Teutonic Knights (19 page)

One of the great issues that divided the Teutonic Order and the papacy was the payment of Peter’s Pence, a tax that Poland and England paid directly into the papal coffers. In recent years Pope John XXII had attempted to require this payment from other nations. Meeting resistance, he needed an example; the Teutonic Knights seemed perfect – they owed him obedience, their West Prussian subjects paid Peter’s Pence, and the military order was fabulously wealthy. However, the Teutonic Knights refused on the grounds that many of their possessions were in Germany and Italy, and therefore were immune from this tax; moreover, paying the tax would lend credence to Polish claims to overlordship of Prussia. John XXII, who had little patience with such quibbles, encouraged the order’s foes to bring lawsuits against them; and he made it clear that he would be very understanding of the special needs of his friends and supporters. There was a change in papal policy in 1330, when the pope offered to forgive all past debts if Culm and West Prussia would pay Peter’s Pence in the future. The provincial assembly accepted the offer, but the grand master did not.

The pope then ordered the grand master and his officers to come to Avignon to explain their behaviour, warning that if they failed to do so their privileges would be suspended, his legates’ excommunication would be confirmed, and he would put the officers of the Teutonic Order on trial
in absentia
. The officers still did not attend. The pope had even less success with his commands that the Teutonic Knights join in military attacks on the emperor and his son, Louis of Brandenburg. The Teutonic Knights were unwilling to risk compromise. Not only did they believe that the emperor and his son were within their rights, but they feared that the emperor could order their German possessions confiscated and that Duke Louis, his son, could harass crusaders as they crossed Brandenburg.

If the grand masters were sceptical about papal offers to mediate their disputes with Poland, modern historians might also be sceptical about this pope’s criticisms of the Teutonic Knights. Still, papal legates were figures who could safely pass from one court to another, and all parties recognised that whatever one thought of the pope’s motives, the pope was still the pope, and the Church provided the only international order that Christendom possessed. More importantly, perhaps, both the king and the grand master needed a pause in hostilities and somebody had to arrange these. Consequently papal efforts to arrange truces were successful in 1330, 1332, and 1334; but hopes for a permanent peace were frustrated because the parties were so far apart that only the passage of time and the passing of the principal figures could remove the mutual mistrust. The truces brought a suspension of hostilities but nothing more.

The truces did permit Werner von Orseln to resume his campaign in Samogitia. In the winter of 1330 he welcomed a large group of Rhenish crusaders and led them into the hostile wilderness. He did not find any forts to besiege. The natives, having long since been forewarned of the crusaders’ approach, had abandoned their villages and hidden in the woods. Consequently Werner’s expedition achieved relatively little. However, the crusaders’ offensive had distracted the Lithuanians’ attention sufficiently that knights from Ragnit were able to slip past enemy outposts and raid Vilnius, deep in the interior of the highlands. Finding the watchmen asleep, they sacked and burned the suburbs of the city.

The war in Livonia ended that same year with the surrender of Riga. Although the burghers expected brutal treatment, they were offered such unexpectedly fair terms that a complete reconciliation resulted. For decades to come the burghers abandoned their interference in foreign policy and confined their interests to trade. The Livonian Knights were as close to the Lithuanian fortresses of Vilnius and Kaunas as were the Prussian Knights, and from Dünaburg they could raid regions inaccessible from Prussia. Within a short time they contributed an important reinforcement to the expeditions into Samogitia.

In Ladislas’ mind the situation was becoming intolerable. The crusaders were simply making too much progress. Urged on by Ladislas of Masovia to recapture Dobrin, he turned to his allies, the rulers of Lithuania and Hungary. Gediminas, eager to reopen the communication route to Poland, agreed to a joint campaign in the late summer; he would cross the wilderness at Wizna and meet Ladislas’ army in Dobrin or Culm. Ladislas sought to make good his shortage of experienced knights by sending Prince Casimir to Hungary. In a triumph of personal diplomacy, Casimir persuaded his brother-in-law, Charles Robert, to send knights in the spring of 1331 to assist in fighting a common enemy, John of Bohemia.

Before the reinforcements arrived, however, the grand master sent a large army to a large castle that had harassed ships along the Vistula. The besiegers moved up stone-throwers and towers, working so quickly that after three days little remained of the castle walls. Assault followed assault, and finally the besiegers built a great fire, incinerating many defenders and driving others to attempt a hopeless sally. The Teutonic Knights went on to capture Brzesc and Nakel, two fortresses shielding northern Kujavia. The king despaired, having lacked sufficient troops to attempt a rescue.

At that moment Casimir arrived with the Hungarian reinforcements. The nineteen-year-old prince had been fascinated by the informal but courtly life at the Visegrad palace in Hungary. With his sister’s approval and aid, the blond prince had begun an affair with one of the royal ladies-in-waiting, Clara of Zać. Had Casimir been an eligible bachelor or had the affair been more discrete, the story might have had a romantic ending. As it was, on 17 April the Croatian lady’s father stormed into court, swinging his sword; he wounded the king, cut four fingers off the queen’s right hand, and was barely frustrated in his efforts to kill the young princes, Andreas and Louis. Royal vengeance was swift: the assailant’s body was quartered and the parts displayed throughout the countryside, his son was dragged to death behind a horse and the corpse given to dogs, and Clara was hounded from place to place. The Zać relatives were exiled from the kingdom. Even so, Casimir was urged to leave the country quickly, lest revenge be taken on him.

