This week we look at the reasons the golden age of the Teutonic knights came to an abrupt end at the beginning of the 15th century. It is a sequence of events that involve some remarkable Polish and Lithuanian princes, the Templars, and of course – The brothers of the house of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem. Ah, and a very famous battle.

The music for the show is Flute Sonata in E-flat major, H.545 by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach (or some claim it as BWV 1031 Johann Sebastian Bach) performed and arranged by Michel Rondeau under Common Creative Licence 3.0.

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Podcasts on Poland:

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Poland Is Not Yet Lost — WDFpodcast.com

The History of Poland Podcast (libsyn.com)

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 134 – Tannenberg

This week we look at the reasons the golden age of the Teutonic knights came to an abrupt end at the beginning of the 15th century. It is a sequence of events that involve some remarkable Polish and Lithuanian princes, the Templars, and of course – The brothers of the house of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem. Ah, and a very famous battle.

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Back to the show.

Last week we heard about the great chivalric adventure holidays the Teutonic knights staged for their wealthy aristocratic guests. These were nominally crusades against the pagan Lithuanians, but their military benefit paled into insignificance compared to the economic impact these free spending tourists had on the order’s state.

For those very few of you who may not have heard about that, the story goes roughly as follows. King Philipp IV of France was short of money due to the incessant wars with the English, or more precisely with his main vassal who also happened to be the king of England. Not only was he short of money, he was also heavily in debt to Knights Templars.

What he lacked in money he made up for in ruthlessness. Some of you may remember Episode 92 – The Papal Epilogue. That was the story of the slap of Agnani when soldiers in the pay of Philipp IV allegedly slapped Pope Boniface VIII in the face, and with that simple act brought down the whole edifice of the imperial papacy. Under French pressure the popes moved to Avignon and came under de facto French control.

Philip IV used the fact that he had a pet pope in Clement V to get him to issue an order to all monarchs in europe to apprehend the Templars. The biggest hammer fell in Paris where the grand master of the order had his headquarter. He and his main officers were arrested and put on trial. They were accused of satanic rituals and various forms of blasphemy including kissing a black cat’s anus. Once duly condemned they were burned at the stake and most importantly all their assets were confiscated by the crown.

As you probably know, pretty much any wacko conspiracy theory sooner or later traces their story back to the Knights Templar, their link to the Holy grail, the Cathars, rose crucians and ultimately the CIA, albino monks and god knows what other nonsense.

No worries, I will not talk about that. Instead we will look at the truly interesting question at the heart of this story. And that is why Philip IV got away with destroying an organization that only 50 years earlier had literally been drowning in donations from extremely powerful men all across europe and had been seen as a crucial component in Christendom’s most important political project, the reconquest of Jerusalem.

Part of it was that the Templars had become filthy rich. At their peak they owned 870 estates and castles across europe. Moreover they had become bankers who were best placed to transfer money across their vast network of commanderies. They also lent money to royalty and famously accepted the crown of France as collateral for one such loan. As so often with bankers their willingness to lend to unreliable borrowers is regarded as avarice, rendering them evil in the eyes of many people.

But that alone is unlikely to be enough. The Knights Hospitallers too were extremely rich, as were the Teutonic Knights. And the Hospitallers in particular lent money too, admittedly on a more modest scale.

So here is the question, why did the persecution of the Templars not lead to a persecution of the other two orders?

Now what about our friends, the Teutonic Knights? They too had left the Holy Land, in fact even earlier than the Templars. But they could at least argue that they were engaged in crusading in the North, bringing pagans into the faith.

But that argument was beginning to sound a bit hollow. Once Prussia and Livonia had been conquered and the pagan rebellion were suppressed, there weren’t that many pagans left, except for the Lithuanians.

If these arguments were taking hold amongst the members of the Curia, the entire existence of the Teutonic Knights could be in danger.

Around the time of the suppression of the Templars, these humane voices got support from Livonia itself. Other than in Prussia, in Livonia the bishops, in particular the archbishop of Riga were powerful, so were the burghers of the great cities, Riga, Dorpat and Reval. These different parties were almost constantly in conflict which occasionally turned into actual fighting. In this struggle the church authorities in Livonia sought support from the pope, after all the direct superior of the order. They accused the Teutonic Knights of all sorts of crimes, waging war against Christians, even the bishop himself, which was true, unwillingness to fight the pagans, burning their dead, killing the wounded and witchcraft, which wasn’t true. But the most damning accusation was that they were hindering the conversion of the pagans by their “savagery, cruelty and tyranny” as the archbishop of Riga wrote.

