Teutonic Order

Teutonic Order, religious order that played a major role in eastern Europe in the late Middle Ages and that underwent various changes in organization and residence from its founding in 1189/90 to the present. Its major residences, marking its major states of development, were: (1) Acre, Palestine (modern ʿAkko, Israel), its original home beginning with the Third Crusade (1189/90–c. 1291); (2) Marienburg, Prussia (modern Malbork, Pol.), the centre of its role as a military principality (1309–1525); (3) Mergentheim, Württemberg, Ger., to which it moved after its loss of Prussia (1525–1809); and (4) Vienna, where the order gathered the remains of its revenues and survives as a purely hospital order (from 1834).

Origin.

In 1189–90, when crusading forces were besieging Acre, some German merchants from Bremen and Lübeck formed a fraternity to nurse the sick there. After the capture of Acre (1191), this fraternity took over a hospital in the town and began to describe itself as the Hospital of St. Mary of the German House in Jerusalem. Pope Clement III approved it, and it adopted a rule like that of the original Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (i.e., the Knights of Malta).

The death of the Hohenstaufen emperor Henry VI in 1197, when he was planning a great expedition to Palestine, caused an important change: a number of German crusaders who had arrived in Palestine decided to return home. In order to fill the gap, the German princes and bishops, together with King Amalric II of Jerusalem, in 1198 militarized the fraternity, making it a religious order of knights. The new order was put under a monastic and military rule like that of the Templars. It received privileges from Popes Celestine III and Innocent III and extensive grants of land, not only in the kingdom of Jerusalem but also in Germany and elsewhere. Innocent III in 1205 granted the Teutonic knights the use of the white habit with a black cross.

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Poland: The arrival of the Teutonic Knights

The knights left Palestine forever toward the end of the Crusades, with the final fall of the country to Islām (1291).

Eastern Europe and Prussia.

Meanwhile, under the leadership of the grand master Hermann von Salza (reigned 1210–39), the Teutonic knights had already begun transferring their main centre of activity from the Middle East to eastern Europe. The order’s first European enterprise started in Hungary in 1211, when King Andrew II invited a group of the Teutonic Knights to protect his Transylvanian borderland against the Cumans by colonizing it and by converting its people to Christianity. The order was then granted extensive rights of autonomy; but the knights’ demands became so excessive that they were expelled from Hungary in 1225. By that time, however, a new opportunity was opening: a Polish duke, Conrad of Mazovia, with lands on the lower reaches of the Vistula River, needed help against the pagan Prussians.

Hermann von Salza proceeded carefully, in order to avoid a repetition of what the order had experienced in Transylvania. He already enjoyed the confidence of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II, whom he had served as a diplomat. So, when Conrad made his offer, Hermann in 1226 obtained from Frederick the so-called Golden Bull of Rimini as a legal basis for the settlement. By this charter, Frederick confirmed to Hermann and to the order not only the lands to be granted by Conrad but also those that the knights were to conquer from the Prussians. Later (1234), Hermann also secured privileges from Pope Gregory IX, which can be regarded as the second foundation charter of the order’s Prussian state: the papacy was ready to accept the order’s current and future conquests as the property of the Holy See and to grant them back to the order in perpetual tenure.

In 1233, led by the Landmeister (provincial leader) Hermann Balk and using an army of volunteer laymen recruited mainly from central Germany, the Teutonic Knights began the conquest of Prussia. During the next 50 years, having advanced from the lower Vistula River to the lower Neman (Niemen, Nemunas) River and having exterminated most of the native Prussian population (especially during the major rebellion of 1261–83), the order firmly established its control over Prussia.

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Although the order gave one-third of the conquered territory to the church and granted a large degree of autonomy to the newly developing towns in the area, it easily became the dominant power in Prussia. It worked to develop the region by building castles, by importing German peasants to settle in depopulated areas, by bestowing substantial estates on German and Polish nobles who became vassals of the order, and by monopolizing the lucrative Prussian grain trade, particularly after 1263, when the pope allowed the knights, who had previously been bound by a vow of poverty, to engage directly in trading activities.

In 1237, less than two years before Hermann von Salza’s death, the Order of the Brothers of the Sword (Schwertbrüderorden), also known as the Knights of the Sword, or the Livonian Order (founded 1202), was made a branch of the Teutonic Order, its head becoming Landmeister of Livonia. The Teutonic Order, however, never established such effective control over these northern provinces as it did over Prussia.

By 1309, when the order’s grand master established his residence at Marienburg, the order had created a strong feudal state that governed not only Prussia but also the eastern Baltic lands of the Livonian Knights (i.e., Courland, Livonia, and, after 1346, Estonia); Pomerelia, or Eastern Pomerania, including the city of Danzig (Gdańsk); and lands in central and southern Germany. During the following century the order demonstrated its power by continually, although unsuccessfully, trying to conquer and convert Lithuania; by actively protecting the merchant cities of the Hanseatic League; and by expanding its territories through purchase and conquest.

The order’s expansion and increasing power, however, aroused the hostility of both Poland, whose access to the Baltic Sea had been cut off, and Lithuania, whose territory the knights continued to menace despite Lithuania’s conversion to Christianity in 1387. Consequently, when a rebellion broke out against the order in Samogitia (1408), Poland and Lithuania joined forces and decisively defeated the knights at Grunwald (1410). Although the order was compelled to give up only Samogitia and the Dobrzyń land (Treaty of Toruń, 1411), its military might was broken. Subsequently, its authority and financial position also rapidly declined; it was unable to withstand the wars that Poland continued to wage, and when its own vassals joined the Poles in the Thirteen Years’ War (1454–66), the order was finally defeated. In 1466 it ceded Pomerelia, both banks of the Vistula, and the bishopric of Warmia (Ermland) to Poland (Treaty of Torún, 1466). The order retained the rest of Prussia, but its grand master became a vassal of the Polish king for that territory. Furthermore, the formerly exclusively German order was obliged to accept Polish members.

Decline and fall of the knights.

The Teutonic Order’s rule in Prussia came to an end in 1525, when the grand master Albert, under Protestant influence, dissolved the order there and accepted its territory as a secular duchy for himself under Polish suzerainty. In 1526 a new grand master, Walter of Cronenberg (Kronenberg), fixed his residence at Mergentheim in Franconia (Württemberg). After the loss of Prussia the order still retained in Europe several territories. But in 1558 the Livonian territory was lost, partitioned between Russia, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania. In 1580 the secession of Utrecht meant the loss of territory in the Low Countries. In the late 17th century Louis XIV secularized its possessions in France. In 1801 the Treaty of Luneville stripped the order of its German possession on the left bank of the Rhine. In 1809 the emperor Napoleon, at war with Austria, declared the order to be dissolved and distributed most of its remaining lands among other principalities.

The Austrian revival.

By the end of the Napoleonic wars the Teutonic Order retained only small territories in the Austrian domains and the Tyrol. In 1834 the Austrian emperor reestablished the order in Vienna, as an ecclesiastical institution, reserving the dignity of grand master for an archduke of his house. New statutes in 1839–40 limited the knights to charitable and pastoral activities and limited the order’s sisters to nursing. In 1871 Pope Pius IX approved new rules for the priests of the order. When the Habsburg empire collapsed in 1918, the last imperial grand master, Archduke Maximilian, gave way to a priest as grand master for the first time. A new rule of Nov. 27, 1929, emphasized religious discipline.

Currently the headquarters of the order are in Vienna (Singerstrasse 7), where it maintains a church and an archives of the order. Branch houses also exist in Bavaria, Hesse, and the Italian Tyrol.