Teutonic Knights’ Wars with Poland

At issue: Control of West Prussia

Date: 1309–1466

Location: East and West Prussia

Combatants: Teutonic Order vs. Poles and Lithuanians

Principal commanders:Polish, Władysław II Jagiełło, king of Poland (1351–1434); Lithuanian, Vytautas, grand duke of Lithuania (1350–1430)

Principal battle: Tannenberg

Result: The Teutonic Order became the dominant power of the Baltic coastline in the fourteenth century, then declined to insignificance in the fifteenth

Background

In 1309, the last duke of Pomerellia (West Prussia) died. The uncrowned Polish king Władysław I łokotiek, whose hold on the crown was shaky, asked the grandmaster of the Teutonic Order to eject the duke of Brandenburg, the feudal overlord, from the duchy. When the grandmaster asked for payment, however, Władysław I declined, whereupon the grandmaster purchased the territory from Brandenburg. This guaranteed crusaders from Germany and France passage to East Prussia at the cost of disrupting the traditional alliance of Poland and the Teutonic Knights in their crusades against the increasingly powerful pagan rulers of Lithuania.

In 1343, Casimir III the Great of Poland signed the Peace of Kalish with the Teutonic Order, giving both signatories almost seven decades of peace, during which they mounted military campaigns against the Lithuanians and Tatars. The Teutonic Knights recruited noble crusaders for winter expeditions and chivalric ceremonies; Casimir joined with Louis the Great of Hungary, his eventual successor, to drive into Galicia.

Action

Louis the Great left two daughters: Maria, who inherited the Hungarian crown and married Sigismund of Luxembourg, and Jadwiga, who inherited Poland. The Polish clergy and nobility, objecting to her engagement to Wilhelm von Habsburg, persuaded the devout young woman to marry the dour pagan Lithuanian prince, Jogaila, who was hard-pressed by the Teutonic Order and his cousin Vytautas. Jogaila escaped impending disaster by converting to Roman Christianity, and under the name Władysław II Jagiełło, he became one of the great rulers of Poland.

The Teutonic Order believed Jogaila’s baptism to be nothing more than a clever ploy, and they saw his reconciliation with Vytautas as another clever deception. However, they were willing to cooperate with both men in making war against the Tatars and Moscow, in return for their assistance in subduing the last pagans in the region, the fierce Samogitians.

The Peace of Sallinwerder, 1398, seemed to promise peace for all parties for an indefinite period. If Vytautas’s drives east had proven successful, this might have been the case; however, the defeat at the Battle of the Vorskla in 1399 caused him to listen to his boyars’ concerns about the Samogitians, who were being slowly and cautiously brought toward baptism and feudalism. Grandmaster Ulrich von Jungingen, moreover, was a bold and intemperate warrior who abandoned the quiet diplomacy of his predecessors to face down Polish and Lithuanian interference in Samogitia. Władysław II Jagiełło masterfully worked on Polish patriotic sentiments about Pomerellia and general anti-German prejudice, while carefully avoiding a premature conflict.

In the summer of 1410, Władysław II Jagiełło assembled an army of Polish knights, Bohemian mercenaries, and Lithuanian, Tatar, and Moldavian warriors on the right bank of the Vistula, then moved into the East Prussian wilderness. Ulrich, who had assembled a magnificent army of Teutonic Knights, local knights, and German crusaders, intercepted the invading army twice, once halting them at a river crossing, the second time just failing to catch them on the march at Tannenberg (1410). The set-piece battle, with tens of thousands of troops on either side, was one of the greatest and most significant pitched combats of the Middle Ages.

The hero of the combat was Vytautas, but great credit was earned by Władysław II Jagiełło, who did not flinch when the grandmaster made his final great and fatal charge directly at the king’s hilltop position. The army of the Teutonic Knights was completely destroyed, together with almost all the officers of the order. All Władysław II Jagiełło had to do was march swiftly into Prussia and obtain the surrender of the fortresses before resistance could be organized. However, Polish and Lithuanian losses had been heavy, and the horses were exhausted. Moreover, no one could have anticipated that an obscure officer, Heinrich von Plauen, would abandon his post to hurry to Marienburg and save that key fortress from capture. Władysław II Jagiełło besieged Marienburg in vain; as he retreated, Plauen followed, recapturing most of the castles that had surrendered. In the First Peace of Thorn, 1411, Plauen agreed to pay a heavy indemnity.

There was a reasonable chance that Plauen, who was subsequently elected grandmaster, might have restored the Order’s power and prestige, at least in the short term, but he was overthrown by officers who feared that his warlike policies would lead them into another military disaster. Immediately afterward, the plotters’ overtures to Poland were answered by an invasion, the Hunger War of 1414. The invaders delivered a crippling blow to the Prussian economy, and they came again in 1422; then in 1433, they gave support to an invasion by Bohemian Hussites. Meanwhile, the Teutonic Order had met setbacks in Bohemia and had been driven from the Danubian frontier by the Turks. Sigismund of Hungary, the Holy Roman emperor, promised assistance many times, but he proved to be better at promising than delivering.

In 1454, the West Prussian nobles and burghers revolted against Grandmaster Ludwig von Erlichshausen’s repressive government and called on Casimir IV of Poland for aid. The ensuing Thirteen Years’ War ended with Poland in control of Marienburg, Thorn, Ermland, and West Prussia. The Second Peace of Thorn (1466) required the grandmaster to render fealty to the Polish king. Poland was henceforth the dominant power in the region.

Aftermath

The Teutonic Knights survived in Prussia only until the Reformation; in 1525, Grandmaster Albrecht von Hollenzollern secularized the state and made himself the first duke of Prussia.

Bibliography

Burleigh, Michael. Prussian Society and the German Order: An Aristocratic Corporation in Crisis c. 1410-1460. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Christiansen, Eric. The Northern Crusades. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.

Jasienica, Pawel. Piast Poland. Miami, Fla.: American Institute of Polish Culture, 1985.

Urban, William. The Samogitian Crusade. Chicago: Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 1989.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Tannenberg and After. Chicago: Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 1999.