THE ORDENSSTAAT OF THE TEUTONIC KNIGHTS

After the fall of the city of Acre in 1291, the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights of the Hospital of St Mary of Jerusalem moved to Venice, but remained there only until 1309, at which date it was transferred to Marienburg in Prussia. The Order flourished during the course of the 14th century, purchasing Reval and northern Estonia from Denmark in 1346; seizing the Polish duchy of Dobrzyn in 1392 and the island of Gotland in 1398; and being ceded Samogitia by Lithuania in the same year, thus finally linking the Prussian and Livonian halves of the Ordensstaat. It reached the limits of its territorial expansion by acquiring Neumark in 1402. This apogee of its power was shortlived, however. Dobrzyn was returned to Poland by the Order in 1405, Gotland was returned to Denmark 2 years later, and in 1409 Samogitia received Polish-Lithuanian support in a revolt that was to culminate in the campaign and battle of Tannenberg in 1410. The Order’s defeat there was disastrous, and payment to Poland of a war-indemnity that amounted to 10 times the average annual income of the King of England led to financial ruin. After several decades more, the German nobles and burghers of the Ordensstaat revolted in 1454 and offered to hand Prussia over to Casimir IV of Poland. 13 years of bitter war ensued, with the Order’s 8,000 unpaid mercenaries ultimately selling the towns that they garrisoned — including Marienburg itself in 1457 — to the Poles and rebel German lords. By the Peace of Thorn of 1466 Casimir received a further considerable part of Prussia and the homage of the Order’s Hochmeister (Grand Master).

Though the Order survived even this humiliation with remarkable resilience it was, nevertheless, the effective end of an era, especially since one of the conditions of the Peace was that thereafter no less than half of the Order’s brethren were to be Poles. The Peace of Thorn effectively divided the Order too, for one of its results was that the Landmeistern (see below) of Livonia and Germany became far more independent. The Order’s Livonian brethren played an active and notably successful role as allies of Lithuania against the Muscovites in a war of 1499-1503, under their celebrated Landmeister Walther von Plettenberg, who defeated the Russians on the Seritsa River in 1501 (where his 4,000 horse, 8,000 foot and artillery drove back 40,000 Muscovites), and then won a signal victory with only 5,000 men at Lake Smolina in 1502. The Order’s final demise in Prussia came some 20 years later, when the last Hochmeister became a Lutheran. It survived somewhat longer in Livonia, until smashed in the mid-16th century by Ivan the Terrible, the last Livonian Landmeister ceding the Order’s lands to Poland in 1562.

Organisation remained much the same as is set out in Armies of Feudal Europe. Principal officers of the Order were the Hochmeister, his deputy the Grosskomtur (Grand Commander), the Ordensmarschall (Marshal of the Order), Spinier (Hospitaller), Trapier (Draper, or Quartermaster) and Tressler (Treasurer). Of these the Grosskomtur acted as castellan of Marienburg, and the Treasurer inevitably also stayed with the main Convent. The others became local administrators-in-chief, the Hospitaller commanding Elbing, the Draper Christburg, and the Marshal Konigsberg, where the Order’s headquarters was to be established after the loss of Marienburg in 1457. In addition to these there were the provincial Landmeisters of Germany, Prussia19, Livonia and Italy, plus occasionally regional commanders called Landkomturen. The Livonian Landmeister was usually based at Wenden, and was assisted in turn by his own marshal, draper and treasurer. The basic unit of administration in Prussia and Livonia alike was the Komturei (‘commandery’), comprising at least a dozen brother knights plus usually about 100 or more other soldiers — serving brethren, mercenaries and militiamen — commanded by a Komtur (commander) or a castellan, or in the case of more isolated com-manderies a Vogt (advocate), who was also responsible for tax collection and local government.

Teutonic Knight armies were generally comprised of 4 distinct elements, being brethren, vassals, mercenaries, and adventurers. The brethren were either brother knights (Ritterbrudem) or serving brethren (Diendebrudern), the latter being non-knightly men-at-arms. They were organised into lances as elsewhere in Europe, each lance comprising a man-at-arms, another armed horseman, and a mounted crossbowman or archer (who probably often fought mounted in the role of light cavalrymen), plus 4 horses, the man-at-arms mounting the fourth horse just before entering battle. Relatively small in numbers, many brethren served as officers and NCOs to bodies of mercenaries and militiamen. Most were Germans (from the north in Livonia, from the south in Prussia), but by the end of the 14th century they also included many Poles and even Prussians and Lithuanians. The Order’s vassals provided cavalry in return for grants of land, and even infantry in the form of a militia levy (see below). The cavalry included many light horse, raised on the basis of one per 40 or 50 Hufen at the beginning of this period, increasing to one per 25-30 Hufen by the 1370s and one per 10-15 by the early-15th century (though in the frontier wilderness of Lithuania and Samogitia estates remained somewhat larger). Men-at-arms tended to serve in exchange for estates twice the size of those of light cavalrymen. In Estonia in 1350 it was stipulated that one ‘well-armed’ German (i. e. a man-at-arms) and 2 natives ‘who have at least helm and shield’ were to serve for each 100 Hufen. The Teutonic Knights tended to call such native light cavalry Turkopolen, i. e. Turcopoles. In addition to those fielded by their vassals others were provided by mercenaries, particularly Bohemians and Poles. Most of the Order’s mercenaries, however, were Germans.

