The Northern Crusades (40 page)

The most remarkable religious work of Luder’s time was
Von siben ingesigelen
, dedicated to the grand-master and written by Tylo, a canon of Samland, in 1331, at the rate of seventy-eight verses a day. This was a translation of the
Libellus septem sigillorum
, expounding the seven manifestations of Christ from the Incarnation to Judgement Day, and like all such poems was marked by extravagant and sentimental praise of his Mother, who is symbolized as the burning bush, Solomon’s crown, Aaron’s rod, the fruitful almond, Gideon’s fleece, the ark, the ladder, the linden-tree, the grape and the phoenix. To read of God the Father as ‘the kisser’, the Holy Ghost as ‘the kiss’, and the Son as ‘the mouth surpassing all delights’ is to taste the modish exuberance which permeated the Order’s spirituality. This was an international literary convention, but it went with successful attempts to turn the Word of God into vigorous German prose. Such were the translations of the Prophets by the Franciscan Claus Crane, commissioned by Marshal Dahnfeld of Prussia in 1347–59, the ‘History of the Apostles’, and the ‘Prose Apocalypse’ (based on the verse apocalypse written by Commander Hesler in Thuringia before 1312). And the prose tradition continued in Prussia with the Middle High German Marco Polo (late fourteenth century) and the
Leben der Seligen Frawen Dorothee
(1401–17), which in 1492 became the first book printed in Prussia.

The story of the conquests and crusades also inspired a number of remarkable works, both in Latin and in German. All provided a record of heroic deeds, combined with praise of the Virgin and a justification of the Order’s mission in terms of biblical prototypes, notably the Maccabees. Henry of Livonia led the way, with his history of the founding and expansion of the Riga mission, and his example was followed in Prussia by a Latinist who composed a now lost account of the early wars of the Teutonic Order. This was used and continued down to 1326 by the priest-brother Peter of Dusburg, who apparently was writing his
Chronicon terrae Prussiae
at Königsberg from 1324 to 1330. The Annals of Torun and Oliva, and the historical works of John of Posilge (fl. 1360–1405), Conrad Bitschin (fl. 1430–64) and Laurence Blumenau (d. 1484) continued the tradition of Latin historiography well into the fifteenth century, by which time the need for polemicists, lawyers, and envoys had made Prussia the seat of all varieties of Latin learning. Grand-Master Zöllner von Rothenstein’s attempt to turn Chelmno school into a university was not successful, but, there and at Torun, Elbing and Königsberg, masters trained men for the higher education provided at Prague, Leipzig and the new German universities.

The most distinctive form chosen by the Baltic historians – in Scandinavia and north Germany as well as in the Order’s provinces – was the verse-chronicle, invented by the Anglo-Norman writer Gaimar in the mid twelfth century and well suited to combine both epic and annals, for the entertainment of both learned and unlearned. The first was the Livonian Rhyme-Chronicle, written in the 1290s either by a knight-brother or by a bloodthirsty priest, under the influence of the great Middle High German narrative poems. This powerful but clumsy work related the history of Livonia down to 1291, and the story from 1315 to 1348 was taken up by Bartholomew Hoeneke’s Low German ‘Younger Livonian Chronicle’, which survives only in a later prose recension. After that, no rhymes from Riga; but meanwhile the history of Prussia had been versified by Grand-Master Luder’s chaplain, Nicholas of Jeroschin. His
Kronike von Pruzinlant
is a vast expansion of Dusburg’s Latin work, but more verbose and passionate in tone, and it was continued down to 1394 by the Order’s herald, Wigand of Marburg, who concentrated on the details of sieges and expeditions. Most of the original is lost, but it survives in a Latin translation made on the orders of the Polish historian Dlugossius in 1464.

The purpose of these works is the same as that of the Latin chronicles: to create and affirm a sense of historical mission, by providing foundation myths, an heroic epos, and proofs of divinely ordered destiny. They buttress the Order’s power by emphasizing its international reputation, its sacrifices, its collective courage and the barbarity and ruthlessness of its enemies. Behind these, as behind all the manifestations of Christian culture in the Baltic provinces, lies a strong determination not to become part of the world that the thirteenth-century newcomers had conquered, but to change it.

