Teutonic Knights Read Free Page B

east from Constantinople for a century, and had crossed the difficult Cilician mountain passes leading into Syria, whence his forces could pass easily into the Holy Land. There he was expected to lead the combined armies of the Holy Roman Empire, France and England to recover the lost ports on the Mediterranean Sea, opening the way for trade and reinforcements, after which he would lead the Christian host on to the liberation of Jerusalem. Instead, he drowned in a small mountain stream. His vassals dispersed, some hurrying back to Germany because their presence was required at the election of Friedrich’s successor, his son Heinrich VI; others because they anticipated a civil war in which they might lose their lands. Only a few great nobles and prelates honoured their vows by continuing their journey to Acre, which was under siege by crusader armies from France and England.
    The newly-arrived Germans suffered terrible agonies from heat and disease in Acre, but their psychological torment may have equalled their physical ailments. Richard the Lionheart (1189 – 99), the English king who was winning immortal fame by feats of valour, hated the Hohenstaufen vassals who had driven his Welf brother-in-law, Heinrich the Lion (1156 – 80), into exile a few years before; and he missed few opportunities to insult or humiliate his supposed allies. Eventually Richard recovered Acre, but he achieved little else. The French king, Phillip Augustus (1180 – 1223), furious at Richard’s repeated insults, went home in anger, and most Germans left too, determined to get revenge on Richard at the first opportunity – as the duke of Austria later did, by turning him over to the new Hohenstaufen emperor for ransom. All German nobles and prelates looked back on this crusading episode with bitter disappointment. Reflecting on the high hopes with which they had set out, they felt that they had been betrayed by everyone – by the English, by the Byzantines, by the Welfs, and by one another. They had but one worthwhile accomplishment to show for all their suffering, or so they thought later: the foundation of the Teutonic Order.
    The Foundation Era 1190-8
    The establishment of the Teutonic Order was an act of desperation – desperation based not on a lack of fighting men, but on ineffective medical care. The crusading army besieging Acre in 1190 had been more than decimated by illness. The soldiers from Northern Europe were not accustomed to the heat, the water, or the food, and the sanitary conditions were completely unsatisfactory. Unable to bury their dead properly, they threw the bodies into the moat opposite the Accursed Tower with the rubble they were using to fill the obstacle. The stink from the corpses hung over the camp like a fog. Once taken by fever, the soldiers died like flies, their agony made worse by the innumerable insects that buzzed around them or swarmed over their bodies. The regular hospital units were overburdened and, moreover, the Hospitallers favoured their own nationals, the French and English (a distinction that few could make easily at the time, since King Richard possessed half of France and lusted after the rest). The Germans were left to their own devices.
    The situation was intolerable and it appeared that it would last indefinitely – the siege showed no sign of ending soon, and no German monarch was coming east to demand that his subjects be better cared for by the established hospitals. Consequently some middle-class crusaders from Bremen and Lübeck decided to found a hospital order that would care for the German sick. This initiative was warmly seconded by the most prominent of the German nobles, Duke Friedrich of Hohenstaufen. He wrote to his brother, Heinrich VI, and also won over the patriarch of Jerusalem, the Hospitallers and the Templars to the idea. When they asked Pope Celestine III to approve the new monastic order, he did so quickly. The brothers were to do hospital work like the Hospitallers and