The Northern Crusades (41 page)

One company of Burgundians, including Sire Gilbert de Lannoy, set
out ‘pour aller en Prusse contre les mescreans’ in 1412, and saw service against Wladyslaw in the
reysa
of 1413, but this appears to have been the last time non-German crusaders fought for the Order. They stopped coming partly because the outbreak of war between England and France kept them fully employed in the West for the next generation, and partly because Witold and Wladyslaw were successful in convincing the rest of Europe that they were Catholic princes and neither ‘miscreants’ nor ‘Saracens’. It was widely felt that any further crusade against the heathen – the Russians and the Tartars – ought to be undertaken by Prussia, Lithuania and Poland in concert; there could be no merit in weakening Christendom by helping Catholic powers against each other. Thus the treaty of Torun contained a clause by which Witold and the Order agreed that in future they would convert or conquer the infidels as a joint enterprise. As long as the three Catholic powers of Eastern Europe remained at enmity with each other, this was unlikely to happen.

This was one of the more serious consequences of Tannenberg, as far as the Order was concerned; in future, it had to rely almost exclusively on Germany for allies and volunteers, and this meant showing increased deference to the wishes of German princes – in particular, to Sigismund, who was crowned king of Germany in 1414. Another was the crisis within Prussia, where the burghers and secular knights and bishops began to object to the Order’s monopoly of political power, and Danzig declared war on the Knights. Grand-Master Henry von Plauen (elected in November 1410) tried to placate his subjects by summoning a
Landesrat
of representatives from the cities and landowning class to consult with him over matters of policy, but the policy he favoured was striking back at Poland as soon as possible. Neither his commander, nor his bishops, nor his lay vassals were willing to risk another Tannenberg; he forced them into a brief campaign in September 1413, but was quickly deposed by his own marshal with the connivance of the Estates. Thereafter the government of Prussia was shared between the Order and the Estates, each increasingly resentful of the other. Internal disunity increased the chances of a successful Polish invasion.

Wladyslaw had accepted King Sigismund as arbiter in all his outstanding differences with the Order, but when in 1414 the king’s Award of Buda ordered the Poles to rest content with the peace of Torun, and make no further claims on ancient Polish territory within Prussia, Poland
went to war once again. A large army marched north and laid siege to Strasburg (Brodnica) on the Drweca; the new grand-master, Michael Kuchmeister von Sternberg, cut Wladyslaw’s supply line, and for the Poles the campaign degenerated into the ‘Hunger War’. Pope John XXIII’s envoy arranged a truce and the invaders withdrew.

Grand-Master Kuchmeister was a tall, corpulent man with a taste for study and a talent for political calculation, a ruler better suited to the times than the two impetuous war-heroes who had preceded him.
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The war of 1414 convinced him that, if Prussia were to be saved from conquest by Poland, it would be necessary to redress the balance of power by an appeal to the crusading instincts of the rest of Europe. Pope John would never sanction a public crusade against Catholic Poland on his own account. King Sigismund and the well-disposed German princes were unwilling to risk open war on the Order’s behalf. However, in November 1414 the powers and the prelates of Catholic Europe met together at Constance to take measures for combating the Hussite heresy, reunifying the papacy and reforming of the church; if an ecumenical council could be persuaded to guarantee the Order’s right in Prussia, and reaffirm its support for the Order’s crusading mission Wladyslaw would be deterred from pursuing his claims. A victory in the propaganda war would save the Order from the real war which it was no longer strong enough to win. In December 1414 the Order’s delegation, under the
Deutschmeister
and the archbishop of Riga, arrived at Constance with eleven wagons and an appeal from the Grand-Master’s proctor, Peter Wormditt.

Wormditt’s memorandum
¹⁷⁵
began with a historical introduction. He reminded his audience that Satan’s armies beset Christendom on all sides, and that the Teutonic Knights had been appointed like Maccabees to fight God’s war against the heathen. They had saved Poland from the Prussians and the Lithuanians, and the whole Catholic world had been eager to offer them assistance; Prussia had become a Christian country, and their Order had become a training-ground for all the nobility and knighthood of Europe. However, their prosperity had aroused the envy and hatred of ungrateful Poland, and the king had allied himself with Witold and the pagans to destroy them. He had failed, and had apparently
agreed to a firm peace and an end to all contention by the treaty of Torun.

But what had come of it? Wormditt then went through the articles of the treaty, showing how Wladyslaw had infringed them all, either in spirit or in letter. His bishop had laid a complaint against the Order at Rome; his envoys had spread slander against the Teutonic Knights all over Europe. He had failed to release his prisoners-of-war as agreed, he had plotted to subvert Prussia with the deposed Grand-Master von Plauen, he had violated the frontier and intercepted merchants. He had then defied King Sigismund’s sentence, and once more inflicted all the horrors of war on the unlucky subjects of the Order. These horrors Wormditt found it difficult to describe, but he made the attempt: murder, infanticide, ‘presbitericide’, enslavement by Tartars, rape, abortion, arson and sacrilege, the work of an obdurate Pharaoh at the head of a semi-pagan army.

