Teutonic Knights (30 page)

By spring of 1389 the escalating dispute between the Lithuanian dukes had gone beyond endurance; as Skirgaila said to Vytautas at one encounter, ‘beware of me as I of you’. Soon thereafter Vytautas contacted Conrad Zöllner through two captive knights, Marquard von Salzbach and the Count of Rheineck, offering hostages (his brother Žygimantas and Žygimantas’ son, Michael; his sister, Ringailė; his wife, Anna, and daughter, Sophia; and about a hundred others), a promise to bring all the Lithuanians into the Roman Church, and an alliance against Poland. Marquard spoke to the grand master, who remained sceptical about Vytautas’ sincerity. When Vytautas heard this, he sent a second delegation led by Ivan of Galschan, Anna’s brother, to inform the grand master that Skirgaila had learned of the earlier talks, that the governor of Vilnius was now on the alert, and that Jagiełło’s youngest brother, Svidrigailo (1370 – 1452), had declared war on Vytautas. As almost his last action, Conrad Zöllner agreed to a new alliance with Vytautas and sent an army to invest Vilnius on his behalf. The attack was not successful, but in the three years to follow crusader armies marched with Vytautas throughout western Lithuania, achieving victory after victory. The new grand master, Conrad von Wallenrode, allowed Vytautas no contact with Lithuanians except in the presence of Lithuanian-speaking knights. Marquard von Salzbach was foremost among these, thanks to his friendship with Vytautas, but von Wallenrode needed his talent, advice, and chivalric example too much to assign him full-time duty as Vytautas’ companion.

Jagiełło was becoming desperate. His brothers had proven themselves either incompetent or untrustworthy; and their subjects, even the Samogitians, were willing to forgive Vytautas even his new alliance with the enemy. The king could rely only on Poles to hold Lithuania for him – as governor of Vilnius from 1390 to 1392 he appointed Jan Oleśnicki, a military officer from Cracow whose one-year-old son Zbigniew was to become one of the greatest figures in Polish history through his long association with the new king. As a temporary policy, this was working, but the king could see that native Lithuanians were unhappy. Something had to be done.

To make matters worse, the Hungarian king, Sigismund, was strengthening the position of the Teutonic Order in Masovia. In the spring of 1391 his palatine, Ladislas of Oppeln, mortgaged a castle near Thorn to the grand master, a key fortress protecting Duke Ladislas’ lands in Dobrin and Kujavia that King Louis had given him in pawn several years earlier for loans and services. Jagiełło reacted angrily, attacking Duke Ladislas’ lands, but the Teutonic Knights came down in overwhelming numbers to drive the Polish forces away. The question was then raised as to whether the Teutonic Order might purchase Ladislas’ lands outright; other negotiations began in May of 1392 for the Teutonic Order to purchase the Neumark from Sigismund of Hungary. Conrad von Wallenrode was unwilling to purchase real estate with such cloudy titles – that was not consistent ‘with God, Honour, or Justice’ – but he wanted to do what he could for the king and queen of Hungary and for the duke of Oppeln. In late July he paid 50,000 Hungarian
Gulden
to Duke Ladislas, who gave him Dobrin to hold as pawn against repayment. This was immediately upon the heels of an agreement by which the grand master had purchased the rights to Zlatoria, near the Neumark, for 6,632
Gulden
. Those agreements, though perfectly legitimate by traditional medieval standards, were direct challenges to the developing Polish concept of national sovereignty.

It would not be amiss to believe that Sigismund was working out a plot to dismember the Polish kingdom, taking the most important, southern parts for himself, while rewarding his fellow conspirators handsomely (if perhaps only temporarily) with the less valuable northern territories. Given this circumstance, and the fact that Sigismund was prone to talking too much, we can easily understand why the Poles were becoming paranoid about their national survival. What Poland needed was a ruler as slippery and unscrupulous as Sigismund. Slowly they came to realise that they had exactly that, that their monarch had married the kind of man who could outdo every contemporary in cunning and diplomatic duplicity – Jagiełło. The only question was, was he working for Polish interests, for Lithuanian, or only for his own?

Jagiełło was certainly not going to tell anyone anything other than what he wanted them to believe. In contrast to most of his countrymen, he was quiet and introspective, even dour. He drank no alcohol and ate very little. He had no enthusiasm for music or art, though he kept Rus’ian musicians at his court, and his sexual appetite was exceedingly moderate. His one passion was hunting, and his greatest enjoyment was listening to the nightingales in the forest. He was fortunate in possessing one of the greatest forests in all the world, one so extensive and forbidding that it has not completely disappeared even today. It was then filled with deer, European bison, and the vanishing aurochs, and Jagiełło was perfectly happy in its deepest and most inaccessible glens.