Once Casimir brought the Hungarian reinforcements, Ladislas was ready to strike. With large numbers of knights at his command, and many mercenaries as well, he decided not to waste his army in sieges of well-defended castles, but to invade Culm, join forces with Gediminas, and either force the grand master to a pitched battle or overwhelm the cities there. The campaign began well. In September he misled the grand master as to his intentions by invading West Prussia, then cleverly crossing to the east bank of the Vistula. The timing was wrong, however. He arrived too late to join the Lithuanians. Gediminas knew that his army was being shadowed by a small force of Teutonic Knights, and when Gediminas’ scouts were unable to locate the Polish forces at the agreed time and place the grand prince had prudently gone home. Ladislas was thus in East Prussia with a superiority in troops, but his advantage was not so great as to allow him to besiege cities. Moreover, with the grand master’s army so close he could not send out many foragers, which caused him to be short of fodder and provisions for his forces. The king did not want to make a humiliating retreat, but he could not stay in Culm indefinitely. Werner, in spite of having both the German and Livonian masters present, was unwilling to offer battle, but he did not want the Poles and Hungarians to continue ravaging his most valuable province. Consequently when someone suggested a truce, both Ladislas and Werner were eager to accept. Werner agreed to restore the Kujavian cities to the king after having razed the fortifications and castles and promised to give Dobrin back to Ladislas of Masovia.

A short time later Grand Master Werner met his death at the hands of an assassin. The circumstances provide some rare insights into the process of justice among the Teutonic Knights. It appears that the assassin, a knight from the convent at Memel, had been reprimanded for violent and unpredictable behaviour which had culminated with his threatening the castellan with a knife. He had come to Marienburg in hope of obtaining a pardon but had simply been ordered back to Memel. The disappointed knight left the audience room but not the castle. He had little to look forward to. Light punishment was a year in which one was forbidden to associate with one’s fellow knights and was stripped of honourable clothing and made to subsist on bread and water three days of the week; his would have been a heavy punishment, probably including both imprisonment and irons. Lurking in the corridor until Werner went to Vespers, he stepped out and dealt the grand master two deadly wounds. Apparently having made no plans for escape, he was promptly captured by a notary.

The officers who judged the assassin ruled that he was insane and not responsible for his actions, but they were unsure about the punishment they could inflict. The statutes provided the death penalty for the crimes of apostasy, cowardice, and sodomy, but not for murder. Consequently they wrote to the papacy for instructions, and when the answer arrived they followed the wisdom of the pope: life imprisonment.

Werner’s successor was Luther von Braunschweig, the youngest of the six sons of Duke Albrecht the Great. The other two youngest sons entered the Templars and the Hospitallers. Luther had become the order’s master of the robes, with responsibility for settling German peasants in Prussia. He was very successful, recruiting many of the immigrants from his brothers’ domains in what had once been called Lower Saxony. (It helped that pagan raiders rarely penetrated into the heart of Prussia now.) He maintained his family ties carefully, so that two nephews later joined the Teutonic Order.

Luther was a gifted poet who used his patronage to encourage religious and historical compositions relating to the Teutonic Order. While most of his own works have been lost, his
Life of Saint Barbara
has been preserved because of the close connection of this saint with the order’s conquest of Prussia, and because Luther’s own grandfather had been on crusade in 1242 when the knights captured the reliquary containing Barbara’s head and enshrined it in Culm.

Luther linked poetry with successful wars in Poland and Samogitia. Consequently a special lustre attached itself to his gracious and noble personality, a lustre that was enhanced by his exalted birth. Four years sufficed to make his memory bright a century later, when grand masters were neither especially gifted nor much admired.

Luther was determined to press the war against Ladislas even if it meant suspending the crusade until he had struck the king such blows as would eliminate him as a threat to the order’s rear. In this he depended upon John of Bohemia to pin down Ladislas in Silesia. Both princes claimed lordship over that province and, divided as it was among insignificant Piast princelings, Ladislas would not abandon Silesia to fight in the north. If he did, a victory for King John in Silesia was almost as good as a victory for the Teutonic Knights in Kujavia or Great Poland. War on Poland was beyond the resources of Prussia alone: the Poles were highly respected warriors, well armed, and fighting in defence of their homes. Therefore Luther hired mercenaries from Germany and Bohemia to augment his forces, accepted the services of rebel Polish nobles, and prepared to conduct warfare on the scale of a great prince. As operations commenced in July of 1331, English crusaders hastened to join the expedition. For them one fight was as good as another, and there would be more booty in Poland than in Samogitia.

The mercenary troops were commanded by Otto von Bergau, the son-in-law of the marshal of Bohemia, and a close friend of King John. He led 500 knights, who were not only well paid but also shared the spiritual privileges of crusaders, the most important being an indulgence remitting the sins of all those who participated in this holy work. However, their conduct and that of the Prussian army in general was anything but holy. Widespread reports of rape accompanied the usual lists of burnings, murders, and kidnappings. The worst aspects of the conduct of war in Samogitia combined with mercenary habits in general to wreak havoc throughout northern Masovia and Kujavia. The use of mercenaries disguised as crusaders was a propaganda disaster for the Teutonic Knights and was skilfully exploited by the Poles at later papal hearings.

Ladislas did not offer serious resistance. He left Casimir in charge of a small force while he lay in wait for the Bohemian king with most of his knights. His plan worked well enough. The crusader assault passed through Kujavia without achieving much of military significance. The king did not concern himself about the destruction of homes, churches, and mills, and the mistreatment of the commoners. In a war based on plundering, atrocities were common. What was important was that no castles were lost. Casimir had defended them well.