The historiography on the Teutonic knights, since the nineteenth century, has been strongly conditioned by the fact that they founded their own State of the Order (in German Ordensstuat) on the shores of the Baltic Sea from which, after its secularization following the Protestant Reformation, arose the duchy, later kingdom, of Prussia.
The conflictual relations with Poland and an exploitation and ideologization of the medieval history of the Teutonic knights have given rise to controversies between German and Polish scholars, who, only for a few decades, have started a more serene debate.
The role of the Teutonic Order was positively evaluated by German historiography: the Christianization of the Baltic implemented by the Order and the efficient administrative structure created by the Order itself were highlighted. In Polish historiography, however, the Teutonic Knights were considered ferocious oppressors of the Slavic and Baltic populations, a real colonial power.
The research carried out by scholars, both from the German and from the Polish side, was mainly focused on the history of the Teutonics in the Baltic, while the history of the Teutonic settlements in Germany and in the Mediterranean was relatively neglected.
One could thus have the impression that the story of the Teutonic Order was destined from the outset to end with the creation of a colonial state, on the border between the Germanic and Slavic worlds. From this point of view, the expansion of modern Prussia towards the East, at the expense of Poland, could be considered a continuation of the policy of the Teutonic Knights and the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime in the East as an almost inevitable consequence of centuries of German aggression towards the ! Slavic world. The exploitation of the history and symbols of the Teutonic Knights by Prussian nationalism at the end of the 19th century and by Nazism in the 20th century contributed to the formation of this impression. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Order was considered a negative product of a negative era, i.e. the Middle Ages.
The Prussians preferred not to invoke the Teutonic heritage, because they were fully aware of the fact that the Teutonic Order, which continued to exist outside Prussia, considered the incorporation of the Order's Prussian territories into the Duchy of Brandenburg-Prussia to be illegitimate . which took place in 1525. At that time the Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg had converted to Protestantism, transforming the Order's Prussian territory into the Duchy of Prussia. From here we understand why Frederick III, Margrave of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, when he proclaimed himself King of Prussia in 1701, made no reference to the Teutonic Order. In the eighteenth century then, under the influence of the Enlightenment which was very strong in Prussia, a negative vision of the medieval past dominated.
This only changed towards the beginning of the 19th century, following the war of liberation from Napoleon's rule with the birth of a new German patriotic spirit. Then the Middle Ages was considered the golden age of Germany.
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The black cross of the Teutonic coat of arms, in 1813, was used as a model for the iron cross, an honor invented for the Prussian soldiers of the war of liberation against Napoleon, but which remained in use also during the first and second world wars , thus suggesting, on a symbolic level, a continuity between the Teutonic Order, Prussia and Hitler. (And this is also because the Order's castles were used as training centers for the Nazi elite.) On the Prussian side, in the second half of the 19th century, nationalism became aggressive, anti-Slavic; and in this context began the exploitation of the history of the Teutonic Order to justify the "Drang nach Osten", the Germanic expansion towards the East.
On the Polish side, however, the fight against the Teutonic Order was claimed, which was seen as an ancestor of that Prussian-German state, in which, after the creation of the Empire in 1870/71 (the Second Reich), the Western Poland. Right here, in the territory of the ancient grand duchy of Posna, the most culturally developed part (unlike eastern Poland inserted in the Russian Empire), a strong Polish nationalism developed. The negative vision of the Teutonic Order on the Polish side is novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916), "The Crucifers" (1900), where the Teutonics appear as brutal sadists. The same writer for one of his previous historical novels, the famous "Quo vadis?", then won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905.
Not a little influenced by this negative view is an important monograph on the history of the Teutonic Order in Prussia, published in 1971 in Italian. It is the work of an eminent Polish historian, Karol Górski (1903-1988), at whose school at the University of Toniti an entire generation of scholars was trained, including Zenon Hubert Nowak the original text of the book, written in French, it was never published, while a Polish version came out in 1977. The resonance that this monograph had in the Italian press demonstrates that some of the statements contained in it lent themselves to misunderstandings and hasty conclusions. In fact, in the presentation of the book in the "Corriere della Sera" the Teutonic Knights were addressed as "Hitler's great-grandparents", while the subtitle of the article read: "The monastic state established in Prussia by fanatical crusaders returning from the Holy Land was the premise of the warlike German nation." The author of the article, Arturo Lanocita, concluded from reading Górski's book that the Teutonic Order "in Prussia, where it had found a vacuum of power, put together the roots and premises of that nation bristling with halberds and helmets studded which, under the Hohenzollem dynasty. and then under that of the Nazi heirs, terrorized and devastated half
Gorsky …
What are Górski's statements from which this image of the Teutonic Knights as "Hitler's great-grandfathers" arose? The author, in the introduction, argued that the state created by the Teutonics in Prussia was comparable to that founded by the Jesuits in the 1600s in Paraguay. In both cases there would be the fact that men, who renounced the world on principle, turned to it again to found states, mostly by violence. Furthermore. both in Prussia and in Paraguay, the Polish historian pointed out, “the dominant monastic corporation was recruited from outside the country and therefore constituted a sort of caste closed towards the natives.