In days of old, when the faith was in danger, all men had risen up to defend it. ‘But now it is not so. For nowadays no man takes heed of another’s loss, if it leaves him untouched. No man is concerned with distant perils. As long as he can live at ease, each man thinks he is fortunate enough and perfectly safe.’ Nevertheless, says Wormditt, the Council would do well to look to the defence of Prussia, for it was Holy Ground, purchased by the blood of their ancestors, of which Virgil might have written (quoting Eclogue 1, 70–72):

Do not desert us now, in our time of trouble, he implored the Council – ‘lest in the annals of your pontificate and in the chronicles of your royal reigns a place be found to describe this dire disaster: that the Order itself was destroyed in your days’.
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Wormditt presented his case with ingenuity and pathos, but the pope was anxious not to antagonize the Poles before they had even arrived at Constance, and shortly afterwards he made what amounted to a declaration against the Order by appointing Witold and Wladyslaw his vicars-general, or protectors of all Catholics, in Novgorod and Pskov. He also abrogated the Order’s claim to Lithuania, hoping no doubt to remove discord between the parties, and enlist Poland and Lithuania in
the crusading cause. But this was not exactly what either side wanted. On 5 July 1416, the Polish canon-lawyer Paul Vladimiri (Wlodkowic) delivered a reply to the Order’s charges which systematically challenged all the assumptions on which Wormditt’s appeal had been made, even the legality of the crusade itself. Vladimiri’s standing as rector of the University of Cracow, and pupil of the famous canonist Zabarella, enabled him to adopt an independent stance and carry the argument to a more rigorous intellectual level.

His speech—later published as the
Tractatus de potestate pape et imperatoris respectu infidelium
¹⁷⁷
– began with a historical introduction rather different from Wormditt’s, in which he contrasted the Order’s record of waging war not only on the aggressive heathen, but also on Christians and pagans living in peace, with Poland’s achievement in bringing the Lithuanians to the Church by peaceable conversion. He then investigated the title-deeds by which the Teutonic Knights held their power: first their claim that they were acting for the pope, then their commission from the emperor.

Obviously, the pope could not grant the Order powers which he did not himself possess, and documents in which he appeared to do so would be null and void. The Knights could only do what the popes had specifically ordered them to do, and what the popes were entitled to command; no more. The main question was, ‘Could Christians lawfully be commanded by their pope to attack sovereign infidel nations?’ Yes was the answer, but only in the case of the Holy Land, where Christ himself was born and lived; otherwise, any infraction of the property rights of any unoffending neighbour, be he pagan or Christian, was a violation of natural law which not even the papacy could sanction. Granted, the pope had jurisdiction over all men, and could order infidels to be punished; but not for offences against laws of which they were ignorant. Could he then order Christians to convert infidels by force? No: force is incompatible with the free choice which the Scriptures and canon law regard as inseparable from genuine conversion. The end does not justify the means. Therefore the Bulls on which the Order based its right of dominion were either invalid, or valid solely as justifying the waging of defensive war against infidels who infringed the natural rights of Christians. And in that case the Order had gone much too far.

As for the imperial charters of 1226 and 1245, which instructed the Teutonic Knights to convert, punish and rule the heathen, they were
founded on the mistaken assumption that the emperor had an independent responsibility for the spreading of the faith, when in fact all modern authorities were agreed that his duty was to assist missions, not to initiate them. ‘O Lord Emperor, the preaching of the Gospel is not committed to thee!’ These charters certainly granted the Order the right to wage offensive war against unoffending pagans, and to annex their territory; but the emperor had no right to authorize unjust war, and had no legal power over peoples living at peace outside the recognized limits of the Empire. Frederick II had therefore trespassed on the pope’s own sphere of jurisdiction, and violated the natural property rights which it was his duty to uphold. ‘O! how generous that emperor was with other men’s property.’

In this initial broadside, Vladimiri’s ammunition was drawn from the 200 years of vigorous legal study which had elapsed since the Teutonic Order was given its commission. Under the influence of a succession of teachers, from the twelfth-century ‘school of St Victor’ to Zabarella, the idea of natural law had grown stronger and more widely respected, and the doctrine of the Just War had been established with far greater precision. If the Order could appeal to tradition, and to documentary evidence, Poland could appeal to reason and Aristotle. However, embedded in the heart of canon law there remained a comment which the great decretalist Henry of Susa, bishop of Ostia (‘Hostiensis’), had made on a passage in Gregory IX’s Decretals (III, 34, 8) in the period 1245 to 1254. He had argued at some length that

Therefore the popes did have dominion over the heathen, and they were entitled to confer this on the Teutonic Knights, as every trained canon-lawyer in the Council must have been muttering when Vladimiri concluded his speech on 5 July. But Vladimiri was prepared; on 6 July he came out with the refutation which he later expanded into the tract known as
Opinio Ostiensis
.
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He admitted that Hostiensis had indeed laid down that infidels were
wholly incapable of exercising lawful political power, and that Hostiensis had many followers – Giles of Rome, Oldradus, Andreae, and Peter de Anchorano, who had recently stated that ‘Christians may lawfully steal, purloin, rob, seize and invade the lands and goods of infidels who do not recognize the Roman Church or Empire, even if they wish to live peacefully with us.’ If this was so, Christians were not required to obey either divine or natural law in their dealings with the heathen; but Vladimiri, speaking ‘not as an ambassador, but as a doctor’, undertook to give fifty-two conclusions that proved Hostiensis wrong. He used Scripture to show that God had commanded the pope to feed and protect, rather than destroy, the heathen, and Roman law to establish that property rights were always to be respected; he quoted Aquinas to prove that infidel property and authority were as inviolable as Christian. He justified the exception of the Holy Land by claiming that Titus had conquered Palestine as the result of a Just War, and that therefore the pope, as inheritor of the dominion of Rome, had the right to restore it to Christian rule. And all lands wrongly taken from Christians by Muslims could be rightly recovered, but only after the illegality of the dispossession had been established by process of law. The pope had the right to judge and punish infidels, but only for offences against natural law – idolatry, sodomy, attacks on Christians, and refusing to admit missions to their territory; and he should proceed to dispossess them only as a last resort, to avoid imminent peril to Christendom. And, if he did so, and conferred dominion over them on a Christian ruler, their property rights must still be respected.