The Northern Crusades (30 page)

The other development was Jogaila’s breach with the Order in 1383 (when he became convinced that Zöllner meant to divide Lithuania between him and Witold), and his election to the throne of Poland in 1385. This
coup
did not produce a Polish-Lithuanian super-power, since the rulers of the two countries pursued separate and often antagonistic policies for the next fifty years at least, but it resulted in the baptism of the leading Lithuanian nobles; Jogaila’s own baptism (as Wladyslaw IV) did revive Polish hopes of regaining territory lost to the Order, and enabled the Poles to reopen the offensive against the Order which had been suspended by Casimir III. By 1392 Witold had come to terms with Wladyslaw, who let him keep the lands of his father, Kestutis, including Vilnius. The Order could only continue its crusade against Lithuania by ignoring the fact that its ruler was a baptized Christian, who professed to be baptizing his subjects.

At the same time, the old quarrel with Riga broke out once more.
Archbishop John IV left the city for Lübeck and appealed to the pope and King Sigismund of Bohemia for protection. The Order seized his castles, and Sigismund occupied the Order’s land within his kingdom; the master of Livonia, Wennemar Hasenkamp von Brüggeneye, was summoned to the Curia to answer the archbishop’s charges.

Under grand-masters Conrad von Wallenrod (1391–3) and Conrad von Jungingen (1393–1407) the Order responded to these reversals of fortune by a policy of territorial expansion. Since the old frontier was now inadequate, it was decided to push it out as far as possible, both by war and by purchase. Between 1390 and 1395 the Order bought the duchies of Dobryzn and Opole, on Wladyslaw’s northern and south-western frontier, from the dukes who owned them, and between 1400 and 1402 the whole of Brandenburg Neumark, which hemmed him in to the north-west. Repeated campaigns against Lithuania by larger and larger armies, which included both crusaders and mercenaries, convinced Witold that it was worth buying off the Order to avoid becoming dependent on his cousin, and in 1398 he agreed at Sallynwerder to surrender his rights over Samogitia in return for a ‘perpetual peace’ and a strip of wilderness west of the lower Niemen.

The boyars of Samogitia were not a party to this transaction, and were still unbaptized. Campaigns against them continued for the rest of Conrad von Jungingen’s grand-mastership, sometimes with the help of Witold and sometimes not, but in 1406 they submitted, and the following year applied for permission to live under the town law of Prussia – in vain. Wladyslaw had been placated by the return of Dobryzn, and for three years he, Witold and the Order co-operated against the newly risen power of Muscovy. Grand-Master Conrad von Jungingen’s brother Ulrich succeeded him at a time when it appeared that only the schismatic Russians were left to fight.

However, neither Poland nor Lithuania had relinquished its hopes of regaining its lost lands, and the rulers of both countries were aware that the price of the Wallenrod–Jungingen expansion had been discontent with the Order’s rule within Prussia. Burghers and kingly vassals were expressing discontent with war taxation and military service, and crusaders had been in short supply since 1396, when the prospect of fighting the Turks had diverted French, English and German knights from the Lithuanian front to the crusade of Nicopolis. In 1409 the Samogitians revolted, with the support of their former prince, and Grand-Master
Ulrich retaliated against Poland by reoccupying Dobrzyn and harrying Mazovia. This action was in accordance with the policy stated by his brother in a letter to the German electors in 1397; all who gave aid to the heathen would be treated as enemies of the Order.
¹¹²
But were Samogitians still heathen? And, if so, what had the Order been doing in their country for the last decade? That August, Wladyslaw and Witold combined to produce a public manifesto against their common enemy. In it they stated that the Samogitians were laudable converts, whom they had themselves baptized, while the native Prussians were still semi-pagan after nearly 200 years of rule by the Teutonic Knights. They claimed that the brothers were not interested in conversion, only in aggrandizement at the expense of their neighbours; unless God stopped them, they would subjugate all the princes in the world.
¹¹³

This rhetoric prepared the way for a combined Polish–Lithuanian invasion with an army strong enough to overcome any forces the Order could send against it. From this point, the character of the war changed. It was no longer a fight against the heathen pursued by a strategy that involved the seizure of land from Christian neighbours: it became a war waged by Poland and Lithuania for the reconquest of lands the Order had taken. It was pursued both in the field and by an intellectual assault on the concept and function of monastic knighthood.

The war against pagan Lithuania has been described as a war of attrition, but this gives little idea of how it was conducted. Since it lasted for more than a hundred years, during which both combatants grew steadily richer and more powerful, neither the Order nor the heathen can be said to have achieved the aim of a war of attrition. There was some kind of fighting almost every year from 1283 to 1406, vast expenditure of labour and money, and a continuous record of atrocities and devastation: both war-machines were effective enough to leave the enemy’s resources undestroyed.

To explain this paradox, it is necessary to look at the geography of the region. At this period, as was pointed out in chapter 1, most of it was covered by a dense deciduous forest, reaching from the Baltic coast to the Beresina, and from the Pripet marches to the Dvina. In the middle of this area, on the upper Niemen, Viliya, and upper Dvina, the Lithuanians and their Russian tributaries had cleared enough land to support sizeable populations; but this still left a belt of uncleared land, almost 100 miles wide, between them and the Order’s settled zones in Prussia and Livonia. Within this belt, the going was very tough: not only trees, undergrowth and the thickets left as
bege
or barriers all round Samogitia, but also marsh, bog, lake and the innumerable tributaries of the great rivers, presented problems of logistics and transport which medieval armies were ill equipped to solve. There survives a compilation of routes between Prussia and Lithuania (
Die Littauischen Wegeberichte
, made 1348–1402)
¹¹⁴
which gives a clear picture of the difficulties. For example, if you had got to Betygala, near the upper Dubysa, which flows into the Niemen from Samogitia, and you wanted to proceed to Vandziogala, north of Kaunas, twenty-one miles as the crow flies, thirty-five by modern by-roads, the following route (twenty-seven miles) was offered: first there was a
damerow
, or patch of scrubland, with a track; then a great wood where you had to clear your way (
rumen
); then there was a heath; then another wood, ‘the length of a crossbow shot, and there you have to clear your way too’; then a heath; then another wood (more trail-blazing for over three miles). That was on the edge of the true
Wiltnisse
: the route from the Prussian lowlands to the upper Niemen crossed the middle of it. One way which was found by a native Prussian scout was described in a letter that was copied into the
Wegeberichte
, and dated from Insterburg (Chernyakhovsk) on the Pregolya. It begins,

