God's War: A New History of the Crusades (115 page)

In the fourteenth century the crusade against Lithuania served a
variety of rather different purposes. It provided the Teutonic Knights, who never numbered more than about 1,000 to 1,200 unevenly split between Prussia and Livonia, with necessary reinforcements on the ground and political capital abroad. Crusades legitimized, at times to the scandal of observers, the order’s long struggle with Lithuania, which, in turn, assisted the maintenance of their grip on their own territories. The regular frozen winter and soggy summer raids, or
reisen
, provided a reassuring focus for Christendom’s longstanding self-image of religious mission. Until 1386, Lithuania remained a vigorous and aggressive pagan kingdom, although hostilities were not concerned with conversion so much as power and profit. More precisely, these campaigns offered adventurous nobles opportunities to show off. Glamorous in repute but difficult, dangerous and sordid in practice, the raids across the wildernesses that marked the Prussian/Livonian/Lithuanian border, were often run by the order as chivalrous package tours, complete with special feasts, displays of heraldry, souvenirs and even prizes. Perfected by Grand Master Winrich of Kniprode (1352–82), these festivals of knighthood became almost
de rigueur
for the chivalric classes of western Europe, a rather different clientele to the more habitual Baltic crusaders from Germany and central Europe.
⁵³
The dozen prize winners who dined at the Table of Honour after the 1375
reisa
each received a badge bearing the motto ‘Honour conquers all’, a far cry from the Jerusalem decree of Clermont (‘Whoever for devotion alone, not for honour or money goes to Jerusalem…’). While remaining popular throughout the fourteenth century, especially during truces in the Hundred Years War in the 1360s and 1390s, the strategic significance of these crusading enterprises waned. Their ideological foundation collapsed after the conversion of Lithuania. Promoters and apologists increasingly fell back on what has been described as the language of illusion to justify what had become simply a matter of secular politics.

The longevity of crusading in the Baltic was impressive. From 1304 until 1423, repeated contingents of German recruits arrived. John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, campaigned three times, as did William IV count of Holland and the Frenchman Marshal Boucicaut. William I of Gelderland went on no fewer than seven
reisen
between 1383 and 1400. Armies could be substantial for summer campaigns (the winter
reisen
usually accommodating only a few hundred). Duke Albert III of Austria arrived in 1377 with 2,000 knights of his own. It has been
calculated that at least 450 French and English nobles made the journey over this whole period, a habit recognized by Geoffrey Chaucer when giving his Knight a suitably grand chivalric pedigree:

Ful ofte time he hadde the bord bigonne
Aboven alle nacions in Pruce;
In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce,
No Cristen man so ofte of his degree.
⁵⁴

Evidence from England exposes networks of family involvement, wide social embrace and the relationship between the Baltic front and other wars for the faith.
⁵⁵
Between 1362 and 1368, during peace with France, knights and their retinues left England for the Baltic on an almost annual basis, reaching a crescendo of activity in the winter of 1367–8, when licences were granted to at least ninety-seven men to travel to Prussia. These ranged from the large and well-funded retinues of the sons of the earl of Warwick, himself a Baltic veteran from two years before, to an esquire, William Dalleson, who was apparently accompanied by a single yeoman, two hacks and thirty marks.
⁵⁶
The exercise could be expensive and dangerous. However packaged, the fighting was real enough. The Marienkirche at Königsberg became a mausoleum as well as monument to the international dimension of the Lithuanian wars; there John Loudeham, killed on a
reisa
to Vilnius, was buried with military honours in 1391. A number of those who joined the Teutonic Knights also saw service against the infidel in the Mediterranean. Thomas Beauchamp earl of Warwick’s vow of 1365 was regarded by the pope as interchangeable between Prussia and Palestine.
⁵⁷
Humphrey Bohun earl of Hereford was on the Vistula in 1363; he had also been with the king of Cyprus at the capture of Satalia in southern Turkey in 1361, as had one of his companions in Prussia, Richard Waldegrave from Bures in Suffolk, a future Speaker of the English House of Commons (1381).

