The Teutonic Order (German: Deutscher Orden;
Latin: Ordo domus Sanctæ Mariæ Theutonicorum) was a
crusading military order
under Roman Catholic religious vows which was formed at
the end of the 12th century in Palestine to give medical aid to pilgrims to the holy places. They received Papal orders for crusades to take and hold Jerusalem for Latin
Christianity. They were based at Acre (Akko). They wore white coats with a black cross.
When the mission of the order in Palestine was nearing its end, the Teutonic
Knights moved their headquarter to Venice and offered their services to Christian
rulers confronted with hostile non-Christian neighbors. In 1211, Andrew II of Hungary
accepted their services and granted them district of Burzenland in Transylvania. Andrew had been involved in negotiations for the marriage of his
daughter with the son of Hermann, the Landgrave of Thuringia, whose vassals
included the family of Hermann of Salza, the new grand master of
the Teutonic Order. Led by a brother called Theoderich, the Order defended Hungary against the neighbouring Cumans. In 1224 they petitioned Pope Honorius III to be placed directly under the authority of the Papal
See, rather than of the King of Hungary. King Andrew responded by expelling them in 1225.
At that time Konrad I Mazowiecki, duke of Masovia in northwestern Poland, appealed to the Knights to defend his realm and to subdue the
native tribes in Prussia, giving the Order the Chelmno Land as a fief (1226) for the time until the conquest was over. Soon the Teutonic knights annexed part of the smaller order of
Bracia Dobrzynscy and their Dobrzyn Land. The conquest of Prussia was
accomplished with great bloodshed over more than 50 years, during which the Prussians were subjugated and forced to adopt
Christianity. Eventually the Order transferred its headquarters to a huge brick castle it built at Malbork (Marienburg) on the Nogat River south of Gdansk (Danzig). The Order did not conquer Prussia in order to incorporate it into
Poland, but instead ruled it under permits issued by both the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor as a sovereign Teutonic Order state, comparable to the
arrangement of the Knights Hospitallers in Rhodes and later in Malta.
The Order induced the immigration of many thousands of colonists from Germany and the Netherlands, founded numerous towns and cities, and built a number of castles (Order Castles (Ordensburgen in German)), to defend the
territory against attacks from Lithuania and Poland, with which the Order was at war many times during the 14th and 15th centuries.
Among the cities founded by the Order was Königsberg (1255), later capital of
the German province of East Prussia (Ostpreussen) and, after World War II, renamed Kaliningrad, the administrative center of the Soviet Russian enclave
of the same name. Many knights from western Europe, including some from England and
France, journeyed to Prussia to participate in the wars with Lithuania, which remained
non-Christian until the end of the 14th century, much later than the rest
of eastern Europe.
When the order of the Livonian Brothers
of the Sword was absorbed into the Teutonic Order in 1237, its territorial rule extended over Prussia, Livonia, Semigalia, and Estonia. Their next aim was to convert Orthodox
Russia to Roman
Catholicism, but that idea had to be dropped in the wake of the disastrous Battle on the Ice (1242).
The crusading rationale for the Teutonic Order's state finally ended when Lithuania officially converted to Christianity after
1386. The grandduke of Lithuania, Jogaila, was baptised, married the queen of Poland
Jadwiga, and became king Ladislaus II of Poland. This initiated an alliance between the two countries and created a
formidable opponent for the Teutonic Knights.
King Albert of Sweden conceded Gotlandia to the Teutonic Order as a pledge (similar to a fiefdom), with the understanding that they would eliminate the piratical Victual Brothers from their strategic island base. An invasion force under
Grand Master Konrad of
Jungingen conquered the island in 1398, destroyed Visby and drove the Victual Brothers out of Gotland and the Baltic Sea.
In 1410 at the Battle of
Grunwald (also known as the battle of Tannenberg), a Polish-Lithuanian army
decisively defeated the Order and broke its military power. The Grand Master, Ulrich von Jungingen, and most of the Order's higher dignitaries fell on the battlefield. The
Polish-Lithuanian army then besieged the capital of the Order, Marienburg (Malbork) castle, but was unable to take it. When peace
was made, the Order managed to retain essentially all of its territories.
In 1454 gentry and the burghers of western Prussia rose up against the Order in the "War
of the Cities" or Thirteen Year War, at the end of which the
Order recognized Polish crown rights over Prussia's western half
(subsequently Royal Prussia) while retaining eastern Prussia under
nominal Polish overlordship (Second Treaty of Thorn,
1466). Eastern Prussia (subsequently Ducal Prussia) was also lost to the Order when in 1525 its grand
master, Albert of Brandenburg, converted to Lutheranism and assumed the title and rights of hereditary Duke of Prussia.
A new Grand Magistery was then established in Mergentheim in Württemberg, and the grand masters, often members of the great German families
(and, after 1761, by members of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine), continued to preside over the Order's considerable holdings in Germany until 1809, when Napoleon ordered its dissolution and the Order lost its last secular holdings.
The order continued to exist, headed by Habsburgs through the First World War, and today operates primarily as a charitable organization.
The Order and its relations with its neighbours (Poland, the Duchy of Masovia and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) are the main motive in a novel by the nationalistic Polish author and
Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz, called
Krżzyząacy (or, in English, The Cross
Bearers).
Grand Masters (Hochmeister) of the Teutonic Order, 1198-present
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