Teutonic Knights (7 page)

Already by the time the Hungarian king had expelled the Teutonic Order from the ramparts of the Carpathians, he could hardly have failed to hear reports of the 1223 battle on the Kalka River in south-east Rus’.
⁶
But it was another fifteen years before the full extent of his error became apparent. The Mongols had won their first battle, then returned home; but in 1237 – 9 it became clear that they were in Rus’ to stay.
⁷
In the meantime the Polish and Hungarian kings had been expanding into Galicia and Volhynia, the most westerly Rus’ian states. Rumours that the Mongols planned to mount an offensive against Poland and Hungary spread quickly, based partly on Tatar warnings and partly on the assumption that the grand khan was determined to rule over all Rus’ and every steppe tribe. However inaccurate or misleading these accounts may have been, they were indicative of a massive shift in the balance of power. King Bela of Hungary (1235 – 70) had hoped to profit from this confusion, but his gains were only temporary.

The Cumans, under pressure from the grand khan to pay tribute and contribute warriors to his armies, withdrew into Hungary, where they remained an important and disruptive element for the rest of the century. Pagan nomads, they had little in common with the Christian nobles and peasants of the Danubian basin. But they were sufficiently like the Mongols to be seen as potential competitors for dominance in southern Rus’. Therefore, the grand khan ordered Batu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, to eliminate them. Doing this would not be easy, however, because first he had to crush Rus’ian resistance in Galicia – and he could anticipate meeting Polish and Hungarian forces there, too – then penetrate through the fortified passes of the Carpathian mountains. The khan, ever resourceful, decided upon a bold strategy that would put a second army in the rear of the royal forces at the passes: he would send a swiftly moving cavalry force across Galicia and Poland, then press through the mountains at the gap west of Cracow, thunder through Moravia, Slovakia and Austria, making a counter-clockwise sweep along the base of the mountains, and enter Hungary from the rear. As it turned out, this distracting invasion was not necessary – King Bela could not persuade his nobles to follow orders, so the high passes were inadequately defended. The Tatars overwhelmed the royal army in the summer of 1241 and chased the king all the way to the Adriatic coast.
⁸

It is not recorded whether Bela repented of his having expelled the Teutonic Order from the Carpathian mountain passes, but he probably did not. Bela never had many doubts about his own abilities, and he generally managed to foist blame for his failures onto others. On this occasion it was convenient to blame the Poles, for not having defended Galicia properly. In fact, this was not completely inaccurate.

When the Mongols had first invaded Galicia that spring, Conrad of Masovia had led the Polish armies east and won an engagement near Sandomir. Although his forces slew the Mongol general, the victory was hardly decisive – his own forces, dismayed at their heavy casualties, had allowed thousands of their opponents to escape when they could have destroyed them; some of his units, in fact, had been routed by their Tatar opponents. Certainly few Poles were eager to fight the invaders again soon, and in any case, the warriors had performed their military duties for the season. The second invasion, probably spearheaded by a new Mongol-Turkish army, consequently caught the Masovian and Volhynian dukes by surprise. There was no possibility of meeting the invader in Galicia, nor even of intercepting him on the frontier. As each Piast duke concentrated on defending his own ancestral lands, the Mongols pressed on toward Cracow, then into Silesia. Near Liegnitz the Tatar cavalry crushed the army of the duke of Silesia, who may have been supported by units of Teutonic Knights. The Tatars then turned around and rode through Moravia and then into Hungary, to join with the victorious forces that had routed Bela’s army.

The Tatar presence in East Central Europe did not last long. The khan withdrew from Hungary in 1243 upon hearing news of the grand khan’s death: he would need every warrior to support his cause during the election of the latter’s successor. The Christians emerged from their hiding places or came back from exile to find empty and devastated lands, but no sign of the enemy. The Mongols had come and gone like some biblical plague, perhaps to return without warning to once again punish the people for their sins. It did not occur to many that their principal sin was political disunity, and those with sufficient wisdom to recognise this saw no practical way to correct the fault.

