Teutonic Knights (11 page)

The uprising seems to have been provoked by Scumand, whose recent raids had been so devastating that the order’s chief castellan in Pogesania had been sacked in 1276 and replaced by a more daring official. Perhaps angered by subsequent defeats that several of his smaller raiding parties suffered that year, Scumand asked the Lithuanians to help him. They agreed, and in 1277 he led them and 4,000 of his own tribesmen through the wilderness into Culm, where he captured one small castle on the Ossa River, then passed by Rehden, Marienwerder, Zantir, and Christburg, burning all the villages near them and the small forts that lay along his route. Peter von Dusburg described a pitiful scene, one confirmed by the Polish chronicler, Długosz:

Meanwhile, Lithuanian armies following the wilderness paths from Gardinas down the Narew River into Masovia were continuing west, plundering Polish villages and crossing the Vistula River into Kujavia. This was the very situation that had brought the Teutonic Knights into Prussia in the first place – the Piast dukes’ inability to protect the northern frontiers of Poland. It was not just that the raids were terrible, because the crusader raids were terrible too, and probably some of these people had been recent victims of the latest campaign of the Teutonic Knights, resettled in these supposedly safe regions; but the fate that awaited the Polish prisoners was believed to be much worse.

Although the Christian raids lacked none of the initial terror and frightfulness, there was a somewhat different attitude between Christians and pagans. The Christians resettled most of their prisoners as farm labourers, often as serfs; in short, many such captives continued life much as before. The Christians ransomed some captives and exchanged others, but they rarely sold them on the international slave market. The pagans, being more economically backward, needed fewer serfs and therefore often sold their prisoners into foreign slavery, used them in human sacrifices, or made them into concubines and household slaves. According to the crusaders, prisoners taken by the barbarians were no longer treated as human beings, but rather like human cattle. We know of uprisings among the prisoners, throwing themselves unarmed on the backs of their captors when the pagans halted the slow progress of the line of captives in order to face a pursuing column of Teutonic Knights and militiamen. Desperate times, desperate measures.

Presumably both sides recognised that some of their prisoners had been taken captive previously, and, acknowledging that these captives had been unwillingly in enemy hands, allowed those unfortunates to return to their own people. In meetings held before combat to discuss tactics and the division of the booty, native tribesmen insisted that released captives not count as their share of the loot, should the army succeed in overhauling and destroying a raiding party.

Both sides must have made efforts to provide relief for the victims of raids. However, not even the Teutonic Knights and the bishops were rich enough to provide new homes and lands for every family made destitute, nor had they the bureaucracy to keep detailed records such as would be necessary to reunite scattered families or establish proof of identity, past services, and so forth. This had to be done by personal knowledge and memory, and all the inefficiency which that entails. The Teutonic Knights often resettled their captives in villages under their ancestral leadership and allowed them to retain their arms. Although this policy was often successful in winning over many natives, it worked best when the war was going well for the crusaders. When military operations went wrong, it was a different story. These tribesmen still had the capacity to organise and to fight; and since both nobles and commoners had reasons to revolt, all they needed was encouragement and some prospect of success. When Scumand demonstrated that the Teutonic Knights were impotent to protect their more secure provinces, even the Pogesanians rebelled. The uprising in this long pacified district north of Culm came an as a nasty surprise to the Prussian master.

The rebels had an immediate and surprising local success. Under the leadership of a Bartian chief they captured the castellans of Elbing and Christburg, probably by a ruse. This Bartian noble, who earned a reputation for cruelty far above the other rebel leaders, hanged a priest and killed a squire in an attempt to terrorise his prisoners; he probably would have caused the officers to perish, too, if a loyal native had not freed them from their chains and helped them to escape.

That the rebellion failed to spread was partly due to the caution that tempered native hatred and partly to the work of Theodoric, the advocate of Samland, who hurried back from Germany when he heard the news. As the probably biased report of Dusburg put it:

There was only one execution, that of a polygamist whose wives testified against him. Because the frightened Teutonic Knights saw a self-confessed conspirator in any native who continued pagan practices such as having plural wives or cremating the dead, there must have been great opportunities for individuals to turn in personal enemies as traitors. But there was no persecution that we know of. Perhaps there was a deliberate policy of turning a blind eye toward the native sins at this moment. The execution of the bigamist proved that the order would not tolerate open disobedience, but also that the master would not seek out secret sins. More repression might have caused other nobles to revolt while they still could. (Who might have a secret concubine? Did ancient oaths not come to lips anymore?) The master certainly did not want to encourage other tribes to join the Pogesanian rebels. This was a policy of which Machiavelli would have approved. On the other hand, the Pogesanians who had already taken up arms gave the Prussian master no alternative to crushing them by force. Conrad von Thierberg led an army there in the summer of 1277 and returned in the autumn, killing and capturing, and resettling so many of the people that vast stretches of land remained empty thereafter. Many Pogesanians abandoned their homes, fled through Galindia and Sudovia, and were eventually given homes by the Lithuanian grand prince around Gardinas, where they resumed their fight against the Teutonic Knights. The grand prince, by putting confirmed enemies of the crusaders at that dangerous and important place, demonstrated that he, too, was a shrewd politician.

