The Northern Crusades (44 page)

To make matters worse, the internal peace of Prussia was threatened by the spread of Lutheran opinions among the laity and some of the secular clergy. This meant riot and confusion in most German principalities, but in ecclesiastical lordships it threatened the very existence of the state. Albert lacked the resources to wage civil war for the maintenance of the old order, especially as several of his commanders and his own bishop, Polenz of Samland, favoured the heresy; he met Luther at Wittenberg in 1522, and found a way out. In Luther’s view, it was the duty of all Teutonic Knights to renounce their vows and marry, and it was Albert’s duty to establish a secular duchy for himself in Prussia. These measures would reconcile Albert to his anti-monastic Lutheran subjects, and preserve his standing as a territorial ruler. After he had secured peace with Poland, by persuading King Sigismund to enfeoff him as hereditary duke of Prussia, and his own Estates and bishops had ratified the agreement, those knight-brothers who objected to the change had no means of stopping it. Albert had allowed all the great offices to fall vacant and had run down the total strength of knight-brothers in Prussia to fifty-five. He summoned only a minority of these to Königsberg in May 1525 to approve his decision. Most of them were intimidated by the hostility of the burghers and egged on by Albert’s entourage. Only seven stood by their vows. After a few days’ hesitation even these gave their consent, and cut the crosses from their habits for fear of being lynched.

It was not the spiritual decadence of the Order, or the decline of the crusading ideal, that put an end to the rule of the Teutonic Knights
in Prussia. The subsequent reform of the German bailiwicks under Grand-Master Kronberg, and the part played by the Knights in the Habsburg offensives against the Protestants and the Turks indicate that armed monks still had a place in European politics long after 1525, and the survival of the Order in Livonia until 1562 proves that the Baltic convents still had life in them. It was the failure of the Prussian knight-brothers to come to a satisfactory political settlement with the Polish kingdom that put an end to the old Prussian system. By putting their trust in German princes, the Knights lost the power to preserve a monastic affiliation that was no longer essential to the military defence of the country and had become a contentious issue in the religious ferment of the 1520s. ‘It happened with us lords of Prussia, as it happened with the frogs who took a stork as their king’ – thus Brother Philip von Kreutz wrote a
Relation
of the whole ‘dirty deal’, as he called it. ‘Now all the estates had done their homage, and I saw that there was no means by which the dirty deal could be changed, I did homage too, in order to save my property thereby, for I had a large sum of money in my employment [he was commander of Insterburg], more than any other Teutonic lord.’
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It is interesting that, in the debate that accompanied the dissolution of the Prussian houses, the question of the morality of the crusade played little part: both the Teutonic Knights and their enemies preferred to argue about the morality of monasticism.
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The only Prussian brother who declared against the new duke was the commander of Memel, Eric of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, who was also the scion of a German territorial dynasty. The other Prussian convents accepted the change. The majority of those inside Germany remained deaf to Luther’s ‘Exhortation to the Lords of the Teutonic Order’ (March 1523), but many of their estates were devastated in the Peasants’ War, and subsequently confiscated by Protestant princes. In 1527 Master Kronberg of Germany became grand-master, and the Order embarked on a new career as an ally of the Habsburgs in the Wars of Religion.

In Livonia, the Teutonic Knights held their ground during the fifteenth century with greater success than in Prussia. The country did well: the burghers at Reval and Dorpat cornered a fat slice of the Novgorod trade
at the expense of the rest of the Hanseatic League, to which they belonged; Riga benefited from the continuing prosperity of Lithuania, and the knights of the Order and secular vassals profited by the export of rye. The country had been run on constitutional lines, with assemblies of estates deliberating with the master and bishops for much longer than had Prussia, but the demarcation lines between the authorities were now gradually redrawn in the Order’s favour. The ancient triangular contest between the master, the archbishop and burghers of Riga, which appeared to have been solved for good in 1394, when Boniface IX ordered the chapter of Riga to adopt the habits and Rule of the Order, in fact recurred every generation until the end of the century, but these successive challenges by strong-minded prelates merely served to confirm the master as the predominant Livonian authority.

