Theology

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Council of Constance Part 1

The Council of Constance marked a pivotal moment in the history of the Catholic Church and the history of Europe in general.

One issue on the agenda was the ongoing schism that the council of Pisa had failed to resolve. Another the reform of the increasingly corrupt clergy all the way up to the pope himself. And then there were a number of individual questions this gathering of thousands had to address.

Whilst all these were crucial questions, the way the council constituted itself foreshadowed a fundamental change in the way European saw themselves.

This part 1 deals with the establishment of the council and the removal of the popes, most importantly the pope who had convened the council on the first place, John XXIII and his counterpart, the emperor Sigismund.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 171 – The Council of Constance Part 1 – Cleaning House, which is also episode 8 of season 9 “The Reformation before the Reformation”.

On a cold night in October 1414 a most unusual procession appeared near the village of Klösterle on the Arlberg pass. Not an army but almost as large. 600 men, some soldiers and bodyguards, a few high ranking aristocrats but mostly men of the cloth. Clerics, doctors of theology but also abbots, bishops and archbishops as well as the true princes of the church, cardinals, dozens of them. And at the center of the procession an enormous cart and in it the true lord of all of Christendom, the bearer of both swords, pope John XXIII.

The roads they had travelled on for days were terrible. Whatever was left of the old roman infrastructure had long been buried underground or had deteriorated so badly, it had gone out of use. So through the autumn mud the processions ploughs on. Just as they were passing the hamlet of Klösterle, in the holloway that masked as one of Europe’s busiest north-south connection the attendants watched in panic as the right hand side wheels of the papal wagon climbed the bank of the road. Before anyone could reign in the horses and prevent disaster, the carriage rose, went past the point of vanishing stability and with a terrifying thump landed on its side. The holy father was thrown out of his vehicle and lay buried deep in the snow. His lords and bishops run to him and ask: “Oh Holy father, has your holiness been harmed?” and he responded “here for devil’s sake I lie”.

Shaken but unharmed the vicar of Christ kept going. As the panorama widened and he could see the city of Bludenz down in the valley that leads to the lake and the city of Constance he uttered, full of premonition “So this is where they catch the foxes”.

And the old fox was right to be worried. For a year later he will find himself in prison in Mannheim, then just a solitary tower by the shore of the Rhine. How that happened and why he is now resting in a magnificent monument in the Baptistery of Florence paid for by the Medici family and bearing the inscription: John the XXIII former pope, Died in Florence A.D. 1419, on 11th day before the Calends of January is what we will look at in this episode!

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Here we are, the pope John XXIII is travelling across the Alps to go to a general church council in Constance. Which begs just one question – why? Why would Baldassarre Cossa, elected pope and recognized as head of the church in dozens of lands, born on the sundrenched island of Procida near Naples call a church assembly to discuss the schism and in a foggy mid-sized town in the German lands to boot?

Well, the answer is, he didn’t. Or at least he did not call a church council to debate the schism. As far as John XXIII was concerned, the schism was done and dusted. The Community of the Faithful had come together in Pisa in 1409 and had deposed the two competing contenders, Gregory XII and Benedict XIII and had replaced them with his predecessor Alexander V. And he, Baldassarre Cossa had been canonically elected as the successor of Alexander V. The fact that Gregory XII and Benedict XIII were still around claiming supremacy was a logistical and maybe military problem, but not one we need a church council for.

So the reason he did still call a church council had to do with one of the provisions of the previous council the one in Pisa. The Pisan gathering had made pope Alexander V swear he would call another council within the next three years to deal with the open issue of church reform. Because in all that debate about how to put an end to the schism, the important issue of how can we make a church a little less corrupt had fallen off the agenda.

That was why John XXIII found himself in a bind to call a church council. And he wasn’t opposed to the idea. Presiding over a major reform council would elevate him on to the level of the great popes Innocent II &III, Alexander III and  Gregory X. That would make everybody forget his – how can  say that politely – somewhat checkered past.

But as so often, Pope John XXIII struggled to find a suitable venue for his grand ecumenical council. Initially he wanted to do it in Rome, after all his capital and a categorical statement that the time when the Pope had to live away from the eternal city was now well and truly over.

The problem was that John XXIII had to live away from the eternal city except for very brief periods. His neighbor, King Ladislaus of Naples kept conquering papal lands and sacking Rome on regular intervals. That is the same Ladislaus who had inherited and pursued a claim on the crown of Hungary from his father Charles the Short who was made even shorter by Elisabeth of Bosnia. If that last sentence was complete gobbledygook for you, listen back to episode 169.

A lasting peace with Naples was unlikely. Pope John XXIII did not like Ladislaus of Naples very much ever since Ladislaus had his two brothers hanged as pirates. Ladislaus did not like the pope very much, because he could.

With Rome off the list of suitable venues, John needed to find a neutral place in Italy. But by then, the peninsula was in the grip of near perennial war. Many of the former communes have become principalities ruled by local strongmen. And strongmen do what strongmen are wont to do, they go after other people’s lands, cities and treasure until there are armies crisscrossing the land from early spring to late autumn.

