Teutonic Knights



         


The Teutonic Order (German: Deutscher Orden, Latin: Ordo domus Sanctæ Mariæ Theutonicorum) was a crusading order of knights under Roman Catholic religious vows which was formed at the end of the 12th century in Palestine to give medical aid to pilgrims to the holy places. They received Papal orders for crusades to take and hold Jerusalem for Christianity. They were based at Acre.

When the mission of the order in Palestine was nearing its end, the Teutonic Knights moved their headquarter to Venice. Despite the fact that their mission of conquering the Holy Land was ended, they wanted to introduce the idea of religious crusades to Eastern Europe, on the border with pagan nations. The Knights offered their services to the local Christian rulers posing as religiously motivated mercenaries. Nevertheless, they hoped that using their influence in the Holy Roman Empire could help them become territorial proprietors of the newly conquered lands.

In 1211, Andrew II of Hungary accepted their services. They were granted the district of Burzenland in Transylvania. Andrew had been involved in negotiations for the marriage of his daughter with the son of Hermann, the Landgrave of Thuringia. The latter's vassals included the family of Hermann of Salza, the new master of the Teutonic Order. Led by a brother called Theoderich, they defended the Kingdom of Hungary from the neighbouring Cumans. In 1224 they petitioned Pope Honorius III to be placed directly under the authority of the Papal See, rather than the Kingdom of Hungary. King Andrew responded by expelling them in 1225.

At that time Konrad I Mazowiecki, duke of Mazovia in what is now east-central Poland, appealed to the Knights to defend his province and conquer the native tribes in Prussia, giving it the Culmerland as a fief (1226) for the time until the conquest was over. The Order's conquest of Prussia was accomplished with great bloodshed over more than 50 years, during which the native Old Prussians were subjugated and forced to adopt Christianity. Eventually the Order transferred its headquarters to a huge brick castle it built at Marienburg (Polish: Malbork) on the Nogat River south of Danzig (Gdansk). The Order did not surrender Prussia to Poland; instead it was converted into Teutonic Order state, which in principle was against the rules of a Chivalric Order.

The Order instigated the immigration of many thousands of colonists from Germany and the Netherlands, founded numerous towns and cities, and built massive castles, called Ordensburgen in German, to defend the settlements against attacks from Lithuania and Poland, with which the Order was at war many times during the 14th and 15th centuries. Among cities founded by the Teutonic Order was Königsberg (1255), later capital of the German province of East Prussia (Ostpreussen) and, after World War II, the Soviet Russian city of Kaliningrad. Many knights from western Europe, including some from England and France, journeyed to Prussia during the 14th century to participate in punitive raids against Lithuania, which remained non-Christian ("heathen") much later than the rest of eastern Europe.

In 1454 gentry and the burghers of western Prussia rose up against the Order in the "War of the Cities" or Thirteen Year War, at the end of which the Order recognized Polish crown rights over Prussia's western half (subsequently Royal Prussia) while retaining eastern Prussia under nominal Polish overlordship (Second Treaty of Thorn, 1466). Eastern Prussia (subsequently Ducal Prussia) was also lost to the Order when in 1525 its grand master, Albert of Brandenburg, converted to Lutheranism and assumed the rank of hereditary Duke of Prussia.

The new Grand Magistery was then established in Württemberg and members of the Habsburg family continued as grand masters over the Order's considerable holdings in Germany until 1809, when the Order lost its last secular holdings. The order continued to exist, headed by Habsburgs through the First World War, and today operates primarily as a charitable organization.

The Order and its relations with its neighbours (Poland, the Duchy of Masovia and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) are the main motive in a novel by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, called Krzyzacy (or, in English, The Teutonic Knights).

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Grand Masters (Hochmeister) of the Teutonic Order, 1191-present

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See also

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