630

The German Order

[1190-1255 destinies of Prussia. While Emperor and Pope each declared that the country owed allegiance to him alone, the power to which it actually became subject was that of the German Order of Knights. The youngest of the great Orders which owed their origin to the enthusiasm of the Crusades, had, like the others, taken its origin from small beginnings; in this case from the charitable efforts of German crusading knights co-operating with those of Lübeck and Hamburg merchants to provide for their afflicted countrymen in the course of the long siege of Acre (1190). Here the Order was afterwards duly established under its actual founder, Duke Frederick of Swabia, the second son of the great Barbarossa. Favoured by both Popes and Emperors, it had within a single generation distanced both the Templars and the Knights of St John, and was regarded as the most powerful association of Knights in the Western world. Its outlying settlements (Balleien) spread over both Italy and Germany; and its great days began with the election to the High Mastership of the Thuringian, Hermann von Salza (1210), whom his great patron, Emperor Frederick II, created a Prince of the Empire, the Imperial eagle thus finding his way into the Black Cross of the Order. He was not only a most able politician who in times of bitter hostility between Pope and Emperor was the friend of both, but also a great statesman who perceived that the task of the German Knights was no longer specifically in the East, but wherever they could render real service to the cause of Christianity and civilisation. In Transylvania they began in small the experiment which on a larger scale they were to repeat in Prussia. What Hermann von Salza could not know was that his Order was after all only an aftergrowth of the crusading spirit; and that chivalry, even if fired with religious enthu siasm, could no longer do more than supplement and aid in its expansive action the conquering impulse of commercial enterprise.

Starting from the Culm lands, made over to Hermann and his Knights in 1226 by the Duke of Masovia, a vassal of the Polish Crown, as its base of action, the German Order was to invade Prussia and conquer it to the honour and glory of God. But the High Master took care at the outset to obtain for himself and his successors investment with all the rights of a Prince of the Empire over all the Prussian lands of which the Order might possess itself. Its advance was promoted, while its design of controlling the eastern coast of the Baltic was indicated, by the union effected by him between his Order and that of the Sword, which had subdued Livonia (1237). Still, the conquest of Prussia, a process carried on by a small and compact body of assailants against a population which can hardly have reached a quarter of a million, occupied rather more than half a century. Neither the advance to the north-eastern corner, where to this day Memel is the northeastern boundary-point of the German Empire, nor the subsequent construction (1255) in Samland of the fortress called Königsberg in

1254-1313]

The Order conquers Prussia

631

honour of the aid given to the advance of the Order by Ottokar II, King of Bohemia, contradicts the fact that the process was gradual, and its result achieved by an adherence to the principle of "pegging away."

This advance continued during the greater part of the thirteenth century. At every stage in its course - from Danzig to Narva on the Gulf of Finland -it was seconded by the mercantile instinct, which insisted on the foundation and organisation of centres of civic life. The terrific outbreak of the repressed Prussian spirit of nationality, which began in 1261 and rapidly spread through the whole Lettic group of populations, placed the Order on the defensive, and is rightly held to have given rise to its heroic period. A season of rigorous, and even cruel, repression and reorganisation ensued, which left its mark on the history of Prussia. The old nobility of the land virtually ceased to exist; while, with certain privileged exceptions, the entire population capable of bearing arms was obliged to take part, not only in defensive war, but in the reysings or excursions beyond the frontier which were an integral part of the regular work of the Order. In a word, its dominions were organised strictly on the footing of a military State, without any sustained attempt to raise the civilisation of the lower classes of the population, whose use of their own language lasted into the sixteenth century. Inasmuch, however, as the primary purpose of this State was the Christian propaganda, it rapidly arrived at a clear and definite understanding with the Church; so that the Prussian clergy (more especially as no archbishopric had been established within the borders of Prussia) submitted to the authority of the Order even after it had come into conflict with Rome. This authority was further strengthened by the fact that the German colonists who found their way to Prussia came from every part of the Empire-in the patient German fashionseeking, rather than bringing with them, the elements of cohesion.