Master Conrad presumably settled the Pogesanian captives around his new castle at Marienburg, where he could watch them more carefully. He had begun this castle to supersede Zantir, an outdated fort on the Vistula estuary, as the order’s regional centre. In the next century it became the seat of the grand master and one of the largest and finest castles in the world, but at the moment it was simply a stronghold that formed a rough triangle with Elbing and Christburg, enabling the order to watch the former rebels more closely. Like other castles being built at this time and later, it was constructed of brick. There was practically no stone in coastal Prussia, and it was too expensive to import except for use in architectural features such as lintels and capitals. As soon as a brick industry had been developed, all important buildings in Prussia, whether castles, churches, storehouses, or palatial homes, were built of that sturdy material.

Following the Third Prussian Insurrection, the Teutonic Knights took the Sudovian problem more seriously. Although the tribe had been battered by the Teutonic Knights, the Volhynians, and the Poles, and even by the Nattangians in recent years, it was clearly still dangerous and capable of carrying the war deep into the order’s territories. When Lithuanians came to their aid, the Sudovians were particularly fearsome – but that was only on the offensive, since Lithuania was too far away to assist in repelling attacks unless reliable information gave the anticipated date of a raid. Nobody could afford to have troops sit around and wait for invaders to appear. Alone, the Sudovians were not strong enough to turn back incursions from the German, Rus’ian, and Polish armies.

In the first major raid the crusaders scored an outstanding success, gathering up cattle, horses, and captives in tremendous numbers. Then, as they retreated, they laid an ambush for the 3,000 angry Sudovians who pursued them. At the cost of six men the Christians killed many of the pagan warriors who clumsily fell into the trap, and routed the rest.

There were defeats as well as triumphs, though some could be seen as moral victories. A Polish chronicler wrote this in 1279:

The Poles rendered some indirect help in these conflicts, but not as much as they could have had they been united. The Piast dukes had first been fascinated by the fast-changing situation in the Holy Roman Empire, where Rudolf von Habsburg had killed King Ottokar in battle in 1278, and then they watched the Habsburg emperor wrestle with Duke Otto of Brandenburg for influence in Bohemia and Silesia. The Piast dukes were also jealous of one another. After years of dividing the kingdom into smaller and smaller duchies for the many heirs, there had been a sudden series of consolidations. Several dukes died without direct heirs, and their relatives quarrelled over the inheritances. Kujavia was divided among five brothers, but three were childless as of that date, and the family stood united against all outsiders. Silesia was cut into four pieces, each so under foreign domination that the dukes were unimportant outside their tiny possessions. Following the death of Boleslaw the Pious (1226 – 79) there was a struggle for his Cracovian duchy; the eldest son of Casimir of Kujavia (1211 – 67), Leszek the Black (1240 – 88), was the victor.

The Lithuanians and Sudovians had meanwhile taken the offensive in 1277 and 1278, ravaging vast regions of Volhynia. This lasted until the terrible famine of 1279 brought the pagans to Volhynia to beg for grain. When the grain was sent down the Bug River and up the Narew River, Conrad of Masovia-Czerski (Warsaw) set an ambush, stole the grain, and destroyed the ships.

Duke Leszek took seriously his obligation to defend the eastern frontier of Poland. Although he did nothing so dramatic as the 1273 invasion of Sudovia that had persuaded the tribes to pay tribute, he defeated an army of Rus’ians and Lithuanians that the Mongols had sent into Sandomir in 1280, and he was personally present to guard against Sudovian and Lithuanian raids in Masovia and Volhynia; in one pursuit of Prussians across the Narew’s swamps he learned the raiders’ hiding place from the howl of dogs who had recognised their owners – this allowed him to rescue all the captives without the loss of a single man. The other Piast dukes, however, did nothing beyond watch one another for signs of ambition or illness; they were unwilling to leave their provinces to fight against the pagans for fear their lands would be attacked in their absence. Leszek the Black did what he could to defend his lands against attacks from the east, but he had little authority in the west, where the bulk of the Polish population and wealth was located.

This situation fed anti-German sentiment in Poland; patriots found it easier to blame foreigners than themselves for their nation’s difficulties. While this sentiment was mainly directed against the rulers of Bohemia and Brandenburg, who were rightly suspected of seeking their own aggrandisement from Polish troubles, the Piasts and their nobles and knights were suspicious of everyone; without making the Teutonic Knights prominent among their list of dangerous neighbours, they did not exclude them from that number. The political tensions created a climate of distrust of all things foreign, so that eventually Poles saw dangers everywhere. Strong states and confident cultures do not fear for themselves. But Poland at this time was weak and, except for Leszek’s energy in the east, leaderless.

Just as the Piast dynasty seemed to be dying out, so was the line of Pomerellian dukes. Dukes Sambor (1204 – 78) and Racibor (? – 1275/6) had no male children, and they hated their nephew Mestwin (duke 1266 – 94) so much that they tried to deprive him of his inheritance by every means possible. Duke Racibor willed most of his lands to the Teutonic Knights and other religious bodies, and Sambor did the same. Duke Mestwin was able to nullify Racibor’s bequests by seizing his lands and then defending them against the claims of the Brandenburg dukes, but Sambor was able to deliver Mewe – a key position near the Vistula – to the Teutonic Knights, establishing them firmly on the left bank of the great river. This was a safer area for settling immigrants than in Prussia. Consequently Mewe quickly developed into a valuable German-speaking possession.

Mestwin had no surviving male children and had taken a vow of chastity, so the dynasty would end with his death. He could live with that prospect, but he still wanted to prevent the duchy, or even Mewe, from falling into the possession of his bitterest enemies, the Teutonic Knights. Much better to give it all to Piast relatives, as he did in a will dated 1282.

The Teutonic Knights must have given considerable thought to this, as they sat around their tables, eating and discussing politics among themselves and with their many visitors; but they apparently did nothing about it except talk. Talk and diplomacy. Their duty was the crusade, not the acquisition of Christian lands. Although the crusade could be carried on better if the order had more resources, demanding the lands willed to them by Racibor would have involved war with Poland. Crusaders were not supposed to make war on Christians (though the example of crusaders in the Holy Land demonstrated that they could); but, more important, the Prussian master could not afford to alienate powerful rulers in their rear. For now little could be done about Pomerellia. The Teutonic Knights had to concentrate on the war in the east.

War in Sudovia was principally a contest of small war-parties. The Teutonic Knights lacked the troops for large-scale offensives after 1279, because a serious defeat in Livonia required the master to send his reserves to that endangered front. The Livonian master had perished, and when Master Conrad von Thierberg died of natural causes later that same year Grand Master Hartmann von Heldrungen and the grand chapter that met in Marburg saw an opportunity to combine the command of the two regions so as to co-ordinate attacks on rebellious Semgallia and unconquered Samogitia. Those operations were to be given top priority again. That meant that only nuisance raids were to be conducted against the Sudovians. The new master, Conrad von Feuchtwangen, hurried to the Baltic. His experience in the Holy Land had persuaded him that the order’s future was in its wars against pagans, not against Moslems; and he saw clearly that this future was in danger too. His was not an easy task. The enemy seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. He could smash almost any force he could locate, but locating the foe was not easy.

When Prussians attacked a mill in Elbing where the local populace had taken refuge, they behaved with such bad faith that in the future Christians would be unwilling to surrender. When the master led an army into Warmia to capture the fort that became the future site of Heilsberg, the Prussians struck back in Culm, capturing castles and burning villages. Vast areas became a no-man’s-land, and neither side had the strength at the moment to occupy and settle the wilderness.

Nor was there any help to be had from the Poles, who had been so helpful in past campaigns by fighting in Volhynia, a land now almost completely in disorder. The Lithuanians, who were beginning to think of the southern Rus’ian lands as already theirs, committed so many resources to this many-sided struggle for hegemony that they had few men available to assist the Sudovians. The complexity of this desperate war on the frontier can be seen in 1280, when Lev of Galicia made an arrangement with the Tatar khan to borrow steppe warriors for an attack on Cracow. While the southern Piasts met the invaders, dukes Leszek and Casimir of Masovia attacked Lev’s rear, leading their men into Volhynia. The lesson was that Poles had to watch their south-eastern steppe frontier before taking care of the north-eastern forest frontier.

Of course, what was true for Poles was equally so for Lithuanians – the big prizes were in Rus’, not in the Prussian forests. Lithuanian ambitions to occupy Volhynia left the last independent Prussian pagans vulnerable to small-scale raids by their relatives who were now subjects of the Teutonic Order. While the crusaders’ attacks in these years did not merit being called offensive operations, they wore the pagans down.