The Northern Crusades (37 page)

The military efficiency of this system may be judged from the Order’s war record (see
chapter 6
); its economic performance is hard to assess, as there are no overall figures to show how much the Prussian government was making in the fourteenth century. However, the evidence of landpurchases, castle- and church-building, loans and campaigning suggests that it was doing very well. Not until the end of the century was it necessary to impose a general war-tax on Prussia, and not until the early fifteenth century are there signs of financial crisis and serious debt. The difficulties that convulsed Denmark, Sweden and the north-German principalities – declining state revenues, rebellious magnates, disintegrating territories – were avoided in Prussia and Livonia, or at least postponed.

This stability was not the result of rigid centralization or uniformity. The apparently similar hierarchies of the Order in Prussia, Livonia and Germany were actually performing rather different tasks, and remained largely separate in their political and economic working, although ultimately under the rule of the grand-master. In Prussia, the relatively subordinate position of the bishops of Samland and Warmia allowed the Order a free hand in state-building and administration. In Livonia, the master (appointed by the grand-master from the two candidates
submitted by the Livonian commanders) was always preoccupied with the problems of a control shared with the much more independent bishops of Riga, Courland, Dorpat, and ösel, and with the Estonian knights and bishop. After 1330, when Master Monheim occupied the whole city of Riga, the Order steered this commonwealth with a firmer hand, and the growing wealth and military effectiveness of the masters increased their independence. They, too, had their treasurers, marshals and great officers, and private estates in Germany, and, although they co-operated with the grand-masters, local concerns often came first: they could only be managed from Marienburg by tact and persuasion, and they could only rule with the assent of their provincial parliament, the
Landtag
, which met annually after 1422.

(a)
Natives

The conquerors of the eastern Baltic lands tried to reorganize the traditional patterns of society they found there. They wanted to make them more ‘Christian’ – that is, either more like the home countries, or more like an ideal Catholic model, and they wanted to make them manageable. They were all guided by the normal west European assumptions of the time, but they had to make concessions to pre-existing social patterns and to a variety of local difficulties: harsher climates, thinner populations, poorer soils, precarious economies and tenuous communications. By 1300 the makings of a new order were there: in each province there were laity and clergy, lords, peasants and burghers, administrators and subjects – categories that could not have been applied in 1200. However, as in other frontier lands, there were many people who could not be categorized in this way, and all categories had a peculiar east-Baltic flavour.

This was most noticeable in Finland, where social change was least planned and most gradual. A Finnish peasant with a holding of arable land on the west coast might appear similar in wealth and status to a Swedish peasant living near Stockholm, and be liable for the same forms of tax; but in fact he and the group to which he belonged might well derive most of their gains from inherited hunting rights fifty miles upstream, which could only be exploited by leaving their farms at certain times of year and letting their women do the work. In Karelia, most of
the free population was so frequently engaged in hunting and trapping expeditions that a substantial and respected family might appear to the tax-collector to have no fixed abode; and when in 1316 King Birger insisted that all Karelian women should have the same rights as Swedish women,
¹⁵⁰
he seems to have overlooked the fact that, while the she-Karelians were not allowed to inherit landed property, they were trained to hunt, fight and work alongside their men. A Lapp had no land, and might be bound to a farm like a slave; but he might only go to that farm once a year, and have the use of natural resources over an area bigger than an English shire. A parish as big as an Italian diocese might afford a bare living for one priest.

Further south, where there was a sharper distinction between conquerors and subjugated natives, and where lordship was already prevalent before the Germans came, the new rulers were able to reorganize society in their own image to a greater extent. One of the most pressing problems in the thirteenth century was how to adapt existing patterns of control without creating disorder and discontent. A native nobility already held sway; if the new regimes were to survive, they had to make use of it, and they were commissioned both by popes and by emperors to grant a measure of liberty to converted peoples.

At first, the treaty of Christburg (1249) laid down a number of civil rights which were to be enjoyed by all free members of the Prussian tribes which accepted Christianity. They could marry, bequeath property, trade, litigate, enter the Church and become knights; they could be disinherited only by due process of law. Any deviation from Christian law or custom carried the penalty of disenfranchisement, and the church courts run by the Teutonic Knights therefore constituted a method of political supervision; but, apart from this check, the treaty allowed much of the old order to survive under the new.

Then came the revolts and apostasies of 1260–83, during which many Prussians lost their lands, rights and lives, and many nobles emigrated. What emerged at the end was a more tightly regimented society, within which favoured natives enjoyed more clearly defined rights that raised them well above the level of ordinary freemen and aligned them with the German landowners who were beginning to settle among them. There was no one treaty to establish the position of this reorganized grouping, but its outlines can be deduced from the charters to individuals which were preserved in the Order’s archive. One of the earliest was
granted by
Landmeister
Rechburg to a certain Tropo in 1262, and its terms were remarkably generous.
¹⁵¹

