Teutonic Knights (17 page)

While Ladislas the Short and Henryk of Silesia were contending for the crown in the south, the dukes of Brandenburg had moved into Pomerellia again, claiming that land for themselves. In the late 1260s Duke Mestwin had sought their aid against his brother and the Teutonic Knights. The price was Mestwin becoming a vassal of the ambitious dukes. The feudal relationship, however, was rarely a quiet one. There was a quarrel in 1272, during which the Brandenburgers had occupied most of the duchy, but after failing to capture Danzig the dukes had declared themselves satisfied with a settlement that confirmed their status as Mestwin’s overlords. Later, when Mestwin willed his lands to his Piast relatives, the Brandenburg dukes were not strong enough to make valid their right to dispose of escheated lands. In 1295 Przemysł made a brief visit to Pomerellia but was able to heal only a few of the many angry feelings left by Mestwin’s quarrels with the bishops, abbots, and vassals. Przemysł’s death the following year brought renewed chaos to the north – his daughter, who inherited a claim to his lands, was married to Wenceslas II; this made the Bohemian monarch the leading candidate to be king of Poland, and Wenceslas immediately moved to occupy Cracow. Meanwhile, Leszek the Black and Ladislas the Short each raised claims to Pomerellia, and Henryk of Silesia tried to seize Great Poland. It was under these dizzying circumstances that the Swenza family rose to prominence, and it was no surprise that they recognised Wenceslas II as king and worked closely with his Brandenburg supporters, just as they did with Wenceslas III during his short reign (1305 – 6).

There was no way for the Swenzas to foresee that in 1306 Ladislas the Short would become king, nor even to anticipate that his short visit to Pomerellia that year would be such a disaster – Ladislas, wanting to punish the Swenzas for their disloyalty (and perhaps confiscate their lands in order to pay his expenses), ordered their arrest on charges of treason. The frightened nobles appealed to Brandenburg, whose aged duke soon occupied all Pomerellia except Danzig, and in Danzig only the citadel held out. The town, with its many German merchants, surrendered without fighting.

As the siege continued, the royalist commander at Danzig twice asked Ladislas to come to his aid, but he was told that since no rescue could be expected, he should seek aid from the Teutonic Knights. He did so. That fateful request was to mark the end of the first great era of crusading in Prussia, the era when all the enemies of paganism customarily co-operated. Nobody seems to have foreseen that the quarrel between the Prussian master and the king would endure as long as it did, but in retrospect it seems so logical that some historians have viewed the ensuing events as premeditated aggression.

This suspicion is associated with the change in the order’s leadership. Conrad Sack retired in early 1306 on grounds of health. His last campaign had been a winter attack on Gardinas – his men had clambered over the walls under the cover of a snowstorm and had overwhelmed the sleepy garrison, but they had been unable to take the keep. His successor, the well-born Sieghard von Schwarzburg, the castellan of Culm, resigned after only a few months. The electors then chose Heinrich von Plötzke, a notable warrior who had been sent to Prussia by the grand master only a few months before.

Master Sieghard had sent a garrison to join the embattled royalist Pomerellians in Danzig. There was nothing particularly notable about this. This action and the little that followed immediately from it were considered so insignificant at the time that the chroniclers, Peter von Dusburg and Nicholas von Jeroschin, did not interrupt their narratives to mention it. But it was an important step. From that moment on, the Teutonic Order was deeply enmeshed in the Pomerellian-Polish issues; afterward, the more Heinrich von Plötzke learned about Ladislas’ plans for Pomerellia, the less willing he was to turn the province over to him.

Heinrich von Plötzke, acting on Ladislas’ request, drove the Brandenburg forces out of Danzig in September of 1308. The citizens apparently welcomed the new occupying force at first, but became very impatient when no movement could be discerned in returning authority to royal administrators. In November the citizens staged an abortive uprising in which considerable blood was spilled – most of it belonging to the German merchants and artisans who had settled the city and made it into a mercantile centre more important than Elbing or Thorn.

The Teutonic Knights faced an unpleasant choice after putting down the revolt – to evacuate the hostile city and give up any hope of being paid for their services, or to finish the job in such a way as to make negotiations with Ladislas easier. Heinrich chose the latter – he captured Dirschau and every other stronghold in possession of the Brandenburgers. Not long afterward he presented a bill for services rendered – 10,000 Marks. Ladislas was as lacking in money and tact as he was in stature, and he refused to pay. Also, there was an implication that he expected the order to serve him whenever he summoned it. The refusal to pay the order for its services was a mistake on Ladislas’ part that set back Polish unification for many years and brought about the fateful confrontation of Poland and the Teutonic Order that was so bothersome to him and his successors.

Somehow the lesson of Riga, which the Teutonic Knights had made war against since 1298, was lost. Perhaps this was the result of pride. Ladislas probably could not imagine himself being treated like a mere archbishop of Riga. Perhaps, like many successful people, he had come to rely upon his remarkable luck and his demonstrated knack for escaping dangerous situations. He had not got as far as he had by deferring to powerful opponents or accepting meekly whatever happened. Like all successful Piasts, he relied on persuasion, personality, intimidation, and finally force, escalating the pressure as each stage failed to produce the desired results.

