God's War: A New History of the Crusades

third.⁴⁷ The 1245 grant by Innocent IV, no natural ally, of Jerusalem indulgences to all recruits for the order’s wars who ‘without public preaching’ took the cross devolved on to the order the power to summon fully fledged crusades.⁴⁸ This did not stop subsequent papal crusade appeals or the authorization of widespread preaching by the friars. However, Innocent’s grant established the mechanics of a permanent crusade run by and for the Teutonic Knights without constant recourse to specific papal approval. This was reinforced in 1260 by Alexander IV’s permission for the order’s priests to preach the cross on their own initiative on terms similar to those granted the Dominicans, Franciscans and local bishops.⁴⁹ In the circumstances of the revolts of 1242–9 and 1260–83, and in the eternal crusade with Lithuania in the fourteenth century, this special status allowed the order to run its affairs as an autonomous business.

The Later Middle Ages

By 1300, the Teutonic Knights were secure in Prussia, Livonia and southern Estonia, over the following generation consolidating their rule through subjugation and selected favour of ‘Old Prussians’ and the sponsorship of trade and rural and urban immigration by German ‘New Prussians’. Eager to dominate as much of the southern and eastern Baltic as possible, the order annexed Danzig and eastern Pomerania in 1308–10. In 1337, the emperor Louis IV authorized the order to conquer the whole of eastern Europe, by which he meant primarily the growing power of pagan Lithuania and its regular allies in Poland, even though frequent attempts were made by successive popes to recruit the nobility in the latter, a Christian power, as crusaders themselves, against Mongols and, confusingly, Lithuania. In 1346, the order purchased northern Estonia from Valdemar IV of Denmark. The reasons for this expensive and sustained programme of expansion lay in the nature of Baltic politics and of the order itself. Expelled with the rest of the Latin Christians from the Holy Land after the fall of Acre to the Mamluks of Egypt in 1291, the Teutonic Knights relocated their headquarters to Venice. It says much for the respective status of the enterprises that, while it had entrenched itself as sole ruler of a large state in northern Europe, at the cost of unimaginable treasure and more blood, the High Masters, as they called themselves, remained in the Mediterranean. It took a crisis on three fronts to persuade the leadership to move north.⁵⁰

In Livonia, challenges to the order’s rule by the archbishop and citizens of Riga led to a messy civil war in 1297–9 similar to the feuding that had marked the last decades of Christian rule in Acre. The Knights appeared willing to prosecute their rights even by physical violence against the clergy. The protagonists appealed to the pope. At least since the Second Lyons Council of 1274, the role of the Teutonic Knights had come in for critical scrutiny. While the order’s credentials and role as a bastion against the pagan Lithuanians was praised by Bishop Bruno of Olmutz in a memorandum written for Gregory X in 1272, others doubted the order’s methods and motives.⁵¹ Baltic crusade appeals petered out towards the end of the thirteenth century, only reviving in the fourteenth. The Livonian conflict added weight to charges against the order that rumbled on at the papal Curia for years. In 1310, Clement V ordered an inquiry into claims that the order was waging war ‘against Christ’.⁵² Such legal action coincided with concerted efforts by the powerful and still pagan Lithuanians under Grand Prince Vytenis to conquer Livonia and Prussia. Even more alarming was the arrest and trials of the Templars begun by Philip IV of France in 1307 and confirmed by Clement V a year later. For over a generation there had been serious talk about merging all military orders so as to more effectively defend or recover the Holy Land. With the Templars under the cosh, the Hospitallers established themselves in Rhodes (1306–10), moving their central convent there in 1309. The Teutonic Knights followed suit. In 1309, they moved their headquarters to Marienburg in the safety of their own realm, symbolizing their commitment to the continuing struggle against the infidel. Even then, their Christian enemies almost succeeded in their undoing, the Livonian brothers being excommunicated in 1312 for a year.

