Teutonic Knights (28 page)

Karl von Trier, having relieved Christmemel, was unwilling to dismiss his army without accomplishing something even more notable. He sent back much of his force, probably with great fanfare, to persuade enemy scouts that he had returned home; but he retained 6,000 men, then sent them by night farther up the river to Welun. The surprise there was complete. As the natives hurried from the village to the citadel, the Christians pursued them, slaughtering many of the fugitives. The crusaders made no effort to assault the central fortress but set fire to the houses and retreated.

Welun was the bulwark of the Samogitian defence system. The grand master was not ready to besiege it, but hardly a year passed without his men burning the suburbs. If he could not capture Welun immediately, he would wear down the people little by little, destroying their homes and fields, knowing that the grand prince was incapable of providing them food and additional garrison forces year after year.

In 1316 the first Western crusaders arrived. These Rhenish pilgrims (as they called themselves) had been recruited by Karl von Trier on a visit to Germany. From this time on, crusaders came ever more frequently to Prussia on what they called
Reisen
(journeys), a medieval euphemism for a military venture. The participants of this expedition were later able to relate that they had killed 200 pagans at the cost of fifty men. That boast was less important than the number of squires who became knights at the end of the expedition. The ceremony of dubbing knights became a popular part of each crusading expedition, with the honour performed by the most prominent visiting lord as soon as each candidate performed some deed of valour. Moreover, the grand master invited the most valiant warriors to sit at a table of honour modelled after King Arthur’s Round Table, and awarded distinctions to the most outstanding knights.

While the crusaders were indulging in chivalric ceremonies in the Samogitian forests, the new grand prince of Lithuania was expanding his influence east and south. Like his predecessors, Gediminas understood that while Rus’ian princes, nobles, and burghers wanted an Orthodox ruler, some would accept any Christian ruler, and in the end all of them would settle for any overlord who could protect them against the Tatar khan who ruled the steppes of southern Russia. For three-quarters of a century Tatar khans had ruled over Rus’, allowing only a modicum of independence even to the princes on the outskirts of their empire, Novgorod and Pskov in the north, Galicia and Volhynia in the west. Now the power of the khan was weakening, and Rus’ian princes and cities saw an opportunity to escape his terrible servitude. As each prince considered rebellion, he cautiously looked about for protection, for Tatar fury was notorious. A misjudgement could bring about a retaliation that few boyars or burghers would live to describe, that few would want to live to remember. Although some nearby Rus’ians had submitted to Vytenis, others did not look for salvation from Gediminas because he was an old antagonist whose armies had often ravaged their lands. The princes of Galicia and Volhynia sought aid first from the pope, then from Poland and Hungary. Since the Teutonic Knights were old allies, they even approached Karl von Trier. However, no Western ruler was ready to send a large force to the steppes, least of all the Teutonic Knights. The Rus’ians turned to Gediminas almost as a last resort. As it happened, it was a brilliant resolution of a complex problem. The Westerners were really too far away, had other pressing concerns, and were demanding a church union on Roman terms. The Byzantines and Balkan states were far too weak. Gediminas was relatively close by, was ready to give full attention to Rus’ian problems, and was tolerant in matters of religion.

As Gediminas proved that he could protect his clients, the trickle of men coming to him became a torrent. Gediminas often allowed the Rus’ian boyars to retain their offices and always permitted them to live by their traditional laws and customs. He especially respected the Russian Orthodox Church and its leaders; they, in turn, urged their people to be loyal to him. Gediminas used this augmentation of his power to make the conflict in Samogitia more equal than it had been. Even so, Gediminas’ ability to resist the crusaders grew only slowly. He was not able to pour Rus’ian warriors suddenly into the war zone along the Nemunas. Even much later the overwhelming majority of his cavalry and foot were Lithuanians and only occasionally did he bring large numbers of Rus’ians to the west. It was more important that he could provide his nobles and boyars with appointments in his army, so that even if their lands were ravaged by crusaders, they did not have to choose between surrender and starvation. Now they could serve honourably as professional soldiers (often as officials or in garrisons of Rus’ian cities) where they could acquire the experience and military equipment which would make them equal to their Western opponents.

Soon Gediminas could sign his letters ‘King of the Lithuanians and many Rus’ians’. He put his brothers Fedor (Theodoric) and Varnys (Woini) to rule over Kiev and Polotsk and his son Algirdas (Olgierd) over Vitebsk. Later he put David of Gardinas in Pskov, where he could harass the Livonian Order. He won over some Rus’ian princes through marriage alliances: he took the heiress of Vitebsk to wife himself and gave his daughter Maria to the prince of Tver. Later he expanded his net of alliances to include Moscow, Galicia, Masovia, and the kingdom of Poland.
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Realising that his military technology was inferior to that of the crusaders, Gediminas sought to attract merchants and artisans from the West, men who knew how to make or acquire the equipment he needed. His contacts with German merchants in Riga were especially important. Those burghers, still fighting the Livonian Order, were eager to enlarge their trade and to strengthen any enemy of the Teutonic Knights. Their sole hesitation came from their desire to defend and extend the Christian faith. Furthermore, if they allied themselves with a pagan monarch against crusaders, violating a strongly held religious code, they would undermine their standing with the pope and emperor, and among other Hanseatic merchants and those nobles whose subjects purchased Livonian products. However, the archbishop of Riga told the merchants that they were not harming Christendom by their actions. Franciscan friars at Gediminas’ court in Vilnius further assured them that the Lithuanians were ready for conversion, if only the crusaders would cease their attacks. The Franciscans were Gediminas’ most fervent partisans, and they spread stories of his eager desire to become a Christian. This prospect, however dim it was, was an argument that the Rigans could use effectively to justify an informal alliance with the Lithuanian grand duke.

In actuality, there was almost no chance that Gediminas would join the Roman Church, but he allowed the Western visitors to fantasise all they wished. His toleration of the Eastern Church was vital to keeping the loyalty of his Rus’ian subjects and the Lithuanians expected him to remain pagan. Gediminas was interested in creating an empire which included both Roman and Rus’ian churches as well as pagans. Religious tolerance of any kind was incomprehensible to the crusaders. Freedom of religion meant freedom to err and freedom to persuade others to err. The Teutonic Knights had been taught to smash evil-doers over the head, and they could not learn to tolerate religious practices which would condemn masses of people to hellfire. For them this kind of tolerance was surely the greatest evil imaginable.

The crusade was fundamentally a means of advancing Christendom, an ideal many nationalities could understand and share; it expressed religious concepts perfectly suited to the contemporary mind. The crusade was also a means of enlarging the territories of the Teutonic Knights, who represented the papacy and the Church at large as well as themselves. They justified holy war as the only way to pacify and Christianise pagans. That had been done successfully in Prussia and Livonia, it was being done with Moslems in Spain and Portugal. The kings of Poland and Hungary used the same reasoning for warring against Tatars and Turks – what was good for them as well as for Christendom was doubly right, doubly justifying the cost in blood and treasure.

What all late medieval crusades had in common was that they were popular struggles of Western Europeans against dangerous enemies on the borders of Christendom. There was an aura of romanticism connected with these crusades that the nineteenth-century public was able to grasp, but which eludes the modern mind.
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Similarly, medieval men and women were upset by the mere existence of pagans on their frontier, even the existence of non-Christians who were peaceful and tolerant. They feared the magic and superstition of the pagan priests, believed that their charms and incantations were effective, and looked upon war against such manifestations of devil-worship as a holy project. Nor were Eastern Christians pleased at having pagan neighbours – like the Tatars, Baltic pagans were not peaceful.

The Lithuanians saw no need to justify their raids into Christian lands to gather cattle and people for sale. The slave trade down the great rivers to Byzantium and the Moslem world was ancient. The Vikings had begun it, local peoples continued it, and Tatars would perpetuate it until the reign of Peter the Great. In addition, Lithuanian boyars were beginning to emulate their neighbours in establishing large estates based on grain production and serfdom. It was impolitic to subject local labour to such debasement, and unnecessary as long as they could round up experienced workers in Poland, Prussia, and Livonia. Christians did not frown on slavery in principle, they simply insisted that one had to limit the practice to enslaving non-Christians. In effect, Lithuanian pagans had it backward! And the crusaders were determined to put a stop to that.

The order’s critics – including Paulus Vladimiri, the fifteenth-century Polish scholar who demanded that the Council of Constance declare the crusade un-Christian – never defended paganism
per se
. Assertions of the moral and intellectual superiority of paganism are a modern phenomenon, often associated with beliefs in the healing power of crystals and herbs, radical feminism, and nature worship, but only rarely with sorcery and voodoo, as medieval men and women would have done. Nor were Eastern Christians friendlier or more understanding of paganism than was the West; there was, in fact, that same mixture of revulsion and fascination that one sees in Western texts, especially the Renaissance era historians.

Lithuanians were not children of nature. The Gediminid princes and their boyars lived in a political and social environment far too sophisticated and complex for them to qualify as examples of Rousseau’s noble savage, even at the end of the century, when several of them became Roman Catholics, they were newly baptised, and their armies contained numbers of Moslem, Orthodox, and pagan warriors. Few demonstrated much respect for the Western church. Through most of the fourteenth century the Gediminids were pagans, and they evidenced little more than contempt for foreign superstitions.

Crusaders were outraged by stories of attacks on churches, desecration of the host, and the murder of priests, monks, and nuns. It should not be forgotten that this was the era of the Black Death, of flagellation cults, of mass hysteria, of witch hunts, of pogroms, and of secret heresies. The pagans were among the few visible enemies that religious men could find to blame for their troubles. They were an obvious and dangerous foe of Church and state.

That allows us to differentiate to a certain degree the Samogitian crusade from the purely territorial aspirations of the Teutonic Order. The difference may seem difficult to establish, especially if one reads only modern historians, but the spiritual aspects of crusading were never forgotten. The order needed subjects who would provide food and labour, castles that would serve as convents and supply depots, and frontier posts where scouts could live safely and where troops could gather when raiders were reported or when raids into pagan lands were being organised; in addition, there were strategic lands, such as Samogitia, which were bases for raiding Prussia and Livonia. Nevertheless, if one looks only at those situations where the military order fiercely defended its territorial integrity, one will be misled. More often than they cared to remember, the Teutonic Knights granted truces to the pagans, permitted papal emissaries to influence policy, and trusted the word of Lithuanian princes. Such a generous attitude was not present at all times in equal quantity, of course. Experience creates cynicism, and the Teutonic Knights could be very cynical when well-meaning outsiders argued that the crusade should be suspended so that the idealists could talk to the pagans about conversions; suspiciously, except to these newcomers, the Lithuanian offers usually appeared just as the Teutonic Knights were about to win a significant advantage over them. Similarly, Polish demands for the surrender of West Prussia and Culm, usually part of a plan for general peace, were hardly likely to cause the crusading warrior-monks to open their hearts to pleas that they seek a peaceful rather than forced conversion. Nevertheless, hope and idealism were still present in the fourteenth century.

For practical minds, however, there seemed to be little choice in using force as the principal method of making the Gediminid dynasty consider conversion. Pagans happily sent priests and missionaries into the other world as martyrs. They ignored or rejected papal efforts to win them over through diplomacy, offers of crowns, or the sending of friars. Moreover, they were militant warriors. No matter who first shoved whom, the Teutonic Knights found themselves defending their own borders against Samogitian and Lithuanian raids almost as often as they marched or sailed forth in pride and chivalric pomp, or sneaked across the wilderness for sudden and devastating raids. Crusading visitors from the West came in large numbers, spending their money freely and risking death because they believed they were defending Christendom.

The Samogitian
Reisen
were joined by Frenchmen, Englishmen, Scots, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, and a few Italians. It was an international venture that appealed to individuals who were uncomfortable in an era of rapidly growing nationalism. The more that nationalism came to the surface in politics, in the Church, and in literature, the more popular became the few surviving aspects of internationalism. The crusade against paganism bound many characteristics of Western religion and secular life together in colourful ways – as sport, as war, as chivalric display, and as recognition of worthy achievement. The fourteenth century was an age that honoured accomplishments. For nobles who wanted to prove themselves by doing noble deeds, the crusading expeditions into Samogitia provided an almost universally approved means to demonstrate their valour, daring, and knightly worth. By mid-century this aspect of the crusade had become more prominent than the religious obligations. Slowly the expeditions became more secular, more chivalric, until the crusade suffered the fate of idealistic knighthood everywhere and became an arthritic anachronism.

There was some national identity in the crusade, of course: the Teutonic Knights were the German Order. As such, they had to represent the German nation of the Holy Roman Empire. While the grand masters were well aware of that obligation, and they understood how to exploit Germans’ love for their land and language, they were not to allow that aspect of their identity to overshadow others; that became a serious problem only in the fifteenth century.

There were few alternatives in the fourteenth century for the expression of the crusading ideal; and those few were more difficult, dangerous, and expensive than the crusade from Prussia, not to mention their being more time-consuming. The Samogitian expeditions became popular two decades after the fall of the Holy Land. A notable coincidence. Twenty years had sufficed to persuade most men that plans for a new Mediterranean crusade were impractical. The crusading spirit had seemingly breathed its last, but the Teutonic Knights knew how to revive it by organising small expeditions (too small to have achieved anything against the Turks) and sending the participants home with stories of exciting victories over the enemies of the Cross. What had once been almost unco-ordinated Polish, Bohemian, and German expeditions became a pan-European venture.

Thus there was nothing odd in Henry of Derby coming to Prussia in January of 1352 and challenging Casimir of Poland to combat. Henry had brought an army to fight the pagans, but had been told that there could be no expedition because the king was making trouble over the boundary markings between Prussia and Poland. So he decided to put an end to this interference. His bravado may have helped hasten a compromise, but the English nobleman was delayed in reaching Königsberg in time to join the winter expedition.

Nor was there anything particularly unusual in Louis of Hungary sitting through an elaborate pagan ceremony in 1351, the sacrifice of a red bull to sanctify the agreement with the Lithuanian prince, Kęstutis (pronounced Kenstutis, 1297 – 1382), regarding the ransom of Kęstutis’ brother, who had been taken prisoner by Casimir that summer. The Polish and Hungarian crusaders soon regretted their naive trust, because Kęstutis slipped away with his brother, then attacked the camp so fiercely that the Połish and Hungarian monarchs barely escaped with their lives, and Boleslas of Masovia was slain.

In 1352 Louis was wounded in fierce fighting in Volhynia, and Casimir mortgaged Dobrin to the Teutonic Order to raise money for his campaign against the Tatars. In short, the crusades in East Central Europe were more complex than simply campaigns of Teutonic Knights against pagans in Samogitia and Lithuania. They also included wars against Orthodox princes and Moslem Tatars; and not far from everyone’s mind were the Turks, camped on the doorsteps of Constantinople.

The Teutonic Order publicised its holy mission in every way imaginable to the era. Its architecture, for example, emphasised the ways that military and religious obligations intertwined; and every detail underscored the order’s solidity and power. They succeeded so well that we rarely think of the more important expeditions by Poles and Hungarians in Galicia, Volhynia, and Ukraine.