Such recruits saw themselves as answering a higher calling. Sympathetic observers described these recruits as pilgrims. Many of them visited the various shrines dotted around Prussia that offered indulgences to visitors. Even though it is difficult to be sure whether or not those who fought with the Teutonic Knights had actually taken the cross in a formal ceremony, traditional language was still applied, one contemporary depicting Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV of England, as going to Prussia in 1390 ‘against the enemies of Christ’s
cross’ to ‘avenge the Crucified’.
⁵⁸
Whatever the precise legal niceties, foreign participation in these Baltic campaigns can only be understood in the context of the crusade and its continuing tradition. This did not mean that the displays of piety and chivalry necessarily transformed behaviour. Henry Bolingbroke in 1390–91 spent £69 on gambling debts and only £12 on alms.
⁵⁹
Secular considerations abided. The order was sensitive lest their commercial rights were compromised by foreign infiltration arriving in the wake of foreign armies. Concerted efforts were made to try to break into the Baltic trade in the teeth of opposition from the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights. Fish wars broke out in the North Sea. In 1373, Edward III of England’s government encouraged a York bowyer to establish a bow-making factory in Prussia. The following year, a Norwich vintner was allowed to try to dump vinegar on the Prussian market, fourteen tuns of Spanish plonk that because of ‘its weakness and age… may not be advantageously sold in England’.
⁶⁰
English merchants settled in Danzig and Königsberg. Lord Bourgchier owned a house in Danzig. This did not make for harmonious relations despite all the free military assistance the Teutonic Knights received. By the early years of the fifteenth century, the English exchequer was paying substantial damages to the Prussian authorities to compensate for trading irregularities. The warriors were not immune. Bolingbroke became involved in a dispute over herring traders in 1391. The same year his uncle, the duke of Gloucester, was authorized to negotiate with the Teutonic Knights, probably over the failed trade agreement of 1388, as well as joining the
reisa
. In the event, bad weather put paid to both.
⁶¹

The conflation of the material and the idealistic that patterned the whole tapestry of crusading and holy war could lead to its unravelling. The decades of war in the Baltic had created no lasting advantage to either side. Lithuania had not driven the Germans into the sea; the Teutonic Knights, despite some notable triumphs, failed to restrain the rise of Lithuania or prevent its union with Poland and consequent conversion in 1386. Once their main adversary had abandoned paganism, the
raison d’être
of the crusades and, some argued, of the Teutonic Knights’ rule in Prussia and Livonia itself was called into question. Despite the rhetoric of holy war against a now non-pagan ‘infidel’, the political battle lacked any obvious religious element, as the order jockeyed for position and control by trying to set Lithuania and Poland against each other. With each, the order achieved some successes in the
1390s, coinciding with a revival of foreign military aid, on occasion with larger armies even than those of the 1360s and 1370s. Dobryzn was briefly annexed in the 1390s and Samogitia occupied between 1398 and 1406. Yet the strategy of divide and rule collapsed when Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen, almost all the upper hierarchy and 400 brothers were killed at the battle of Tannenberg (or Grünwald) on 15 July 1410 by a much larger Lithuanian-Polish army.
⁶²

The defeat at Tannenberg did not end the Teutonic Knights’ rule in Prussia. Marienberg held out against the Lithuanians and the final territorial losses were minimal. It did not end the Baltic crusade. There had been a significant number of crusaders from across Germany and possibly even a few Frenchmen at the battle, and further reinforcements arrived over the next three years from Germany and Burgundy. But there is no hard evidence that non-Germans campaigned after 1413, perhaps because of the renewal of the Hundred Years War in 1415 following a quarter of a century’s interlude. Already before Tannenberg, there had been a decline in non-German crusades. After, traditional wells of support such as England seemed to have dried completely. From 1423, even the Germans stayed away. It was difficult to persuade onlookers to regard Tannenberg as a Hattin-like defeat for Christendom, not least because it was not. The Council of Constance (1414–18), which healed the great papal schism (1378–1417), witnessed a violent debate between the order’s apologists, eager to gain conciliar approval for a condemnation and crusade against Poland, and the Polish advocate Paul Vladimiri, who with conviction but unsound canon law attempted to cast the Teutonic Knights as unchristian in their wars and alliances and illegitimate as rulers of Prussia.
⁶³
Although Vladimiri’s case, including a radical assault on non-Holy Land crusades, gained few adherents, the council effectively conducted a trial of the order’s methods and mission. In 1418, the order escaped censure, but it failed to gain support for a crusade against its enemies. Instead, the rulers of Poland and Lithuania were appointed papal vicars-general in their promised war against the schismatic Russians. Any suggestion that, as some of the order’s more extreme partisans tried to insist, the Poles were unchristian was thereby decisively repudiated. The proceedings at Constance left a stain on the order’s reputation of hypocrisy, tyranny and making war on Christians which proved indelible.

