The Northern Crusades (31 page)

Different weathers and seasons imposed different types of campaign on the belligerents. The
winter-reysa
had to be a rapid foray of some 200–2000 men, carrying both rations and fodder at the back of their saddles; the object was to loot, devastate and depopulate a given area as quickly as possible. On reaching enemy territory, they would put up simple cabins, or
maia
, to store their provisions and plunder, then spread out and do all the damage they could without taking or building forts, or spending long enough to invite a serious counter-attack. After each day’s plunder they would return to headquarters and camp for the night, moving on the next day. A good
winter-reysa
had to arrive without warning, and retire before the enemy could mobilize or the weather changed. Hermann of Wartberg records one such success in 1378: the Livonians went into Lithuania in February, stayed there for nine
suwalky
(overnight camps) and came back with 531 head of cattle and 723 horses.
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Meanwhile the Prussians also had
una bona reisa
, according to Wigand of Marburg, and returned with 100 prisoners. There were usually two
winter-reysen
, one in December, one in January or February, leaving a gap for the Christmas festivities, when the seven-hour day left too little time for raiding. This, at any rate, was the custom of the Teutonic Knights, who appear to have campaigned in winter more regularly than the Lithuanians, perhaps because their bases were nearer the Baltic coast and less snow-bound than the Lithuanian heartlands. The Lithuanians did make great winter incursions, notably in 1322–3, when the cold was too great for the Order to attack Lithuania, and in 1356, 1370 and 1382 under Kestutis, but for the most part they seem to have calculated that their frontier garrisons were likely to do more harm to the raiders than they would inflict on the Order by going out themselves. Like Nicholas I, they put their trust in generals Janvier and Février.

The
sommer-reysa
was usually a bigger affair, when the masters of Prussia and Livonia mobilized all their resources for a full
hervart
(offensive expedition), and the grand-prince set out with a
karias
(large army) of boyars, castellans and their levies. It was usually intended to secure new ground by destroying an enemy fort or building a new one in enemy territory, but it always involved devastation, plunder and harassment as well, and was sometimes preceded by smaller incursions intended to ‘soften up’ and impoverish the area round the fort marked out for attack. The Order’s marshal appears to have collected reports on the enemy’s state of readiness, and to have made his plans accordingly; thus in the
Wegeberichte
there is information about places forty miles to the east of Grodno (Dubitshki, Vasilishki, Zheludok and Volkovisk), which ‘lie thirty-six, forty-five and fifty-four miles apart from each other, and are full of arable estates, and they report that no armed force has yet been to that part of the country.’
¹²⁰
And, when von Kniprode went to besiege Kaunas in 1362, he was acting on the reports of a reconnaisance made the previous year.

Since there was always a wilderness to cross, the summer campaigners had to carry their food with them, as in winter, and in 1365 von Kniprode insisted on a full month’s supply for every man. However, they could expect to find grass for their horses on the march, and the routes marked by the
letzlute
went through places where there was ‘good water and fodder’. Even if no forts were taken, there would always be hauls of people and animals; as in 1376, when Kestutis returned from the Pregolya with fifty mares and sixty stallions from the stud farm at Insterburg and 900 prisoners, and in 1378, when the commander of Ragnit carried off forty waggon-loads of spoil from Samogitia. However, the quest for plunder could sometimes go too far. In September 1314, Marshal Henry of Prussia pushed over 100 miles east of Grodno to Novogrudok, leaving his loaves and packhorses at
maia
along the return route, and discovered that the castellan of Grodno, Gediminas’s brother David, had swooped on them before he could reach them; his troops had to eat their own horses, and any herbs and roots they could find, on the way back to Prussia, and many died of starvation.
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It was always safer to raid lands adjacent to the Dvina and the Niemen, within reach of river-boats, castles and bailey-bridges, and it was here that most of the fighting took place. Each side was trying to hold (in the case of the Dvina) or gain (in the case of the Niemen) a stretch of river that could be fortified and garrisoned so as to serve as a reliable entry into enemy country beyond the wilderness. This meant lavishing more
and more resources on territory that had little intrinsic value and could not be properly settled or cleared for as long as hostilities lasted. Raids into fertile country, if successful, did something to replenish the supplies of men and material that were constantly being reduced by sieges and castle-building along the rivers and frontiers, but for most of the fourteenth century this served to prolong, rather than conclude, the fighting. It was only after von Kniprode had managed to win control of the Niemen up to the confluence of Kaunas that one side gained a definite advantage, and could begin continuous raiding with a view to winning and holding the homelands of the other; and even then the advantage was to some extent counterbalanced by the introduction of cannon. The process took so long – ninety-three years to advance from Ragnit to Kaunas, a distance of seventy-five miles as the crow flies – because the armies were wearing themselves out on the terrain, rather than annihilating each other, and were constantly drawing strength from expanding economies a long way behind the front.

