Teutonic Order

The Teutonic Order's state was the crusader Prussia from 1230 to 1525, monks in armour ruling pagans from brick castles. Founded about 1190 as a field hospital at Acre, the Brothers of the German House took the white mantle with the black cross and followed Hermann von Salza, friend of emperors and popes, to a papal gift: the heathen Prussians between Vistula and Neman. Summoned by a Polish duke in 1226 and confirmed by golden bulls, they conquered in fifty years of forest war, built Marienburg, the greatest brick castle in the world, and ran a theocracy of komturs who prayed, taxed amber and forbade towns to sneeze. Winrich's long mastership was the golden age: grain fleets, Hanseatic dues, and missionary swords pushing into Lithuania, the last pagans of Europe. Then Grunwald: in July 1410 Polish and Lithuanian hosts annihilated the Order's army, killed the Grand Master with most of his knights, and though Marienburg held, the Order never recovered, paying indemnities and losing Samogitia, then West Prussia at Thorn in 1466. In 1525 Albrecht of Brandenburg, last Grand Master, rode to Krakow, knelt to the Polish king, turned Lutheran and took Prussia as a hereditary duchy: the monks' state became the duchy that would become a kingdom.