Teutonic Knights (8 page)

Independent action was such a characteristic of the people that an early traveller, Ibrahim ibn Jacob, noted that in warfare the individual warrior would not wait for his friends to help him but would rush into combat, swinging his sword until he was overwhelmed. This berserk courage was apparently limited to the nobility, because the general evidence is that the ordinary fighting man slipped off into the woods when confronted by greater numbers, leaving his fellows to fend for themselves, but surviving to fight another day. In this they were much like the general run of humanity.

The armament of the average warrior was extremely poor, so much so that he must be considered practically unarmed. The clubs and stones that the average militiaman used effectively in ambushes and in defending forts did not give him the confidence to fight pitched battles where the enemy had horses, armour, and swords. That was left to the nobles, who served as light cavalry with sword, spear, helmet, and mail coat. This equipment was less heavy than a western knight’s outfit but was well suited to the swampy, wooded lowlands and the rough, wooded hills of their native land. Most likely the Prussian nobles would not have adopted western weapons even if they had been more easily available.

Prussian nobles were in many ways like nobles elsewhere. They lived by hunting and warfare and on the labour of their slaves. The women and children they captured on raids served as household help and as concubines, but often they treated them as human merchandise in the regional slave markets. There is some evidence of a trade route south through Poland, and no one would be surprised if many captives were sold down the Rus’ian rivers, the traditional slave route to the Turks and Byzantines. Although this eastern traffic was long past its heyday and was being interrupted by nomad incursions into southern Russia, it was still profitable. Men were of little use as prisoners or slaves unless they could be sold immediately, because they could escape too easily while performing agricultural work in the small forest clearings. Children were even less valuable, because it was expensive to raise a child to adulthood just to work in the fields. Women were more suitable in every sense for the primitive farming in grain crops and for gathering food in the woods.

Prussian nobles did not work, but lived by their own set of traditions that distinguished them from the commoners. The nobles in Germany and Poland did not work either, but they did not live by the labour of slaves or the income derived from the sale of prisoners taken in warfare. The tradition of slave-catching and the concept of honour that lay behind the successful Prussian social/religious system were cited by Christians in Poland and Pomerellia as the main reasons for their making war on the pagans in Prussia. A cynical modern observer might suggest that Christian rulers’ eagerness to expand their domains was considerably more important. No matter. Either way it appears that religion
per se
was not the most significant cause of the wars between the Christians and pagans along the Vistula River. Religion became important later, of course, for all parties. The Prussians, certainly, once provoked, were not content to remain at home and practice their rites in peace, but were compelled by their evolving customs to continue their raids on Christian neighbours long after they had taken revenge for the initial outrages. Clearly, it was this increasingly aggressive activity over the years, whether it started as raw war-lust or as a reaction to Polish invasions, that eventually brought not just the Poles and Pomerellians but also Germans from the distant Holy Roman Empire to make war against them.

The oft-raised issue of Prussian independence and Prussian freedom meant something very different to the warriors of thirteenth-century Prussia than to the nineteenth-century liberals who praised them for their resistance to foreign invaders. The issue is a false one because the Christians had little choice but to defend themselves; there was no living with such a barbarous system. Moreover, the modern concept of nationalism does not track well onto medieval concepts of ethnic identity. Nevertheless, the issue is sometimes still raised, often in the context of imperialism and neo-imperialism, with Western nations almost always in the wrong.
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There were philosophers in the thirteenth century, too, who must have discussed the same questions that bother us today. There is no doubt that informal debates took place between the elders and priests of the Prussian clans and the trained dialecticians of the Church when the missionaries sought to convert the tribesmen. On the one hand there was praise for the traditional values and free choice, for martial virtue and no taxation; on the other, condemnation of gross superstition, ignorance, and barbaric habits. The churchmen who prized freedom of the mind and spirit did their best to persuade the simple but shrewd rural folk that what they had to offer in the way of civilisation and salvation was worth the sacrifice of ancient, warlike ways – and they failed. The churchmen had to overcome too many obstacles: their own minds were not as open as they thought; they brought with them concepts favourable to serfdom; their promotion of feudal government alienated the local nobility; they seemed to be the forerunners of foreign rulers; and they did not speak the Prussian language very well. But Prussian paganism owed its survival to more than just the failure of the missionaries. At its root was a flourishing military culture.

Military success had bred brutal and ambitious nobles who profited from the slave raids into Christian lands. Though approached by peaceful missionaries, they refused to stop their attacks, and occasionally killed those bold and uncompromising visitors. Before Prussian nobles would accept Christianity they had to be shown that the God of Victory favoured the other side. After that the missionaries could slowly introduce the changes that would break the traditions supporting the pagan philosophy.