The change was more strongly marked in some places than in others. On the lower Vistula, for example, in the years between 1362 and 1394, it was possible for the daughter of an immigrant Dutch farmer, Dorothea of Montau, to win a reputation for outstanding holiness in a wholly German and Catholic society. As a craftsman’s wife at Danzig, and as a widow and recluse at Marienwerder, she dreamed dreams, saw visions and gave advice, which earned the respect of people of all ranks, from the grand-master to the peasant. She was the flower of Prussian piety, a middle-class St Bridget whose voice and miracles were proof that God and his Mother were deeply interested in the daily doings of the province, and despite her criticism of the Knights the Order worked hard to get her canonized. However, among the 260 deponents who testified to her sanctity, only one was an Old Prussian, although it was claimed that she had done good work among Prussian converts. It is clear from her well-recorded life and utterances that she belonged almost exclusively to the world of the castle, the cathedral and the township, where Catholicism was thoroughly ‘at home’; not to areas where her Church confronted Old Prussian ‘superstition’, Lithuanian paganism or Greek Orthodoxy.

Yet many, perhaps most, of the Order’s subjects lived in such areas. In Prussia, the eastern wilderness acted as a barrier against schismatic and pagan influence, although rural heathenism survived to the west of it, and Jews and Hussites reached the coast down the Vistula. In Livonia, the much-crossed Russian frontier let in the Orthodoxy the Order was fighting against. There were Russian communities at Riga, Dorpat, Reval and Narva, with their own priests and churches, and, however much Greeks and Latins referred to each other as ‘dogs’ and ‘godless ones’, they shared many beliefs, festivals and cults: in particular, the cults of the Mother of God, Holy Cross and St George. Thus, at Reval in 1425,
the bishop and parish clergy included the Russian Church among the stations of their Rogationtide procession, but ignored the Dominicans, whom they despised for ‘eating bran and chaff like pigs’.
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In Dorpat, for all its sovereign bishop, cathedral, churches, nunnery and two friaries, too much Catholicism was bad for business and endangered the peace; a city so dependent on Russian merchants had to make room for their religion and culture. Out in the country, the indigenous population seems to have remained, if not heathen, then only halfway Catholic. In Estonia the old beliefs and the new combined in the popular festival of
Hinkepeve
, when the spirits in the sky were venerated under the guise of All Souls. In Livonia a similar legacy of pre-Christian myth and ritual survived in the midsummer vigil of St John, down to the present day.

To describe such cults as ‘one form of ideological struggle against foreign oppressors’, or to claim that because paganism survived ‘there are no grounds for speaking of a cultural mission on the part of the German crusaders affecting the local population’ (Mugurevics) is to ignore the layering of faiths throughout central Europe, the Balkans and Russia into modern times, quite irrespective of Germans or crusaders. The synthesis of Christianity and other religions has been in progress far too long for any particular significance to be applied to the ‘double faith’ of the Baltic. The phrase ‘cultural mission’ is no doubt sinister, Teutonic, and somewhat moth-eaten; but the success of the ‘foreign oppressors’ in setting up a predictably and characteristically imperfect medieval church system ought not to be denied.

Grand-Master Conrad von Jungingen, the conqueror of Samogitia, died on 30 March 1407. According to Laurentius Blumenau, he was both a martyr and a prophet: a martyr because he hastened his own death by refusing to have intercourse with a woman, which his doctor had prescribed as a sure remedy for gallstones; a prophet because he warned his brother knights not to elect his brother Ulrich as his successor, since he was an incurable Pole-hater.
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But Blumenau was writing fifty years after the event, and there is no contemporary evidence for either story. Ulrich was elected grand-master, and two years later declared war on Poland: not because he hated King Wladyslaw, but because his brother’s policy of playing off Poland against Lithuania had broken down. The Samogitians had revolted; Grand-Prince Witold had supported them, and Wladyslaw had refused to restrain Witold. Evidently he was no longer wary of defying the Order; the invasion of Dobrzyn and other of his lordships in 1409 was a logical, if unintelligent, way of forcing him to change his mind.