The element I have called adventurers are those often inappropriately called ‘crusaders’ in both contemporary and modern sources. Like the Order’s mercenaries they were chiefly Germans, but also came to the Ordensstaat from much further afield and included Englishmen, Frenchmen, Lowlanders, Italians, Hungarians, Scots and Swiss. Although some came in fulfilment of a crusader’s vow, most came for practical military experience or, more often, simply for loot. Froissart observed that Prussia was the place for a soldier to go to ‘take his profit’, and where ‘all knights and esquires go to advance themselves’, while the 15th century poet John Gower complained that knights went to Prussia and Tartary simply ‘to win praise’ or to secure a lady’s affection. Celebrities from Western Europe who participated in such expeditions included King John of Bohemia, who during a campaign of 1328-29 contracted the opthalmia that was to lead to his blindness; Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, who led his own company of horse and foot to Prussia in 1352; Jean de Grailly, the Captal de Buch, in 1357; Albert, Duke of Austria, who in 1377 came with allegedly as many as 2,000 men; Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, the future King Henry IV of England, in 1390 and 1392 with companies of supposedly 300 men (but more probably about 150-200); and Marshal Boucicault, who indulged in 3 separate expeditions to Prussia in the late-14th century. Even Chaucer’s Knight was such an adventurer, for we are told that he had often raided in Lithuania. Sienkiewicz claims that as many as 22 nations were represented in the Order’s army at Tannenberg, the Burgundian chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet specifically mentioning that a few knights from Normandy, Picardy and Hainault were present in addition to a seemingly considerable number of Hungarians. The presence of non-Germans on this occasion was exceptional, however, for they were rare in Prussia after 1400, and even rarer in Livonia, and disappeared entirely soon after Tannenberg. The very last body of such non-German crusaders on record appears to have been a company of Burgundians who participated in a campaign against Poland in 1413.

Many of the Order’s infantry were similarly provided by the retinues of crusading lords, others being recruited by the use of the crusading vow as a means of atonement or contrition. Of the latter category, large numbers enlisted with the Order itself and, along with mercenaries, were organised into units commanded by brother knights. Other infantry were provided by town militias of German burghers, or else by levies of native Prussians, Kurs (Curonians), Letts (Lettigallians, Semgallians and Selonians), Livs, and Estonians. Such troops had begun to diminish in importance during the early-15th century, but could still even then be found in sizeable numbers — a Livonian raiding party defeated in Samogitia in 1434, for instance, comprised 800 Kur militiamen alongside just 40 brother knights.

By about 1380 there were some 700 brethren in Prussia alone, and by 1400 there were probably some 1,600 brethren altogether in Prussia and Livonia under whom, at its greatest extent, the Order was able to raise considerable armies from its assorted reserves of manpower. For their initial attack on Gotland in 1398 they were able to muster 4,000 men, and when the island had to be recaptured from the Danes in 1404 the Hochmeister despatched an army of as many as 15,000 men. The greatest army ever assembled by the Order was inevitably that fielded at Tannenberg in 1410, which has been variously claimed as 30-80,000 men, including many volunteers and mercenaries as well as some 7-800 Prussian brethren (Livonia not being represented at this battle)20. Polish accounts refer to the Order’s losses on this occasion as 18,000 dead and

14.000  captured, a census of the latter group taken the next day indicating that they were comprised principally of the army’s Slav elements, including thousands of Poles from Silesia, Pomerania, Kujavia and elsewhere, plus Bohemians, Moravians and Lusatians. Of the Teutonic Knights themselves, Desmond Seward in The Monks of War says 205 were killed, and Eric Christiansen in The Northern Crusades says 400. Sienkiewicz, however, relying on Eastern European sources, wrote in The Teutonic Knights that of 700 ‘white-cloaks’ present at the battle only 15 were taken alive (though he fails to specify whether any actually escaped). Certainly it seems likely that most of the brethren were killed, since it is unlikely that the battle-flags of every squadron would have been captured otherwise.

Some further details of the composition of this army are to be found in a book of 1448 by Jan Dlugosz (see notes to figure 103), from which it would seem the army was organised in 50 squadrons or ‘standards’, confirmed by other accounts which put the Order’s left wing at 14 squadrons, its right wing at 20, and its reserve at 16 squadrons. From Dlugosz’s notes it is apparent that about a third of them were made up of adventurers and the Order’s feudal vassals, while of the balance each was comprised of the brethren of an individual commandery plus its hired mercenaries and local men-at-arms. Only one squadron appears to have been made up entirely of brethren (that of the Marshal), since even the Hochmeister’s division included German mercenaries. Dlugosz provides us with the strengths of just 7 of the squadrons, of which 2 are of German adventurers (60 and 80 lances strong); the others include those of the Bishopric of Warmia (Ermland), numbering 100 lances, and the Burgomeisters of Danzig (100 lances, including mercenaries and seamen) and Thorn (80 lances, including the town’s own regular troops plus some foreign mercenaries). The strengths of only 2 of the Order’s own squadrons are recorded, being those of the komtur of Mewe (80 lances) and the vice-komtur of Danzig (70 lances). Overall these figures therefore give an average strength of 80 lances per squadron, which would make the entire army some 4,000 lances strong; since we have already seen that in Prussia a lance comprised 3 mounted men, this must have put their cavalry strength at about

12.000  men (assuming that the archers/crossbowmen remained mounted), while it is known that their lances also included an unknown number of foot-soldiers (it probably being these who Dlugosz intends by his references in many places to ‘the men of the town’, i. e. militiamen; and in what other military role could Danzig seamen possibly serve on the battlefield if not as infantry?). Dlugosz also provides us with the strengths of 4 Livonian squadrons that fought at Nakel in 1431, two of which were of 100 lances, the others being considerably bigger at 200 and 300 lances. A later battle, at Swiecin near Lake Zarnowiec in 1462, provides us with rare details of the actual composition of the Order’s armies in terms of troop types, telling us that on this occasion the army was comprised of 1,000 heavy cavalry, 600 light cavalry, 1,300 militia and 400 other infantry.