Teutonic Knights (36 page)

In 1449 a grand chapter elected Louis von Erlichshausen as grand master. A man eager to force the issue of Prussian unity to a decision, Erlichshausen believed that the order’s problem was not the lack of means, but the lack of will. Correctly sensing that the Prussian League was his principal challenge at the moment, he followed the example of the most successful German princes of the era by attempting to curb, hopefully crush, its most influential members. In this he was not only supported, but pressured by important officers to act even more decisively. Erlichshausen had been offended not only by the protesters’ tone and the demand that he end the emergency taxes on commerce, but by their insistence that he send his Italian-trained lawyers out of the assembly so that he could not turn to them for advice. Erlichshausen knew the League’s weak point was its lack of legal standing; and therefore he sent a young lawyer, Laurentius Blumenau – a Danzig-born patrician who had studied in Italy – to speak to Emperor Friedrich III (1440 – 93) and Pope Nicholas V (1447 – 55) about the crisis. The bishop of Ermland was the decisive voice in this; he had been among those advisors who had most strongly recommended striking down the League, but his advice had been repeatedly rejected by the previous grand master, Louis’ brother Conrad von Erlichshausen; now his advice led three cardinals to send a papal legate, the Portuguese bishop Louis de Silves, to Prussia in late 1450.

Equally involved in the dispute was Cardinal Nicholas von Cusa, bishop of Brixen, whose reputation as diplomat and scholar made his a powerful voice in German politics. His extensive correspondence with the grand master contained advice that the order took seriously.

The order’s procurator (the lawyer who represented the grand master at the papal curia), the highly capable Jodokus von Hohenstein, argued that the League was a ‘conspiracy’ designed to destroy the Teutonic Order. This was a tactic which did not even win universal support inside the order’s membership. The juristic foundation of his argument was sound, but the timing was not. The grand master could have waited for a moment when his enemies were weak or divided, but waiting was not in Erlichshausen’s personality. He moved quickly and confidently, hoping perhaps to overawe the opposition by sheer force of character. Clearly, the influence of Blumenau was important in reinforcing his existing tendency to disdain his less nobly-born and less educated opponents.

The grand master and his advisors were also very much aware of Danzig’s current estrangement from Lübeck over English competition and piracy (activities which were essentially interchangeable at this time). Danzig was ready to compromise, Lübeck was not. If ever there was a moment that the grand master could challenge the merchants in Danzig, this was it.

Louis von Erlichshausen was doubtless encouraged to believe that he could intimidate his opponents. He had just enjoyed a great success in Livonia: Heidenreich Vincke von Overberg had died in June 1450, bringing to an end the most contentious era in the order’s history, the civil war between the Westphalian knights and the Rhinelanders. Years earlier Vincke had led the Westphalian party to a bloodless victory over their opponents, then made peace with Lithuania. When the grand master had ordered him to keep the pressure on the enemy, the Livonian master had begun to work together with the German convents to limit the grand master’s authority; this, in effect, would decentralise the order, allowing each region to concentrate on local concerns. With Vincke off the scene, Erlichshausen was able to begin returning the Rhinelanders to more nearly equal status with the Westphalians. The new master, Johann von Mengede, though a Westphalian, agreed with the grand master that the Prussian League had to be crushed – the parallel with the hated Livonian Confederation was too obvious to be missed.

Within a short time Erlichshausen and Blumenau frightened the members of the Prussian League, who came to believe that the lawyer’s pompous declarations were a true guide to the grand master’s future actions against their freedom and property. The secular nobles, gentry, and burghers began making plans to defend themselves.

Erlichshausen mistook his opponents in thinking that they would accept a papal or imperial ruling as the last word in the dispute. In permitting Blumenau to ask the pope and emperor whether the Prussian League was a legal body or not, he was too clever by half. Of course, the pope and emperor assigned lawyers the task of consulting the charters of the order. The lawyers made prompt, clear answers: the League was illegal and must dissolve itself. That in itself achieved nothing except to warn the cities and nobles to beware of lawyers, especially clever ones like Blumenau, who was able to persuade papal and imperial officials that the League’s expensively obtained forged documents were, in fact, not genuine. The League’s high-powered lawyer was overmatched by the grand master’s. Blumenau could dig into the order’s extensive archive and come up with whatever document the experts needed, and the League’s lawyers could not.