The Grand Master was summoned to come to the Curia to defend himself and his order. The situation was certainly precarious. But Pope Benedict XI decided that whatever crime the Teutonic Knights may have committed, it was more important to reconcile the parties in order to defend Livonia. So, he replaced the archbishop of Riga and sent a harsh indictment to the order, demanding they sort themselves out.

In response the grand masters ordered a sharp tightening of discipline, moved to Marienburg to be far away from any monarch keen on seizing and burning them, and began constructing a new narrative for the order’s purpose.

Conversion of the pagans was still a major objective. But alongside it stood a new threat to Christendom. These pagans beyond the frontier weren’t peaceful villagers who may be misguided but otherwise harmless. No, they were a terrifying foe who intended to break into the Latin world forcing their faux religion on not just the recently converted Prussians, Estonians, Letts ,Livs and Courlanders, but were intending push all the way west into Poland, the Empire and ultimately Rome itself. These hordes were the Lithuanians, but also the successor states of the Kyivan Rus with their orthodox heresy and behind them their overlords, the Mongol Khans. It was they, the Teutonic Knights who formed the bulwark of the west against this existential threat.

And to make this story stick they needed to make these adversaries sound terrifying. As it happened, that was not that difficult. The Lithuanians had always been a worthy opponent and there was a good reason why the precious crusading tourists never spent too much time in Lithuania itself.

As this went on, defeating and forcibly converting the Lithuanians became an ever more improbable prospect for the Teutonic Knights. And in a perverse way, that was to their benefit. Had they been successful in converting the Lithuanians, they would have lost their raison d’etre. There would not have been any more pagans to convert or to defend Christendom against. They could have directed their forces against the Principalities of Novgorod and Moscow, though these were less impressive at the time, Christian, if orthodox, and given to the Swedes as their special crusading task.

That event, the conversion of the Lithuanians to Christianity did happen, though not thanks to the efforts of the Teutonic Knights. For that story we have to go back again to the beginning of the 14th century and take a look at the other neighbor of Prussia, Poland.

Before I do that I have to ask my Lithuanian and Polish listeners for forgiveness. I am trying to get all these events right, but as I do not speak either Lithuanian nor Polish, I am reduced to German and English language sources. That means I may not get many of the subtleties and I will end up blanking out quite important events that do not directly affect the story of the Teutonic knights. There are some excellent podcasts that dive a lot deeper into these stories and are done by people much more knowledgeable than myself. I will put links to those in the show notes.

With that caveat, lets take a look at Poland in the 13th and 14th century.

The real shock to the system came when the Mongols invaded in 1241. Though several of the dukes tried to mount some resistance, they were comprehensively defeated at the battle of Legnica/Liegnitz in April 1241. Though the Mongol invasion did not continue into western europe, Poland was not so lucky. They were attacked again in 1259 and 1287, sacking Lublin, Sandomierz, Bytom and even Krakow.

By the end of the 13th century the various Piast dukes realized that their existing structure was not sustainable. None of them was able to fend off any of these invaders on their own. Calling in the Teutonic Knights had resulted in replacing the hostile but ultimately not life threatening Prussians with the well ordered powerful militarized state of the Teutonic Knights. The defeats of the Pomerelian dukes who had supported the Prussian uprisings brought home to them the relative superiority of the Knight brothers.

What then followed was a protracted process of reunification. It was in part driven by simply military success as ambitious dukes managed to eject the rulers of rival duchies. Then there was a lot of luck involved as several of the dynasties died out and the last of their line took the enlightened decision to pass their lands to the most powerful of the dukes at the time. And one has to assume that to a degree the ruling families decided that they would rather submit to one of their own family than to some foreigner. I will not go through all of them, but it is certainly worth to mention some.

In 1306 Wladislaw the short was back in Krakow. He had become a key beneficiary of a grand papal strategy to bring the kingdoms of central europe, Hungary, Bohemia and Poland under new management. In Hungary the dynasty of the Premislids was replaced by the Anjou, the French dynasty that had already taken the kingdom of Sicily from the Hohenstaufen. The plan was to also replace the king Wenceslaus III in Bohemia and in Poland. The Bohemian project did not work, but with Hungarian help Wladislaus the short was able to throw the Bohemians out of Poland. In 1320 he was solemnly crowned king of Poland in Krakow.

Kasimierz was an able administrator and forward thinking politician. To rebuild his depopulated lands he encouraged the immigration of foreigners, in particular of jews who had faced persecution in the wake of the Black Death. He codified the corpus of the existing laws and granted city rights under Magdeburg law. He launched a building program which, along with the cathedrals of Gniesno and Krakow and churches all across the land gave rise to 65 new fortified towns, the fortification of 27 existing ones and 53 new royal castles . He also rerouted the Vistula at Krakow and constructed a canal linking the salt mines at Wieliczka with the capital. He reformed a fiscal system with a central chancellery allowing the kingdom to raise taxes. He introduced new coinage accepted across the kingdom, dramatically facilitating trade. That trade was also supported by the banking skills of the Jewish immigrants who were given a significant degree of fiscal and legal autonomy which was the beginning of the Jewish culture that thrived for so long in the country.