He received two tracts of land, and two settlements, with full rights of justice over both, to be held by him and his heirs of both sexes in perpetuity. He was freed from paying tithe or labour dues, and in addition he was given personal lordship over nine kin-groups in Samland. His only public obligations were to supply an unspecified number of men for three duties:
hervart
(offensive expeditions),
lantwern
(local defence) and
borcbbuunge
(fortification). He probably already held the lands he was granted; the charter merely established the terms on which he could keep them, and, since he was evidently loyal, these enabled him to ‘live like a lord’. Others got less, as witness the six Old-Prussian brothers named in
Landmeister
Baldersheim’s charter of 1267.
¹⁵²
They got forty-eight hides, and the tithe for which they were liable; but they were bound to pay
census
or grain-tax on all cultivated plots, let the Order have jurisdiction over their peasants, and let the peasants emigrate if they wanted to. They owed the three military services, and they also had to supply food to the Order’s castles. Only if they agreed to this, runs the text, ‘will we forgive them for the outrage they have done to the faith by their apostasy’. Loyalty paid: these men would cut a smaller figure in the neighbourhood than Tropo. There survives a document of 1299
¹⁵³
in which the commander of Samland recorded the names of all the local
witingi
or nobles who had a clean record since the time of the apostasy; and Samland remained an area with a high proportion of Old-Prussian landowners. The more prosperous came to resemble German feudatories, with manors, manor-houses, town proporties and coats-of-arms; they intermarried with immigrants and spoke their language. But many well-born Prussians who held their land by feudal tenure, and enjoyed rights over others which might be termed seigneurial, remained in practice unassimilated, sharing exiguous properties with kinsmen under the tribal law, and doing military service not as knights but in bands of rough-riders equipped ‘with Prussian weapons’ – shield and spear, rather than full armour. As long as the Lithuanian war lasted, such men were valuable; they were the vital link between the commanders and the rank and file, and the nature of the fighting ensured that they would not become too civilized.

In Livonia, where German settlement was sparser, fewer native warriors appear to have won the privileges of feudal tenure and noble
standing, and the relatively backward state of the province allowed native society to remain unaltered for longer. In the fourteenth century, a recognized indigenous nobility survived in Courland, where it was protected by a ‘Curonian feudal law’ which allowed dozens of squireens to use the title of king as late as the eighteenth century. Elsewhere, the ascendancy of German knights absorbed a small number of loyal kinglets, and tended to degrade all other natives into the condition of a peasantry, from which the better-armed were recruited for the
reysa
. In Estonia, the battle for lordship between the king of Denmark and the Sword-Brothers led to the parcelling out of each
kilegund
or settlement-area among immigrant vassals; by the 1230s the king’s list names only one landowner, Clement, as an Estonian.

The mass of the native populations paid the price for the privileges which were granted to their leaders. The treaty of Christburg let many Prussians be subjected to Polish law, and Polish law meant a rigorous seigneurial regime for the peasant. He owed his lord escort duty, transport services, the use of carts and carriers, varied labour services, bridge-building, boon works, attendance at his house, watch and ward over his property, hospitality, a tax on livestock, a plough-tax, two taxes on the value of his movable goods, and renders, on different occasions, of a cow, an ox and all dogs, beavers and falcons.
¹⁵⁴
This was hard by any standards, and absurdly hard in a country where the government’s prime requirements were military service and ready money; besides, it could only prevail in fully manorialized parts of the country. The tendency of the period 1250–1350 was for more Old Prussians to be brought under seigneurial control, but on much better terms than Polish law allowed. Landlords desperate for labour to develop their resources could only hope to attract tenants by imposing minimal dues and services, and the Prussians benefited from the favourable conditions granted to German and other immigrants.

The condition of those who lived in long-settled areas can be deduced from the law-code for the district of Pomesania, which was drawn up about 1340, in German.
¹⁵⁵
These laws speak of two categories of people, free and unfree, and consign the unfree to the jurisdiction of their lords; they come under peasant law,
Gebauersrecht
, which is private. The freemen also include peasants, but they are peasants with rights, who cannot be sentenced to death in private courts and may demand trial by the written code. They live in households, under the authority of a responsible and
hereditary head, and the community of householders forms the lowest court, regulating the economic life of the village. It exists in both free and unfree villages: in the former under a
Starost
, or head-man; in the latter under the lord’s steward.

The unfree include various sorts. Some are just peasants, with farms of their own, who lack freedom because they owe suit of court to their lord, and are liable to be punished by his officers; they are not serfs or slaves, and they are allowed to answer for themselves in law-suits. Others are
gerthner
, smallholders living on plots belonging to the lord and liable to eviction; others are
Knechte
, hired labourers without personal rights, but with claims to a legal wage-rate. Evidently some lords were making money out of private justice, but their regime cannot have been harsher than that that was found in parts of England at the time and was much less oppressive than that of many French and German seigneuries: Pomesania had self-governing villages, and villeins with rights. The severest penalties were reserved for those who interfered with the machinery of justice: for refusal to appear in court, for forging charters, for bringing unsubstantiated charges against the lord’s steward.

Nevertheless, the Teutonic Knights were clearly determined that Old Prussian peasants should be kept in their place. An appendix to the Pomesanian code stated that, when Prussians and Germans were drinking together, the Prussians must always drink first – in case of poison. If a Prussian were sentenced or acquitted under German law, he could not seek redress under his own law. If he killed a German, he paid twice as dearly as if he had killed a fellow-countryman. His best chance of improving his lot was to leave such prosperous districts as Pomesania and settle nearer the frontier under the more favourable conditions of German law. The relative freedom a man enjoyed within his ethnic grouping need not diminish the drawbacks of being a member of that group; the Order’s policy of
Lasset Preussen, Preussen bleyben
(let Prussians stay Prussian) was not benevolent.

Many commentators, including St Bridget of Sweden,
¹⁵⁶
were shocked at the way Prussian converts were left semi-pagan, uncouth and lawless, and they were probably right in deducing that this sort of neglect made the natives easier to manage from the military point of view – better fighters, and less apt to complain about their rights than German settlers. When they appeared in court and tried to testify, ‘the Lords just sit and laugh’, complained the Carthusians in 1428,
¹⁵⁷
and Polish critics were
never slow to point out that, even after 200 years of monastic rule, the Old Prussians were Christian only in name. In this as in other matters, the brothers acted as knights rather than as monks. And only two Old Prussians rose to high office in the church: Bishop James of Samland and the Grand-Master’s chaplain Saul.