Teutonic Knights (13 page)

The military disaster experienced by the Swordbrothers in 1236 was far from unexpected. For several years the order had realised that its manpower was insufficient to accomplish the tasks that lay before it. It dared not further overburden the natives, who had suffered significant losses in lives, cattle and property during the conquest. Consequently, its officers believed that the best way to increase the revenue needed to support its knights, mercenaries and priests was by obtaining property in Germany. Acquiring manors and hospitals in the Holy Roman Empire, of course, could not be done instantly, and certainly not without a powerful patron. In 1231 Master Volquin had sought to resolve the economic and political crisis by uniting his order with the Teutonic Knights. He had hoped that the superior resources of the ‘German Order’ would provide the men and money needed to defend Livonia, that its discipline would reinvigorate the Swordbrother convents, and that its good offices with Pope Gregory would resolve the conflicts with the bishop of Riga. Even more importantly, there was a terrible row with the papal officer appointed by William of Modena to serve in his absence, who seems to have seen this assignment as a step toward a great career in the Church.

The grand chapter of the Teutonic Order that met in Marburg chose not to act on the Swordbrother proposal, but the idea was far from impractical. In the interchanges of experience and ideas that took place at their frequent meetings at the papal and imperial courts, the Teutonic Knights probably learned more than they taught. The Swordbrothers had the greater experience in the Baltic, having been there for two and a half decades before the Teutonic Knights sent their first permanent unit to the region.

Hermann von Salza sent two castellans from Germany to inspect the situation in Livonia. They spent the winter of 1235 – 6 there and reported their findings to the annual assembly that must have taken place shortly after Friedrich II and the grand master had attended the canonisation of St Elisabeth in Marburg. The report was so negative that there could have been little discussion. In addition to the political problems previously mentioned, they found that convent life among the Swordbrothers was far below the standards of the Teutonic Order, and that the Swordbrothers demanded such autonomy within any future united order that reforming their convents would be impossible.

The Swordbrothers came to their downfall soon afterwards. Their greed and ruthlessness made them vulnerable to accusations before the pope, and they were cut off from the money and the crusaders needed to survive. Desperate for some way out of his situation, Master Volquin led his armies into the pagan regions to the south. A reconciliation with the papacy arranged by William of Modena came too late.

The Swordbrother Order might have survived its financial crisis if Volquin had avoided unnecessary risks. Unfortunately for him, a party of crusaders from Holstein arrived late in the season in 1236 and, despite the lack of adequate numbers to guarantee success, they demanded to be led into battle. Master Volquin, not wanting to disappoint his guests, reluctantly undertook a raid into Samogitia, that part of Lithuania that lay between Livonia and Prussia. Perhaps earlier expeditions into Lithuania had been no less risky, but this time fate collected its due. Volquin led the crusaders across the Saule River (Šiauliai), where they attacked Samogitian settlements. Resistance was insignificant, because the native warriors chose to abandon their homes in favour of ambushing the raiders at the Saule River crossing on their way north. When the retreating crusader force reached the ford, they found it blocked by a small number of resolute pagan warriors. Volquin ordered the crusaders to dismount and wade across the stream. He warned that unless they hurried, it would soon be even more difficult to fight their way across, because the pagans would be reinforced. The Holstein knights, however, refused to fight on foot. Volquin could not impose his will on the visitors, and the crusaders made camp for the night. The next day, when the crusaders splashed across the stream, they discovered that the leading highlands chieftain, Mindaugas, had either led or sent a large body of men to fight alongside the Samogitians. In the ensuing combat Volquin and half his Swordbrothers perished, together with most of the crusaders. The native militias scattered early in the battle; unencumbered by heavy armour, most native warriors found ways to cross the river and flee north while the Lithuanians were preoccupied.

In retrospect we can see that the prospect of occupying the borderlands next to Lithuania had been too tempting for the Swordbrothers. The Lithuanians had appeared to be so much like other native peoples that the crusaders probably did not consider them capable of united resistance. Like the Prussians, the Lithuanians had a single language and a single culture, and they were divided into perhaps as many as twenty different groups led by clan elders, but that was a misleading comparison for several reasons. First, there were actually only two major groupings, the highlanders (Aukštaitija) and the lowlanders (Žemaitija, or Samogitia) north of the Nemunas River. Second, one family had already made itself supreme in the highlands, that of Mindaugas, whose primacy can be dated approximately from the time of the victory over Volquin. He soon bore the coveted title grand prince. Third, the Lithuanians had a long tradition of co-operation in mounting terrifying raids on their neighbours. This was a tradition that any warlord could build upon, and Mindaugas was no ordinary warlord – he was a gifted, if cruel, upstart, who knew how to climb to the top on the ruins of collapsing states.

The crusaders and the Mongols had taught the Lithuanians one lesson – that national unity was necessary for independence. That was an easy concept to understand, but only Mindaugas grasped its corollary: that national unity can be attained only through a ‘modernising’ autocracy. He was soon crushing domestic dissent and leading his former rivals’ armies through burning villages in Livonia, Rus’, Volhynia, and Płock. One could say that ‘a family that preys together, stays together’.

Other than by its militarism, which was not a pagan monopoly, Lithuania was not a threat to either Orthodox Rus’ or Roman Catholic Poland. Its priests did not proselytise, and their belief system was hardly more superstitious than contemporary Roman Catholicism as practised at the local level – crusaders often believed in astrology, magic, and witchcraft. Some Western practices were based on aspects of the pre-Christian religions found throughout Europe, while others were approved by the wisest and best educated philosophers and churchmen (Friedrich II, a ruler so secular-minded that his enemies perceived him as the tool of the Anti-Christ, if not the archdemon himself, was a patron of astrology). The pagans rarely practised human sacrifice, though they occasionally burned alive a highly regarded enemy prisoner. Polygamy was already rare. Their ferocity in warfare is hard to distinguish from that practised by the Christians, other than in their preference for hit-and-run raids over slugging it out on a battlefield; all sides saw the civilian population as a legitimate wartime target. In short, since the princes and boyars would not have to modify their daily lives too much, the missionaries had reason to believe that the pagan leaders were willing to become Christians if the price was right.