Ulrich miscalculated: he did not expect Witold and Wladyslaw to combine against him effectively, and he expected his own ally, King Sigismund of Hungary, to play an active part in any further hostilities against Poland. In fact, Witold and Wladyslaw stuck together, and raised armies larger than the Order’s total Prussian strength, while Sigismund accepted money and did nothing. After a nine-months’ truce, it became clear that Lithuania and Poland were going to attempt nothing less than the reconquest of Kulm, and that none of the grand-master’s friends was going to help him; even Master von Vietinghof of Livonia had agreed not to attack Witold without three months’ warning.

On 1 July 1410 Wladyslaw and Witold made contact at Czerwinsk on
the Vistula, and soon afterwards began a rapid march northwards with an army of Polish and Lithuanian levies, reinforced by Czech, Moravian, Wallachian and Crim Tartar mercenaries. They were met a few miles inside the Prussian frontier by the grand-master’s combined force of Prussians and crusading volunteers, and on 15 July, at Tannenberg/Grünwald, von Jungingen committed his troops to battle. He was presumably hoping that the Virgin would once more save her disciples by granting them victory against overwhelming odds; but by the end of the day, the entire high-command and the bulk of the field army of the Order in Prussia had been annihilated. The grand-master, the marshal of the Order, the grand-commander, the treasurer, several commanders and 400 brothers lay dead on the field of battle; the rest of their army was either killed, captured or routed. At one stroke, the allies appeared to have destroyed their enemy and made Prussia defenceless.

However, the Order was saved by the strength of its citadel, and by the losses of the allies at Tannenberg. One of the Henries von Plauen,
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who had been entrusted with the defence of Pomerelia, took charge of the remaining forces, and held out at Marienburg for fifty-seven days. While the Prussian bishops and their vassals submitted to Wladyslaw, von Plauen refused to come to terms; he was waiting for bad weather, disease, the arrival of reinforcements from Livonia, or action by King Sigismund. On 19 September, Wladyslaw raised the siege. His artillery had not proved effective, his troops had dysentery, there was news of Livonian troops on the move, Sigismund had made an attack on his allies in Silesia, and he could no longer afford to pay his Bohemian mercenaries. On the way home he captured the new marshal of the Order, Michael Kuchmeister von Sternberg, but his chance of reconquering the Kulmerland in one campaign had vanished. On 1 February 1411 he agreed to a peace at Torun by which the Order kept all it had held before 1409 except Samogitia, which was to pass to Witold and Wladyslaw for the length of their lives. The Order was also bound to pay an indemnity amounting to £850,000 – ten times the average annual income of the King of England.
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The Teutonic Knights had suffered other great defeats in the past, but in those days the enemy had been the heathen and death in battle had been interpreted as martyrdom. The blood of slain knights had served to glorify the Order and to stimulate the recruitment of new members and crusaders. Tannenberg would not have been such a disaster
if it had been possible to view it as a blow against Christendom, because it would then have brought in a rush of volunteers eager to save Prussia, but the Order found difficulty in propagating this view. Although it was emphasized that Wladyslaw had employed Tartars and schismatic Russians to bring about his victory, the rest of Europe was not outraged; contemporary references to the battle describe it as a lamentable tragedy, but a tragedy for which the Order was partly to blame. A Lübeck chronicler claimed that the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by God’s will, because of their pride, and ‘because they became too harsh towards their poor subjects, so they say’.
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An English commentator, used by Walsingham and translated by Capgrave, wrote that the ‘kyng of Crakow’ had asked the ‘heres of Pruse’ to help him against the Saracens, but instead they had

There had been no lack of German crusaders in von Jungingen’s army. There had been the usual mixed company under St George’s banner, and separate companies of volunteers from Westphalia, Swabia, Switzerland and the Rhineland. The reaction to the defeat within the Empire was favourable to the Order, and reinforcements began to arrive soon afterwards, led by the bishop of Wurzburg. However, non-German crusaders had been in short supply for ten years before Tannenberg (where, according to Monstrelet, there were a few knights from Normandy, Picardy and Hainault), and the lack of response from England and France after the battle showed that the international standing of the Order had declined. King Henry IV, an old Prussian crusader who always posed as a good friend of the Order, and who had laughed at the Polish manifesto against it in January 1410, suddenly lost interest in paying damages to Prussia for shipping taken by English privateers. Never had the Order needed £10,000 more urgently; but the king felt that the likelihood of Prussia’s falling to the ‘infidels’ made it inexpedient to meet the debt.
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