From Acre to the Baltic
The Teutonic Order began in the Holy Land. During the siege of Acre at the end of the twelfth century, German merchants and pilgrims were said to have set up a field hospital, and the group was recognized as a military and religious order in 1198. Like the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller, its members took monastic vows while also fighting. The order was led by a Grand Master, and the full members were knights drawn largely from German-speaking lands, supported by priests and sergeants.
The order held lands and castles in the Mediterranean world, but in the thirteenth century its focus shifted toward the east of Europe. Hermann von Salza, grand master from about 1210 to 1239, became close to the emperor Frederick II and helped secure privileges that made the order a major power in the Empire.
The call to Prussia
The Baltic region was one of the last places in Europe where many people were still pagan. Missionary efforts and crusades were already under way in the twelfth century, for instance against the Wends and in Livonia. Duke Konrad of Masovia, a Polish prince whose borders were raided by the Old Prussians, invited the Teutonic Knights in the 1220s to defend his lands. The emperor and the pope issued documents supporting the order’s rights over whatever it conquered. Scholars debate the exact legal meaning of these grants, but they gave the knights a strong claim.
The conquest of Prussia began around 1230 and took about fifty years. The order proceeded slowly, building timber and later brick castles along the rivers, founding towns, and bringing in colonists from Germany. The Prussians, a Baltic-speaking people distinct from the later Germans who took the name, resisted fiercely, and revolts in the 1260s were serious. By the end of the century most Prussians had been defeated or absorbed, and their language later died out. Crusading was voluntary service, so each year knights and nobles from the Empire and further afield joined short “reysen,” or campaigns, often in winter when frozen marshes allowed travel.
Livonia and the north
Further north another group, the Brothers of the Sword, operated in what is now Latvia and Estonia. After a heavy defeat by pagan forces at Saule in 1236, it was folded into the Teutonic Order as the Livonian branch. Livonia remained semi-independent in practice.
The order also met Orthodox rivals. In 1242 forces led by Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod defeated a German force at Lake Peipus, in an episode popularly known as the Battle on the Ice. The battle’s scale and its place in the order’s plans are probably exaggerated in later tradition, but it marked the limits of eastward expansion.
A state run by an order
The order became, in effect, a monastic state. Its capital was moved from Venice to Marienburg (Malbork) in 1309, and the great brick castle there is among the largest of its kind. The knights took the Pomeranian region of Danzig in 1308–09 after a dispute with Poland, an act that Poland long resented. The state controlled most of the southern Baltic coast and traded grain, timber and amber. Its main towns joined the Hanseatic League.
Conflict with Lithuania and Poland
By the fourteenth century the pagan Prussians were gone and the order’s main enemy was Lithuania, which was pagan until 1386. The order continued its yearly campaigns and used the Lithuanian frontier to justify them. Critics, including Polish representatives at church councils, argued that the order now fought for territory and not faith. Lithuania’s conversion and union with Poland removed the formal justification for the crusading, even though the order’s rivalry with Poland and Lithuania continued.
The decisive clash came in 1410 at Grunwald (or Tannenberg), where Polish and Lithuanian forces defeated the army of the order and killed its Grand Master. The order survived the immediate crisis through the defense of Marienburg, but its finances and prestige suffered. The Battle of Grunwald became a major symbol in Polish and Lithuanian memory, while later German tradition gave it a different meaning.
Decline
Taxes, internal revolts of towns and nobles, and further wars weakened the order. In 1466, after a long war, the Peace of Thorn gave Poland western Prussia and made the remainder subject to the Polish crown. In 1525 the Grand Master, Albert of Brandenburg, converted to Lutheranism and turned the territory into a secular duchy under Polish overlordship. The order itself continued in other lands.
Why the history is disputed
The Teutonic Knights were seen by supporters as defenders of the faith and builders of a Christian society, and by critics as conquerors who used religion to take land. Both narratives were shaped by modern nationalism. Careful historians treat the order as a typical product of its age: religious in its aims, military in its methods, and political in its ambitions.