Jadwiga, for her part, was glad to have her uncouth husband off in the woods. She was a devout Christian, who was persuaded to abandon her young Habsburg lover only by churchmen’s pleas to consider the lost souls of what could be her future subjects. Her greatest pleasures were church services and good deeds, her most feared moments were court entertainments and marital duties. She took an active part in politics, especially in dealing with the grand master, whose friendship she came to value. She was not quite clear herself what her husband’s plans were. She did not know Lithuanian or Russian, and his Polish was still rudimentary; moreover, Jagiełło was not talkative.

The questions that the Poles were asking about Jagiełło were exactly the ones that the Lithuanians were asking, too. As Jagiełło spent more and more of his time in Poland, his Lithuanian subjects gave their hearts increasingly to his rival. Vytautas held the lesser title of great prince, but he had been responsible for Lithuanian resistance to the crusader armies and hence had been able to make a reputation for himself as a valiant and straightforward man, a characterisation that Jagiełło could never hope for. Jagiełło and Vytautas mistrusted one another, and neither could forget the circumstances of Kęstutis’ death. When Vytautas went over to the Teutonic Order in 1389, Jagiełło appointed Skirgaila, the duke of Kiev, to administer western Lithuania, Vytautas’ lands; and he sent other brothers to participate in the coming war. None could win the love of their subjects as Vytautas had done, and some came over to the crusaders’ side just to fight for him.

In the summer of 1390 Vytautas led crusaders from Prussia before the walls of Vilnius, where they were joined by the Livonian Knights. English bowmen, led by the future king of England, Henry Bolingbroke, demonstrated their customary efficiency in slaughtering vast numbers of enemies, Lithuanian, Rus’ian, and Polish. Vytautas lost a brother in the fighting, as did Jagiełło. Eventually the siege became a war of engineers, and after five weeks the weather turned bad. The crusaders reluctantly broke off their daily attacks and nightly revels and retreated to Königsberg, where they started the rounds of entertainment anew.

Although Poles were engaged in the war in Lithuania, the Teutonic Knights remained at peace with the kingdom of Poland. Neither side had any desire to start a general war, and Jadwiga absolutely forbade discussions of hostilities. The Teutonic Knights did not want to be distracted, Sigismund of Hungary was planning a major crusade against the Turks, and Poles rightly feared that the war would be fought in their lands – moreover, they suspected that they might well get the worst of the fighting. The reputation of the Teutonic Knights had grown since the last time Poles had entered the field against them, and as of yet few Poles trusted Jagiełło’s motives or his military skill.

Meanwhile news from the steppe was fascinating listeners in Rus’ and at the Polish court. Since 1385 Tokhtamysh, the Tatar khan, had been warding off as best he could the advance of Timur’s (Tamberlane’s) forces from Turkestan, but in 1391 he was crushed in a great battle, barely escaping the field with a handful of followers. He fled to Lithuania to ask for refuge and assistance. It appeared that Lithuania and Poland, in an alliance with Tokhtamysh, could drive Timur away and become the masters of the western steppe and more Rus’ian states. To do this, Jagiełło and his brothers would need peace with the Teutonic Knights, perhaps even their aid. How were they to achieve this? Jagiełło knew what the price would be – Lithuania to Vytautas and Samogitia to the Teutonic Order – but he was ready to pay it.

Jagiełło understood that he had better chances of making war on the steppe than his grandfather had possessed. For him it would not be the traditional struggle of swordsmen, spearmen, and archers. Innovation in warfare was changing the traditional strategies and tactics. The introduction of cannon had made many of the older fortresses obsolete – one of the reasons for the extensive recent rebuilding of the Prussian and Livonian castles – and temporarily gave the offensive an advantage over the defensive. The weapons were unwieldy and often unreliable, but under the right circumstances they were powerful. Their main use was in sieges, since they could shatter tall thin walls more effectively than stone-hurling machines had ever done and they were easier to erect and service than the bulky catapults. Mounted on defensive works, they could inflict fearsome casualities on attackers; in the field, they could kill at a greater distance than arrows, and their noise and smoke frightened horses and men alike.

Jagiełło had seen the effects of this new firepower personally. He knew that the constant influx of foreign crusaders who told the grand master about new weapons had resulted in the Teutonic Knights emphasising firepower – not only cannon, but also more archers. Even so, the grand masters’ technological advantages were not as great as they had been in the past, and they were only temporary. The Lithuanians could now obtain the latest weapons through Poland – Cracow was actually closer to Italy, the industrial and technological centre of Europe, than to Livonia – and, consequently, the former pagans were never far behind the crusaders.