Scarcely had the conquest of Prussia been accomplished, when the Order cast an eager eye upon the territory of Pome relia on the western bank of the Vistula. Pomerelia was under the rule of Dukes who were the vassals of Poland; but the Order was strong enough to assert its power in this direction without asking any co-operation from either the Dukes of Pomerania-Wolgast or the Brandenburg Margraves. In 1311 the Order established its authority over Danzig which was to become the wealthiest of the cities of the Baltic - its inglorious Venice; and for a generation the Knights were the masters of Pomerelia. This great advance of the power of the Order thus coincided with the widest expansion of the early power of Brandenburg under Waldemar the Great.

It was in this very period that the German Knights had once more to face the problem of their corporate future; for the Order of the Templars was abolished by the Council of Vienne (1313), and the younger Order did not escape the papal thunderbolts. Very wisely, it determined

632

The Order's greatness and decline

[1313-48 to meet its destiny as a consolidated rather than as a dissipated Power, and to this end permanently fixed its seat in the centre of Prussia, between the Vistula and the sea-at Marienburg on the Nogent. Here, in the acropolis whence their Virgin patroness gazed forth upon the subject plains around, the German Knights seemed immovable and unassailable; and, when they sent forth their representatives to Avignon or other Courts, it was as a Power with which other Powers had to reckon.

Yet, already in the earlier half of the fourteenth century, the revival of the national spirit of the Poles under Casimir III the Great, the last in the male line of their national Kings, the Piasts, and the design of a union of Poland and Lithuania, threatened the overthrow of the German Order. But, after a protracted struggle, the Peace of Kalisch (1343) assured to the Order a dominion even wider than that to which it had laid claim. Now began its golden days, during which it was not only esteemed the high school of Christian chivalry, practising on the vast mass of Lithuanian heathendom, but also asserted itself - and this is the great age of the Hansa as a notable commercial and maritime Power.

The land of "Spruce" was now something of a promised land, and the sprusado the militant darling of the age. The ulterior political designs of the Order were fully commensurate with its actual achievements; and if the partition of Poland which it negotiated was not actually carried out, it obtained possession, as has been seen, of the New Mark of Brandenburg in pledge from the still-vext Sigismund. At home it maintained the freedom of its government from all alien interference. No Peter's Pence were levied in Prussia; the Bishops, though their dioceses were of papal foundation, and the great convents of Oliva and Peplin, were subject to the territorial authority of the High Master. On the other hand, a large measure of liberty was left to the towns, of which in the fourteenth century a vast network, together with a multitude of German villages, overspread the land; the Culmische Handfeste became a kind of model charter of municipal rights.

The reason for the decline of so strenuous and prosperous a polity as that of the German Order cannot be examined here. The loyalty of the Knights began to give way, so soon as the religious basis of the Order became mere formalism; the allegiance of the towns, tired of being mastered by a garrison of monks, and jealous of their mercantile competition, had never rested on any foundation beyond the traditions of force; the military system of Europe was passing through a change to which the heirs of the crusaders could not accommodate themselves; and the real raison d'être of their actual position-the carrying on of warfare against the heathen- was at least not so self-evident as of old. Meanwhile Poland, the hereditary foe of the Order, was preparing for a resumption of the struggle.

The memorable attempt to extend once more the range of power and influence covered by the Slavonic nationality connects itself with the

1364-1411] Political weakness of Order.-Henry of Plauen 633

dynastic ambition of the Emperor Charles IV, already noted in its bearing on the history of Brandenburg. The religious movement of which John Hus was the centre (though its dogmatic origin has to be sought in the speculations of Wiclif) accentuated the antagonism between German and Slav, till in the Hussite Wars its record was written in letters of blood on the face of the Empire. As a matter of course, this conflict declared itself in those northern borderlands, where German and Slavonic enterprise and ambition had been perennial rivals. Under the Jagello dynasty (1386-1572) Poland reached an unprecedented height of territorial power, though the seeds of her decay were sown when the control of the government was acquired by a nobility responsible to neither King nor people.

