Crusades in the Holy Land
The Teutonic Order is principally remembered as a Baltic power. Its convents in Prussia, its wars with Lithuania, and its conflict with the Polish-Lithuanian union dominate the popular and the academic historiography. But the Order was, for the first century of its existence, a Levantine institution. It was founded in Acre in 1190, it took its rule of life from the religious customs of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and it fought, with varying intensity, in the wars of the Latin East until the final Mamluk conquest of 1291. The Levantine apprenticeship of the Order, though often overlooked, was the institutional forge in which the mature Order of the Baltic was hammered out.
The Order in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem at the time of the Teutonic Order’s foundation was a shrunken and embattled polity, hemmed in along a narrow coastal strip by the Ayyubid possessions of Saladin and his heirs. The capital of the Kingdom had effectively moved to Acre. The Kingdom’s defensive perimeter was held by a chain of fortresses in the Galilee, in the lordship of Sidon, and in the county of Jaffa, garrisoned jointly by the secular barons of the Kingdom and by the two great military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers. The newcomers, the German fraternity of 1190, were welcomed by all parties as a useful supplement to the existing military-religious establishment, and they were rapidly integrated into the defensive arrangements of the Kingdom.
The early years of the Teutonic Order in the Latin East were modest. The Order received grants of land within Acre itself and a small annual income from German donors. It was given, by way of further endowment, a number of petty fiefs and tenements in the coastal cities. It was allowed to construct a small hospital in the German quarter of Acre, modelled on the great hospitals of the older orders. It was not yet, in any sense, a major actor in the politics of the Latin East. It was, however, a recognised corporation under the protection of the papacy, and it was beginning to acquire the habits of religious life that would distinguish it in the later Middle Ages.
The first three grand masters — Heinrich Walpot von Bassenheim, Otto von Kerpen, and Heinrich Bart — presided over a small, internally coherent fraternity that was gradually accumulating the property, the privileges, and the corporate confidence on which a much larger institution could be built. The conversion of the fraternity to a military order by the bull of Celestine III in 1198 gave it the legal status necessary for an armed religious corporation, but it did not, in itself, give it the manpower to operate as a major field force.
Hermann von Salza and the Levantine Theatre
The grand mastership of Hermann von Salza, from 1209 to 1239, was the period in which the Teutonic Order first operated as a major field force in the Latin East. Hermann himself was rarely resident in the Holy Land; his diplomatic duties kept him in Italy and the German lands for most of his mastership. But he built, in the Latin East, a network of commanderies and a chain of responsibilities that the Order’s regional leadership could operate without constant supervision from headquarters.
The most consequential of the Order’s early Levantine operations was the crusade of 1218–1221, in which a large crusading army, including a Teutonic contingent under the Master of the Order in the Holy Land, joined the forces of the Ayyubid pretender al-Kamil in the siege of the Egyptian port of Damietta. The expedition was a tactical success — Damietta fell in November 1219 — but a strategic disaster, the crusading army being forced to surrender in 1221 and to withdraw from Egypt in disgrace. The Teutonic Order suffered relatively light losses, but the campaign was an early warning of the dangers of operating in the eastern Mediterranean on the same scale as the older military orders.
In the years that followed, the Order’s Levantine activity was concentrated on the defence of the Kingdom’s northern frontier. The Order received, in 1220, the castle of Montfort in the Galilean hills — a powerful new fortress in the upper course of the Litani — and used it as the principal seat of the Order in the Holy Land for the next forty years. It accepted responsibility for other castles in the Galilee, in the lordship of Sidon, and along the coastal road. It built, in the 1220s, a small but symbolically important convent at Acre itself, near the hospital from which the Order had grown.
The Treaty of 1229 and the Aftermath of the Sixth Crusade
The Sixth Crusade, proclaimed in 1228 by the Emperor Frederick II, was, in political terms, a diplomatic success: by the Treaty of Jaffa, signed in February 1229, al-Kamil ceded to the crusaders the Holy City, the strips of coast connecting Jerusalem to the Latin Kingdom’s residual ports, and a ten-year truce. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the masters of the Templars and the Hospitallers, however, refused to participate in a crusade led by an excommunicated emperor, and the political conditions of the Latin Kingdom’s recovery were, in consequence, very fragile.
The Teutonic Order was the only major military order to take a positive view of Frederick’s enterprise. Hermann von Salza, who had been one of the principal architects of the diplomatic rapprochement between the Emperor and the papacy, accepted the imperial leadership of the crusade and played a major role in the diplomatic negotiations with al-Kamil. The Order’s reward was a substantial endowment in the reconstituted Kingdom: a series of properties in the city of Jerusalem itself, a commandery in Jaffa, and a number of smaller holdings. These acquisitions were politically controversial — the Latin Patriarch regarded the German presence in the Holy City as a kind of imperial occupation — and they were of limited military value. They did, however, give the Order a presence in the city from which it took its full Latin name, the Ordo domus Sanctae Mariae Theutonicorum Hierosolymitanorum.
The truce of 1229 broke down in the late 1230s, and the Latin Kingdom was gradually reduced, by a series of Ayyubid and Khwarazmian offensives, to a handful of coastal cities. The Order’s Montfort cashe was abandoned, in 1271, in favour of the more easily defensible castle of Acre. The Order’s other Galilean and coastal possessions were lost, one by one, in the course of the 1260s and 1270s.