The last foreign crusade to help the Teutonic Knights ended in 1423.
The rest of the fifteenth century saw the order’s rule in Prussia pared on two sides, by their own landowners and burghers and by Poland. After a thirteen years’ war (1454–66), these two opponents combined to wreck the integrity of the order’s rule in Prussia. At the Treaty of Thorn in 1466, west Prussia was relinquished, including the order’s seat at Marienberg and most of the earliest conquests dating back to the mid-thirteenth century. The new capital of the eastern rump was fixed at Königsberg; the Grand Masters became Polish clients. Occasionally, Teutonic Knights engaged in holy war. In 1429 a detachment fought the Ottoman Turks on the invitation of their ally and protector Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Hungary. In Livonia a semblance of the order’s original function remained, in the interminable struggle with the Russians. However, the order seemed no longer able to recruit crusaders for itself and popes, quite willing to issue crusade bulls in wars against Turks and heretics, declined to reintroduce formal crusading into the politics of what was now eastern Latin Christendom. Even when repeatedly begged for a crusade bull to help the Livonia order against the Russians between 1495 and 1502, Alexander VI refused. The Baltic crusade was over, an experiment in holy war that had run its course. In 1525, the Prussian order secularized itself, to be followed by the Livonian convent in 1562.

In a sense, the decline of the Teutonic Knights and the Baltic crusade came as a consequence of their success. Together, they made the Baltic part of Christendom and thus became redundant. The Baltic crusades played their part in one of the most decisive processes of infra-European colonization since the barbarian invasions of Late Antiquity. While this expansion rode commercial and technological advantages, it adopted, at least into the fourteenth century, a self-consciously religious definition of identity. The crusades did not drive the expansion of German, Danish or Swedish power. Wider cultural, economic, demographic and social forces did that. By articulating these expansionist and aggressive impulses in religious terms, crusading offered a particular vocabulary, at once practical and inspirational, that could service self-referential ideologies and self-righteous policies of domination. Holy war gave Prussia, Livonia, Estonia, even Finland a pedigree as well as a legitimacy to compensate for a lack of history, always a difficulty in conquered lands and new polities. Holy symbols – physical, human, institutional – achieved political, social and legal significance, the Catholic churches
and churchmen presiding over the transmission of a distinctive western European culture even where the underlying processes of trade, settlement and land ownership remained resolutely secular. It says something for medieval rationality that at no time was this alliance of the material and religious taken for granted. When its contradictions became too egregious, crusading in the Baltic was abandoned, not necessarily because it was bad business, but because it had degenerated into at best a sham and at worst a lie.

The Defence of Outremer

22

Survival and Decline: the Frankish Holy Land in the Thirteenth Century

The century after the Treaty of Jaffa in 1192 and Saladin’s death the following year established a wholly new political configuration in the Near East. The twelfth century had been dominated by warring emirs, atabegs, seigneurs and mercenary captains from competing city states in shifting coalitions and alliances that cut across region, race and religion. A hundred years later, the area had become dominated by an empire based on the Nile, incorporating Palestine and Syria, which faced a Mongol successor state of the il-khanate of Persia, which included Iraq, a division of the Fertile Crescent that survived into the sixteenth century.
¹
To this process, the Christian enclaves on the rim of western Asia were far from passive bystanders.
²
The century of renewed Christian occupation of Acre saw the golden age of crusading in terms of the number of significant military expeditions east, as well as the integration of crusading institutions into the lives of the Christian faithful. The so-called second kingdom of Jerusalem lasted longer than the first. Control of the ports of the Syrian and Palestinian littoral allowed the Christian authorities, an often messy and volatile alliance of local nobles, foreign adventurers and competitive Italian businessmen, to exploit international trade routes that found access to the Mediterranean in their territories. Only with the shifting of these trade routes in the wake of the Mongol invasion of the late 1250s, and the consequent economic decline of Syria, did mainland Outremer’s commercial function as well profits decline. This coincided with the emergence of the aggressive Mamluk sultanate of Egypt, which found the Christians of the Levant coast useful whipping boys to establish internal authority and international éclat. Yet this outcome was hardly inevitable.