For the time being, such considerations were only dreams. Daytime plans had to concentrate on turning back the crusader advance up the Nemunas River. Jagiełło’s brothers wanted heavier cannons to oppose the Teutonic Knights’ new weapons, but since gun carriages did not exist yet the heavy weapons could only be transported by water. Because the Teutonic Knights controlled the lower reaches of the Nemunas River, the only route from Poland to Lithuania was from the Vistula up the Bug River to the Narew, then up that river’s tributaries until close to streams that led down to the Nemunas at Gardinas. Cannon could be dragged over a short portage, or perhaps even transported the entire way over the many bodies of water in the Masurian Lake district. Not unexpectedly, the Teutonic Knights sought to block this route by building forts in the wilderness north of the Narew. This presented some complications, because that land belonged to the Masovian dukes, but it did hinder Jagiełło’s efforts to send assistance to his brothers. The wilderness had been unoccupied since the withdrawal of the Sudovians to the east, and empty of all humans other than raiding parties from Prussia, Lithuania, and Masovia. But technically it was still Masovian.

Meanwhile the war had become even more brutal than before. The Teutonic Knights decapitated any Poles captured in the Lithuanian forts – they accused them of apostasy and aiding pagans – and the crusader raids into Samogitia met so little resistance that they were little more than manhunts. In reprisal the Samogitians occasionally sacrificed prisoners to their gods, burning knights alive, tied to their mounts in full armour over a giant pyre, or shooting them full of arrows while bound to a sacred tree. Even so, the war was not continuous. Despite the desperate nature of the fighting, there were truces and sudden changes in alliances; and nothing disturbed the universal love of hunting, for which special truces were arranged.

Although Vytautas was a crusader ally, as he saw his ancestral lands being destroyed he began to look for an alternative means of returning to power in Vilnius. Intellectually, he understood that it was most logical to join forces with his cousin, but Vytautas was a passionate man, not always ruled by his mind. Besides, he had not forgotten Jagiełło’s past treacheries and, well-aware of assassination plots, he surrounded himself with Tatar bodyguards. Consequently Vytautas was an emotional pendulum, swinging from one side to the other, forced to seek help from someone, but not liking any of the available allies. The Teutonic Knights took a cynical but philosophical view of this, as one chronicler stated: ‘Pagans rarely do what is right, as the broken treaties of Vytautas and his relatives prove’.

Still, when he considered the situation rationally Vytautas saw his present alliance with the Teutonic Order as a losing strategy. Victory under such circumstances would make him an impoverished ruler, hated by his own people and dependent upon the goodwill of the grand master. He may have sent a message to Jagiełło, somehow evading the order’s efforts to watch over his every move; if so, it was undoubtedly vague, the kind which would do no harm if discovered. Or perhaps Jagiełło merely sensed that the time was ripe to make his cousin a proposal. All that is known for certain is that in early August 1392 Jagiełło sent Bishop Henryk of Płock to Prussia as his emissary. This rather unpriestly Piast prince-bishop was related by marriage to the king’s sister, Alexandra of Masovia. Henryk used the opportunity provided by confession to inform Vytautas of his master’s propositions. Vytautas, under the pretext of allowing his wife to make a visit home, told Anna to negotiate with Jagiełło; he also managed to secure the release of many hostages who had been kept in honourable captivity in scattered fortresses. Then he gave his sister in marriage to Bishop Henryk and dismissed the English crusaders who had just arrived to join another invasion of Lithuania. He thus eliminated from the game the most dangerous bowmen in Europe, warriors who had been so effective in recent battles with Jagiełło’s subjects.

Vytautas plotted his betrayal carefully, arranging for the Samogitian warriors stationed in the crusader castles entrusted to him to kill or capture the Germans in the garrisons. After this had succeeded, he sent Lithuanian armies on widely separated fronts into Prussia and Livonia and overwhelmed what forces the Teutonic Knights still had in Samogitia. Vytautas’ return to Lithuania was greeted with wild enthusiasm. Every Samogitian appreciated his courage and cunning, contrasted his genial personality with Jagiełło’s vengeful brothers, and understood that the series of military disasters was likely now at an end; and the highlanders were happy to see the reign of foreigners – Poles – at an end.

