Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (62 page)

Within a short time, the Teutonic Order created a socio-military machine that could sustain unbroken campaigns of conquest and that turned the frontline in
Borussia
into the scene of non-stop operations. Both the Order of Dobrzyn and the Order of the Sword were absorbed into it, providing a pool of knights to support a regular army. Recruits appeared from all over Christendom, attracted by the adventure of combat and the lust for land. Peasant colonists, mainly Germans and Flemings, were imported on favourable terms to work the land and to ease the manpower problem. Towns were built, marshes drained, trails cut through the wilderness and trade routes opened up. The amber monopoly was appropriated, taxes collected, troops raised, trained and paid, and the war against the infidels incessantly pursued. The killing, burning and deportation of the native
Prusai
was pursued in the name of the Faith, and the ‘Black Knights’, who wore a white cloak emblazoned with the black cross, assumed the divine mantle. They and their dependants spoke German, and it was among them that the name of
Preussen
gained currency.

The political organization of the
Ordensstaat
, as it came to be known – the State of the Teutonic Order – was built up in the course of the conquest. To begin with, its headquarters remained in Acre, but then moved to Venice; it did not come to
Borussia
until 1309. The grand masters were chosen by the Brother-Knights through an electoral committee. Once confirmed by the pope, they served both as commander-in-chief and as chief executive, appointing the subordinate
Landmeisters
, the provincial governors, and
Komturs
, the district commanders. Altogether, during the 327 years of the Order’s existence in its medieval form, thirty-five grand masters held office for an average of nine years each. The first of von Salza’s successors was Conrad of Thuringia (1239–40), and the last Albrecht von Hohenzollern (1510–25). The longest serving grand master was Winrich von Kniprode, from 1351 to 1382.

The conquest of
Borussia
proceeded over six decades, and was formally completed in 1283. Unfortunately, since the
Prusai
left no records, the story has only been told from the Order’s perspective. The chief source is the four-volume
Chronicon Terrae Prussiae
, composed by Peter Dusberger half a century later, probably in Königsberg. Peter saw the Order’s work as a sacred mission, and his Brother-Knights who died in battle assured of a place in Heaven. The pagans, he acknowledged, were also to be admired for their unwavering devotion to their misguided beliefs. Many Christians, he laments, could learn from their example.
³²

There can be no doubt that these Northern Crusades were contested with great ferocity on both sides. It was said that captured knights were roasted alive inside their armour. The
Prusai
, if they resisted conversion, could expect no better. All forms of violence and cruelty were justified. Captives were routinely tortured, settlements systematically razed, and survivors of both sexes were forced into slavery, from which baptism was the only exit. Their huts and homes were cleared to make way for incoming colonists. Large numbers were deported to reservations; others fled to neighbouring Lithuania. Thus did ‘Western Civilization’ advance.

The
Livonian Rhymed Chronicle
,
*
written in the late thirteenth century, described the initial offensive:

Being on a peninsula, the land is almost surrounded by the wild seas… No army had ever invaded there, and on the [seaward] side no one can fight against it because a wild stream, wide and deep, flows along it… A narrow strip extends towards [Lithuania] and there the Christians came with their stately army. The Christians rejoiced. They found the great forest of the Samites there… [made] of trees so large that they served as a bulwark… The Christians… vowed not to rest till it had been cut in two… Then, when they had… slashed through the forest, the army advanced directly into the land. The Samites learned that they were visited by guests who wished to do them harm.
³³

On that occasion, the crusaders had fallen into a trap. Deep in the wilderness, they were ambushed and annihilated.