It was not long before this dispute came to the attention of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the papal legate to the imperial court. Piccolomini could remember one evening years ago at the Council of Basel, when he listened entranced to a missionary’s stories about life in Lithuania and the problems caused by the Teutonic Knights’ activities; he had more recently been working closely with the legate Louis of Silvius. Piccolomini was a many-sided individual. He was without question the most spectacular scholar in the Church, a figure whose masterful rhetoric and elevated style of composition was transforming the ways that every aspiring lawyer wanted to speak and every chancery official sought to write Latin. As the ‘Apostle of Humanism to the Germans’, his determined efforts to impress the ‘barbarians’ made as many enemies as friends – he was either unaware that his mail would be opened and his devastating analyses of politicians’ abilities and his opponents’ foibles would be read, or he did not care. His ability to shift his point of view according to the needs of the moment outraged the ‘simple, honest’ Germans, who quickly concluded that he was a shifty Italian, not to be trusted in any way. (Stereotypes are no modern invention.)

Piccolomini’s job was a difficult one. He gave high priority to preventing another church council from being called. The papacy was weak enough as it was without having to go through the Basel experience again.
³⁷
Christendom needed leadership, not feuds. Therefore, Piccolomini did not see another Church council as being in anybody’s interest. Reforms had to be made, of course, but those should be traditional ones, such as freeing churches and monasteries from the control of local families; but that was not a programme likely to be welcomed by the minor princes of Germany. In the end, he argued, the papacy had to have an income in order to be an effective force in international affairs; and, in principle, the more income a pope had, the better he would be able to support the crusading movement, the less he could be intimidated by secular rulers, and the more justice he could bring to society.

A second task was to preserve the powers of those very princes who were stripping the Church and the empire of their most important resources. Piccolomini worried about leagues of cities and knights (like the Prussian League) which were becoming more powerful than any one prince. If the princes were made impotent, the Holy Roman Empire would become totally impotent; without strong princes, Christendom would be too weak to protect itself. Piccolomini saw no way to make a parliamentary government effective nor any way to put some backbone into the Habsburg emperor, Friedrich III.

A third assignment was to persuade the emperor, the kings of Hungary and Poland, and the princes to support a crusade against the Turks. Belgrade had been attacked in 1451, but had been saved by John Capistrano; Constantinople had obviously been targeted, and when that great city was besieged in 1453 Piccolomini’s duty was to arrange a general peace in East Central Europe so that Germans, Hungarians, and Poles could march together to its rescue. Resolving the Prussian dispute was suddenly Piccolomini’s highest priority.

Justice, alas, often moves slowly. Constantinople had already fallen before the Prussian matter could be argued at the imperial court. Delays were caused by someone waylaying the League’s representatives and stealing their papers, and by the Polish ambassador warning that his monarch, Casimir, would not participate in the crusade if any ‘outsiders’ interfered in the Prussian matter – this provoked shouted threats from the German princes. The most Piccolomini could do was to seek to delay a decision. As much as he detested urban leagues, he did not want a war now.

Piccolomini’s letter to Cardinal Oleśnicki, the power behind the throne in Poland, in October 1453 illustrates well the manner in which he attempted to cajole, persuade, and intimidate his listeners and readers into going along with his wishes. His epistle was a masterpiece of eloquence, classical citations, wisdom, flattery (‘I am fully aware of the many ecclesiastical responsibilities of your office which involve not only yourself but the king, and that after him you by virtue of your rank as cardinal are the second most important man in Poland. I am also aware that decrees are not passed without your approval, that higher courts seek your opinion, and that plans for war and peace are not made without consulting you.’), self-flattery, irony, and chastisement of Polish efforts to seize the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia. By the time he concluded, his letter had, as Piccolomini put it, become a book – but the power of his style made it certain that the letter would be read by a far larger audience than the august bishop of Cracow would have liked.

Piccolomini’s speech to the
Reichstag
was among his greatest orations. As reported in his history,
de Pruthenorum origine
, he had said: ‘This quarrel, most high Caesar, seems to me neither small nor contemptible . . . It is not the fields of Arpinas or Tusculanus that are contested, but great provinces which are desired by a powerful king.’ He concluded with a denunciation of warfare in general, citing the proverb ‘Laws are mute when kings speak’. His advice was, as usual, rejected. In January of 1454 the emperor ruled against the Prussian League. Now it remained to the grand master to figure out some way to enforce the decision – without conceding the secondary point in the imperial ruling, that the Teutonic Order’s Prussian possessions were a part of the Holy Roman Empire. The German convents were willing to make any concession necessary to save the order, especially if the concession resulted in an increase in the German master’s influence. The grand master, however, was not willing to abdicate his sovereignty or authority. Nor was Friedrich III going to do anything that might involve him in a war. His path to success lay on the marriage bed (
Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube
: ‘Others wage war, but you, happy Austria, marry’) and he had only recently taken a wife.

