Teutonic Knights

The Teutonic Knights: A Military History by William Urban, 278 pages

 

The Teutonic Knights - also known as "the Order of the Hospital of St Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem" or "the German Order" - were a religious order founded by some of the German participants in the Third Crusade.  Similar to the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaler, the Teutonic Knights were soldiers who swore the three monastic vows - poverty, chastity, and obedience - and lived a common life marked by regular liturgical prayer.  Originally focused on the fight in the Holy Land, as the Crusades waned they redirected their attentions to Prussia and the Baltic states, where they had been involved in struggles against the pagan Balts, and erected a state that survived until the sixteenth century.

 

As a military history, this book spends little time on the non-martial work of the order, while noting that "[h]ardly a middle-sized town in Germany was without a hospital, church, or convent which street names commemorate today."  Urban resists the dominant narrative which sees the Knights as a German spearhead into the Slavic East, foreshadowing later German expansion (and especially the Second World War).  He does not shy away from the more grisly moments in the history of the Order, but he doesn't romanticize their enemies, either.  The result is an objective, balanced account.  The lack of a strong narrative flow does mean that the book sometimes seems like a barrage of names and dates.

 

An informative work about that shadowy corner of Europe where Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and paganism met, often bloodily.