They had travelled a distance of less than seventy miles as the crow flies, in nine stages, each marked by a ‘night-camp’ at the end of a day’s journey; and these were experienced rangers, carrying out a mission as quickly as possible. They reported that they had ‘found a lot of peoples and a lot of houses in the waste’, and alternative routes listed in the
Wegebericbte
suggests that there was no lack of ‘good and secret’ tracks, if only people knew where they were; but nothing like a public road that could be used by armies and merchants. Knights who left the track, or failed to travel in parties, were sure to be killed or die of starvation;
armies were constantly getting lost or failing to make contact with the enemy. A good day’s journey through the
Wiltnisse
was about twelve miles; it took a week to get from Kaunas to Vilnius (fifty-five miles apart as the crow flies), four days from Merkine to Trakai (forty-three miles), six days from Trakai to Traby (fifty-two miles). Only the Niemen and the Dvina provided sure methods of bulk transport through these forest zones, and both rivers were often used in support of military operations – for bringing up supplies, bricks, siege-machines, horses, reinforcements – but there were still problems. The upper Dvina is a fairly rapid river in places, running between steep banks, and therefore river-borne armies had a hard pull upstream: only once did the Livonians get to Polotsk by water. The southern tributaries that flowed from Lithuania were short and shallow. The Niemen is remarkably placid and winding. So extravagant were its meanders that it was said in the fifteenth century that boatmen could spend a day going round one of these bends and light their evening fire by walking a short distance over to the embers left in yesterday’s camp.
¹¹⁶
Progress this slow would not matter when there was a castle to be built, or when, as before 1283, the enemy was only a few miles away, but it became a severe handicap when a campaign had to be fought a long way up- or downriver; and weather conditions made speed essential. Both Prussians and Lithuanians kept prams and longboats on the Niemen, and sometimes they raided and fought in them; they were essential for keeping the Order’s castles above Tilsit (Sovetsk) supplied; but it was not practicable to float large invasion forces to the mouth or headwaters of the river within the ‘real time’ available to summer campaigners. Short-cuts were sometimes found: thus in 1376 the commander of Balga had six-man boats built on the banks of the Niemen when he got there by the overland route, and in 1393 the marshal carried his boats thirty-six miles on waggons. But these stratagems were only ways of cutting down a marginal difference between two very slow and cumbersome ways of travelling. On the whole, the mounted expedition guided by expert woodsmen (
leitzlute
) remained the only effective way of getting into enemy territory where there were tracks; while, where there were none, one could only go on foot.

The climate placed further restrictions on such expeditions. Then as now, the region was liable to heavy rains and heavy snowfalls, and, since there were no roads, the effect of either was to make movement impossible. Sheer cold made it impossible for the Order to invade
Lithuania in the winter of 1322–3; the common soldiers fell dead on the march, and many of the fruit-trees that had been planted in Livonia and Prussia never recovered. In February 1376 the snow was so deep that a Livonian expedition had to ride out in single file, and that March the Lithuanians lost a thousand horses from hardship. In other years, as in 1387, the snow lay so thick that no one attempted to get through. But a ‘weak winter’ was even worse: unless the ground froze – 120 days of frost is the modern average – it would not support men or horses, and there could be no fighting. The rain swelled the rivers and soaked the soil. When the snow melted, and the ice broke up on the rivers (any time during March and April), communications were again impossible, and autumn rainfall could be intolerably heavy. However eager the enemies were to fight each other, they were always apt to be kept apart by the weather. Thus in 1394 Duke Philip of Burgundy wrote to the grand-master asking whether there would be a
reysa
the following year, and Conrad von Jungingen had to write back,

There were only two sets of weather conditions which would allow serious campaigning, and neither could be expected to last for more than two months at the outside. One was a ‘hard’ or ‘good’ winter: not too cold for a man to relieve himself in the open air, or too snowy for riding, but just sharp enough to congeal the bogs, harden the ground and freeze over the rivers. As in 1364, for example: ‘This year winter was hard, and it lasted three months, so that we had several good
reysen
…’
¹¹⁸
The other set of favourable conditions was provided by a hot sun and drying winds, so that land and water transport could be used in combination. This could happen any time from April to October, or not at all, and was unlikely to last for more than a month. In both cases, a sudden change in the weather could prove disastrous. Floods in summer or thawing ice in winter could trap an army without hope of relief, as when King Wladyslaw III of Poland was caught between two swollen lakes at Mazowsze in August 1332, or when the thawing of the
Strawen made it impossible for the fleeing Lithuanians to escape from Marshal von Kniprode in February 1348. The effect of these risks was to confine all large-scale operations to areas along the Niemen and Dvina, where there were tried and tested escape-routes, and where warfare took the form of siege and castle-building. It was also prudent, when more ambitious invasions were attempted, to split up the invading army into detachments so as to reduce the chances of disaster. This was grasped from an early date by the Order, which had fewer men to lose.