The destructiveness of the raids is hard to assess, because estimates always come from chroniclers or advocates interested in blackening the enemy and emphasizing the achievements of their own side. When the Order’s own annalist Wigand of Marburg records of a
reysa
in 1364 (which included English crusaders) that it attacked an unprepared territory, which they devastated inhumanly,
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it seems fair to conclude that the peasant population suffered more than usual. But those who lived in areas liable to attacks would naturally become skilled at hiding and escaping, and it was usually more profitable to take them prisoner, and drive them home over the wilderness, than simply to massacre them. It was the garrisons of outlying castles that were most likely to be killed to the last man, but, after King John of Bohemia had insisted on sparing the 6000 Samogitians who surrendered in Medewage in 1329, this kind of slaughter became less common. No count was kept by the Order of the peasants killed on its
reysen
, however, and it can only be assumed that the death-toll was sufficiently high to deter settlers from the wilderness and balance losses inflicted by the Lithuanians. These lose nothing in the telling. According to the Order’s sources, the great raids of Prince David of Grodno in 1322–3 were responsible for the death or capture of 4000 in Estonia, 10,000 in Dobrzyn (of whom 8000–10,000 were killed) and 2000 in Mazovia. Kestutis was supposed to have carried off over 2000 in 1352, 500 in 1353, 900 in 1376 – figures which are not incredible,
even if they are unlikely to be accurate. On the whole, it seems that captivity was a much more likely fate than death for a peasant caught by invaders, simply because he was worth more alive than dead. Nevertheless, the Order was quite prepared to massacre as a way of bringing about political submission, as had been proved during the conquest of the Prussians, and again in the 1390s during the war for Samogitia. The lives of prisoners might very easily be sacrificed on the march. Thus in 1311 Commander Gebhard von Mansfeld slaughtered all his captives and cattle to prevent their falling into the hands of a Lithuanian army, and in 1377 the commander of Balga murdered 200 prisoners because it was too much trouble to take them back through an unexpected thaw – unlike the hundred horses and thousand steers with them. It would be wrong to deduce that this war was more inhumane than others fought at the same time in France and Spain; but the fact that the displacement of civil populations was part of the strategy of both sides made it more likely that the defenceless would die.

In addition to the
reysen
there were constant small raids by enterprising frontier commanders and castellans, or by bands of native guerrillas. Thus Wigand of Marburg reported of the commander of Insterburg in 1372:

Small companies of Old-Prussian irregulars, called
latrunculi
or
strutere
, had been allowed to terrorize the wilderness and adjacent lands since the 1260s, and, since they acted as guides and auxiliaries to the Order’s
reysen
, their dirty deeds were recorded with approval. Murdering Lithuanians in their bath-houses, or at their feasts, or in bed, was reckoned sport. Since the
strutere
knew all the secret paths, and often went on foot, creeping up to villages through the forest, no settled community was safe from them.

On the other hand, the warriors tended to develop a certain consideration for each other as the century wore on. In theory, it was a fight to the death, with no quarter given or asked, and there were always some dedicated heroes who lived up to the theory, holding out to the last man and refusing mercy when it was offered. Such were Nicholas
Windekaym, of Old-Prussian stock, vainly jabbing at Kestutis, who was safe inside his armour, and asking, ‘Why should I not take my revenge on the pagans?’, and the warriors who murdered Captain Gastot on the march back home in 1363, when Marshal Schindekopf had given him his hand.
¹²⁴
But this was not how the knights of Western Europe treated each other, and the more the Order relied on these auxiliaries the more it had to accept the usages of war which they respected. By 1350 both sides were ransoming prisoners, and in von Kniprode’s time there were ceremonious parleys on the field of battle and truces involving the exchange of captives; the Order undertook to advance money for the release of all crusaders who fell into enemy hands, even if they were captured by brigands outside Prussia. But, if crusaders or mercenaries captured any Lithuanian over the rank of knight, they were obliged to sell him to the Order for a fixed sum: the tariff in the indenture made with the lords of Strammel and Manteuffel in 1390 specified 500 Prussian marks for a king, 100 Prussian marks for a duke, and 50 for a count. Not very much, considering that they were paying these two freelances 5400 Prussian marks for a year’s service with their retinues; the grand-master would make a handsome profit on the resale.
¹²⁵

Such conventions protected the rich, but not the common soldiers, and still allowed the wholesale slaughter of garrisons in castles taken by assault. Lithuanians could sometimes buy their lives by promising to accept baptism, but, considering the ultimate purpose of the war, it is surprising that there are not more references to such bargains; either there were many convinced pagans, or the blood-lust of the Order’s armies was too often uncontrollable.

Nor were the Crusaders from the West reluctant to wage war as destructively as possible, provided they saved their own skins. The apparatus of chivalry – heralds, truces, challengers, ransoms, picnics in armour – was inseparable from the military profession to which they belonged, but it still allowed them to kill, burn and destroy the civilian population without remorse or pity, whether in France or in Lithuania. For many, the attraction of a
reysa
was that it provided military training and experience, rather than remission of sins. The Sire de Boucicaut went to Prussia three times as a young man, ‘because it seemed to him that there was a great lack of warfare in France at that time… and he had been told that there was bound to be
belle guerre
that season’ in Prussia. In 1390 he wanted to go on crusade with the duke of Bourbon
in the Mediterranean, but the king forbade him, and let him undertake a
reysa
instead; he had to wait a whole year for Conrad von Wallenrod’s first campaign, but he enjoyed it very much, because ‘he saw that it was a grand affair, and
moult honorable et belle
’, what with the ‘great assemblage of knights and squires and noblemen, from both the kingdom of France and elsewhere’.
¹²⁶
For this kind of knight-errant, the Lithuanian crusade had very little religious importance; Boucicaut’s biographer hardly bothers to use even the rhetoric of the Holy War in describing his deeds. Yet for the Teutonic Knights and their subjects the rhetoric was inescapable, because they were a religious Order with political powers vested in them solely as a means of carrying out this crusading mission. It was essential that Latin Christendom should accept that fighting in Prussia was good for the soul. Thus, when the chronicler of the Cistercian Abbey of Oliva heard of the terrible casualties at Crécy, he wrote, ‘Would that all these men had been stained in waves of their own blood by infidels, on behalf of the celestial kingdom and for the defence of the Catholic Faith!’ In that case, the citizens of heaven would rejoice; but since they had merely been killed for the sake of the earthly kingdom ‘it is to be feared that there was rejoicing at this event among the citizens of Hell’.
¹²⁷