Teutonic Knights (35 page)

The most effective help came from Bohemia. This was surprising, because King Wenceslas had not originally shown much interest in saving the Teutonic Knights: although news of Tannenberg had arrived in Prague within a week, he had done nothing. That was typical of Wenceslas, who was often inebriated when decisions had to be made, and even when sober was not particularly interested in work. It was only after the order’s representative shrewdly lavished gifts on the royal mistresses, then promised payments to impecunious lords and mercenaries, and finally suggested to the king a proposal that would make Prussia subordinate to Bohemia, that the monarch acted. Wenceslas was suddenly willing not only to allow his subjects to campaign in Prussia, but he loaned the order’s diplomat more than 8,000 Marks to pay them.

The Prussian state was saved. Except for the loss of lives and property, both of which were considered replaceable in the long term, the Teutonic Order did not seem to have suffered greatly. Prestige was damaged, of course, but Heinrich von Plauen had recovered most of the castles and driven the enemy beyond the frontiers. Later generations of historians have seen the battle as an incurable wound from which the order later bled to death. In October of 1410 that would have been considered an unlikely future for the Teutonic Knights.

The next battleground was over public opinion. Heinrich von Plauen sought to explain to nobles in Germany and France, to Sigismund, to Wenceslas, and to the three prelates who claimed the title of pope, what had happened in Tannenberg. He needed a plausible story which could counteract the propaganda already cleverly disseminated by Jagiełło’s diplomats. Plauen’s story had to explain the defeat without compromising either the honour of his knights or suggesting that a future victory was unlikely. Thus he could not say that the Poles were better warriors, or better led, or even that their numbers were too great. He chose to say that the Teutonic Knights had been stabbed in the back (a tale that found an echo after 1918, with even less logic) by a group of secular knights of Polish ancestry; he accused the members of the Lizard League
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of lowering their banners and fleeing, thereby causing a panic in the crusader ranks. Jungingen, he said, had died bravely trying to reverse the consequences of this treason. Thus was born a conspiracy theory that poisoned German historiography until 1945.

For some important monarchs and churchmen, the lesson of Tannenberg was often all too clear. It was the long-awaited opportunity to extort money and favours from the proud knights of the Teutonic Order. The opportunistic Wenceslas, who had demonstrated his fickleness over the decades, proved once again that he blew with the winds of politics; nor was Sigismund more reliable. Both supported the grand master as long as he poured money into their coffers. But Plauen’s money was not inexhaustible. Therefore he found himself in the unenviable position of raising additional revenues from lands and cities which had been recently ravaged by invaders. At first he received considerable co-operation, partly because many people wished to avoid further suspicion of treason, partly because people understood that Plauen could expect no effective help from abroad unless the money continued to flow. But that could not last; people cannot give what they do not have.

Plauen had much to do. Now that he had driven the Polish and Lithuanian armies from Prussia, he had to reorganise the shattered economy, restore the depleted ranks of the order, appoint new officers, and persuade the important rulers of Europe that the Teutonic Knights were still a power to be reckoned with. If he could win a military victory he could achieve all these goals and eliminate his need to buy friendship. However, that victory would be hard to achieve, because his immediate subordinates were persuaded that Prussia needed a period of peace in which to reorganise.

Plauen ordered his forces to assemble in West Prussia for an invasion of Poland, but during a bout of illness he was overthrown by his staff and arrested. The conspirators hurriedly called a grand chapter together, intimidated the representatives, and elected Küchmeister grand master with instructions to discharge the mercenaries and negotiate with the Polish king for a permanent peace. This policy was a mistake. The war the conspirators had attempted to forestall soon overwhelmed them. Küchmeister’s clumsy efforts at clever and deceitful diplomacy were easily turned aside by Jagiełło, who, having disarmed his foes, then hammered them into submission. The terms of the First Treaty of Thorn (1422) were much harsher than what Jagiełło had offered Plauen. Tannenberg had not been immediately fatal, but the need to maintain large numbers of mercenaries ready for combat eventually eroded the financial resources that had sustained the war machine through the decades. The road to the future, for the Teutonic Knights, led downhill.

What happened to the Teutonic Order after the defeat at Tannenberg? Certainly there is far more to the decline of a state than being worn down by overwhelming forces; more than the personal failure of leading personalities; and more than the simple operation of the law of inertia. Internally there were problems that can be traced directly to the military disaster at Tannenberg.

Firstly, at a critical and chaotic moment many local officers who might never have earned promotion had been forced to take control of administrative operations which previously had been directed from the centre of the Prussian state; visitations ceased, and in the course of time officers who had become used to acting independently came to resent orders from Marienburg which limited their autonomy. It hardly needs saying that the officers of the next critical years were either aged or very young or newly arrived in Prussia. Factions began to rise, often based around regional origins – Bavarians and Austrians were suspicious of Rhinelanders, and vice versa. The authority of the grand masters was undermined by successful revolts, so that the castellans and advocates felt justified in resisting even the most minor reforms aimed at reasserting the grand masters’ control over the convents. No longer could the knights boast of rendering obedience without question, for that combination of mock humility and chest thumping no longer had any substance.

Secondly, religious reform became an obsession. In an era that believed that God judged organisations and states for the moral shortcomings of the people and their leaders, it was logical for the Teutonic Knights to conclude that the defeats at Tannenberg and after were punishments for their failure to live up to their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Many modern readers may find that bizarre, except for the obvious impact of allowing the good life of hunting and drinking to interfere with one’s duties, to neglect training for battle, or to harden hearts so excessively that one’s subjects seek the first opportunity to change rulers. There is no indication that this was true before 1410. Visitors considered Prussia a model state. Pride was the deadly sin of the pre-Tannenberg knights. The complaints about misgovernment began to heap up later, as hard-pressed castellans and advocates collected emergency taxes year after year, squeezed the citizenry for extraordinary services, and haughtily rejected cries for justice and mercy.

Thirdly, a state in decline rarely governs well. The Teutonic Order was no exception, and monastic reform was essentially irrelevant to that collection of problems. Perhaps more prayer and a greater emphasis on chastity will result in treating one’s subjects better, but the connection is not easily demonstrated. When one compares the Teutonic Knights to contemporary ecclesiastics, can one say that the officers were extraordinarily sinful? Or that they were more arrogant or oppressive than neighbouring secular rulers?

The grand masters were, without exception until the last to rule in Prussia (Albrecht von Hohenzollern), true to their monastic oaths, even pious, devout, and puritanical. Of course, their example alone was insufficient to keep the officers and men within the narrow bounds prescribed by the rules, but there must have been a substantial majority of the membership who agreed with their efforts to enforce the rules; after all, the knights, priests, and sergeants at the general chapters elected one reforming grand master after another. While the chivalric trappings of the Teutonic Knights had long been more prominently displayed than in the typical monastic foundation, the Roman Catholic Church has never found pomp and ceremony completely incompatible with its religious functions; today, even the most resolutely Protestant visitor can be impressed by a papal mass in the Vatican. The medieval era put a much greater emphasis on processions, celebrations, and public prayer – one can hardly imagine a modern head of state ordering the entire population to pray for the success of its diplomats, then attending lengthy services day after day, and the public voluntarily doing the same.

The real problem was the grand masters issuing edicts they could not enforce or which were irrelevant to the problems the castellans and advocates had to deal with. It was not that the convents were overrun with women and other secular creatures, but the uniformity and discipline that had once been the pride of the order was gone. When military disasters followed hard upon one another’s heels, the officers had a difficult time keeping men and mercenaries in order. As drink and minor luxuries became commonplace, morale sank under public ridicule and criticism. The religious community was on the defensive, unable to prevail by force of arms or by exhortation. The answer to the problem of discipline was peace, a restoration of the financial health of the country, and finding a new military task which would keep the knights busy and spiritually satisfied.

Fourthly, the number of knights was declining. The population of Europe was recovering only slowly from the plague, and there were fewer unemployed younger sons of minor nobility seeking a religious vocation. Even more importantly, the prestige of the order sank too low to attract good recruits. That was not the disaster it would have been a century earlier, thanks to changes in military tactics which made knights less useful than mercenaries, but it was still hard on morale. The most successful fifteenth-century armies were composed of mercenary soldiers, men in the prime of life hired for short periods, then dismissed. Such armies had proven their ability to defeat levies of horsemen, mobs of peasant infantry, and ageing knights who had once been formidable warriors. Moreover, the soldiers (in German
Sold
means pay) were willing to campaign as long as necessary, as long as the pay lasted. Mercenaries had already become common in Prussia; now they were indispensable. The handful of friar-knights now served only as officers, supervising the hired troops, the levies, and the military specialists such as cannoneers, engineers, and quartermasters. Since money was in short supply, the grand masters preferred to spend it on mercenaries and equipment rather than on noble horsemen. The knights sensed that their role was changing, and not all of them were pleased. Few of them fitted easily either into the form prescribed by practices common 250 years earlier or those necessary for the future.

Fifthly, more money was needed than ever before. Consequently the merchant oligarchy in the cities and the knights in the countryside understood how important they were becoming, and they resented the obligations imposed by the order – especially military service and taxes – and the limitations they placed on their role in the supervision of justice and the formulation of foreign policy. As long as their mercantile interests were defended against competitors and pirates, the cities did not complain too loudly; but after Tannenberg they were giving out more and more money for less and less protection. At the least they wanted a voice in foreign affairs. The nobles felt the same way. One by one the grand masters had to give way to those protesters until finally there was the choice either of giving the Prussian League full participation in the government via some type of assembly or of attempting to suppress the cities and secular nobles. In 1454 Grand Master Erlichshausen decided to fight, with disastrous results.

These main causes of internal decline do not explain fully the reasons why Prussia fell so low. For that it is necessary to look beyond the narrow horizons of the Baltic, to the greater problems besetting all Europe at that time.

First of all, the grand masters’ loss of authority was not a uniquely local problem. The inability of the head of state to exercise power was seen in the Holy Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church, the kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the united kingdoms in Scandinavia. Everywhere the lower orders challenged the right of their betters to give orders; everywhere, at every level, individuals and groups attempted to strip power from those above them and gather it into their own hands. Pictorial expressions of the Wheel of Fortune illustrate each ruler’s problem: the monarch sits atop a loosely fastened wheel, hands filled with orb and sceptre, wearing a tall crown and draped in expensive robes; but the balance is delicate, and the slightest wisp of air disturbs the equilibrium; how easily and swiftly one is thrown from the heights to utter despair and humiliation!

Secondly, crusading goals had changed. As long as the Lithuanians, even the Samogitians, had remained pagan, there was still a religious justification for the crusade led by the Teutonic Order. However, once Jogaila had become Ladislas Jagiełło of Poland and Vytautas had been baptised and had sent delegates to Constance to proclaim all Samogitia to be Christian, it became increasingly difficult for the grand masters’ representatives to persuade European knights that the operations in Lithuania were crusades, that war against Poland was justified, and that they should volunteer their services and contribute their wealth to such ventures. The procurators certainly found it ever more difficult to persuade the popes with the traditional arguments.

The principal danger to Christendom was now clearly in the Balkans. The Turks were on the move, or seemed to be – they might have been more interested in rounding up slaves and cattle than in acquiring new provinces, but that was hardly a comfort for those who fell into their hands. The Islamic gains in the late fourteenth century frightened traditional supporters of the crusading movement, who were unable to prevent their possessions in Greece from being overwhelmed and who already foresaw the fall of ancient Christian kingdoms south of Hungary. The great crusade of 1396, which was supposed to reverse that momentum, ended in disaster at Nicopolis; how much the French crusaders’ fatal contempt for their adversaries was a result of their experiences in Samogitia can only be guessed, for the Lithuanians were renowned as good warriors, in their own forests and swamps equal to any in Europe, and very nearly a match for the Tatars. Yet the crusaders had repeatedly bested them. Surely that was proof that Western crusaders could whip the Turks and their local Slavic allies? Alas, no. After Nicopolis, the French sent no further major expeditions to Prussia. They left the northern crusades to the Germans, who were now led by the chastened organiser of the Nicopolis venture, Sigismund, king of Hungary and later Holy Roman emperor, whose sole interest in crusading (inasmuch as he could manage to concentrate on any one matter) was to guard against the Turkish menace and crush the Hussite rebels in Bohemia.
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He had little sympathy for the border wars of the Teutonic Order except as a means of applying pressure on Jagiełło, with whom he was contending for control of Silesia and Bohemia.

A third danger was heresy. The Hussites in Bohemia not only defended themselves against Sigismund’s armies of German and Hungarian ‘crusaders’, but they went on the offensive. The Teutonic Knights suffered damage to their properties in Germany and Prussia, reaping all the problems of defeat without any of the rewards expected for their efforts. Between the Turks and the Hussite heretics, the crusading energies of Central Europe were exhausted. There were none left to be used against Christian peoples in Lithuania and Poland.

Fourthly, there was an attitude of depression among the general population, a feeling that one’s endeavours would lead only to failure, that even the best success was transitory and vain. Johan Huizinga called that era ‘the Waning of the Middle Ages’ and compared it to the senility of old age. Certainly there were fewer nobles now who were willing to abandon their comfortable lives for a religious vocation, fewer who were willing to travel far to ‘journey’ into the cold Samogitian wilderness. Talk replaced action, show superseded performance. What was the use in any case? Was there really much hope of accomplishing anything? The world was doubtful, suspicious, cynical. If anything should be done, it should be done against the Turks. But even there, God seemed to be on the other side.

Chivalry was not dead, of course, and chivalry was the motor that had long propelled the Samogitian crusade. But chivalry had overheated: the parts had melted together, and now nothing moved. In those aspects of it that remained, chivalry was an expensive form of display which only the greatest lords could afford. It was now priced beyond the reach of those nobles who had accompanied the territorial princes to Prussia; and no prince wished to compete with Albrecht of Austria, whose outlay in 1377 had bordered on the fantastic. Also, the Teutonic Knights lacked the money to entertain on the new scale of lavishness. What had been wealth in the fourteenth century was poverty in the fifteenth, and the grand masters could not even attain the old scale. No one wanted to travel on a tourist class crusade, and few could afford to go first class.

In short, crusading was no longer enjoyable. The extravagance of activity, the delight in adventure, and the search for fame that were the hallmarks of fourteenth-century chivalry were gone. The Samogitian
Reisen
had combined the excitement of the hunt, the danger of warfare, and the adventure of travel with a brilliance of display and entertainment that no one else could match. Now the crusaders could not raid Lithuania to chase down villagers, nor did they dare offer open battle. They could not even provide the chivalric spectacle that was the vogue from Burgundy to Italy. Nor could any other crusade provide a substitute. Consequently potential crusaders stayed home and talked of the old glories.

The decline of Prussia as a state was beyond the control of the grand masters. Not even the German convents of the order cared much. Although they, too, talked much and gave frequent advice, they did not provide warriors, crusaders, or money – and without those, what use was advice? Their new endeavour was to support the emperor in his ventures. The fact was that the crusade from Prussia was over. The Teutonic Knights had outlived their usefulness there. All that remained was to demonstrate this fact.