As for Piccolomini’s hopes of organising a crusade to recover Constantinople, he was close to success when Pope Nicholas V died; thereupon nothing could be done until the papal election, because the new pope might wish to pursue different policies or have different priorities. As a result, even though the new pope, Calixtus III (1455 – 8), was so determined to revive the crusading spirit that he made Piccolomini cardinal in order for him to have the necessary rank to override resistance, Christendom had lost a year.

The members of the Prussian League, aware that they could not resist the Teutonic Order militarily if they gave the grand master time to raise an army, ended the litigation in February by delivering him a letter of secession: they withdrew their allegiance to Prussia and turned to the king of Poland. Their written justification echoed the most extreme statements of Polish sovereignty over Prussia. Naturally, King Casimir (1447 – 92) welcomed their action, although he was neither ready nor eager to go to war on their behalf at that moment.

The challenge by the estates took everyone by surprise. The grand master, who had been arming for war but was not yet ready, found that he was not able to fight everywhere at once. The castles in Elbing, Danzig, and Thorn fell immediately, then were either fully or partially destroyed.

Nothing remained of the walls or buildings in Elbing and Danzig, and only the mighty Danzker was left in Thorn – that toilet facility was the only reminder that the order had once ruled there! Soon every important post in West Prussia except Marienburg, Stuhm, and Konitz was in the hands of the rebels. Slowly the grand master’s officers recruited mercenaries in Saxony, Meissen, Austria, Bohemia, and Silesia – all the eastern duchies of the empire – until he had a force of 15,000 troops.

Such a state of affairs sixty years earlier would have brought pagan Samogitians into the countryside, fifty years ago Islamic Tatars. Now all of Lithuania was Christian and united with Poland. There was no vengeful prince eager to humble his proud enemies, urged on by rabidly anti-German nobles and clergy. Quite the contrary. At the head of the Polish state was Casimir, a quiet man whose principal difficulty was in persuading his independent-minded nobles and clergy to adopt any type of foreign policy, even one directed toward defending the country against an obvious threat from the Turks. Instead of worrying about the southern and eastern frontiers, however, the nobles were alarmed that the conquest of Prussia could provide their king not only with more of the resources needed to drive back the Islamic armies, but also enhance his ability to dominate the Polish clergy and nobles. These groups feared that any authority which could make royal armies effective in war could also be misused in peacetime. Therefore there was little rejoicing in the diet about the success of the royalist forces in Prussia.

The king chose to support the Prussian rebels despite the diet’s lack of enthusiasm. To his delight and surprise, the uninterrupted string of victories seemed to indicate that the destruction of the Teutonic Order would be cheap, quick, and total. Casimir hurried north to claim the credit, riding through Prussia in a triumphal procession, cheered by the inhabitants of city and countryside, welcomed by mayors and nobles. The end of the Teutonic Knights as a territorial power seemed assured, a matter of days rather than months.

The Prussian League settled down to a siege of Marienburg, while royal levies watched Konitz. The only danger was the arrival of relief troops from the west, because the German master had recruited Bohemian mercenaries. Those were the finest troops in Europe at the time, still enjoying the prestige won in the Hussite wars, wars they had fought to a standstill against the Holy Roman Empire and the Church. Even so, Casimir felt confident that his feudal levy from Great Poland could overpower these mercenaries as they crossed into Prussia. He was mistaken. The castellan at Konitz was another Plauen – Heinrich Reuss von Plauen, a future grand master. When Plauen saw the two armies engaged in battle below his fortress, he sallied out and struck the Polish host in the rear. Caught between the two forces, the Polish knighthood was cut to pieces and the king barely escaped being captured. It did not take a genius to imagine what kind of peace settlement Louis von Erlichshausen could have extracted from Poland in return for Casimir’s release. The dream of such an event had sustained the Teutonic Knights’ persistence for decades now, and it had come so close to becoming reality.