At the moment the Lithuanians hardly deserved to be considered in crusader plans. Their proto-state in the highlands was far away, only half-organised, and, it was believed, would probably disintegrate long before a crusader army again approached its frontiers. Mindaugas was to prove such calculations false. He would take advantage of the political crisis in Rus’ to enrich his followers by attacking the weakened states there, and by enriching the warrior class he made himself deserving of the title grand prince. Within a few years Lithuania would be a recognised state.

The lesson in this was clear. The papacy had great powers, and could not be defied even when it was wrong. The Swordbrothers had relied on the emperor’s help and he had failed them. In the years that lay ahead the pope and the emperor would quarrel again, and the Teutonic Knights, who succeeded the Swordbrothers in Livonia, found it necessary to assess and reassess the position they would take in each of these disputes. This occasioned bitter disputes within the Teutonic Order, but in the end its members chose to be as neutral as they could and maintain at least an appearance of friendship toward both of their benefactors and lords.

A second lesson, well-remembered from the long wars that followed the Wendish Crusade (1147), was that it is always easier to convert a people by working through a native lord – if you can find one, or create one able and willing to become a feudal lord, ruling over his newly Christianised people with the aid of foreign arms and the assistance of foreign advisors. An astute native lord, using the Church against his rapacious neighbours, could make himself independent and relatively powerful. That was perfectly acceptable to most Christians, who knew that marriage alliances could gain land more surely and with less expense and risk than warfare entailed. It was a solution also thoroughly acceptable to the knights of the Teutonic Order, as long as it did not cost them lands already occupied at great cost in blood and treasure.

A third lesson was not lost either, at least not in this generation: the Swordbrothers would not have been in trouble if they had not coveted Estonia. The Teutonic Order carefully avoided territorial disputes with their powerful Christian neighbours whenever they could. That did not mean that they gave in easily whenever a duke claimed a territory or a new tax, but it did mean that they avoided warfare by calling upon neutral parties, particularly papal legates, to judge matters, and binding themselves to follow whatever decision was rendered. This averted many a potential test of arms.

Grand Master Hermann von Salza was in Vienna with the emperor when he heard the news of the Swordbrothers’ defeat, but his business was taking him south, into Italy, not north to Marburg in Germany where a special chapter meeting was ready to discuss the Swordbrothers’ desperate call for help. He sent the two Swordbrother messengers to speak to the grand chapter, which debated the request without being able to reach a decision. At last the chapter referred the matter back to Hermann von Salza at the next chapter meeting in Vienna, an assembly which must have been spectacular, with both Hermann von Salza and Hermann Balk in attendance, and the emperor Friedrich II in the city. Still unable to reach a decision, the grand chapter sent the delegation on to Gregory IX, who was then in Viterbo, a papal retreat in the hill country north of Rome. There Hermann von Salza and the Swordbrothers presented a petition to the pope, asking that the Swordbrother Order and all their lands be incorporated into the Teutonic Knights. The pope withdrew into a private conference with the grand master, after which he summoned the two Swordbrothers and a few witnesses. Ordering the Swordbrothers to kneel, he released them from all their previous oaths, explained briefly what the rule of the Teutonic Order was, and asked if they vowed to keep it. When they said yes, his servants took their mantles off and laid new white ones with a black cross over their shoulders. They and all their brethren were now members of the Teutonic Knights.

The two messengers were so astonished at the speed of the ceremony that they could barely wait to ask the grand master about the conditions they had set for union with the Teutonic Knights. When they were told that the union had been made without conditions, and that Estonia would have to be returned to Denmark, they were bitter. Despite their disappointment, the knights honoured their vow of obedience. A papal document announcing the act of union was issued on 12 May 1237:

The next day Gregory IX wrote to his legate in the Baltic, William of Modena, to open negotiations between King Waldemar and the Teutonic Knights for the resolution of the dispute over Estonia. In June there was a chapter meeting in Marburg at which the assembled representatives voted to send sixty knights (about 650 men) to Livonia immediately, and to make Hermann Balk responsible for governing the region. Hermann raised his knights from the North German convents; these were men who understood the Low German language spoken by the Swordbrothers and most secular knights and burghers in Livonia. With 500 Marks contributed by the emperor he outfitted his men and shipped them from Lübeck to Riga before the onset of winter weather closed the seas.

The reinforcements saved the Livonian Crusade. Hermann Balk distributed the knights among the castles so that they would learn about the countryside, the natives, and the enemy. In 1238, at Stensby, he returned Estonia to King Waldemar, winning him as an ally for the Teutonic Order.

This brusque dismissal of the Swordbrothers’ most significant achievement confirmed the worst fears of the surviving knights of that order. They withdrew from the reformed convents in the south of Livonia to those on the Rus’ian frontier and made life so difficult for Hermann Balk that after he sailed for Denmark he hurried to Italy to speak with Hermann von Salza and Gregory IX about the knights’refusal to recognise his authority. He got practically no hearing, however, because the dispute between emperor and pope had become so serious that they could not be persuaded to look into problems on a distant and inconsequential frontier. Shortly afterward Hermann von Salza died in Salerno. This was a crippling blow to the moderates in both church and state who had hoped against hope, if not for a peaceful resolution of the problem, then perhaps a delay in the deadly confrontation that would allow God time to work a miracle. Hermann was one of that handful of men who, with divine inspiration, might have been capable of such a feat.