Teutonic Knights (2 page)

The medieval Roman Catholic Church was often of two minds about the use of force to carry out its various missions in secular society. Firstly, one must forgive the sinner without forgetting the need to protect those who are sinned against. Therefore to forgive the repentant robber is one thing, to ignore robbery is another. Similarly, it was important to enjoin priests from taking up weapons and to encourage believers to resolve their personal disputes peacefully; but it was also necessary to support those secular rulers who were responsible for protecting the priests and their congregations from outside attack and domestic violence.

No one can pretend that medieval society was peaceful, or that piety equalled pacifism. Yet monasteries and nunneries provided secure moral and physical refuge from the turmoil of daily politics, and most Roman Catholics who approved of using force in defending the realm and in arresting criminals were aware of the New Testament injunctions against killing and violence. This stood in sharp contrast to the blatant worship of strength and cunning that was central to Scandinavian paganism; the Viking sagas gloried in their heroes’ deeds in ways that Western epic poetry could hardly match. Yet even the most valiant Vikings came to understand, through stories such as the
Njal Saga
, that paganism was no foundation for a proper society; there had to be some underpinning for government other than rule by the strongest.

For the most part it was missionaries who persuaded the regional strongmen in Scandinavia that, for the good of their people and their own survival, they had to end the ancient way of life based on plunder and war. That is, before anything else, they had to become Christians. Once these newly baptised strongmen made themselves kings of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, they had clerical advice on how to collect taxes, enlist other powerful lords to serve them and enforce their edicts, and erect the foundations of a state government. Surprisingly quickly this brought an end to the Viking reign of terror across northern Europe.

To a lesser degree (or a greater, depending on one’s point of view), the Western military response to the Northmen’s raids aided in this conversion process. The development of feudal institutions created a warrior class in North-Western Europe that was better trained and equipped than Vikings were, with peasants who provided them with the means of buying weapons and horses, building castles and supplying garrisons. Also, as some Viking leaders took over Western lands it became in their interest to defend their new properties against relatives who still saw French, English, Scottish and Irish farmers as their natural prey.

Although many missionaries entered pagan lands without armed guards, they were courting martyrdom; and in truth, some of those priests and monks would have welcomed the opportunity to die for their faith and thereby earn a prominent place among the elect in heaven. But there were relatively few trained churchmen, and the rulers of Western states needed them at home even more than the Church needed martyrs. Consequently, many years before, when Irish priests first began to work among the pagan Germans, Frankish rulers sent armed guards to accompany them. This established the practice of sending along skilled warriors to protect the missionaries, a practice that ultimately lead to the crusade in Livonia. Such guards did not save St Boniface from Frisian assassins, but for other missionaries – those who did not insist on cutting down holy woods for lumber to build their churches – their presence was sufficient warning that open resistance would not be tolerated.

The combination of preaching even at the risk of the missionary’s life, of encouraging non-Christian rulers to emulate successful Christian monarchs, and of threats to use force, was not a strategy that could work against Moslems. Although we do not remember the Islamic invasions of Europe – they lack the glamour and flair of the Northmen, and their ships were standard Mediterranean galleys – Moslems pushed into northern Spain, sacked many Italian cities, set up bases in the Alps, and regarded southern France as a good place to take a vacation.

Frankish volunteers in the Spanish wars against the Moors and Islamic volunteers from North Africa long predated the crusades. Similarly, Western mercenaries were fighting for the Byzantines against the Turks before Pope Urban II issued his call in late 1095 for the Franks to retake the Holy Land from an enemy of Christianity, which was oppressing believers and preventing pilgrims from worshipping at the holy places in and around Jerusalem.

Careful listeners caught papal references to the benefits that would accrue to local societies if all the riffraff and thugs put their energies and talents into fighting the enemies of Christendom rather than beating up on one another and on their innocent fellow-citizens. Just getting unruly nobles and their followers out of the country for a while would, he intimated, bring peace at home. This is an often-forgotten aspect of military service that is worth remembering – it was not long ago that Western judicial systems, faced with the problem of deciding what to do with wayward young males, gave them the choice of jail time or enlisting in the armed forces. It was hoped that a little discipline, a glimmering vision of having a larger purpose in life, and just growing up would change a juvenile delinquent into a useful citizen.

