founded subordinate ones, appointed their preceptors and received their responsions. Thus Grobnig had authority over Upper Silesia and northern Moravia; Gross-Tinz over lower Silesia; Prague over Bohemia;

Commandery of Nieder-Weisel, an example of a two-storey church with a hospital above; now the property of the J ohanniterorden.

Mailberg over Austria and southern Moravia; Bubikon (founded in 1192 by a crusader who had been healed by the Hospitallers) over Switzerland; Werben over Brandenburg and northeastern Germany; Steinfurt over Westphalia, Friesland and part of the Netherlands; Utrecht (a rather later foundation, of about 1250) over Holland; Burg over the lower Rhine. The heads of such houses were generally knights and were distinguished by the title of Meister, which at Mailberg was retained until 1519.

A special case among these regional groupings is Scandinavia. The Hospitallers arrived here

Bubikon, the chief Hospitaller commandery in Switzerland.

In the second half of the twelfth century as preachers of the crusade, and in 1219 they helped the Danes defeat the pagan Estonians; as a consequence the Danish kingdom adopted the Order’s flag as its own. The Templars held little or no property in Scandinavia. The Priory of Dacia was created in 1266;34 the prioral residence was fixed at Antvorskov, and there seems to have been a deliberate policy of establishing a pre-ceptory in each of the eight Danish dioceses. Norway and Sweden had one preceptory each at Vaerne and Eskilstuna; the former, founded in the late twelfth century, had a special connexion with the royal bodyguard, the hird, whose members had the right to retire there as cor-rodaries. There were very few knights among the Scandinavian brethren, and the Priors until the fifteenth century were always German or Dutch.

The first Polish donation to the Order was made by Duke Henry of Sandomierz in Zagosc

* The name Dacia (which properly belongs to Romania) is an example of pretentious and erroneous medieval Latinity, originating apparently in a confusion between Danica or Danici and Dacia or Dacii.

In 1153, and the preceptory of Posen was founded in 1170; until 1610 it was the only Polish preceptory. Poland was included in the title of other priors (usually the Bohemian) from 1252, but there was no separate Polish priory until 1775. In Hungary royal favour towards the Order began to be shown as early as the reign of Geza II (1141-61) and here too the policy of encouraging German colonisation may have been an influence. By the end of the century there were five Hungarian preceptories. Larger benefactions followed the participation of Andrew II in the Fifth Crusade in 1217. He stayed at Crac des Chevaliers, was received as a confrater and invested the Hospital with the entire county of Somogyi, one of the finest territories in the kingdom. The creation of a separate Hungarian Priory dates from the same year, though its first head (like most of his successors) was a foreigner, Pons de la Croix.

The building up of a centralised Priory of Bohemia out of the autonomous groupings of Silesia, Bohemia, Austria, Carinthia, Styria and Carniola began in the period 1253-78 when those lands were united under the crown of Ottocar II. The chief promoter of the process was Hermann von Hohenlohe, councillor to successive Bohemian and Austrian rulers, a nobleman who accumulated such power that the Order was eventually constrained to discover that his illegitimate birth disqualified him from the Priory he had held for fourteen years (128296).

In Germany the regional preceptories also began to lose their position, but more to the advantage of their subordinates, whose independence increased. A distinctive example is to be found in Friesland, where the Hospitallers arrived at the time of the Fifth Crusade (121721) and developed a special type of mixed houses of lay brethren and sisters who lived by tilling the land. The number of Frisian preceptories reached twenty in the fourteenth century, a remarkable proportion of the 45 religious communities of all orders found in Friesland at the time; in 1319 these houses demanded and obtained their emancipation from the head establishment at Herrenstrunden, with the right to elect their own preceptors from among native brethren. 34

After 1320 similar fissile tendencies developed in Brandenburg, during the confused period that followed the extinction of the Ascanian dynasty. There was difficulty in securing any sort of government at all; finances deteriorated, some preceptories were sold, and there were irregular alienations of property. Yet the strivings for independence were directed against the Priory of Germany, not against the Order’s government; responsions were sporadically sent to Rhodes, and when the lands in Pomerania and Pomerelia were sold off to the Teutonic knights it was with the permission of the Chapter General (1366). Eventually Fernandez de Heredia, with characteristic skill, achieved the compromise of Heim-bach (1382), which established the north-eastern preceptories as a distinct group, nominally subject to the Prior of Germany but in practice a separate priory: it appointed its own preceptors and was ruled by its own head, known to his subjects as the Herrenmeister and to the Order as the Grand Bailiff of Brandenburg, whose election was subject only to the formality of confirmation by the Prior.