The Prussians had not always enjoyed complete independence. Each generation had been obliged to defend its freedom and way of life. The Vikings had been the most successful in subjugating parts of Prussia and had come and gone so easily that the Prussians came to regard all strangers as hostile. The first missionaries to the region, Adalbert of Prague (997) and Bruno of Querfurt (1009), met martyr deaths; and the Prussians’ hostility toward Christians, expressed in their raids, caused the Polish king Boleslaw III (1146 – 73) to lead crusades against them. The archbishops of Gniezno promoted the cult of St Wenceslas, depicting on the bronze doors of their cathedral his martyrdom by the Prussians. So it was that while the people of nearby Mecklenburg and Pomerania were being converted to Christianity by the Wendish Crusade, only the Prussians and the people living to their east and north-east held true to the old religions, and even there the Christians made strong inroads – between 1194 and 1206 many inhabitants of Culm were made into Christians by a combination of persuasion, self-interest, and raw force. The Poles were becoming stronger and moving closer. Some pagan Prussians must have known that time was running out.

In 1206 the abbot of the Polish Cistercian monastery at Lekno went to Prussia to negotiate for the release of some prisoners taken in recent raids. To his surprise he met a friendly reception, so friendly that he came to believe that he could make numerous converts to his faith if he remained there permanently. He wrote to Pope Innocent III to ask permission to conduct a mission supported by the other Cistercian abbeys in Poland. The pope responded:

The abbot’s zeal was further fired by reports brought from Livonia by monks who had spoken to Theodoric, the Cistercian monk responsible for the success of the mission organised by the bishop of Riga. If Theodoric and his fellow-monks could convert pagans in Livonia and Estonia, why could he not do the same in Prussia?

Complicating the peaceful conversion were the periodic efforts of Polish kings and dukes to expand their rule. While this eastward push was often successful, in Prussia it did little beyond disrupt the missionary effort and bring about pagan retaliation. However, deploring past mistakes was not an option open to the Christian rulers. As the Piast dukes, especially Conrad of Masovia and his bishops and abbots, watched their subjects being carried off and sold to slave traders from the Moslem and Orthodox worlds, they had to act. Unable to defend their frontiers alone, they called on the military orders for help. The Teutonic Order was among those willing to talk about providing help.
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The first small force of Teutonic Knights to enter Prussia was commanded by Conrad von Landsberg, a native of nearby Meissen who was familiar with Polish geography and customs. His tiny army came with the intention of establishing a foothold in the lands that Duke Conrad of Masovia and Bishop Christian had promised them. Grand Master Hermann von Salza had needed every knight and man-at-arms for Friedrich II’s crusade, but he understood that he could not allow the Prussian invitation to remain totally unanswered. He was aware that competitors – the Dobriner Order, the Templars, and the Hospitallers – could expand in this direction too; and he understood that the duke might change his mind. Medieval rulers – like modern ones – had short attention spans and often reversed their decisions with little warning or reason.

In all likelihood Conrad von Landsberg gathered up his handful of knights from convents in Central Germany, probably taking only new recruits and perhaps a few warriors who were too ill or injured to join the grand master when the fleet sailed for the Holy Land. There were only seven knights, accompanied by seventy to a hundred squires and sergeants, and servants to bake bread, malt beer, wash clothes, and keep the horses and equipment in order. Since it was a partly cloistered order, and also a hospital order, there were priests and doctors with them too. All were male, and attendance at the eight religious services held each day was a major function that took up much of their time. They were well-armed, well-equipped, and very well-trained, but no one thought them supermen. Outwardly they were ordinary knights; inwardly they were dedicated monks.

Conrad von Landsberg did not dare to enter directly into Culm, at the strategic bend of the Vistula River, but stayed on the south bank, in Masovia, where Duke Conrad had built a small castle on a hill opposite the future location of Thorn (Toruń). With black humour the German crusaders named it Vogelsang (bird’s song). The chronicler Nicholas von Jeroschin explained: ‘There sang many a wounded man, not as the nightingale sings, but with the sorrowful song that the swan sings as he is killed.’

This small force of Teutonic Knights could not have held out against a large army of Prussians, but the district had already been partly depopulated in earlier Polish invasions, and some of the local natives were Christians with ties to Duke Conrad and Bishop Christian. Therefore the number of pagans in Culm was not large, and those who were there had no reason to consider the newly arrived warriors a serious menace. That was a mistake. Once Conrad von Landsberg had completed his castle/convent, he sent his knights across the Vistula River to cut down the nearest pagan warriors, to burn their fields and villages, and to destroy their crops. He offered peace only on the condition that the people became Christians.