Rus’ lay prostrate. Only one state, Novgorod, remained independent, and its fate was uncertain. Those familiar with the brilliant silent movie by Sergei Eisenstein,
Alexander Nevsky
, with Prokofiev’s magnificent score, might remember the opening scene, where a Mongol khan visits Novgorod to collect tribute and slaves. In the movie Alexander Nevsky stands up proudly to his dangerous Asiatic visitor; in real life he served in the Tatar armies and was ultimately murdered by the khan.

The Polish lands had been ravaged terribly. The power of the king was negligible for years thereafter, and none of the once powerful Piast dukes were able to provide national leadership. This not only made it almost impossible to defend Galicia against nomad raiders, but also hindered Masovia’s ability to prosecute its ongoing campaigns against the pagans in Prussia. In fact, it was the pagans who were soon on the offensive, carrying away Polish captives to be sold in the slave markets of the East.

The consequences for Hungary were even more profound. So many Hungarian peasants had perished that several regions could be repopulated only by attracting immigrants from surrounding lands. Although the ethnic origin of these peasants was not important immediately, the presence of Rumanian, Serbian, Slovakian, and German peoples on the Hungarian plain would eventually become a serious obstacle to creating a national identity.

The most important beneficiary of the situation was the Teutonic Order. Only a military order had access to reinforcements, supplies, and a dependable source of immigrant peasants and merchants, volunteers for combat, and pious donations to aid the struggle against the enemies of Christendom. Moreover, to the extent that the Teutonic Order could pin down Prussians and Lithuanians in the defence of their own lands, this would relieve Hungary and Poland from fear of devastating raids. Therefore, for many years the German crusaders’ presence in Prussia was very welcome.

The confrontation between Friedrich II and the popes grew worse each year until the emperor’s death in 1250. The principal victim of the conflict was the Holy Roman Empire, which was fragmented, left leaderless for half a century, and remained permanently weakened. Through these years of desperate struggle the membership of the Teutonic Order was badly divided over whether to give primary loyalty to the emperor or the pope, but in the end somehow managed to prevent becoming permanently identified with either camp. For the rest of the century the grand masters were close friends and allies of the popes; in the next century they tended to favor the emperors, but the contests of those decades were between weak opponents, not strong ones. In these years the Church declined in power and reputation, while the Holy Roman Empire recovered slightly during the reign of Charles IV.

The orientation of the Teutonic Order reflected these larger trends: in the thirteenth century, the primary interest was in defending the Holy Land; in the fourteenth century it was prosecuting the war in Prussia.

Meanwhile, local families in Germany and Bohemia became very important as supporters of the Teutonic Knights, contributing sons and money to the military order generation after generation. This provided the Teutonic Knights with hospitals, churches, and estates that not only produced significant revenues, but brought in knights, priests and men-at-arms for membership and recruited volunteers for the crusading expeditions.

Prussia was never a part or a province of the kingdom of Poland, although Polish culture had made some inroads among the nearest tribe, that which had pushed west into Culm. Perhaps only the Danes could put forward any claim to be the lawful overlords of any of the Prussians, and that claim was very weak indeed, although in the early thirteenth century King Waldemar II was on the way toward giving it substance by making expeditions into Samland – that prominent peninsula bounded by the
Frisches Haff
(Freshwater Bay) and the
Kurisches Haff
(Kurland Bay) – and other coastal provinces. Waldemar’s kidnapping by Count Heinrich of Schwerin in 1223 brought a sudden end to those prospects.

Duke Conrad of Masovia had a claim on the southern borderlands of Prussia because he was their closest Catholic neighbour, save only for Duke Sventopełk of Pomerellia (1212 – 66), whose lands lay on the western bank of the Vistula River. Conrad and Sventopełk were thus best situated to revive the Polish crusades of the mid-twelfth century that had failed to conquer and convert the pagans in Prussia. Although Duke Conrad tried to move down the east bank of the Vistula, he never succeeded in doing more than occupying briefly the territory of Culm, which was, like his own provinces just upriver (Płock and Dobrin), so much a battlefield that some areas were depopulated.

The Prussians were ethnically and linguistically different from the Poles, Scandinavians, and Rus’ians. They were neither Germanic nor Slavic. Like their neighbours to the east – the Lithuanians and some of the tribes of Livonia – they were Balts, descendants of Indo-Europeans who had not migrated elsewhere during the great movements of peoples and had held onto their own languages and customs with relatively little change over the centuries.