The Teutonic Knights only very rarely welcomed the descendants of German nobles who settled in Prussia; just as the order of Malta was closed to the nobles of the island, unless they were born outside its possessions, and the Jesuits of Paraguay, exclusively European. they didn't even accept guaranis as coadjutors. Natives were admitted into all these state organizations only in subordinate functions."
Górski later explained, responding to the criticisms of a German scholar, Udo Arnold: “the fundamental sense of my book, which was the fruit of over 40 years of research and reflection, is contained in the thesis that the Teutonic Order, as an ecclesiastical corporation consecrated to asceticism and mysticism does not have the right to create a state. This thesis comes ex definition from the Teutonic Order. The ideology of every Christian order consists in the renunciation of earthly goods, and among them the exercise of state powers. This emerges from the evangelical text which narrates the temptation of Jesus and his refusal to assume powers over states (Matt. 4, 8-11). [...] If you want to found a state you have to take on all the consequences that derive from this decision, even invasion wars and crimes.
For Gorski. the Teutonic Order is thus identical with the state he created in Prussia. A negative judgment on this State therefore implies an identical evaluation of the religious-military Order of the Teutonic Order. It should also be noted that for the Polish scholar the religious component of the Order is irrelevant. In fact, according to him, by the time the Order was founded, at the end of the 12th century, the idea of the crusade would have already been in decline.
Therefore the birth of the Teutonic Order would not be due "to a persistence in Germany of the idea of crusade", but rather "to political calculations, in particular of the Hohenstaufen in Sicily, who sought to exert their influence in the Levant". Górski therefore clearly contests any religious motivation in the origins of the Order: "If at the beginning of the Teutonic Order there were a spark of purely religious inspiration, it would be possible to follow its development even in the course of the bloody history of this religious order , who was looking for a country to conquer and a state to found".
Significant, for Górski's negative vision of the Teutonic Order, is the obscure image that he traces of the great master Ermanno di Salza (1209-1239), tireless mediator between Frederick and the popes, under whom the expansion of the The Teutonic Order in Eastern Europe. According to the Polish historian, Ermanno originally from a family of ministeriales, i.e. knights-servants who had won their freedom, would have been driven by an irrepressible personal ambition to obtain for the Order he led a territory in which to establish a State, which would allow him to become prince10. For the Polish historian, Ermanno's work "was that of a politician, and none of his most important actions was that of a religious". “He was undoubtedly a great man who died in Salerno in 1239 and was buried in Barletta in the chapel of the Order. He had given Germany a new province, launching his own Hospitaller order in the wake of the Empire. Having to choose between two notions of Christianity at the time at war with each other, the Empire and the papacy, he had preferred the first, i.e. a decidedly political rather than a religious conception. The choice of means had proved to be consistent with this approach: it had deceived the prince of Masovia. while the bishop of Prussia had been left in captivity; he had not shied away from resorting to false documents. For a monk, that was no small feat."
The negative image of the Teutonic Order that emerges from Górski's book must be seen in the context of the Polish historiographical tradition, but the echo it aroused in Italy, where the history of the Teutonic Order was associated with that of Prussia and Nazism, was certainly influenced by a factor unrelated to the work of the Polish historian. We are talking about the film "Alexander Nevsky" 11 (1938) by the Soviet director Sergej M. Ejzenslejn (Eisenstein) in which the Teutonic knights are presented as the champions of the Germanic world as opposed to the Slavic world, with a clear allusion to the threat of Nazi Germany.
In the seventies of the twentieth century, however, a slow and gradual revision of the opposing historiographical positions between German and Polish historians began, which had still been reaffirmed in the reaction that Górski's book had aroused in Germany and in the Polish historian's reply to the criticisms by German.
French revision
Indeed, on the one hand, we find texts in which the negative stereotype of the Teutonics is overcome. For example, the book by a French author, non-specialist on the subject, Henry Bogdan. of 1995 (translated into Italian in 1998). in which a positive judgment is expressed on the history of the Order: "As in all social groups, even among the Teutonic Knights there were some black sheep who forgot the vows they had pronounced, but overall, the vast majority of this cavalry elite remained faithful, for more than eight centuries, to the mission that had been established by the founders of the Order in the XII century, both in the Holy Land and in the Baltic world, when they defended Western Christendom in the face of its enemies, and in our days , placing himself at the service of the poor and dispossessed, thus fulfilling the traditional obligations of chivalry, servitum et aiixilium.
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