Historiography on the Teutonic Knights since the nineteenth century has been strongly influenced by the fact that they founded on the shores of the Baltic Sea their own Order State (in German Ordensstuat) from which, after its secularization following the Protestant Reformation, the duchy, later kingdom, of Prussia was born.
Conflicting relations with Poland and an instrumentalization and ideologizing of the medieval history of the Teutonic Knights have given rise to controversy between German and Polish scholars, who, only since a few decades, have engaged in a calmer debate.
The role of the Teutonic Order was evaluated positively by German historiography: the Christianization of the Baltic implemented by the Order and the efficient administrative structure implemented by the Order itself were emphasized. By Polish historiography, on the other hand, the Teutonic knights were considered fierce oppressors of the Slavic and Baltic populations, a veritable colonial power.
The research carried out by scholars on both the German and Polish sides was mainly focused on the history of the Teutonic settlements in the Baltic, while the history of Teutonic settlements in Germany and the Mediterranean was relatively neglected.
Thus one could get the impression that the story of the Teutonic Order was from the very beginning destined to end with the establishment of a colonial state, on the borders between the Germanic and Slavic worlds. In this view, the expansion of modern Prussia eastward, at the expense of Poland, could be seen as 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 ver so i! Slavic world. Contributing to the formation of this impression was the instrumentalization of the history and symbols of the Teutonic Knights employed by Prussian nationalism in the late nineteenth century and by Nazism in the twentieth century But from Prussian and German bread the Teutonic Order had not always been viewed positively. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Order was seen as a negative product of a negative era, namely the Middle Ages.
The Prussians preferred not to invoke the legacy of the Teutonic Order because they were fully aware 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. which had taken place in 1525, to be illegitimate. Then Grandmaster Albert of Brandenburg had converted to Protestantism, turning the Order’s Prussian territory into the Duchy of Prussia. From this we can understand why Frederick III, Margrave of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, made no reference to the Teutonic Órdine when he proclaimed himself King of Prussia in 1701. In the 18th century then, under the influence of the Enlightenment, which was very strong in Prussia, a negative view of the medieval past dominated.
This changed only toward the beginning of the 19th century, following the war of liberation from Napoleon’s rule with the emergence of a new German patriotic spirit. Then the Middle Ages were considered Germany’s golden age.
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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 that was invented for Prussian soldiers in the War of Liberation against Napoleon, but which remained in use during World War I and World War II, thus suggesting, on a symbolic level, a continuity between the Teutonic, Prussia and Hitler. (This was 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 instrumentalization of the history of the Teutonic Order to justify the “Drang nach Osten,” Germanic expansion eastward.
On the Polish side, on the other hand, the struggle against the Teutonic Order, which was seen as an ancestor of the Prussian-German state into which, after the creation of the Empire in 1870/71 (the Second Reich), western Poland had been incorporated, was vindicated. Right here, in the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Posna the most culturally developed part (unlike eastern Poland incorporated into the Russian Empire), a strong Polish nationalism developed The negative view of the Teutonic Order on the Polish side was concre-tized in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s (1846-1916) novel, “The Crucifiers” (1900), where the Teutonicists appear as brutal sadists. The same writer for an earlier historical novel, the famous “Quo vadis?” later won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905.
Not uninfluenced 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 in the University of Toniti an entire generation of scholars was trained, including Zenon Hubert Nowak the original text of the book, written in French, was never published, while a Polish version came out in 1977. The resonance that this monograph had in the Italian press shows that some statements in it lent themselves to misunderstanding and hasty conclusions. In fact, in the book’s introduction in the “Corriere della Sera” the Teutonic knights were apostrophized as “Hitler’s great-grandfathers,” while the article’s subtitle 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 power vacuum, put together the roots and premises of that nation bristling with halberds and spiked helmets that, under the Hohenzollem dynasty. and then under that of the Nazi heirs, terrorized and devastated half
Gòrski …
What are Górski’s assertions 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 Teutonic Knights in Prussia coughed comparable to that founded by the Jesuits in the 1600s in Paraguay. In both cases there would be the fact that men, who had renounced the world in principle, turned to it again to found states, mostly by violence.” Moreover. in both Prussia and Paraguay, the Polish historian noted, “the dominant monastic guild was recruited from outside the country and therefore constituted a kind of closed caste vis-à-vis the natives.
The Teutonic Knights only very rarely accepted descendants of German nobles settled in Prussia; just as the Order of Malta was closed to island nobles unless they were born outside its possessions, and the exclusively European Jesuits of Paraguay. did not even accept Guarani as coadjutors. Natives were admitted to all these state organizations only in subordinate functions.”
The Teutonic Knights only very rarely accepted descendants of German nobles settled in Prussia; just as the Order of Malta was closed to island nobles unless they were born outside its possessions, and the exclusively European Jesuits of Paraguay. did not even accept Guarani as coadjutors. Natives were admitted to all these state organizations only in subordinate functions.”
For Górski. the Teutonic Order is thus identical to the state he created in Prussia. A negative judgment on this state thus entails an identical evaluation of the religious-military 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 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, particularly of the Hohenstaufen in Sicily, who sought to exert their influence in the Levant ‘. Górski thus sharply disputes any religious motivation in the origins of the Order: “If there was a spark of purely religious inspiration at the beginnings of the Teutonic Order, it would be possible to follow its development even in the course of the bloody history of this religious order, which sought a country to conquer and a state to found.”
Significant to Górski’s negative view of the Teutonic Order is the dark image he draws of Grandmaster Hermann of Salza (1209-1239), tireless mediator between Frederick n and the popes, under whom the expansion of the Teutonic Order into Eastern Europe began. For the Polish historian, Hermann originally came from a family of ministeriales, i.e., of knights-servants who had won freedom, and 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 a prince. For the Polish historian, Hermann’s work “was that of a politician, and none of his most important actions were proper to a religious man.” “He was undoubtedly a great man he 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 then warring notions of Christianity, the Empire and the papacy, he had preferred the former, that is, a decidedly political rather than a religious conception. His choice of means had been consistent with this approach: he had tricked 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 this was no small thing.”
The negative image of the Teutonic Order that comes out of Górski’s book must be seen within the Polish historiographical tradition, but the echo it aroused in Italy, where the history of the Teutonic Knights was associated with that of Prussia and Nazism, was certainly influenced by a factor unrelated to the Polish historian’s work. This is the film “Alexander Nevsky” 11 (1938) by Soviet director Sergey M. Ejzenslejn (Eisenstein) in which the Teutonic knights are presented as the champions of the Germanic world as opposed to the Slavic world, with clear allusion to the threat of Nazi Germany.
The 1970s, however, saw the beginning of a slow and gradual revision of the opposing historiographical positions between German and Polish historians, which had still been reaffirmed in the reaction that Górski’s book had aroused in Germany and in the Polish historian’s retort to criticism on the German side.
French revision
In fact, on the one hand, we find texts in which the negative stereotype of the Teutonic is overcome. For example, the book by a French author, not a specialist in the subject, Henry Bogdan. from 1995 (translated into Italian in 1998). in which he makes a positive assessment of the Order's history: "As in all social groups, even among the Teutonic knights there were black sheep who forgot the vows they had taken, but, overall, the vast majority of this elite of German chivalry remained faithful, for more than eight centuries, to the mission that had been set by the Order's founders in the 12th century, both in the Holy Land and the Baltic world, when they defended Western Christendom as it grappled with its enemies, and in our own day, putting themselves at the service of the poor and dispossessed, thus fulfilling the traditional obligations of chivalry, servitium et aiixilium.
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