It was a year before Grand Master Wallenrode was able to take his revenge. In January of 1393 he struck at Gardinas, employing Dutch and French knights. This threatened to cut the major communication route between Masovia and Vilnius, effectively isolating Lithuania. Vytautas and Jagiełło appealed to the papal legate to arrange for peace talks, which did in fact take place in Thorn in the summer. After ten days, however, Wallenrode became ill and left the conference. A short while later he died.

The new grand master, Conrad von Jungingen, was a decisive leader of far-reaching plans and far-reaching vision. Regional peace could be achieved, he believed, by a decisive victory in Vilnius, the one location that Vytautas and Jagiełło had to defend with all their might.

Already collecting in Prussia in the waning days of 1393 was a great army of French and German crusaders, among whom was a body of Burgundian archers (perhaps English mercenaries) whose concentrated firepower had the potential to savage the pagans quite as badly as they had mauled French armies in recent years. The crusaders began their march up the Nemunas in January 1394, relying on the thick ice to serve as a highway into the Lithuanian heartland. Vytautas attempted to halt the crusader march early on, but he barely escaped death under the first barrage of his enemies’ missile weapons, and his army was badly routed. The Lithuanian stand turned into a hurried retreat before the 400 advancing crusader knights and their thousands of sergeants and infantry.

Vytautas received a reinforcement from Poland, a strong contingent of knights, to join the 15,000 mounted warriors under his command, but their numbers were insufficient to stop the advance of the now much-feared archers into the heart of his country. The crusaders passed through forests, swamps, and open fields, evading ambushes, to reach Vilnius, where Vytautas was joined by his Rus’ian troops. The grand prince fought a desperate engagement, giving and taking heavy losses until his Rus’ian wing fled and was followed by one Lithuanian unit after the other. At last, he, too, had to retreat, and again he barely escaped the field alive. While Vytautas sought to rally his scattered and demoralised forces at a safe distance, the Teutonic Knights settled down to besiege his capital, a place they knew well from 1390. They made new plans to celebrate the conversion of the Lithuanians, this time assured by their arms that the baptismal ceremony would take place properly – a true conversion, not the ambiguous promises of Jagiełło and Vytautas, whose Christian names were used only in formal documents. What further proof, the crusaders asked, did anyone need that their allegiance to Rome was very thin?

On the eighth day of the siege the Livonian master arrived to reinforce the crusader host. He was welcomed heartily, for now the crusaders could surround the entire city, contain the sorties from the fortress, and make a determined assault on the wall at its weakest point. The Livonian forces were sent to the river front, where they built two bridges, then rode across the river to plunder the countryside. In this foraging they lost fifty men (only three of them German and only one a knight, indicating that a large native contingent was present) while killing and capturing ‘innumerable’ Lithuanians. Nevertheless, the siege did not go well. After another week of fighting, the firing posts that the engineers had built for the archers, the siege towers, and the bridges were destroyed by an inferno that the garrison set during a sortie. Nevertheless, the crusaders had some successes – their artillery had brought down a stone tower and set fire to various wooden fortifications. Soon afterward, however, the Lithuanians set a tower in the crusader camp ablaze, which not only caused extensive casualties among the French but destroyed most of the supplies, so that the crusaders would be unable to remain at Vilnius as long as planned. The grand master allowed the war of engineers to continue four more days, but it was obvious that the Lithuanians could destroy new siege works almost as fast as the crusaders could build them. An assault would require more time to prepare than the army could be kept fed by its remaining supplies. Also, Vytautas had been regrouping his scattered forces. Scouts were reporting that he would soon be coming to relieve the city. This meant that the crusaders would have to fight on two fronts – an unattractive prospect.

The leaders of the crusader armies met, discussed their situation, and reluctantly agreed to abandon the siege. The grand master sent the Livonian forces home first, then moved west himself, harassed by Lithuanians cutting down trees across the road, fortifying the river crossings, and laying ambushes in the woods. The Prussian force alternately negotiated and fought its way along the route away from Vilnius, then abruptly changed direction and marched through Samogitia, thereby avoiding Vytautas’ army and the obstacles he had erected.

The expedition had been one of the most memorable enterprises of the medieval era – the siege of an enemy capital with knights and military specialists drawn from all of Europe – and a chivalric exploit worthy of any land; but the capture of the greatest city in Lithuania was beyond the ability of the crusaders. The war continued, with the Teutonic Order striking up the Nemunas River and ravaging the Samogitian settlements; they were far from attempting another invasion of the highlands, farther yet from Jagiełło’s capital. The Lithuanians remained on the defensive, biding their time. They had no reason to risk everything on a pitched battle, no reason to carry the war back into Prussia. Not yet, at least.