Kasimierz also pushed for education. The university of Krakow was founded in 1364, after Prague but before Heidelberg and Vienna.

Kasimierz died in 1370. Though married four times he had no children. So he gave his kingdom to his nephew, King Louis of Hungary. Louis himself came up to Krakow to be crowned but left the country to be run by Elisabeth, his mother, the sister of Kasimierz.

The Hungarian-Polish alliance lasted until the death of Louis who in turn also had no male heir. His two daughters became Europe’s most desirable heiresses. When Louis died his older daughter Maria who had married Sigismund of Luxemburg was to inherit Poland, whilst the younger one, Hedwig was to marry Wilhem of Habsburg who would then become king of Hungary.

At which point the question was, who Jadwiga should marry, if not the Habsburg. The Poles had come up with a most unexpected idea. Jadwiga was to marry Jagiello, the Grand Prince of Lithuania. From a Polish perspective this made a lot of sense. After the South-east expansion of both Poland and Lithuania, the two realms shared a nearly 900 km long border. Having rejected Sigimund and the Bohemians who stood along the other end of that same border meant they were vulnerable to attack with no-one there to help.

The main problem was that Jagielo was still a pagan. The only way this marriage could go ahead was if Jagielo would get baptized.

As it happened Jagielo was prepared to make that transition. Though the Lithuanians had spent the last 200 plus years defending their religion against the incursions of the Teutonic Knights, they had also expanded far and wide into lands that had already become Christian. Their principality included not just pagans but also orthodox Christians, Latin Christians and Jews. As part of an astute policy of playing one enemy against the other, the Lithuanians had often promised conversions or at least allowed missionaries to come in and proselytize. Hence at the time Jagiello was made the offer of the hand of Jadwiga, Lithuania was no longer fully pagan.

And Poland was an incredibly attractive opportunity. Thanks to Kasimierz success as a ruler, Poland was incredibly rich and cultured as well as militarily capable. All he had to do was to get his head wet and build a cathedral, and all of that was his.

No wonder he went for it. On February 12th Jagiello arrived in Krakow. Three days later he was baptized, on the 18th he married Jadwiga and on March 4 he was crowned king of Poland.

This is the beginning of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, at times the largest state in Europe that at its height stretched all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from Krakow almost all the way to Moscow.

For the Teutonic Knights this was a major calamity. Their territory in Prussia was now surrounded on all sides by one hugely powerful neighbor. And not only that, the Lithuanians were no longer officially pagans bringing down the whole edifice of the Bulwark of Christianity that justified their existence.

And with at least one side, the Lithuanians, the order was already in a state of continued low intensity war.

Relations with Poland weren’t that great either. Initially the Teutonic Knights and the Piast dukes had a good relationship. After all it was the duke of Mazovia who had called them in for help. Many of the crusaders who came to conquer Prussia and suppress the revolts had come from Poland and many Polish settlers had helped cultivating the Prussian lands. Sure there was occasional conflict, in particular with the dukes of Pomerelia, Swentopolk and Mestwin who had played a major role in the Prussian uprisings.

But all in, it was in the Teutonic Knights interest that Poland was supportive as the crusaders had to travel through Polish lands or into Danzig to get to Prussia. At the same time the Polish dukes relied on Teutonic Knight support in keeping their Northern border safe from Lithuanian and Russian attacks.

In 1308 the grand master Heinrich von Ploetzke took his army to Danzig and drove the Brandenburgers out. He did this in part out of the generally friendly relationship with the king but also in the expectation to get paid 10,000 mark for his services.

The Teutonic Knights in Danzig were waiting for the money to arrive, but somehow the cheque got lost in the post. The citizens of Danzig, most of whom were German speaking traders and artisans did not like their new occupiers very much. They had got used to a much higher level of autonomy than the Knight brothers would allow them. A revolt broke out that was brutally suppressed. How brutal is a big debate, though the claims of 10,000 dead made by later Polish rulers is highly improbable.

The suppression of the revolt did not resolve the problem. King Wladislaw the Short was still not prepared to pay. It wasn’t just the lack of payment that irritated the knights, it was the assumption on the side of the king that he could call upon the Teutonic knights whenever he wanted, as if they were his vassals.