Prussian was part of a language group which included Lithuanian and Latvian, as well as the tongues of several smaller peoples such at the Jatwingians and Semgallians. This language group had once extended from Moscow to the Baltic Sea, but as prehistory became history the pressure of Slavic newcomers caused its domains to shrink drastically. Modern studies of the language that concentrate on the retention of native words in spite of centuries of intrusion and influence by larger language families reveal much about the speakers’ pre-Christian culture. Words relating to three important economic activities – bees, horses, and wagons – demonstrate that Baltic culture was far from primitive (though, undoubtedly, the lack of population limited the extent to which the Prussians could specialise or maximise their potential for producing wealth). But the study of other areas of activity illustrates that Prussian society was failing to keep pace with its neighbours’ progress in economic and governmental development. Institutions associated with feudalism were almost completely lacking. Consequently the Prussians had few prospects of unifying in ways that were necessary for an effective national defence, for promoting agriculture and commerce, and for sharing in the wider European culture.

The Prussian lands extended along the Baltic coast from the Nemunas (Memel) River in the north-east to the Vistula River in the south-west, and bordered Lithuania, Rus’ian Volhynia, Masovia, and Pomerellia. This meant that their neighbours spoke four different languages. Prussia was divided into eleven districts, each representing a major tribe: Culm, Pomesania, Pogesania, Warmia, Nattangia, Samland, Nadrovia, Scalovia, Sudovia, Galindia, and Bartia. According to the fourteenth-century chronicler Peter von Dusburg, one of the Teutonic Order’s most knowledgeable writers, the most powerful tribes were the Samlanders, who could raise 4,000 cavalry and 40,000 infantry, and the Sudovians, who had 6,000 horsemen and ‘an almost innumerable multitude of other warriors’. He estimated that the other tribes had about 2,000 horsemen each and an appropriate number of infantry, except for Culm and Galindia, which were largely depopulated – particularly Galindia, an interior province usually described as a wilderness. Galindia’s terrain was so rugged and wooded and filled with so many lakes and rivers that all armies avoided crossing it. Modern estimates place the total Prussian population at approximately 170,000, a figure considerably smaller than Peter von Dusburg’s calculation. Although not as numerous as their Lithuanian or Livonian neighbours, the Prussians were settled more densely on the land and were better organised. There were numerous forts that served as refuges for the people in wartime, and although these were not comparable to Western castles of the first rank they served their purpose effectively.

Peter von Dusburg described Prussian paganism thus:

While Peter von Dusburg was fascinated by the thought of a pagan anti-pope, it is obvious from other sources that Prussian religion was far from a mirror image of Christianity that worshipped the dark lord, Satan, and his ilk. It was rather a development of that Indo-European nature worship that is familiar to us through Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic mythology. There was a strong element of Scandinavian religious thought that was probably introduced during those centuries when the Vikings exercised a loose authority over the region; and also some Christian ideas that had come in recently from Orthodox Rus’ and Roman Catholic Europe. Western missionaries had visited Prussia since the tenth century, although without making many converts.

The customs of the Prussians were like those of their Baltic neighbours, the Livonian and Lithuanian tribes. The dominant class was the warrior nobility, who lived from booty, hunting, and the produce of their slaves. The free men lived by a combination of hunting and farming that gave them experience in the use of arms and a sense of tribal territory. There were a few priests, some artisans and merchants, and agricultural slaves. The clans organised civic life, raised armies, and regulated justice. Thus one’s place in society was determined largely by the condition of one’s birth.

The Prussians had been long known for hospitality and friendliness, but recent attacks by Scandinavians and Poles had caused that to change. Similarly, the simple nature worship of the past was evolving to resemble Christianity in its emphasis on powerful personal deities such as Perkunas, who had some attributes of a warrior god.

Unlike the Kurs (Curonians or Courlanders) and the Estonians, Prussians do not seem to have participated in piracy. Although they had slowly expanded their territories to the west, toward the Vistula River valley, that area might have been largely depopulated by Viking slave raids previous to their arrival. There is little evidence of their raiding their neighbours for cattle or slaves as was common in Livonia and Lithuania; but on the other hand there is almost no evidence of any kind for the politics or warfare of these years.
¹⁰
The Sudovians certainly were aggressive, but their lands abutted the Lithuanians, an even more aggressive people, and they may have learned the military arts solely in order to protect themselves. This made their military situation significantly different from that of other Prussian tribes. Similarly, the warlike tribesmen in Culm and Pogesania were possibly only reacting to Polish and Pomerellian pressure.