The German Order's real occupation had gone after, towards the close of the fourteenth century, it had completed the official Christianisation of Lithuania - a process bearing a most shadowy resemblance to a crusade, and rather resembling annual manœuvres, to which foreign visitors of distinction and adventurers "reysing in Littowe" were largely attracted. About the same period, the power of the Hanseatic League, the natural and all but indispensable ally of the Order, had, in face of the union between the Scandinavian States, visibly begun to decline. We pass by the successive attempts at resistance to the authority of the Order, the losses to which it was subjected by the decline of its maritime power and by the fickleness of the native Prussian nobility (the Knights of the Lizard) under the influence of unscrupulous Polish intrigue. The collision was only a question of time; and, as the Order was true to its chivalrous traditions in refusing to avoid the decision of arms, the contest might seem to have been at an end with the crushing victory of the Polish host at Tannenberg (1410). But the siege of Marienburg broke down, and, thanks to the resolution and sagacity of the new High Master, Henry of Plauen (from whose House are descended the Princes of Reuss), the whole of the territories held by the Order at the outbreak of the war, with the exception of Samogitia, were preserved to it in the First Peace of Thorn (1411).

Henry of Plauen endeavoured to strengthen the administrative system of the Knights by establishing a Landratha Council of Estates consisting of deputies of nobility and towns; but all his efforts were in vain, and his deposition, half-treason, and miserable end signified that the last shadow of its former greatness had departed from the Order. While its dominions had to suffer a series of inroads, which it sought rather to avert than to resist, the Slav peoples, excited beyond bounds by the Hussite successes, drew closer and closer together. The Order had, in a word, lived too long. As has been well said, being nothing but a corporation, it had not in itself the power of self-renewal which is inherent in a nation. It was no longer German in its composition; the Knights made no pretence of observing their vows of poverty or chastity,

or the High Masters of setting an example which no one would have cared to follow. To its subjects the Order was no longer a defence, only a danger; and, being unable to assimilate to its system either learned or lay, it had sunk into a thing of the past before it had actually come to an end. The so-called Prussian League or Alliance, of which the motive spring was to be found in the Danzig Patriciate, had thus become a State within the State; and in 1454 its members in town and country renounced their allegiance to the Order. When the fortress of Thorn and nearly threescore other castles had fallen into the hands of this League, it threw off the mask, and offered the dominion of Prussia to King Casimir IV of Poland. After his arrival in Prussia Danzig finally declared for the Polish Crown, which was thus placed in possession of the sinews of war.

It was in its dire distress and supreme need of funds for paying its mercenaries that the Order, as has been seen, sold the New Mark of Brandenburg to the Hohenzollern Elector, Frederick II; but the sum received proved quite insufficient for the purpose. The turbulent mercenaries (among whom there were many Bohemian Hussites) drove the High Master forth from the Marienburg (1457), which they incon tinently sold to the King of Poland, though it was some time before he could succeed in taking the town. In the end both sides were exhausted. and the second or so-called Perpetual Peace of Thorn put an end to the thirteen years' war (1466). It divided Prussia into two parts. West Prussia, i.e. the country to the west of the Vistula and the Nogent, including Danzig, together with the land of Culm, Marienburg, the seaport of Elbing, and the bishopric of Warmia (Ermeland), became an integral part of the Polish kingdom, and was as such called Royal Prussia. East or, as it afterwards came to be called, Ducal Prussia, was restored to the Order as a Polish fief. Thus the humiliation of the Order, of which the League had refused to countenance the reconstruction on a new basis that would have placed it under German control, was shared with the Order itself by the Empire, then weak and shrinking, and under an Emperor (Frederick III) who had nothing to contribute to the situation but brave words.

The decay of the German Order was as sorry as its greatness had been deserving of admiration. Neither the Hansa, unable to stay the progress of Scandinavians or of Muscovites on the Baltic shores, nor the provinces and dependencies of the Order itself, were able to raise an arm on its behalf; and the inner constitution of its ruling oligarchy was a mere nest of jobbery. At length the obvious counsels of worldly wisdom found acceptance, and the Knights began to follow the practice of electing as their High Master a member of some important princely House, whose support in the struggle for existence might thus be conciliated. At Königsberg, whither the seat of the Order had now been transferred, Duke Frederick of Saxony from 1498 carried on the