The Order at Acre in the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century
The fall of the inland possessions reduced the Teutonic Order, in the Latin East, to the status of a garrison within the city of Acre. The Order’s principal convent — the Konventshaus — was a substantial building in the Montmusard suburb of the city, near the harbour, and it served as the residence of the Order’s Master of the Holy Land, the regional commander responsible for the surviving Order in the East. The Master of the Holy Land was, in this period, one of three regional commanders of the Order; the others were the Deutschmeister, responsible for the German commanderies, and the Hochmeister himself, who presided over the whole corporation and, from the late 1220s, resided in Venice and then in the Latin Kingdom’s residual ports.
The Order’s Levantine activity in the second half of the thirteenth century was dominated by the defence of Acre. The city was, by 1270, the only major port in the hands of the Latin Christians; it was overcrowded, politically faction-ridden, and dependent for its food supply on Italian merchant convoys. The Teutonic Order was one of the principal military organisations within the city, and it shared responsibility, with the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the secular knights, for the maintenance of the walls. The Order’s contribution to the city’s defence was substantial, but it was overshadowed by the much larger establishments of the older orders.
The Order also participated, in this period, in a number of naval operations in the eastern Mediterranean. The Order’s ships — small cogs and galleys, based in the harbour of Acre — joined in the piracy that was the regular commerce of the Latin East, and they participated in the defence of the city against the Mongol invasions of 1244 and 1260. The Order was, however, never a major naval power in the eastern Mediterranean; the Italian maritime republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa dominated the sea, and the Order was a minor auxiliary in the system of naval defence that they maintained.
The Fall of Acre, 1291
The final catastrophe of the Latin Kingdom came in the spring of 1291. The Mamluk sultanate of Egypt, under Sultan Qalawun and his son al-Ashraf Khalil, had been preparing, for several years, a major offensive against the residual Latin possessions. The fall of the great Hospitaller fortress of Margat in 1285, the fall of the Templar fortress of Laodicea in 1287, and the fall of the city of Tripoli in 1289 had progressively reduced the Kingdom to the single city of Acre. The Order’s Master of the Holy Land, Hermann von Salza’s distant successors in the regional command, took an active part in the diplomatic and military preparations for the defence.
The Mamluk army appeared before Acre in early April 1291. The siege lasted, with terrible intensity, for six weeks. The city fell on 18 May. The details of the siege are examined in the article on the fall of Acre in 1291; for the purposes of the present article it is sufficient to note that the Order’s convent in the Montmusard suburb was overrun, the Master of the Holy Land was killed, and the bulk of the Order’s Levantine property was lost. The Templars and Hospitallers withdrew, with the surviving secular population, to the harbour, and from there to the island of Cyprus, where the Latin Kingdom’s residual government was to survive for several more decades in a purely titular form.
The Consequences of the Levantine Defeat
The fall of Acre was a catastrophe of the first order for the Latin Christian presence in the East. The fall was, a turning point for the Teutonic Order. The Order had, by 1291, lost almost all of its Levantine property; it had lost its Master in the Holy Land and a substantial proportion of the knight-brothren who had been stationed in the East. The Order’s political and military weight in the eastern Mediterranean was, in effect, brought to an end.
The fall of Acre was, however, less disastrous for the Teutonic Order than it was for the Templars and the Hospitallers. The Templars were, in the following decade, to be brought down by the concerted action of the King of France and the Pope; the Hospitallers were to retire to Rhodes, and later to Malta, and to commit themselves, for the next several centuries, to a Mediterranean maritime strategy. The Teutonic Order had, by 1291, a much more diversified set of possessions than either of the older orders. The headquarters had already been relocated to Venice, and the Order’s principal territorial base was in Prussia, where the Prussian Crusade was approaching the end of its first, decisive phase. The Order could, in consequence, absorb the Levantine loss with less institutional trauma than its rivals.
The fall of Acre completed the process by which the Order became, in identity as well as in fact, a Baltic power. The Order’s institutional centre of gravity had, by 1309, definitively moved to Marienburg; the Order’s military operations were, by the early fourteenth century, almost exclusively directed against the Lithuanians and the Poles; the Order’s chancery was producing, by the mid-fourteenth century, the documents of a German-speaking territorial prince. The Order never again operated as a major field force in the eastern Mediterranean. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, on whose institutions the Order had been modelled, ceased to exist as a political entity. The Order was, in a sense, the institutional heir of the Latin Kingdom, but the inheritance was now to be administered in the Baltic rather than in the Levant.
Sources
- Boockmann, Hartmut. Der Deutsche Orden: Zwölf Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte. Munich: Beck, 1981.
- Forey, Alan. The Military Orders: From the Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Centuries. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.
- Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades: A Short History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
- Urban, William. The Teutonic Knights: A Military History. London: Greenhill, 2003.
Related Reading
The principal Levantine engagement of the Order in the early thirteenth century is treated in the article on the battle of Damietta. The catastrophe that ended the Order’s Levantine career is examined in detail in the account of the fall of Acre in 1291. For the wider context of the Order’s early years, see the parent History of the Teutonic Knights and the article on the founding of the Order at Acre in 1190. The Baltic successor state is examined under the Prussian state, and the Order’s overall military campaigns are surveyed in the parent article. The Order’s own brothers and sisters are treated in the parent cluster.