Clan government was rough and ready, and status and power were probably more important to securing ‘justice’ than having a just grievance was. In this the Prussians may have been no more deficient than the Poles and Germans, whose systems of justice still relied on individual power and the support of relatives and dependants. Clans protected their members from injury by the threat of taking revenge against enemies. If a clan lost a member in a fight, his relatives would kill the murderer – or, more likely, one of his kinfolk. For lesser crimes they would demand compensation. The tribal council was responsible for resolving disputes, and since the council was composed of the elders of the clans, its decisions were generally respected. The council met at intervals to discuss justice, common action, and to celebrate religious festivals. It had some authority to discipline unruly clans, but apparently exercised it only rarely.

Prussian mores were as strange to those who wrote about them as Christian customs were to the Prussians. Drunkenness was the national pastime, as it was for their Slavic neighbours, for Scandinavians, and for Germans. There were parties for marriages, deaths, births, religious festivals, and to honour visitors. The host passed a bowl brimming with an alcoholic beverage among his guests, the womenfolk, the sons and daughters, and even the servants, until everyone was in a stupor. It was an act that demonstrated mutual trust and friendship. As alcoholic beverages they knew only mead, made from honey, and kumiss, made from mare’s or cow’s milk. Because infant females were often killed soon after birth, Prussian women were scarce, and the fathers could demand a high bride price for the sale of their daughters. Nevertheless, polygamy was practised, and a prominent noble was expected to have several wives and concubines. That made it necessary to raid neighbouring lands in order to bring back women as prisoners. This combination of bride purchases and slave-catching probably lowered the status of women in Prussian society. On the other hand, it might have enhanced the role of native wives. There is evidence that women sometimes were important at all levels of society, but they did not assert this importance overtly.

The local markets could hardly be called mercantile centres, nor the villages towns, but the Prussians were not completely isolated from the commercial world. There was one important natural resource – amber. Known to Romans, Babylonians and ancient Egyptians for its lustre and smoothness, amber had been sought by foreign merchants time out of mind. In any form, rough or polished, this petrified tree sap made attractive jewellery, and the wood chips and insects trapped in the glowing material made it more interesting than common jewels. Also, amber could be found in only a few areas of the world, but no matter where it washed up on the shore, it was of a quality inferior to the Baltic product; as a result, Prussian amber had the attraction of being rare, mysterious and expensive.

There is a wealth of anecdotes about Prussian life. The nobles bathed regularly in sauna-like buildings, but the commoners avoided the practice altogether. Some people thought white horses unlucky, and others black horses. The Prussians had no calendar; whenever they wished to call a meeting, they sent around a stick with notches cut in it to signify the number of days remaining before the assembly. The Germans noticed that they had no spices for their foods and no soft beds. Their houses were scattered in the woods, surrounded by their fields, never too far from the refuge provided by a log fort. It was a primitive civilisation, but it was far from that of the so-called noble savage; the primitive and warlike nature of the people, combined with their impenetrable forests and swamps, made it possible for them to remain independent and to practice their peculiar customs long after their Polish and Rus’ian neighbours had adopted Christianity and become great kingdoms.

The size of the Prussian territorial unit, the tribe, was limited principally by the ability of the clan-based government to provide defence for its members. The main strongholds were the centres of tribal activities and the safest refuges in time of need. The smaller forts of the individual clans were sufficient to shelter people from minor raids, but unless reinforced would quickly fall to large invasion forces; as a result, such small forts were usually abandoned in times of great danger, the people hurrying to hiding places in the forests. Of course, abandoning homes, crops, and livestock was a highly undesirable course of action. If the clan fort was too far from other clans to receive prompt help, the clan might find it necessary to surrender or to move to a safer location; if the clan was numerous enough to be self-sustaining, it could evolve into a new tribe. The clans do not appear to have had any requirements for marriage inside or outside the group, or to have had any function other than religious and military. The individual nobles and elders do not appear to have been limited greatly by clan responsibilities.