The Northern Crusades (39 page)

The architects, sculptors and painters provided what was strictly necessary for worship and defence: the cathedral, two friaries, eighty pre-Reformation churches, the Brigittine convent at Nådendal, six castles, and shrines and frescoes in honour of the Virgin and St Henry. There were no chroniclers; only a few historical jottings survived to be
worked into a
Chronicon episcoporum Finlandensium
by Bishop Juusten in the sixteenth century. The cult of Henry the Martyr gave the province its main indigenous literary theme: the story of the Swedish bishop murdered by a Finn, but devoted in heaven to the peace and welfare of Finland, which was celebrated both in the Latin
legenda
, office, hymn (
Ramus virens
) and sequence (
Ecce magnus presbyter
), and in the Finnish poem
Piispa Henrikin surmaruno
. Not an impressive total, by the standards of, say, medieval Ireland; but the starting-point was a mainly un-christian, illiterate and ungoverned world, which in two centuries became a recognizably Catholic society.

In Prussia and Livonia also, Christian civilization meant an attempt to reproduce Western models in unpropitious and sometimes stultifying circumstances; but, thanks to the nature of the conquests and settlements, the seeds were taken from a more florid stock than Sweden could provide, and nourished in a richer soil. As early as 1270, a Paris-trained schoolman, Maurice of Reval, was lecturing to the Dominicans in Estonia. Since the cultural innovators – Hanseatic merchants, friars, Teutonic Knights and mission-bishops – belonged to organizations rooted in Germany, their innovations were utterly German. Since they were either celibate or endogamous, they were resistant or hostile to the cultural forms both of their conquered subjects and of their Russian or Polish rivals. They generated a civilization which continued to express two things, Catholic supremacy and German solidarity, long after the Holy War had ceased to absorb their energies and aspirations. Its main determinants were war and the accumulation of wealth. Its nurseries and sanctuaries were the castle and the borough. Its vehicles were the German and Latin languages, and types of architecture and design derived from the family of cultures contained within the Empire.

The castle developed from the fortified tower, which replaced the timber blockhouse, and all its forms betrayed its pedigree. The most elaborate was Marienburg, which was not only a fort but also a palace, a monastery, a parliament-house, a government office, an arsenal and a holy city, alerting the senses and awing the mind. The convent of knights and priest-brothers sang continual masses in the great chapel while the grand-master kept up the state of a prince, and the grand-commander and the treasurer conducted the business of the Order in their own suites. The inner citadel – the
Mittel
- and
Hochschloss
– covered over five acres of land by 1400, and at either end lay an outer castle and a
sizeable town. The Sire de Lannoy, who went there in 1412, reported that Marienburg contained arms and provisions enough to ‘maintain a garrison of a thousand persons for ten years or ten thousand for one year’.
¹⁶⁶
This all-purpose structure merely elaborated a pattern found all over Prussia and Livonia on a much smaller scale: a tower and a fortified quadrangle.

The square keep, or
Stock
, as it was called in Livonia, contained the bare essentials of military and monastic life: a chapel, a refectory (
Remter
), a dormitory and the commander’s chamber. The central quadrangle was a fortified yard containing kitchen, stables, workshops, armoury and sometimes parish churches. The need to preserve all the components of religion, wealth and authority behind walls led to rebuilding and enlargement in pacified areas, and this meant either emphasizing the cubic unity of the buildings or diversifying the parts by raising towers and roofs, and duplicating the quadrangle to form a rectangle. Most rebuildings of this kind took place in the fourteenth century, under the supervision of imported German architects, and in the more secure parts of Prussia the ingenuity and simplicity of their work expresses the supremacy of their masters in the plainest terms. From outside, the people saw only smooth cliffs of brick, soaring up from the
parcbam
, or levelled terraces, and presenting blind surfaces almost as far up as the battlements. The gateways defied entry, and the fortified latrines, or
dansker
, which projected from the top of the walls like truncated viaducts proclaimed to a humiliated world, ‘As for the dregs thereof, all the ungodly of the earth shall drink them’ (Psalm 75.10). The immense vaulted chambers of the interior, made necessary by the collective life (for example, the
Remter
of Marienburg, Arensburg, Heilsberg, and Allenstein), suggested rooms fit for giants, and the complexity of the roof-lines indicated a ‘city builded upon a hill’.

