Teutonic Knights (18 page)

Up to 1320 the Teutonic Knights did not consider Ladislas a serious threat. They had no reason to see him as a military genius or even a particularly good administrator, and they knew that conflicts broke out wherever he appeared, creating military chaos that he was able to repress only with difficulty. They must have welcomed his attacks on relatives, since that practically guaranteed that the Masovian dukes would support the order politically and militarily.

The Polish clergy was initially divided over whether to recognise Ladislas, but that ended when the hostile bishop of Cracow went into exile. Later Ladislas obtained the support of the archbishop of Gniezno, the chief prelate of the kingdom. Still, it was not until 20 January 1320 that he was crowned king, and the coronation took place without prior papal blessing. This awkward by-product of the quarrel of the German emperor and the Avignon pope created problems in the short term, but long term it established the Polish monarchy as independent of papal politics. It also marked the rebirth of the Polish monarchy on a hereditary basis, father to son, rather than passing the crown among all surviving brothers before giving it to the eldest son of the eldest brother, as ancient practice dictated. Moreover, Ladislas, being from the north of the country, wanted to possess Pomerellia, whereas most competing Piasts were interested only in Silesia. Also, he was a stubborn, vengeful man who did not forget past slights such as those given by the Teutonic Knights.

By 1320 Ladislas had learned much from his many defeats. Most importantly he had finally understood that one should not start a war without some hope of winning. Since he had no hope of victory over the Teutonic Knights at that time, he concentrated on reorganising his state on a feudal basis; and his appeals to the pope laid the foundation for future legal challenges to the order’s possession of West Prussia, Danzig, and Culm.

When the Rus’ian prince of Galicia and Volhynia died in 1323, Ladislas sought to have Boleslaw of Masovia inherit his territories, but Gediminas of Lithuania made it clear that no broad swathe of lands along his western and southern borders could be transferred to a Piast duke without his permission. Negotiations over this revealed that Poland and Lithuania perceived common interests; most importantly, they had enemies – Tatars on the steppes, Teutonic Knights along the northern coasts – that could be resisted effectively if they worked together. An alliance was arranged. Gediminas sent daughters to the Masovian dukes, and Ladislas’ fifteen-year-old son, Casimir (1310 – 70), wedded Aldona, an appealing Lithuanian princess. Aldona bought joy again to a court that had been saddened by the deaths of Casimir’s two elder brothers. She went about in the company of beautiful maidens and musicians, and for a while her young husband loved her deeply. Later, when Casimir began pursuing other women, he abandoned her to his mother’s domestic tyranny.

Ladislas was by now a wily diplomat. In early 1326 he signed a truce with the Teutonic Order that seemed to repudiate his Lithuanian alliance. Without much question the grand master probably thought that he was dividing the order’s enemies and diverting the king to a war against the Tatars – Ladislas had recently obtained a papal indulgence ‘for the defence of the Catholic faith in war or battle in the kingdom of Poland or in any other Christian land or in areas adjacent to the abovementioned kingdom or near to it inhabited or possessed by schismatics, Tatars, or any other mixture of pagan nations’. But Ladislas’ actual target was Brandenburg, whose dukes had been staunch supporters of crusading. In the spring he allowed fiercely pagan Lithuanians to cross his domains, to fall without warning on German villages and towns, ravaging districts that had never felt a military threat from pagans even during the most hard-fought campaigns of the thirteenth century.

A chronicler contemporary to these events expressed the crusaders’ outrage at the devastation of churches, the desecration of the host, the murder of priests and burning of convents, and the torture of prisoners of both sexes. He claimed that those scenes horrified even the Poles who had accompanied the pagans. He reported incidents that have the ring of eyewitness accounts: of pagan warriors quarrelling so seriously over one beautiful girl that a leader stepped forward, cut her in two, and said, ‘now she’s worth nothing. Each can have the part that pleases him’; and the nun who begged for death rather than lose her virginity, and was dispatched by the sword of a co-operative pagan after appropriate prayers. The Teutonic Knights used the stories to inflame popular feeling against the pagans and their Polish allies. A rumour circulated that the Lithuanian leader, David of Gardinas, had been murdered by a Polish knight, and many wondered if the Polish alliance with Lithuania would be ended by this general fiasco.

The Teutonic Knights did not await the expiration of the truce to take revenge for Ladislas’ attack on their ally. They drew up alliances with Piast princes that threatened Ladislas’ very grip on the Polish crown, first with Henryk of Silesia, later with Boleslaw of Volhynia-Galicia. The first treaty fairly burned with angry words denouncing Ladislas, accusing him of breaking the peace, aiding pagans in ravaging Christian lands, and of being an inhuman tyrant. Later Duke Henryk and his brothers became lay members of the Teutonic Order.

The grand master was now Werner von Orseln, the former castellan of Ragnit and grand commander. Although he was an enthusiastic proponent of war against the pagans, there was little fighting during the next three years. This was not due to Ladislas’ actions, but because the emperor-elect and the pope were at war, making it impossible to recruit crusaders from Germany.