As the crusaders progressed, they planted many fortified towns and castles in the wilderness. Elbing, Thorn, Allenstein and Marienwerder were all Teutonic foundations. Königsberg (‘King’s Mountain’) was founded in 1255 on a site sacred to the
Prusai
called
Tvangste
. It was named in honour of King Ottakar II of Bohemia, who had participated in the fighting personally. But nothing rivalled the size and grandeur of the Marienburg, the ‘Fortress of the Virgin’, erected from 1274 on the banks of the River Nogat. Four times larger than the royal castle of the English kings at Windsor, it was almost certainly the biggest medieval castle in Europe, and could be approached from the sea. Its vast walls, soaring towers and bristling battlements exude a sense of triumph and permanence. When completed in the early fourteenth century, it became the seat of the Order. By then, the land of the
Prusai
had been subdued, and the new country of
Preussen
established.
³⁴

The advance of the Teutonic Order naturally went hand in hand with the power of the Roman Catholic Church which had blessed its activities. The first, missionary, bishop of
Borussia
, Christian of Oliva (d. 1245), was a Cistercian monk with Polish connections who had worked with the Order of Dobrzyn. But the Teutonic Knights preferred the Dominicans, and in the 1330s, when Bishop Christian was being held for ransom by the
Prusai
, they made fresh arrangements. A papal legate arrived to mediate, and in 1243 he divided the country into four dioceses: Chełmno, Pomesania, Varmia and Sambia. He placed the new church province under the archbishop of Riga.

Kulmerland had formed the northern border of the Polish Duchy of Mazovia, and contained the towns of Kulm (Chełmno), Thorn (Toruń), Graudenz (Grudzia˛dz) and Płock. The castle at Dobrzyn had belonged to the eponymous knightly order. Once the lakeland area to the north was cleared of its native inhabitants, it was settled by Polish colonists from Mazovia known as Mazurs, thereby receiving its name of Mazury (Mazuria/Masuren). According to later folklore, Pomesania enshrined the name of Pomeso, son of a legendary king, Vudevuto. It occupied the maritime district to the east of the Vistula. Its principal town Elbing (Elbla˛g) replaced the former port of the
Prusai
at Truso. Varmia or Emeland was the homeland of a Baltic tribe descended from a legendary chieftain, Varmo. It became the seat of a powerful line of bishops, prince-bishops and, eventually, archbishops. The first of the bishops never assumed office, but the second and third, Anselm von Meisser and Heinrich Fleming, ruled the see until the turn of the fourteenth century. Their cathedral was built at Frauenburg (Frombork), which in 1310 became the first Prussian city to be incorporated, as was common in the Baltic according to the Law of Lübeck. In due course, Frauenburg would become the home of its cathedral’s canon-astronomer, Nicholas Copernicus.
³⁵
Sambia or Samland remained beyond the control of the Teutonic Order until the 1250s. It consisted largely of the maritime peninsula which separates the two principal coastal lagoons – subsequently known as the
Frisches Haff
and the
Kurisches Haff
. The city of Königsberg was surrounded by countryside in which the native Old Prussian language persisted long after being suppressed elsewhere.

The most easterly parts of
Borussia
were not conquered until the early 1280s. The key moment came with the fall of the island fortress within the ‘Salmon Lake’ of Ełk. German settlers renamed the fortress ‘Lyck’, and the Poles ‘Łe˛g’. But the salmon motif was not forgotten. Nearly 700 years later, when another population transfer took place, the Old Prussian name of Ełk was restored and a salmon reappeared in the town’s coat of arms.
³⁶

Despite the neglect with which the heritage of the
Prusai
was once treated, enough remnants of their language, Prusiskan, have survived for it to be reconstructed by modern scholars. It is classified as ‘Old Prussian’ to distinguish it from various Germanic dialects, such as Low Prussian, which developed in the province subsequently. It is one of the oldest known forms of Indo-European, and is closest to modern Latvian.
³⁷

Old Prussian was written down in the Latin alphabet from the thirteenth century onwards. The so-called Basel Epigram, which was probably inscribed in the margin of another manuscript by an educated Prussian sent to study in Prague, reads: ‘
Kayle rekyse, thoneaw labonache theywelyse. Eg koyte, poyte, nykoyte, penega doyte.
’ This has been rendered as: ‘Hello, sir! You are no longer a kind uncle, if you want to drink yourself but don’t give a penny to others.’ The so-called Elbing Vocabulary, dating from
c
. 1400, records 802 words in their German and Old Prussian versions, and a fifteenth-century fragment records the first line of the paternoster: ‘
Towe Nüsze kas esse andangensün swyntins
.’ By far the fullest texts are to be found in three catechisms printed in Königsberg in 1545–61 in the hope of converting the last surviving
Prusai
to Protestantism.
³⁸

The Germanization of the conquered province, therefore, was a very long process. Though the Knights and the majority of colonists were German-speaking, the official language of the Church and of administration was Latin. What is more, once the Old Prussian population was baptized, the campaign to eradicate their culture waned. Many Old Prussian place names and river names (Tawe, Tawelle, Tawelninken) and even personal names survived, as did small rural pockets of native speakers. As things worked out, the
Ordensstaat
disappeared before the Old Prussian language did.

