Teutonic Knights Read Free Page A

shield, used a heavy sword with great effectiveness, and rode a large war-horse that was trained to charge into bodies of armed men or against oncoming horses. The only major concessions to climate were the wearing of a light surcoat that protected the mail from the direct rays of the sun, and avoiding travel in the heat of the day. The harsh climate of the Holy Land was, of course, a distinct shock to visitors from Northern Europe, who were often quickly prostrated from the heat and local diseases. This made the presence of the military orders all the more important, in that they could provide advice and example to the newcomers, which, if taken, would convert such newly-arrived crusaders into effective warriors rather than invalids or easy victims of Turkish fighting skills.
    The contrast between the brute force of Western knights and the subtlety of the swift, lightly-armed Turkish and Arab warriors is part of what makes the crusades interesting from the intellectual point of view. There was never a question of two armies simply going at one another, with the stronger and more numerous prevailing. Instead, there was a complex interaction of strategy and tactics, each side possessing advantages and disadvantages, with the commanders weighing and calculating each move carefully before committing their forces to action. That is, weighing and calculating as much as was possible, always aware that the nature of warfare is to flout all plans and predictions. No general, no army, could forever impose order on the chaos of battle. Climate, geography, numbers, equipment and supplies all had their part in determining victory or defeat, but in the end much rested on individual and collective wills. Also, as both Christian and Moslem conceded, on the will of God.
    Other Crusades
    By the mid-eleventh century it was well recognised that enemies of Christianity and Christendom existed outside the Holy Land. Spaniards and Portuguese had no trouble identifying their long struggle against Moslem foes as analogous to the crusades, and soon they had persuaded the Church to offer volunteers similar spiritual benefits as were promised to those who went to defend Jerusalem. Germans and Danes, inspired by St Bernard of Clairvaux, attacked ancient enemies east of the Elbe River. This Wendish Crusade of 1147 overran a bastion of Slavic paganism and piracy and opened the way for eastward migration and expansion.
    Poles were soon aware of the potential of employing the crusading spirit in their own eastward and northward expansion. The Prussians, however, were more difficult to defeat than the Wends had been, and they had no leaders who could be persuaded of the benefits of conversion, as the dukes along the southern Baltic coastline in Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Pomerellia had been. Instead, after initial successes in the early thirteenth century, especially in Culm at the bend of the Vistula River, their garrisons fled before the pagan counterattacks.
    Technically speaking, the Polish invasions of Prussia were not crusades. They had not been authorised by the popes nor preached throughout Europe by the clergy. But that was a technicality that the Teutonic Knights would correct when, in the late 1220s, Duke Conrad of Masovia and his relatives invited Grand Master Hermann von Salza to send a contingent of his Teutonic Knights to assist in defending Polish lands against Prussian paganism. There was never much thought given to defence, of course. The Poles had planned all along to conquer Prussia. They only needed a little help. Temporarily, they thought.

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The Foundation of the Teutonic Order

    The Third Crusade
    Germans had expected the Third Crusade (1189 – 91) to be the most glorious triumph that Christian arms had ever achieved. The indomitable red-bearded Hohenstaufen emperor, Friedrich Barbarossa (1152 – 90), had brought his immense army intact across the Balkans and Asia Minor, had smashed the Turkish forces that had blocked the land route