Master Heinrich announced that he would keep Pomerellia in his possession until the matter could be settled.
²¹
His diplomats contacted the Brandenburg dukes, who in 1309 sold their claims of sovereignty to the Teutonic Order. The price was 10,000 Marks. That was as good a claim to possess a land as most rulers had; there was, after all, no ‘ethnic identity’ to most states – one was subject to a ruler, who usually cared little what the language or ethnic background of the taxpayers or vassals was. To be sure, people were aware of ethnicity, but class status was more important. The crisis of 1307 – 10 committed the Teutonic Knights to holding Pomerellia permanently.

This was the Prussian master’s answer to what he saw as a threat from a unified Polish kingdom. Heinrich would not allow Ladislas to misuse his knights and abuse their friendship, nor to insinuate a claim of sovereignty over them; instead, they would use the resources of West Prussia (as Pomerellia is best known in the English-speaking world) and the alliance of Brandenburg to defy him. With the taxes and warriors of West Prussia added to their own, and the supply lines to Germany guaranteed, the Teutonic Knights believed that they could defeat any Polish army sent against them. For many decades this was indeed the case.

The action was wrong and, worse – as the proverb goes – it was a mistake. But that was true only in retrospect. At the time and for many decades thereafter the Teutonic Knights thought that the entire process had been properly handled, that it was a stroke of genius. Master Heinrich could justify the act to himself, to his membership, and to most impartial European nobles. Certainly the order had acted to the letter of the law, which was more than many rulers did in expanding their territories. This was an era when the letter of the law was thought more important than the spirit, and the question of national ties was usually considered irrelevant – dynasties went from country to country, and provinces were won and lost, bought and sold, without any concern for the wishes of the inhabitants. The nationalism of the times was that of the knighthood more than of any other group, and at this moment the West Prussian knights and gentry looked upon Ladislas the Short as an oppressor. By all these accepted standards, the Teutonic Knights had acted responsibly and nobly. But here was a case that was soon to be outside accepted standards. The Polish knights and nobles did not acquiesce as expected; they stood behind Ladislas and his successors in demanding the ‘return’ of a province that had been only loosely connected to the historical kingdom through most of the thirteenth century. Polish national feeling made Pomerellia a test case of patriotism, and the general anti-German feelings of the time became centred on the Teutonic Order. As West Prussia became a point of contention, neither the Polish kingdom nor the Teutonic Knights were able to deal effectively with problems on their eastern frontiers.

Polish hostility would make it impossible for the Teutonic Knights to win the crusade against the Samogitian and Lithuanian pagans, but we might bear in mind that even if the Teutonic Knights had foreseen the long-term implications of their action, they had no good alternative to the response they made to Ladislas’ short-term challenge. Moreover, Prussia was now becoming more central to the order’s activities than before. Two decades after the loss of Acre to the Saracens, the German convents had reluctantly concluded that the chances of returning to the Holy Land were slim. They decided to concentrate their resources on supporting the perpetual crusade against the Baltic pagans.

It was in this context that the grand master, Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, transferred his seat from Venice to Marienburg. First, this recognised that long-term complaints from Prussia were valid. For many years the Prussian knights had felt that their interests were being ignored by the distant grand master, and the depth of their anger had become clear in a stormy grand chapter meeting in Elbing in 1303, during which the Prussian and Livonian delegates argued with the Venetian and German representatives over the resignation of the grand master, Gottfried von Hohenlohe. The order was almost in a state of schism until Gottfried’s death eight years later. In those years Siegfried von Feutchtwangen had not dared to cross the Alps even for inspections or to recruit crusaders, lest he offend those knights who wanted to wait for an expedition to the Holy Land. Secondly, the situation in Italy was becoming perilous. In 1303 the king of France had arranged for the kidnapping of Pope Boniface VIII, and the next pope had moved to Avignon where both he and the king of France believed he would be ‘safer’. Four years after royal agents had mishandled the holy father, they arrested the entire membership of the Templars in France and put them on trial for heresy. Those knights confessed to grotesque and improbable crimes, and later many were burned at the stake and their possessions confiscated. In early 1308 the king of England similarly arrested the Templars in his lands.

As Siegfried von Feuchtwangen watched this development, he concluded that it would be prudent to reside in a somewhat safer locality – there were no powerful friends of the Teutonic Knights ruling in Italy or Germany at this moment, and the wealth of the order was a tempting prize for hard-pressed rulers. Moreover, the grand master did not have historic ties to Venice; that was merely a convenient place to monitor politics in the Mediterranean. He saw no hope of organising a crusade large enough to reestablish a foothold in the Holy Land in the next few years, and therefore any knights stationed outside the Baltic would not be of much use to anyone. If by a miracle the crusaders could return to the Holy Land, the Teutonic Knights would join them, but meanwhile they would concentrate on the war against the pagans. Siegfried von Feuchtwangen established permanent residence at Marienburg in 1309, but it would be the next grand master, Karl von Trier, who actually reasserted the authority of his office over all the regional officers, making the grand master once again the leader of all Teutonic Knights; by then the organisation had a firm grasp of what its goals were – the extirpation of militant paganism in the Baltic.

Siegfried von Feuchtwangen named new officers, giving them the more exalted titles formerly used in the Holy Land. He also appointed advocates to rural districts and established a convent of knights in Danzig. As prosperity returned, Danzig became the leading commercial centre in the Baltic. Rule by the Teutonic Knights was no longer seen by the patrician burghers and artisans as an oppressive despotism.