The troubles of the Prussian brothers obliged the Livonians to go to their help several times. In 1410 Conrad von Vietinghof marched south to help the grand-master after Tannenberg; Cisso von Rutenberg and Franke von Kersdorf went on long raids into Lithuania in 1433 and 1435, and Master John Osthof von Mengden made strenuous efforts to reinforce the grand-master in the war of 1454–66. But meanwhile the two provinces drifted apart. The Livonian Knights were recruited from the Low German areas disregarded in Prussia (Westphalia, Ruhr, and Netherlands) and their political outlook was different. The frontier with Lithuania was not under dispute, and the king of Poland had no claim on their lands; they derived no benefit from the grand-master’s wars. When von Russdorf forced them to accept Franke von Kersdorf as their master in 1433, and von Kersdorf led them to a disastrous defeat at Wilkomierz (Pabaiskas on the Sventoji) two years later, they took future elections entirely into their own hands. They no longer let the grand-master choose their master from two elected candidates, and left him with the right to receive homage from a single nominee, who was always a Westphalian.

Not that the standards and lives of the Livonian brethren were either more spiritual or more strenuous than those of their colleagues. Their preoccupation with business, pleasure, rank and politics was equally marked, and their failure to produce or commission a single chronicle or history – even a rhyme-chronicle – has condemned them to obscurity. What they did has to be teased out of correspondence in the archives of the Order and the Hanseatic cities, and from Polish, Russian and
Scandinavian sources. They were dumb dogs, but at least they were able to bite.

In the fourteenth century the Livonians had been less ready than the Swedes to pick quarrels with the Russians, since the trading relation with Novgorod and Pskov was too valuable to be disturbed for long. Unrest along the frontier would lead to occasional raids and reprisals, as in 1341–2,1368 and 1377, but, on the whole, differences were sorted out by discussion and treaty. Thus in 1362 the city of Pskov detained Hanseatic and Livonian merchants as a protest against encroachments by the bishop of Dorpat’s subjects. In 1363 the Pskovians and Dorpaters met at Novgorod, deliberated, and separated without coming to terms. Then the Dorpaters detained merchants from Novgorod; but a committee of Novgorod boyars travelled to Dorpat, persuaded the Pskovians and the Dorpaters to agree, and all the merchants were released.
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This may serve as an example of a long-continued passivity in matters connected with Russia; an attitude of watchfulness and mistrust, punctuated by skirmishes along the Narva, Luga and Velikaya, but no serious attempt by either side to conquer the other. Hence the reluctance of the Livonians to assist King Magnus of Sweden in his mid-century crusades; Swedes, Danes and Russians all had claims to Livonian territories, and the Order preferred to keep all three at arm’s length. In any case, the Lithuanians presented a more immediate threat to the Catholic province than did the Russians.

In the fifteenth century, the conversion of Lithuania to Catholicism gave the Livonians an opportunity of renewing the attempt to subjugate the Russians, with the help of a powerful ally. Thus, in the period before 1409, when Witold was encroaching on Russian principalities and co-operating with the Order, Master Conrad von Vietinghof began to look again at Pskov – a small, prosperous commonwealth, no longer closely tied to Novgorod, remote from Moscow, and vulnerable to a combined Lithuanian-Livonian attack. As soon as Witold began raiding Pskov, Master von Vietinghof joined in; he made three
reysen
to the city, in 1406,1407 and 1408, and destroyed the Pskovian army on the second, but on each occasion there was effective retaliation, and, when Witold lost interest in helping the Order, in 1409, the belligerents made peace.

Again, in 1443–8, Master Vinke von Overbergen, finding Novgorod torn between Muscovite and Lithuanian factions, and liable to succumb to either power, embarked on at least two ambitious
reysen
to the westernmost Novgorodian stronghold, at Yamburg on the Luga. He
failed to take Yamburg in 1444, even with a train of bombards, but he devastated the Vod country up to the Neva, and imposed a trade embargo along his frontier.