In the fourteenth century the crusade against Lithuania served a variety of rather different purposes. It provided the Teutonic Knights, who never numbered more than about 1,000 to 1,200 unevenly split between Prussia and Livonia, with necessary reinforcements on the ground and political capital abroad. Crusades legitimized, at times to the scandal of observers, the order’s long struggle with Lithuania, which, in turn, assisted the maintenance of their grip on their own territories. The regular frozen winter and soggy summer raids, or reisen, provided a reassuring focus for Christendom’s longstanding self-image of religious mission. Until 1386, Lithuania remained a vigorous and aggressive pagan kingdom, although hostilities were not concerned with conversion so much as power and profit. More precisely, these campaigns offered adventurous nobles opportunities to show off. Glamorous in repute but difficult, dangerous and sordid in practice, the raids across the wildernesses that marked the Prussian/Livonian/Lithuanian border, were often run by the order as chivalrous package tours, complete with special feasts, displays of heraldry, souvenirs and even prizes. Perfected by Grand Master Winrich of Kniprode (1352–82), these festivals of knighthood became almost de rigueur for the chivalric classes of western Europe, a rather different clientele to the more habitual Baltic crusaders from Germany and central Europe.⁵³ The dozen prize winners who dined at the Table of Honour after the 1375 reisa each received a badge bearing the motto ‘Honour conquers all’, a far cry from the Jerusalem decree of Clermont (‘Whoever for devotion alone, not for honour or money goes to Jerusalem…’). While remaining popular throughout the fourteenth century, especially during truces in the Hundred Years War in the 1360s and 1390s, the strategic significance of these crusading enterprises waned. Their ideological foundation collapsed after the conversion of Lithuania. Promoters and apologists increasingly fell back on what has been described as the language of illusion to justify what had become simply a matter of secular politics.

The longevity of crusading in the Baltic was impressive. From 1304 until 1423, repeated contingents of German recruits arrived. John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, campaigned three times, as did William IV count of Holland and the Frenchman Marshal Boucicaut. William I of Gelderland went on no fewer than seven reisen between 1383 and 1400. Armies could be substantial for summer campaigns (the winter reisen usually accommodating only a few hundred). Duke Albert III of Austria arrived in 1377 with 2,000 knights of his own. It has been calculated that at least 450 French and English nobles made the journey over this whole period, a habit recognized by Geoffrey Chaucer when giving his Knight a suitably grand chivalric pedigree:

Ful ofte time he hadde the bord bigonne

Aboven alle nacions in Pruce;

In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce,

No Cristen man so ofte of his degree.⁵⁴

Evidence from England exposes networks of family involvement, wide social embrace and the relationship between the Baltic front and other wars for the faith.⁵⁵ Between 1362 and 1368, during peace with France, knights and their retinues left England for the Baltic on an almost annual basis, reaching a crescendo of activity in the winter of 1367–8, when licences were granted to at least ninety-seven men to travel to Prussia. These ranged from the large and well-funded retinues of the sons of the earl of Warwick, himself a Baltic veteran from two years before, to an esquire, William Dalleson, who was apparently accompanied by a single yeoman, two hacks and thirty marks.⁵⁶ The exercise could be expensive and dangerous. However packaged, the fighting was real enough. The Marienkirche at Konigsberg became a mausoleum as well as monument to the international dimension of the Lithuanian wars; there John Loudeham, killed on a reisa to Vilnius, was buried with military honours in 1391. A number of those who joined the Teutonic Knights also saw service against the infidel in the Mediterranean. Thomas Beauchamp earl of Warwick’s vow of 1365 was regarded by the pope as interchangeable between Prussia and Palestine.⁵⁷ Humphrey Bohun earl of Hereford was on the Vistula in 1363; he had also been with the king of Cyprus at the capture of Satalia in southern Turkey in 1361, as had one of his companions in Prussia, Richard Waldegrave from Bures in Suffolk, a future Speaker of the English House of Commons (1381).

Such recruits saw themselves as answering a higher calling. Sympathetic observers described these recruits as pilgrims. Many of them visited the various shrines dotted around Prussia that offered indulgences to visitors. Even though it is difficult to be sure whether or not those who fought with the Teutonic Knights had actually taken the cross in a formal ceremony, traditional language was still applied, one contemporary depicting Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV of England, as going to Prussia in 1390 ‘against the enemies of Christ’s cross’ to