No sooner had the
Ordensstaat
been established than it ran into open conflict with its neighbouring Polish duchies. The Knights had never shown much respect for their neighbours, and for most of the thirteenth century, when the fragmented Kingdom of Poland was unable to stand up for itself, they probably imagined that they could exploit their military advantage unopposed. In the long run, however, they were awakening a powerful rival who would eventually bring them low.
³⁹
The Poles always felt cheated by the way that their Teutonic ‘guests’ had ‘abused their hospitality’; but so long as the Order confined itself to battling the pagans they were not unduly concerned. Yet the Order’s threat to the lower Vistula valley commanding Poland’s access to the sea could not be ignored. The Polish–Teutonic contest over this crucial territory would last for nearly 200 years.

Ever since the Goths had moved away from the lower Vistula in the early part of the first millennium AD, the area had been systematically settled by Slavic tribes. Together with the port of Gdańsk, the area had formed part of the Polish realm for centuries, and was the funnel through which Poland’s contacts with the sea had to pass. It was now coming under double pressure – from the creeping growth of Brandenburg along the coast to the west, and from the Teutonic State to the east.

Brandenburg, it should be stressed, had no earlier connection with Prussia. Based on an infertile and unpromising piece of territory beyond the River Oder, in the Empire’s
Nordmark
or ‘North March’, it was originally inhabited by Slavs, who knew it as Brennibor. It was not yet an electorate of the Empire, and was still to fall into the grasp of the Hohenzollern family. It was ruled by the House of Ascania, heirs of Albert the Bear (
c
. 1100–70), first margrave of Brandenburg and the founder of Berlin. A century after Margrave Albert’s death, the Brandenburgers had crossed the Oder and were entrenched on its eastern bank in their so-called
Neumark
or ‘New March’. Two hundred miles and more of Poland and of Polish-controlled Pomerania separated them from the nearest holdings of the Teutonic Order.
⁴⁰

The Poles were either too divided, or too slow, to avert the danger. Their capital lay far over the horizon in Kraków, and their rulers had grown careless of northern interests. In the decade starting in 1300 the Polish throne fell temporarily to the Bohemian Premyslid dynasty, which also ruled Hungary, and which cared nothing for Baltic affairs. The key moment arrived in 1308–9, when a party of magnates in eastern Pomerania, seeing the distractions of their nominal Polish overlords, transferred their allegiance to the Brandenburgers. Then, in a repetition of Conrad duke of Mazovia’s fatal blunder eighty years before, a pro-Polish party in Pomerania called on the Teutonic Knights to help them retain Gdańsk. The Knights rode in, and kept Gdańsk for themselves. According to one report, to ease the introduction of submissive German colonists, they massacred the entire population of the city. Within a short time they had annexed the entire lower Vistula, and the Polish court was left appealing in vain to a papal tribunal. The Knights had turned from fighting pagans to fighting fellow Catholics.

In the fourteenth century the territorial possessions of the
Ordensstaat
reached their maximum extent. Courland and Livonia had been merged. The last native rebellions had been suppressed, the rural economy thrived, and several cities – Danzig (Gdańsk), Marienburg, Elbing and Königsberg – joined the international trading network of the Hanseatic League. Fine churches were built, like the Marienkirche in Danzig or the cathedral at Frauenburg; monasteries were planted in the countryside; church schools trained an educated class. Crusading continued beyond Prussia, settling down into a routine of seasonal campaigns in Lithuania, where many a foreign knight won his spurs. The Knights had created a disciplined, purposeful and prosperous medieval state, and the fame of
Preussen
spread far and wide. Chaucer’s Knight from the
Canterbury Tales
had been there: