A History of the Crusades (51 page)

The Teutonic Order brought in German settlers and converted
many indigenous pagans to Christianity in a major colonization process which was much more extensive than that conducted by the Castilian orders in Andalusia. It created a model of administrative efficiency and uniform bureaucracy, the
Ordensstaat
par excellence. While Prussia, with a population of perhaps 350,000, did not require money from its commanderies in Germany, its recruitment depended on a continual flow of brethren from Germany. The Prussian commanderies paid no regular dues comparable to the Hospital’s responsions and the German houses sent almost no money, but in Prussia itself the order received incomes from trade, from land rents and booty, and from levies on the brethren’s frequent changes of office; in the fifteenth century it also taxed its population. Incomes from different sources were allotted to specific funds, as with Montesa and the Castilian orders. Some knight-brethren paid their entry fee, were received into a house in Germany, and simply remained there; others were refused admission in Germany and travelled to Prussia or Livonia with their arms, three horses, and sixty florins. Those who went to Prussia, many of them from Franconia, seldom returned. Priests and serving-brethren were recruited largely among the German settlers in Prussia.

There were perhaps 100 brethren at the centre of command at Marienburg and hundreds more in the commanderies; some houses had fewer than ten brethren but others had eighty or more. Chapters general became increasingly infrequent and there was no equivalent to the Hospital’s conventual seal, but the senior officials enjoyed wide administrative experience and they could, like the Hospitaller oligarchy, restrain their master. He was compelled to consult his senior officers and commanders; he could be threatened or deposed, and one master was murdered. Some senior officials resided at Marienburg where, for example, they controlled the treasury, but others had their own territorial seats, such as that of the marshal at Königsberg, and resided in them. The most numerous class of brethren, the knights, constituted a largely aristocratic military caste, but that served to alienate their German settler subjects, who could normally enter the order only as priests or serving-brethren and who lacked representation in their country’s government. The Teutonic Order had
no real navy but its army was excellently armed, after about 1380 with cannon, and its fortresses were well constructed. After 1410, however, the need to hire expensive mercenaries provoked increasingly intolerable financial strains.

Further north, the Teutonic brethren waged a quite distinct holy war in Livonia, where their order developed a quasi-independent regime which had some of the characteristics of a separate
Ordensstaat
with its own organization and policies. There was a separate Livonian master who was confirmed by the high master or
Hochmeister
in Prussia from two candidates chosen in Livonia; after 1438 the Livonian brethren effectively chose their own master. Livonia did not form a unitary state like Prussia, since three bishops controlled extensive territories and in Estonia the knightly class exercized a degree of secular government. The Livonian knight-brethren came especially from northern Germany and the Rhineland, with some priests and serving-brethren being recruited in Livonia. Conditions of service were more drastic than in Prussia, and attrition eastwards involved unending forest raids and devastations, truces, and shifting alliances. The element of exploitation was more pronounced in Livonia where there was little intermarriage between the German settler minority and the indigenous population. The Livonian brethren, scarcely touched by the disaster at Tannenberg in 1410 in which they played no part, retained a more explicit and aggressive anti-pagan role and repeatedly fought the schismatic Russians. However, as in Prussia, there were serious internal quarrels which centred especially on individual control of wealth. In 1471 the Livonian brethren deposed their master, Johann Wolthuss, who was accused of numerous corruptions, of preparing a war against the Russians contrary to all advice, and of personally annexing a number of commanderies and their wealth. The Russian wars continued; in 1501, for example, the Russians ravaged eastern Livonia but were defeated in the following year by the master Wolter von Plettenberg, who did much to stabilize the Livonian situation.

Far away on Rhodes, the Hospitallers procured themselves a double function in the policing and protection of Latin shipping
and in opposing first the Turkish emirs of the Anatolian coastlands opposite Rhodes and later the power of the rapidly expanding Ottoman regime to the north. The Teutonic and Iberian orders were essentially national, but the Hospital was a truly international organization able to survive attacks made upon it within single kingdoms. The Hospital’s struggle was much less concentrated than that of the Teutonic Order and its military action less continuous and intense, but it was not necessarily a weaker body. The fortunate formula of an island order-state permitted its survival for many centuries, while its constitution restricted a master who enjoyed extensive powers on Rhodes but whose authority within his order was quite effectively limited and moderated by his multinational conventual oligarchy of senior officers, by periodic chapters general, and by statutory limitations such as those governing the employment of his seals. Other arrangements, such as the institution of
langues
(tongues), or national groupings, and
auberges
, or residential houses for the
langues
, though they constituted a source of endless friction at one level, actually served to distribute offices and to regulate tensions between brethren of differing origins.

Rhodes was comparatively small and its resources limited, but it could be fortified in stone and defended with minimum manpower; armed conflict was not perpetual while shipping and mercenaries were hired only when necessary. The number of Hospitaller brethren on Rhodes probably varied considerably between about 250 and 450; unlike Prussia, Rhodes needed not men, whose arrival was sometimes positively discouraged, but money, especially to pay for essential food imports. Some funds were generated through the development of the port and of the island economy; much of the rest came from the western priories, whose retention had to be justified by some display of holy warfare. The island order-state demanded the establishment of a naval tradition and the arrangement of the local economy and government in ways which would support defensive measures. The harbour brought shipping, pilgrims, pirates, trade, and taxes; the island was populated to produce foodstuffs and auxiliary forces; its forests furnished timber for shipbuilding; the inhabitants constructed and manned towers and castles or
served as galley oarsmen. Rhodes had been acquired as the result of a capitulation made on agreed terms and the Greeks, perhaps 20,000 by 1522, were reasonably fed, protected, and represented, while as uniates who recognized the Roman pope they kept their Greek liturgy; on the whole the population felt reasonably well treated and was prepared to collaborate.

In moving from Cyprus to Rhodes the Hospital turned its back on the old Jerusalem-oriented crusade, though it continued to give occasional assistance to the Christians of Cilician Armenia and it retained its sugar-rich Cypriot commandery. Its achievement after 1306 was to bottle up the naval aggression from the Turks of Menteshe and to push the centre of Turkish expansion northwards to Aydin and its naval base at Smyrna. The Hospital participated in Latin naval leagues against the great Umur of Aydin, notably in 1334. The order’s finances had by then been restored, yet proposals for crusading action in 1335 and 1336 were suppressed by Pope Benedict XII, probably to prevent the order removing its considerable credits from the pope’s own Florentine bankers; as a result, between 1343 and 1345 the Hospital lost the enormous sum of over 360,000 florins when the Bardi, Acciaiuoli, and Peruzzi went bankrupt. Thereafter the Anglo-French and other wars, the great plague which arrived in 1347, and general economic and demographic decline in the West drastically limited recruitment, resources, and military activity. The Hospitallers’ effectiveness depended on their efficiency and experience as much as on their resources. The one or two galleys which guarded Rhodes together with 50 or 100 brethren and their auxiliary troops could play an important role. The Hospital collaborated in the crusade which captured Smyrna in 1344 and in its defence thereafter; from 1374 until its loss in 1402 the Hospital held sole responsibility for Smyrna. Fifty Hospitallers fought against the Ottomans at Lampsakos in the Dardanelles in 1359, and Hospitaller forces served against other Turks on the Anatolian shores facing Cyprus between 1361 and 1367. Some 100 brethren with four galleys under their admiral, Ferlino d’Airasca, took part in the major crusade which sacked Alexandria in 1365. By 1373 the Hospital was virtually the sole military force available to the
papacy for the defence of Byzantium. Yet a Byzantine proposal of 1374 for the Hospital to defend Thessalonica and another Byzantine city, probably Gallipoli, came to nought. The
passagium
inspired by Pope Gregory XI which sailed to Vonitza in Epiros in 1378 was pathetically small; it was crushed by the Christian Albanians of Arta who captured the master, Juan Fernández de Heredia, and held him to ransom.

The next master, Philibert of Naillac, and a few other Hospitallers fought in the Nicopolis crusade of 1396 and were responsible for saving King Sigismund of Hungary after the defeat. There was apparently a party at Avignon and at Rhodes which from about 1356 onwards insistently sought a broader economic basis and more prestigious opportunities of opposing Ottoman advances by transferring the Hospital to southern Greece, almost as a Hospitaller equivalent of Teutonic Livonia. The order took a five-year lease on the Latin principality of Achaea in about 1377 but had to abandon it following the débâcle near Vonitza, yet between about 1383 and 1389 there were renewed attempts to establish the Hospital in the Peloponnese, and after the Nicopolis disaster the Hospitallers leased the Byzantine despotate in the eastern Peloponnese for several years, defending the isthmus at Corinth against Ottoman invasions of the peninsula. Though severely limited by the general western failure to resist the infidel Turks, the Hospital was an effective element in the defence of Christian Europe, whether acting independently or as part of a general crusade.

The Papal Schism of 1378 split the Hospital into two obediences and thus increased opportunities for indiscipline and the non-payment of dues owed to Rhodes, where the French-dominated convent held firmly to the Avignon allegiance. The English crown supported the Roman pope but allowed English men and money to travel to Rhodes, which in 1398 was allegedly being supported by only nine out of twenty-one western priories. In 1410 a chapter general at Aix-en-Provence showed a remarkable solidarity within the order by ending its own schism some seven years before that in the papacy. Unfortunately, the financial pressures on rival popes forced them into a greater
exploitation of profitable provisions to benefices, and that deprived brethren of the prospect of promotion which supposedly rewarded the seniority they had acquired by service at Rhodes. When in 1413 it emerged that Pope John XXIII had sold the rich commandery of Cyprus to the 5-year-old son of King Janus, the conventual brethren threatened to leave Rhodes. The Papal Schism was ended in 1417 by the council held at Constance where the Hospitaller master acted as guardian of the conclave. This council witnessed the bitter debate in which the Teutonic Order claimed that the Lithuanians were not Christians and that the Poles were allied to them, while the Poles asserted that the brethren had failed even to convert the Prussians.

Occasional Hospitaller participation in campaigns away from Rhodes continued but eventually the island itself came under direct attack. Smyrna was lost to Tamerlane in 1402 and the Morea was evacuated very soon after. A bridgehead providing direct confrontation with the Turks on land was a political necessity, and in 1407 or 1408 Smyrna was replaced with a mainland castle at Bodrum opposite Cos; this brought prestige, indulgences, and tax exemptions which probably made the newly built fortress a profitable investment rather than a strategic advantage. The great new hospital begun at Rhodes in 1440, which much impressed pilgrims, was another successful propaganda initiative. There was a series of truces with occasional ruptures and hostilities. Invasions from Mamluk Egypt were successfully resisted between 1440 and 1444, but not until 1480 was there a full-scale Ottoman assault; the master Pierre d’Aubusson, later created a cardinal, led an epic defence of the city with skill and determination. After that, massive gunpowder fortifications were built to counter ever heavier Turkish cannon, and the Ottomans were cleverly kept in check through the Hospital’s possession after 1482 of the sultan’s brother Jem. Though increasingly isolated as the Ottomans advanced further into the Balkans, Rhodes flourished as a secure bulwark for Latin trade and piracy in the Levant. Especially important was the Hospitallers’ own lucrative ‘corso’. In essence a profitable form of publicly licensed quasi-private piracy, the corso was
justified as a type of holy warfare which irritated Mamluks, Ottomans, and Venetians alike. Dependent on trade with the Turkish mainland and with a very limited naval force, the Hospital was restricted to small-scale operations but it did inflict a major defeat on the Mamluk fleet in 1510. After the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, Rhodes’s position across Turkish communications with Egypt led to another heroic siege during which the Venetians on Crete and the other Latin powers sent little significant aid. The Hospitallers, having failed to mobilize an anti-Ottoman coalition, finally capitulated and sailed away from Rhodes in January 1523.

All military orders required revenues. These they derived principally from farming and stock-raising on their estates either by direct cultivation and herding or through leasings; jurisdictions, justice, seigneurial rights, urban rents, sales of pensions, capital investments, papal indulgences, commerce, and other activities supplemented these incomes. The Teutonic brethren outside Germany lived off their Prussian and Livonian states, but in general the houses of the military orders differed from those of other religious in that their brethren had not only to support themselves but also to produce a cash surplus to maintain their central convent and their brethren in active service. The orders traditionally organized their possessions into priories or provinces each composed of many commanderies, also known as preceptories,
domus
,
encomiendas
, and so on. The commanders managed their houses or increasingly rented them out, and they paid dues or responsions to their prior or provincial, or sometimes to a receiver, and these officials transferred a total sum to the conventual treasury; often the incomes of certain houses were reserved for priors and masters. After 1319 the order of Montesa used a system based not on resident communities paying responsions but on allotting the incomes of individual houses, which mostly consisted of tenths and income taxes, to a variety of officials for different purposes; thus certain monies went to the master and other incomes to the defence of
the Muslim frontier. Similarly the three Castilian orders and the Teutonic Order allotted the revenues from particular areas or commanderies directly to their masters, who had their own
mensa
or private purse. The Hospitaller master received much of the revenues of the island of Rhodes or, after 1530, of Malta.