The long history of the Holy Roman Empire is marked by recurring conflicts between emperor and pope. The particular quarrel of this era was different because neither party had sufficient real power to harm the other significantly; their feud was characterised by few actions stronger than harsh words and empty threats. In 1326, after the pope laid an interdict over Germany, suspending all church services, the grand master summoned representatives to a grand chapter in Marienburg to discuss the matter. The knights and priests voted to support the emperor, Louis IV of Wittelsbach, duke of Bavaria.

At this same meeting the delegates voted on a number of changes in the statutes. The principal innovation was to revise the form of worship service, but later generations remembered the meeting best for a subsequent forgery that gave the German master authority to remove an incompetent grand master.

Grand Master Werner’s first campaign, in 1327, was to the south along both banks of the Vistula, a territory King Ladislas was holding in his effort to assert royal authority over his Masovian relatives. Werner first cleared Polish forces from Dobrin and Płock, then pushed on into Kujavia. When his attack on Brzesc failed, Werner proposed a truce. He may have thought that he had taught Ladislas a lesson. If so, he was mistaken. This conflict was only the beginning of a long war. Ladislas accepted the truce, but was only waiting for the proper moment to strike back hard at his opponents.

Not realising what he had taken on, Werner proceeded with plans to transfer his forces east for an advance into Samogitia. Replacing the garrison of Livonian knights in Memel with Prussian knights gave the Livonian master additional troops for his siege of Riga; also, it made it easier for the Prussian marshal to co-ordinate operations up the Nemunas River. Werner then struck across the wilderness toward Gardinas, the fortress protecting the water route westward across the swamps and lakes to the Narew River and then to the Bug River, the easiest way to travel from Masovia and Volhynia to Lithuania. He employed a clever stratagem to lure the enemy into a headlong pursuit, then ambushed the surprised pagans. The Teutonic Knights then burned an area around Gardinas thirty miles across. Some Lithuanian nobles, either concluding that Gediminas could no longer protect them or being his personal enemies, came to Prussia with their wives and children, accepted baptism, and served in the crusader armies.

About this time Werner lost the use of Christmemel as a forward base on the Nemunas River. Supposedly, warning of a portending disaster was observed a year before, when three knights saw a star moving east from the constellation Aquarius. Of course, there was no way to interpret this as a prediction that an earthslide would destroy Christmemel’s defences. The foundation of the wooden fort gave way and some walls collapsed. Inspecting the damage, the grand master realised that he could not repair it immediately. Therefore, at the conclusion of a magnificent banquet he set fire to the ruins and abandoned the site temporarily.

King John of Bohemia (1296 – 1346) was an extraordinary man by any standard. Crowned at the age of fourteen, he was an inveterate traveller and campaigner who was embroiled in so many quarrels that contemporaries said, ‘nothing without King John’. In his early thirties, he left the government of Bohemia to his vassals so that he could concentrate on foreign adventures. His most persistent ambition was to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. Unfortunately for him, it was impossible to raise a Christian army powerful enough to challenge the Turks, so he accepted Samogitia as a reasonable substitute. In the winter of 1328 – 9 he came to Prussia with a large number of Bohemian, German, and Polish nobles and knights. He was also accompanied by the French troubadour, Guillaume de Machaut, who was to compose a poetic description of John’s exploits. Grand Master Werner called up an estimated 350 Teutonic Knights and 18,000 foot soldiers. The combined army was so large that the participants expected to deal the Samogitians a fatal blow similar to that landed by Ottokar II of Bohemia the previous century. John wanted a victory so spectacular that cities in Samogitia would be named after him, just as Königsberg had been named to honour Ottokar.
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The crusaders marched across frozen swamps and rivers to an inland castle, where their demonstration of power persuaded the garrison to ask for terms, which, in turn, provoked a dispute among the crusaders. Werner argued for resettling the garrison in Prussia; he compared the pagans to wolves who would soon take off for the woods and resume their evil ways. The chivalrous king from Bohemia, however, insisted that the pagans be given a courteous and honourable baptism, after which they be allowed to remain in possession of the castle. John prevailed. Soon priests had baptised 6,000 men, women, and children.

This generous policy might have been wise if the crusaders had gone on to occupy all Samogitia, but they did not have the opportunity. At that moment news arrived that Ladislas had invaded Culm on the same day that the crusaders had marched into the wilderness. The messenger had ridden five days to urge the grand master to send the army back to protect Prussia. Werner and John reluctantly turned back to Culm, arriving too late to catch Ladislas. Meanwhile, the newly baptised Samogitians rebelled.

John and Werner believed that it would be impossible to invade Samogitia again until the grand master had eliminated King Ladislas’ threat to Culm. Moreover, they were concerned about the question of honour, which was easily as important as the strategic situation: they had to take revenge for Ladislas’ violation of the truce. In addition they had to punish Ladislas of Masovia (d.1343), whom they now considered a vile traitor to the Christian cause. In March of 1329, Werner and John signed a formal treaty of alliance. John asserted his claims to the Polish throne by right of inheritance and marriage, a fact that became important when his queen surrendered her hereditary claims to West Prussia to the grand master. They then invaded Masovia and Kujavia, devastating vast areas on both sides of the Vistula River and forcing Ladislas to plead for a truce.

Before hostilities ended, John had made Ladislas of Masovia become his vassal, and the Teutonic Knights had occupied Dobrin, the province that protected the southern approach to Culm. A year later John sold his share of the conquered areas to Werner.