So to make clear what was what the Teutonic Knights decided to stay. They bought the rights to Pomerelia from the margraves of Brandenburg and formed an alliance. With that they now had a direct land bridge into the empire via the duchy of Pomerania and Brandenburg making them less dependent upon the Poles.

This as it turn out was not just a crime, it was worse, it was a mistake. The disagreement over Pomeralia and the city of Danzig poisoned the relationship between the Poles and the Teutonic Knight that when reading the comments on my Facebook page continues to this day.

Strategically Pomeralia and Danzig in particular were extremely important to Poland. It was their access to the Baltic Sea. Danzig stands at the mouth of the great Polish river, the Vistula where grain wood, salt and metals were shipped to the markets of Flanders, England and Norway.

In response the Teutonic Knights began a PR campaign against king Wladislaw the Short, encouraging both external and internal enemies to topple him. One of them was king John of Bohemia, the famous blind knight whose ostrich feathers and motto still grace the Prince of Wales arms.

After that things calmed down until the marriage of Jadwiga and Jagiello in 1386. That was a double blow. A catholic Lithuania meant no more crusades and hence no more tourists and even worse no purpose to the organisation. A combined Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth meant it was only a matter of time before they would came for the Teutonic Knights militarily.

The success of the Lithuanian campaign and the split between Vytautas and Jagiello gave the Grand master of the Teutonic Knights, Ulrich von Jungingen the impression that he was in a very strong position. Yes, the crusades as such were over and support from travelling knights could no longer be relied upon, but all in the Knight brothers were a superior force, easily able to take on the Poles and Lithuanians.

This is when we go from mistake to catastrophic mistake.

What ended the 10 years of relative calm was an uprising in Samogitia that the Teutonic Knights blamed on Vytautas. Ulrich von Jungingen demanded that Vytautas and Jagiello immediately ceased any further support to the Samogitians. That demand was seen as deeply insulting by both Poles and Lithuanians. In particular the Poles had come to trust Jagiello over the past 10 years and – contrary to expectations in Prussia – were willing to go to war for him.

Things weren’t improved when the matter was brought before king Wenceslaus of Bohemia who was asked to act as arbiter. Wenceslaus sided fully with the order, adding more fuel to the flames. One -on- one meetings between Jagiello and Jungingen also failed to resolve issues.

War was coming again.

Jagiello gathered his army at Plock, south of Kulm. One estimate said he gathered 18,000 Polish fighters and Vytautas brought him 11,000 men. These included not just Poles and Lithuanians, but also Bohemian and Moravian mercenaries, tartars, Rus’ians and Moldovans.

Ulrich von Jungingen relied on only about 10,000 cavalry from the order plus some support from the king of Bohemia and the last contingent of crusaders, roughly 15,000 in total.

These numbers are as always inexact. What most estimates have in common though was that the Poles and Lithuanians outnumbered the order’s forces 2 to one. That being said, the order operated as a close unit of men who had trained and fought together for a long time, whilst Jagiello’s forces were a wild mixture who had little coherence, not even in weapons, training, tactics or even language.

This was not a slam dunk.

Ulrich von Jungingen who had split his forces across the length of the frontier now brought his men together in pursuit. When they came to the burning ruins of the town of Gilgenberg the grand master lost his cool. The destruction he had witnessed along the way and he feared would be inflicted on his lands if he did not bring this to an end quickly urged him to double the pace and catch up with the Polish-Lithuanian forces.

At a place the Germans call Tannenberg, the Poles Grunberg and the Lithuanians Zalgiris the two armies came together. As you would expect from a confrontation that has mythical status in Polish, Lithuanian and in the past, German consciousness, quite a lot of it is disputed.

What seems to have happened is that the Teutonic Knights went for an all out attack on the position where they assumed Jagiello was standing. This may have been triggered by a feigned retreat or some other misunderstanding. What we know is that the Teutonic Knights, led by the grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen charged at the Polish centre driving a wedge into the Polish-Lithuanian forces. This charge came as far as the royal bodyguard but was held off. Meanwhile forces commanded by Vytautas attacked the knights’ flank. The result was a massacre. The grand master and his chief officers lay dead. His army fled along the narrow paths through the forest and were killed one by one. 8,000 soldiers died that day on either side, which suggests almost half the entire force of the Teutonic Knights had perished. Those who survived sought shelter in whichever castle they could find.

News of the defeat spread through europe and left people aghast. The mighty Teutonic Knights who many of the Europe’s aristocrats had met on their gap year and admired for their military skills had been all but wiped out. How was that possible? And what is going to happen next? Will the order collapse?

That is a story for another time, next week to be precise. I hope you will join us again.

Ah, and by the way, just in case you cannot remember, my Patreon account is at patreon.com/historyofthegermans and for one-time donations, go to historyofthegermans.com/support