Finding a place to serve society effectively was one of the roles performed by monastic orders, but a life of celibacy and fasting, reading and hoeing, was not attractive to youths trained as warriors, who saw fast horses and sharp swords as more exciting than long prayers and hymns in Latin. The military orders, however, were just what the church doctors ordered – and they were accepting recruits even in years when no crusade was in sight.

The role of the Christian knight was not to spread the Gospel, but to protect those who had the calling and the training to do so. The Christian knight was not well educated (though he was far from being the ignorant lout so often decried), but he was usually conventionally pious and extraordinarily willing to put his life at risk and his money in the hands of strangers in the hope of accomplishing feats that brought him few, if any, material benefits. One may talk about the valuable products that merchants brought back from the east, but what real wealth existed in the shiploads of Palestinian earth that Pisans hauled home for their cemetery is beyond the grasp of the modern mind. That may be the most important point of all – that the mind of the medieval crusader is not always to be understood as equivalent to anything in mainstream modern post-industrial society. It can be understood, of course, to a certain degree, but only on its own terms.

The capture of Jerusalem by the Franks in the first crusade (1095 – 9) demonstrated the great strength of that combination of religious enthusiasm, military technology and expertise, growing population and economic vitality, and the new confidence of secular and ecclesiastical elites which characterised Western Europe by the end of the eleventh century. The floods of Western warriors that had set out on the great adventure had been reduced to a thin trickle of hungry, exhausted men by disease, desertion and death in battle by the time they reached the Holy Land. But those few survivors were still able to overwhelm some of the new and fragile Turkish states that ruled over sullen and angry Arabs, some of whom were Christians. Then, as was only partly anticipated, once the crusaders’ immediate task was crowned with success most of the knights and clerics wanted to return home. Too few warriors remained to complete the conquest, and barely enough reinforcements arrived to hold what had been won. The peasants who had set out on the great pilgrimage to Jerusalem had been massacred not far from Constantinople, and the Italian merchant communities that had rejoiced at the opening of the eastern markets were soon quarrelling over the right to exploit them. It appeared that the crusader states would be short-lived phenomena, destined to survive only until the Turks found a leader who could organise local resources and imbue his followers with a religious passion equal to that of the Western newcomers.

In the ensuing decades each time a Turkish leader arose who dared attack the crusader kingdoms, the West could react only slowly, raising ponderous armies that arrived too late to be fully effective. It was clear to all that some new kind of military organisation was needed, one that could provide experienced knights as garrisons for isolated and endangered castles; which could gather supplies and treasures in Europe and transport them to the Holy Land to feed and equip those garrisons; that understood local conditions and could explain them to newly-arrived crusaders; and was not involved in the dynastic ambitions of the great families. The Westerners found this organisation in the military orders.

The first military order was the Knights Templar, probably founded in 1118 by a handful of visiting French knights whose religious fervour led them to leave their secular lives for one of worship and service to the Church. Technically the first Templars were probably closer to a lay confraternity than a monastic order, not unlike organisations one still finds in the Roman Catholic world today, performing useful services for their communities. King Baldwin II of Jerusalem gave them lodgings in his palace on the Dome of the Rock. Crusaders believed that this site was the location of Solomon’s Temple; hence the new organisation became known as the Templars.

The Templars might have remained another obscure and short-lived noble confraternity had not the patriarch of Jerusalem enjoined them to employ their military talents in escorting pilgrims along a dangerous stretch of road from the coast to the holy city. For years the Templars performed their duties in remarkable obscurity and with only moderately notable success, but they took pride in their accomplishments; their grand masters later commemorated the early years of poverty by using a seal that depicted two knights riding on one horse (implying that they could not afford two mounts). In the course of time their talents and knowledge of the land won recognition, and rather than being undervalued their contributions to the defence of the Holy Land were somewhat exaggerated – this was good for recruiting new and more wealthy volunteers. By the 1130s the order was on its way to fame and prosperity. Recruits flooded in, usually bringing ‘dowries’ in the form of land and money that were necessary to support the order’s dedicated warriors in the Holy Land.

