Polish Wars of Expansion

At issue: Access to the sea and political dominance of eastern central Europe

Date: 1333–1466

Location: Poland, Prussia, western Ukraine

Combatants: Poles vs. Teutonic Knights and Czechs; Poles vs. Lithuanians; Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusans, and Hungarians vs. Teutonic Knights

Principal commanders:Poland, Casimir III the Great (1310–1370), Władysław II Jagiełło (1351–1434)

Principal battles: Tannenberg, Chojnice, Malbork

Result: Polish dominance of eastern central Europe

Background

In 1300, Poland was a kingdom without a king, riven by internal factions and threatened by outside adversaries: Czechs and Hungarians to the south, Lithuanians and Tatars to the east, and the powerful Teutonic Knights to the north. The nadir of Polish fortunes came in 1308, when the Teutonic Knights seized the port of Gdańsk, burned the city to the ground, put its 10,000 Slavic inhabitants to the sword, and populated the city with German colonists. The following year, the Knights took the remainder of Pomerania, cutting Poland’s access to the sea.

Action

A strong Polish leader emerged in the senior Piast duke, Władysław I łokotiek, crowned in 1320. Władysław I managed to knit together a central core of Polish duchies and blunt a Teutonic invasion in 1331. After his death, his twenty-three-year-old son assumed the throne. To preserve his father’s fragile kingdom, the young king made a series of humiliating treaties with the Teutonic Knights and surrendered Silesia and a large sum of silver to the Czechs in return for their claim to the Polish throne.

Although painful, the treaties bought Poland breathing space. In time, the king would be known as Poland’s most brilliant ruler, Casimir III the Great. During his thirty-seven-year reign, the king revived Poland’s economy, created a new legal system, developed industry, founded towns and a university, encouraged immigration, created a corps of civil servants, reformed the military, and built about 120 modern fortresses covering all major invasion routes into the country. Casimir kept his foreign enemies off balance with a combination of skillful diplomacy and short, victorious wars. In the southeast, Casimir seized Przemyśl (1344), Lwów and Halicz (1349), and Chełm, Bełz, Vladimir-Volynski, and Podolia (1366). In the northwest, he regained Kujawy, Płock, and Dobrzyń by treaty in 1343, Sanok in 1366, and other small territories in 1368, expanding his reach almost to the Baltic Sea. Mazovia became his fief in 1351, and he maintained the independent Polish duchy of świdnica as a counterweight to Czech power in Silesia. On Casimir’s death, Poland was a powerful kingdom.

Louis the Great of Hungary succeeded to the Polish throne in 1370 and during his absentee reign, from 1370 to 1382, Poland lost Bełz and Chełm to Lithuania. Louis’s daughter married the Lithuanian grand duke in 1386. He converted to Christianity along with his nation and, after taking the name Władysław II Jagiełło, was crowned king. Whereas Casimir had brought Polish arms up to west European standards, the new king introduced a new set of influences from the Middle East and Central Asia, thanks to Lithuania’s wars with the Tatars. The Polish-Lithuanian alliance ended a long, bitter feud and initiated a new superstate that would remake the region.

Of more immediate importance, the alliance spelled a united front against the Teutonic Knights, who continued their attacks on Lithuania, seizing Samogitia in 1404. Although unable to face the well-trained, heavily armored knights in the open, the Lithuanians carried on their fight from the fastness of their forests and marshes. Polish military assistance began to flow north, and soon Polish knights were seen fighting alongside the Lithuanians. Relations between Poland-Lithuania and the Teutonic state deteriorated, and open war broke out late in 1409.

The Teutonic Knights fielded perhaps Europe’s most formidable army. Backed by the vast wealth of the Baltic amber and grain trade, they could afford the latest weapons (including cannons and handguns) and most skilled auxiliaries. Hundreds of Europe’s best knights flocked to their banner for the honor of fighting with Europe’s last major crusading order. Yet, at the heart of the Teutonic order were the fighting monks themselves: superbly mounted, armed, and trained under their black-cross banners.

The Poles and Lithuanians were an unknown quantity to most Europeans. Polish knights were mounted and equipped to west European standards and organized in banners by clan, region, or royal affiliation. Polish infantry was inferior to that of the knights, consisting of poorer members of the gentry, armed peasants, and townsmen. The Lithuanian army was less well armed and mounted on horses more akin to those used by the Tatars. Joining them were Orthodox Belarusan boyars and Muslim Tatars. Beyond being less well equipped, the allies faced a major strategic hurdle in that the army of the kingdom and the army of the grand duchy were divided by the Vistula River. With few fords and virtually no bridges along most of its stretch, the river could allow the knights to defeat one army before turning to face the other.

The Tannenberg campaign proved a strategic masterpiece. During the winter of 1409–1410, Polish engineers, probably working to Tatar models, built Europe’s first pontoon bridge. As the campaign began in the summer of 1410, the bridge was floated down river in pieces and rebuilt north of Warsaw. A river crossing that should have taken weeks was effected in days and the armies of the kingdom, under Władysław II Jagiełło, and the army of the grand duchy, under his brother Vytautas, linked up.

On July 15, 1410, a Teutonic army of 32,000 and an allied army of 41,000 met at Tannenberg, in the largest battle of the European Middle Ages. The knights struck first, scattering the lightly armed Lithuanians on the allied right. Only the stubborn resistance of a Belarusan regiment saved the allied center. As the Teutonic strike force chased the retreating Lithuanians away from the battlefield, the king, situated on a hill like a Mongol leader rather than among his troops like his European contemporaries, ordered a general attack on the right and center by the Polish knights. The Polish charge forced the Teutonic Knights back in ferocious, bloody combat. On the right, the Teutonic charge spent itself but failed to destroy the Lithuanians and Tatars, who regrouped and counterattacked. With the reappearance of the Lithuanians, the allied army began to encircle and crush the Teutonic Knights. Cohesion broke down. The knight’s mercenaries and European companions began to surrender or flee, but the knights themselves fought to the death as the grand master and his standard were cut down by a final Polish charge.

Tannenberg broke the back of Teutonic power on the Baltic coast, and never again would the knights take the offensive. Despite the great victory, Poland gained little in the way of territory as its Lithuanian king, fearing growing Polish influence in the grand duchy, made a generous peace with the knights. Small conflicts continued to break out between the two sides, but Polish attention shifted to other sectors, especially to the south and east, where Poland had established a virtual protectorate over Moldavia. Władysław II Jagiełło’s successor, Władysław III, engaged in an ill-fated effort to aid Byzantium and died at the Battle of Varna in 1444. He was followed by Casimir IV, who refocused on the Baltic coast. In 1454, German burghers in Prussia revolted against Teutonic rule and asked for Polish protection, beginning the Thirteen Years’ War. In the beginning, Polish arms fared poorly against the Teutonic Knights’ largely mercenary armies and were defeated at Chojnice in 1454. This forced a reorganization of the military structure and of royal finances that allowed for the hiring or training of experts in areas such as engineering and artillery. The Poles regained the upper hand in a war of sieges, taking the surrender of the knights’ most famous fortress, Malbork, from its unpaid mercenary garrison in 1457. In 1466, the Teutonic Knights sued for peace. Gdańsk, West Pomerania, and Warmia were incorporated into the Polish crown while the remaining Teutonic lands became a Polish fiefdom.

Aftermath

On reestablishing its link with the Baltic, Poland focused its attention more and more on the east, where the Lithuanian gentry was becoming increasingly influenced by Poland, and the two nations drew together in permanent union. Under three skillful and long-lived kings, Poland, in the space of just under two hundred years, had transformed itself from a small, weak, divided land into the largest and most powerful state in eastern central Europe.

Bibliography

Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Dwbkowska, Alicja, Jan Zarin, and Maigorzata Zaryn, eds. History of Poland. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999.

Nadolski, Andrzej. Grunwald, 1410. Warsaw: Bellona, 1999.