The forts along the Prussian frontier were much simpler in plan, and in Livonia, where stone was the usual building-material, the four-square layout was the commonest, without much elaboration. Even at Riga, the
Ordensschloss
remained a single massive quadrangle defended by two squat towers. But, wherever the Order and the mission-bishops ruled, their power and their culture shared the same intimidating barracks.

Outside the castles, the symbols of this imported culture were concentrated in towns – sizeable along the Vistula and the coast, otherwise small and, in Livonia, sparse. Here were the cathedrals, collegiate churches,
hospitals, town-halls, guildhalls, friaries and chapels, all modelled on the prevailing patterns of Westphalia or the north German coast and simplified or coarsened to fit in with the defensive system. Tall spires signalled to the seafarer and reminded the burghers of the Lübeck Marienkirche, which many must have visited. Massive gatehouses defied unauthorized entry, and, if the community expanded (as at Elbing), each new parish was walled and stockaded to localize the two perpetual dangers – fire and enemy attack. All public buildings spoke of Germany, and the Holy War.

The builders both of castles and of churches tended to emphasize two simple shapes: the rectangle and the triangle. In Prussia and Livonia, they are displayed with economy and directness. The cathedrals of Frauenburg and Königsberg, the large churches of Danzig, Braunsberg, Wormditt and Rössel, and the smaller churches of Santoppen and Falkenau, are long boxes, weatherproof, secure and structurally sound. Their towers advertise their presence to the surrounding countryside, and their patterned, stepped and rurreted gables reassure the citizens that there is money to spend on triangles of fancy brickwork as well as on rectangles of plain wall. But solidity is never risked by wide ‘Perpendicular’ windows or by outgrowths of aisle or chapel, or by finicky Frenchified buttresses. Elegant brickwork is used like corrugated iron. The result is both perfect and perfunctory.

Inside, the wood- and stone-carvers worked to instruct, delight and welcome. The light denied on the outside of the castles streamed in through the many windows of the inner quadrangles, and the rooms were sometimes blazing with paintwork and encaustic tiles. Subterranean furnaces sent hot air circulating below the floors, and the cloisters offered comfort and delight to the stroller. If the Teutonic Knights used architecture to intimidate others, they used interior decoration to please themselves and their guests, and, beginning at Marienburg, the fashion for elaborate painting, carving and tile-work spread to other leading castles and to the churches and the halls of the burghers. Donors commissioned craftsmen from Silesia, Thuringia, Poland and Prussia itself to beautify their places of worship with crucifixes, triptychs, carved panels, images, friezes and ornamented capitals. For most of the fourteenth century, they were producing stocky, bright, and lifelike effigies which enacted the doctrines and legends of the church in blunt tableaux with widely opened eyes. There was nothing sinuous, stylish or sophisticated
cated about this work.
Hausfrau
madonnas and square-jawed archangels referred directly to the gospel text and to the street, rather than to the canons of elegance and ideal form which stamped the contemporary images of northern France and East Anglia. The poor remnant of these figures collected in the museum at Gdansk (Danzig) gives the impression of a modest and devout congregation posing in its best clothes. The faith ringed and sheltered by awesome defences reveals itself as homely and approachable, fully bearing out the description of Prussian piety penned on the eve of the Reformation by the great Dominican historian Simon Grunau. By then, fashions had altered, and the artists were infusing their work with extremes of feeling.

Such were the cradles and the images of Christian civilization in the Order’s dominions. They stood out like knots in a net of roads and colonized reclamations that was spread out into the underlying forest, marsh and scrub. The net was full of holes and interstices, where alien subjects lived unredeemed lives within sight of the steeple and the battlement, and it stopped short at the wilderness to the east. Between Prussia and Livonia, Christian culture was a strip of coast road, squeezed between the Baltic and the primeval forest. In Livonia, the net resembles a cobweb, stretched to breaking point between the quays of Reval and Riga, and the frontier outposts. It is not surprising that the people who lived on these flimsy structures expressed themselves in forms of worship and literature that joined them to the mainstream of Catholicism, rather than making concessions to what they thought of as barbarism.