As it was, the battle was far from decisive. What might have been the end of an unnecessary conflict became the beginning of the terrible Thirteen Years’ War. For lack of money the Polish king was unable to raise new troops; the diet would not vote sufficient funds to hire mercenaries and his nobles refused to serve in any expedition long enough to deal his enemies a fatal blow. The Prussian League, led by Danzig, made up the difference by taxing itself far more heavily than the grand master would ever have dared attempt, but the League’s efforts, too, seemed totally in vain. Battlefield success eluded them.

The war dissolved into a series of local feuds, many of which cannot be easily fitted into a sensible party alignment. The knights of the order won some minor engagements, lost several border castles, watched helplessly from the ramparts as various mercenary forces plundered the countryside without regard for the peasantry’s allegiance, and slowly bled to death in numerous insignificant combats. The League’s navy (three vessels from Danzig) beat a much larger Livonian-Danish fleet in August 1457 near the island of Bornholm in a night-time engagement. Although Denmark pulled out of the war, the Danzig merchants were otherwise unable to profit from the victory.

Although the League’s revenue measures drove some members back to the Teutonic Knights and provoked the lesser guilds in several cities to attempt revolts, Louis von Erlichshausen was unable to profit from the situation. He could not command his mercenaries effectively because he could not pay them, and his financial circumstances hardly allowed him to promise tax relief as an incentive to switch sides. As a temporary measure he pawned his cities and fortresses to his mercenaries, even Marienburg, while he pressed his remaining subjects for more money.

Erlichshausen’s surrender of Marienburg proved to be a disastrous mistake, second only to that of beginning the war itself. The mercenaries had no interest in the situation other than that their salaries be paid, and their concern with money grew more intense the longer they remained unpaid. The grand master was able to make only partial payments, and his later successes – the recapture of the town of Marienburg and risings in the League’s cities – moved the mercenaries not in the least. Rather, they believed the League was winning the war. The merchant oligarchies in the smaller Prussian towns, supported by troops sent from Danzig, bloodily repressed lower-class movements which had temporarily threatened their regimes; and the king helped in Culm and other border provinces. Consequently the mercenaries felt confident in pressing the grand master for more money. In February of 1457 Erlichshausen had to bow to their demands for a temporary settlement – another partial payment, with permission for the mercenaries to sell the pawned fortresses to the highest bidder in case he failed to raise the remainder of the fantastic sum. Of course, he was unable to raise the money when it came due.

It was at that moment that the Danzig merchants displayed their financial strength. Casimir lacked the funds to pay his mercenaries, and most members of the Prussian League had suffered too greatly from the disruption of trade to raise the sum those troops demanded. But Danzig could raise money and did. Despite the declaration of war by Denmark, whose monarch had hoped to weaken the Hanseatic League, Danzig’s trade had prospered. Not without sacrifices, however, and not without difficulty; but the money was collected. That effort secured the destruction of Erlichshausen’s plans and assured the victorious position of Danzig atop the ruins of the grand master’s state. Casimir granted privileges to Danzig which made it dominant in local politics and trade; in return, the merchant oligarchy presented the king the keys to impregnable fortresses. Louis von Erlichshausen was ingloriously evicted from his quarters in Marienburg, taken prisoner to Konitz, and told he would be turned over to the king; Blumenau, who had attempted to persuade the mercenaries that their actions were ‘against God, against justice, and against Holy Scripture’, had been mugged and thrown out of the castle. At the last moment the grand master escaped and made his way to Königsberg. That fortress, far from the reach of the Prussian League and its fleet, was thereafter the grand master’s residence. The war continued.

This seemed like the appropriate moment for Cardinal Piccolomini to re-enter the fray. The immediate matter at hand was the impending demise of the bishop of Ermland, a loyal supporter of the grand master. If the Prussian League could arrange for the election of a friendly man as his successor, the balance of power might well be tipped. There were three canons living in Danzig, six living in exile in Silesia, and seven held prisoner by the grand master (an action which had brought upon him a papal excommunication). When the grand master heard that the Silesian canons were proposing that the bishop retire from his bankrupt diocese on a pension in order to permit the election of a Polish underchancellor, he sent the Ermland cantor, Bartholmaus Liebenwald, to Rome to speak with Piccolomini. Liebenwald had not returned farther than Silesia when the news arrived that the bishop was dead. Sharing the cardinal’s advice to elect as bishop a powerful personality known both to the pope and the emperor, not the minor figures proposed by the League and the grand master, Liebenwald suggested that the rump chapter elect Piccolomini himself. The six canons agreed, and sent Liebenwald back to Rome to announce their choice to Pope Calixtus III.

Within days the pope confirmed Piccolomini’s election and gave him full authority to arrange matters there and in the region as he wished. Whatever was necessary to restore peace, the pope promised his fullest co-operation. Of course, Piccolomini could not go to Prussia in person. He had much too much to do in Rome, and the pope was not in good health. Instead, he gave detailed instructions to Liebenwald, named him episcopal vicar, and gave him full authority to negotiate, to raise armies, and to collect taxes. He wrote sweet letters to the Polish king, urging Casimir to send a representative to Rome to negotiate a peace. The monarch was not pleased, nor was he co-operative. So Piccolomini raised the stakes.

The death of the bishop of Culm gave Piccolomini his opportunity. The bishop of Ermland had been a dependable supporter of the Prussian League – in fact, a key member of the leadership. When a Polish candidate for the Culm bishopric appeared in Rome, then the grand master’s candidate, Piccolomini spoke on behalf of the former, only to have the pope refer the matter to a jurist, who told Piccolomini to choose between the candidates. Confusion abounded. Just what was the wily Italian up to? The confusion was doubled when he refused a sizeable bribe. What was the world coming to when you couldn’t even trust an Italian (and a churchman, to boot) to take a bribe?

Speculation was rife. Would Piccolomini demand the payment of Peter’s Pence in West Prussia? That speculation diminished only when his efforts to bring the parties together in Prague failed. Then, in August 1458, Piccolomini became Pope Pius II. No longer did he have the time, nor the physical strength, for efforts to bring the candidates, the royal representatives, the League’s lawyers, and the grand master’s procurator together again for peace talks. Pius II retained the
pro forma
title of bishop of Ermland, rejected renewed efforts at bribery, and sent an administrator north to manage the diocese and to work toward a peace settlement. That administrator was first the grand master’s ally, then neutral, and finally a supporter of the League. His military role in the conflict was insignificant, but from that time forth Ermland was an independent territory, freed from the direct domination of either grand master or king. The truce he arranged from October 1458 to July 1459 failed to lead to concrete results, but there was no serious fighting until the end of 1461.

Piccolomini was an unusual figure for a man of letters. First a reformer; then a diplomat and author; at the end he was a crusader. However, his efforts to organise European resistance to the Turkish advance were a mirror image of his failure in Prussia. The Holy Roman emperor, Friedrich III, was more interested in taking Hungary from Matthias Corvinus (1458 – 90) than in fighting in the Balkans, so that the successful defence of Belgrade in 1456 had resulted only in a temporary respite, not a rollback of Ottoman gains; and when Jan Hunyady died during the siege, the Christians lost an irreplaceable general. Furthermore, the French were offended by the pope’s Italian policies, the Italian cities were too absorbed in their own affairs to look abroad, and even Rome itself was in constant turmoil. In 1464, after four years of preparation, Pius II managed to gather together a small, ill-disciplined force, which he led south to meet the Venetian fleet and be transported across the Adriatic Sea to the Balkans. However, the ill, gout-ridden pontiff died before any of his unruly troops could board ship. He was succeeded by a pope, Paul II (1464 – 71), who could not speak proper Latin but who understood politics. Determined to expunge the Hussite heresy, he was very displeased with Gregor von Heimburg, lawyer for Georg of Podiebrady (1458 – 71), the pro-Hussite king of Bohemia. Since Heimburg was also representing the Teutonic Order, the pope automatically favoured the grand master’s enemies. Thus the proud papacy of Pius II, the epitome of Renaissance Humanism, began its descent into its pre-Reformation squalor. Papal interest in the North was henceforth confined largely to the return on financial assets. But money was hard to come by.

Since not even Danzig could pay all the mercenaries now, the Prussian League had to release many of its hired troops. Dismissing the soldiers of fortune, however, did not remove them from the country – it simply turned them loose on the peasantry. As the ragged soldiers ravaged the countryside, sometimes they acknowledged being in the service of one side or the other, sometimes not. They were joined by bands of impoverished peasants originally raised to defend harvests and villages, but who now went from region to region seeking food and shelter, not begging, but as armed units, taking what they needed through threats or force. It was a war of all against all, with pity, loyalty, and morality long forgotten.