The Knights of Saint John, better known as the Hospitallers, were the second military order. Their foundation was earlier than the Templars’, however, dating to about 1080, and papal recognition came sooner, too, in about 1113, but they assumed a military function only in the 1130s. As their name implies, their original purpose was to provide medical services to pilgrims and crusaders.

There was considerable scepticism among traditional churchmen about permitting clerics to shed blood; the knights were merely friars, not priests, but they had taken vows and were therefore clerics. One of the oldest traditions of Christendom was non-resistance to evil – it took very little reflection for any Christian to remember that Christ had reproved Peter for raising his sword to defend his Lord from arrest and crucifixion. On the other hand, bishops and abbots had led armies since time immemorial, and numerous popes had blessed armies fighting enemies of the faith. St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153), one of the dominant personalities of his time, provided the ultimate rationale for the military orders in a treatise entitled
De Laude Novae Militiae
(‘In Praise of the New Knighthood’). He proclaimed, first, the importance of the holy places for reflection and inspiration. He wrote that such places were essential to the salvation of those pilgrims who travelled long distances and endured great hardships in order to pray at sites significant to the life of Christ and His saints. St Bernard attributed special significance to the Holy Sepulchre, Christ’s tomb, a place where all pilgrims longed to pray. Then he made the obvious connection to the importance of crusaders maintaining access to those sites, a task that Turkish rulers were already making more difficult. Of course, dynastic politics in the kingdom of Jerusalem were not helping the situation; the patriarch of Jerusalem lacked the means to support a conventional force of knights or mercenaries; and not even St Bernard had been able to persuade secular rulers to work together during the Second Crusade (1147 – 8). The military orders were the obvious best means of carrying out St Bernard’s perception of the crusaders’ mission – to make the land and sea routes safe for pilgrims.

The military orders met practical, religious and psychological needs, and were perfectly suited to providing garrisons for the castles in the Holy Land during those long, boring and dangerous times between crusading expeditions. Eric Christensen, whose excellent book
The Northern Crusades
cannot be praised sufficiently, summarises this in a chapter entitled ‘The Armed Monks: Ideology and Efficiency’.
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Rulers learned that the military orders were willing to serve in places that secular knights would not, or could not. The military orders also responded to deeply felt needs of the human psyche – they reconciled the apparent contradictions between spiritual and earthly warfare. Christians did not have to remain passive when confronted by great evils; nor did they have to wait for a shift in public opinion or the presence of a great leader to raise an armed force. The military orders made the crusade an on-going operation, one that never ceased or rested.

The armament of the knights of the military orders always remained essentially that current in Western and Central Europe, reflecting minor changes generation by generation. In general each warrior wore mail armour, a helmet and greaves, carried a spear and shield, used a heavy sword with great effectiveness, and rode a large war-horse that was trained to charge into bodies of armed men or against oncoming horses. The only major concessions to climate were the wearing of a light surcoat that protected the mail from the direct rays of the sun, and avoiding travel in the heat of the day. The harsh climate of the Holy Land was, of course, a distinct shock to visitors from Northern Europe, who were often quickly prostrated from the heat and local diseases. This made the presence of the military orders all the more important, in that they could provide advice and example to the newcomers, which, if taken, would convert such newly-arrived crusaders into effective warriors rather than invalids or easy victims of Turkish fighting skills.

The contrast between the brute force of Western knights and the subtlety of the swift, lightly-armed Turkish and Arab warriors is part of what makes the crusades interesting from the intellectual point of view. There was never a question of two armies simply going at one another, with the stronger and more numerous prevailing. Instead, there was a complex interaction of strategy and tactics, each side possessing advantages and disadvantages, with the commanders weighing and calculating each move carefully before committing their forces to action. That is, weighing and calculating as much as was possible, always aware that the nature of warfare is to flout all plans and predictions. No general, no army, could forever impose order on the chaos of battle. Climate, geography, numbers, equipment and supplies all had their part in determining victory or defeat, but in the end much rested on individual and collective wills. Also, as both Christian and Moslem conceded, on the will of God.