The dominant cult was that of the Mother of God, patroness of the Teutonic Order, of the see of Riga, of Livonia and Prussia. The Order impressed her stamp on all it did. The military routine was geared to her feasts;
winter-reysa
normally began on the Purification (2 February),
sommer-reysa
on either the Assumption (15 August) or the Nativity of the Virgin (8 September). Grand-Master von Kniprode was renowned for the redoubled observances in her honour which he ordered before every campaign, and Grand-Master von Feuchtwangen ordered a
Salve regina
or an
Ave
to be said by every member of the Order every hour of the day, as early as 1309. The Conception, at that date a feast more generally observed by the Eastern than by the Western Church, was instituted as a feast of the Order by Grand-Master von Altenburg in 1340, and in 1390 Zöllner von Rothenstein authorized the Visitation to be kept throughout Prussia on 2 July, as a sign of his adhesion to the Roman papacy
during the Schism. In the thirteenth century, the castles of Marienburg, Marienwerder and Frauenburg were named after the Virgin Mary; in the fourteenth, another Marienburg and Marienwerder on the Niemen, and a Marienburg and Marienhausen in Livonia.

For the Teutonic Knights, she was mainly a war-goddess. The Livonians inherited this belief from Bishop Albert and the Sword-Brothers, and embroidered her icon on the master’s battle-flag, but the Prussians also claimed her as protectress, and set up an eight-foot outdoor mosaic of her on the apse of the
Hochschloss
chapel at Marienburg, to watch over the countryside. (It was destroyed in 1945.) She turned defeat into victory. In 1330 she appeared to King Wladyslaw of Poland and demanded, ‘Why do you destroy my country?’ The miraculous triumphs of Strawe (1348) and Rudau (1370) were attributed to her personal intervention. Von Kniprode rewarded her for Strawe by building a Cistercian nunnery at Königsberg, and for Rudau by founding a house of Austin friars at Heiligenbeil.

The favourite male saints were the soldiers Sebastian, Laurence, Maurice and George, and the missionaries Andrew and Bartholomew; their cults reflected the Order’s main concerns, but were not restricted to it. St Maurice was seen as the patron of the young Hanseatic merchants lodging in Livonian towns, and they formed a guild in his name which was called the
Schwartzenhaupter
, after their Moor’s-head emblem. And, as in the rest of Europe, it was Christ the victim, rather than Christ the victor or the judge, who received most attention here, particularly in the cults of Corpus Christi and the Five Wounds. In the 1330s Grand-Master Luder of Brunswick insisted on hearing the mass of the Passion every Friday, and the image of the lacerated body was an emotive symbol for the wounds sustained by Christendom at the hands of the heathen – among other things (see
p. 62
above).

These were the most visible forms taken by the faith in the Order’s colonies, apart from acts of war. The number and intensity of the cults is not surprising, in countries run by monks and bishops, and the comparatively rich literature produced here between 1290 and the Reformation was also the work of the Teutonic Order.

The knight-brothers were seldom scholars, and were often derided for their illiteracy; but illiteracy meant ignorance of Latin. There is evidence that many knight-brothers were practised artists in their own language, and that among priest-brothers there were always good Latinists
and teachers. The need to instruct non-Latinists in the faith, and the pleasure of rhyming in German led to the growth of a vernacular literature inside the Order, but outside Prussia, by the 1290s; from then on wards, Prussian convent libraries, schools (at Elbing and Torun) and writers appear. Mary and the Old Testament are the dominant themes of their German verse. By 1300 there was a
Passional
, a collection of saints’ lives and passions adapted to praise the Virgin, and
Der sünden widerstreit
, in which Lady Spirit triumphs over Lady Sin thanks to Mary’s assistance. Then came a number of poems associated with Grand-Master Luder, himself author of a verse legend of St Barbara (now lost; a Latin version survives), who commissioned a series of verse renderings of biblical texts: Maccabees, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. These were continued under Grand-Master von Altenburg with a paraphrase of Job, and a
Historien der alden ê
, an abridgement of the Old Testament and ancient history in 6000 verses. Such works were probably read aloud at common meals to inspire the knight-brothers with the scriptural prototypes of war-heroism.