These adventures came to nothing; or, rather, ended in a peace that was supposed to last for fifty years. The tie with Prussia prevented the Livonians from coming to a firm understanding with Lithuania, and obliged the masters to waste their resources in support of the grand-master during the war of 1454–66. Nevertheless, Livonia was prospering, and the military potential of the commonwealth was increasing, in both manpower and guns; the possibility of carrying through the failed crusade of 1242 still existed. The Russians had more men, and more guns, but depended on rivers and roads for moving them; Hanseatic shipping could bring both from Lübeck to Reval or Narva more quickly and cheaply. Thus, in about 1430 four Lübeck skippers supplied Reval with thirty-two cannon, powder, and 235 stone balls; a ‘hulk’ or merchant ship sold by a Danziger to a Reval burgher in 1462 carried six cannon, and three small Livonian convents inspected by visitors in 1442 contained six to eight cannon each.
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Moreover, a certain number of crusaders still came to Livonia. Thirteen noble volunteers were captured by the Poles at the battle of Wilkomierz, six of them close relations of the master, marshal or commanders. In 1439 the Lord of Gleichen (Thuringia) was serving as a ‘guest’ in Livonia. These errant lords may not have been much help from the strictly military point of view, but they were part of a wider affiliation with the society of the lower Rhine and Westphalia, where there was a general feeling that the Livonian knight-brothers did a useful job in protecting Hanseatic traders along the Novgorod route. The occasion of the war of 1443–8 was an outrage committed on an interpreter hired by the junker Gerard, uncle of the duke of Cleves, who was then negotiating between the master and the grand-master. Some Russians hacked off the man’s feet, hands and head; the junker insisted on reparations from Novgorod, and five years later Master von Overbergen declared war in his name. As long as there was a risk of piracy, robbery and arrest along the north-eastern trade-route, the Livonian masters could count on German support for their occasional forays into Russia.

The
rapprocbement
between the Eastern and Western Churches in the 1430s and 1440s did nothing to improve relations between the Livonians and the Russians. Among the Orthodox prelates who signed the decree
of union between the churches at Florence in 1439 was the Russian metropolitan Isidore, but when Isidore came home he was not made welcome; ‘he began the naming of the pope of Rome in his services, and other new things which we had never heard since the baptism of the Russian Land’, complained the Novgorod chronicler,
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and he was eventually hounded back to Rome. His protector, Pope Eugenius IV, wrote to Grand-Master von Erlichshausen advising him that now the Order ‘is not troubled by infidels’ the money collected for the purposes of reconciliation with the Orthodox Church ought to be spent on subjugating or exterminating the archbishop of Riga and others who supported the authority of the council against that of the papacy. ‘Destroy them, or they will destroy you’, was the pope’s message.
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Nevertheless, the Livonians pressed on with the war against Novgorod.

The outcome of that war was an armistice that left Novgorodian and Livonian garrisons eyeing each other across the river Narva. Upstream, and on either shore of Lake Chud, the antagonists were the Order and the bishop of Dorpat to the west, and Pskov to the east. Fort and counter-fort marked the frontier; the Order’s Nyenslot, and the Russian Nyenslot, on the upper Narva; the bishop’s Nyenhus (Neuhausen) and Izborsk, south of the Lake; the archbishop of Riga’s Marienhausen, and the Pskovian outposts at Vishegorodok and Ostrov, on the Velikaya. The fact that this frontier was held against Pskov by three different and sometimes discordant authorities gave the Russians a certain advantage; it was possible to raid Dorpat without necessarily offending the master of Livonia. In 1458, Master von Mengden’s involvement with the war in Prussia encouraged Pskov to begin raiding the Livonians, and in 1463 the Russians laid siege to Nyenhus with ‘mennigerleye wunderlike instrument’
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and took the castle. Von Mengden sent an emissary speeding to Italy to warn the pope that the province was in great danger, but the situation in Prussia was even worse; the bishop of Dorpat’s lost marcher land could not be recovered while the master was husbanding all his resources to save the grand-master from the Poles.

Behind the assertiveness of this small Russian frontier-state lay the growing power of the great eastern principality of Moscow, where Pskov was seen as a useful check on both Novgorod and the Lithuanians. A formal alliance was concluded soon after the fall of Nyenhus, and Muscovite troops arrived to secure the surrounding territory. Hitherto, the grand-princes of Moscow had intervened in this area only at the
request of Novgorod, and in dire emergencies such as the Swedish crusade of 1348. Normally they were too busy with their Mongol overlords to pursue an aggressive policy towards their western neighbours, and distance delayed and limited their military expeditions. It was over 350 miles from Moscow to Novgorod, and another 140 to Pskov, so that no invading army could accomplish more than a short season of devastation.