Enter stage left our old friend Sigismund of Luxemburg. By now this extremely intrepid man had not only secured his reign over Hungary but had finally achieved his great ambition and had become king of the Romans. And best of all, his hated half-brother Wenceslaus was still around to see it happening.

How did he become King of the Romans, that was simple. Nobody really wanted the job any more. The reign of Rudolf of the empty pocket had shown beyond any doubt that there was no money left to establish any kind of imperial authority. Only the very, very richest could afford to don the imperial coronation mantle. And even after 4 decades of infighting and mismanagement, the house of Luxemburg was still the richest of the great eligible families of the empire. And being a squabbling lot, two Luxemburgs put their hat in the ring, Sigismund, king of Hungary and Jobst, margrave of Moravia. Weirdly, Jobst had the inferior title but a lot more money. But what he lacked was longevity. Both were elected by a mixture of correct and incorrect prince-electors but Jobst died in 1411. Sigismund had the election repeated and was confirmed by all.

Being king of the Romans and future emperor came with the role supreme protector of the church. And whilst John XXIII may think the schism is over, Sigismund did not see it like that. He had to deal with the fact that some imperial principalities, the Palatinate and Baden for instance kept their allegiance to the deposed pope Gregory XII. So this needed to be cleaned up. And he knew that one way to gain true control over the empire and with it the leverage to initiate much needed imperial reform, was to rescue  Holy Mother church.

That is why Sigismund pops up in Lodi in Northern Italy in December 1413 to discuss the long overdue church council with the pope. By now John XXIII had considered Bologna and even Avignon of all places, but both had been turned down by his advisors as either too dangerous or totally inappropriate.

At which point Sigismund suggested they all come over to his yard. Yard being the word my teenage son uses to describe a home and I thought I use it since I am a bit tired of using the same words again and again.

To tell what happened next, I have to introduce the chronicler Ulrich Richental. He was a citizen of Constance and he wrote a very detailed account of the council that – despite some biases – is still the #1 source for the events during that period. Richental is a big fan of Sigismund not so much of the popes. So he does make things up occasionally, like the road accident at the start of the episode. But he does it so nicely, I couldn’t stop myself pretending it did actually happen.

And here is Ulrich’s account of the two heads of Christendom discussing the venue for the most momentous event of the 15th century:

When Sigismund proposed to come to Germany John XXIII responded: “I cannot convince my cardinals to travel north across the Alps”

Sigismund: “In that case I cannot get the princes and electors to travel south across the Alps”

Gridlock

Sigismund then turns to one of his entourage, the duke of Teck: “Isn’t there an imperial city close to the Alps?  Teck: “Sure Sire, the city of Kempten”. At which point a count of Nellenburg intervenes: “nah, there is not enough food in Kempten. But there is another city, just an hour’s ride away, Constance on the lake. They have a bishopric and everything”

Sigismund: “Holy father – do you like Constance?”

John XXIII: “Oh my beloved son, I do like Constance”

That’s it – That is how that went down – Richental told us so, so definitely true!

That is why on the 27th of October Pope John XXIII and his entourage of 600 entered the city of Costance under a golden baldachin carried by four eminent burghers of the free imperial city. The Imperial bailee performed the service of the groom and a group of schoolchildren sang appropriate hymns. The pope grateful for the friendly welcome blessed the congregation.

Everything was going swimmingly. The pope and his immediate entourage was given accommodation in the bishop’s palace opposite the cathedral. The others were distributed amongst the homes of the locals who were all too happy to AirBnB their spare rooms for outrageous rents.

Because it wasn’t just the 600 papal delegates, which included humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini as well as the various prelates. There were also a total of 3 patriarchs, 23 cardinals, 27 archbishops 106 bishops, 103 abbots, 344 doctors of theology, all of whom came with their scribes, procurators and administrators of various kinds. Then there were the princes, a full complement of the prince electors, the dukes of Bavaria, Austria, Schleswig, Mecklenburg Lothringia and Teck as well as  a further 676 noblemen Those who did not come themselves like the kings of France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Polen, Naples, Castile and Aragon, sent representatives, as did the patriarch of  Constantinople and the emperor of Ethiopia. And then there were all these people who came hoping to make some money of this incredible gathering, goldsmiths, cobblers, furriers, blacksmiths, bakers, shopkeepers, apothecaries, moneylenders, buglers, pipers, entertainers, barbers, heralds, merchants of any kind and the often mentioned whores and public girls. All of them needed to stay somewhere and somehow all of them did.

The city museum at the Rosgarten hosts a wonderful model of Constance from around the time of the council which gives a great idea of its size or lack of it. Constance had maybe 6-8,000 inhabitants at the time which isn’t huge now and wasn’t even at that time. Places like Augsburg or Nurnberg were more than twice the size. How many people came in total to the council is hard to determine, in particular since our friend Richental tends to exaggerate a bit. Plus not everyone stayed all throughout the 3 years and some the council lasted. In one of my secondary sources they talk about 5000 monks and 16,000 priests which would suggest a total number of 25,000-30,000 new arrivals. I struggle to believe that but it is likely that the population at least doubled during that period and maybe more than tripled in the initial phase.

Given there is so much information available about Constance during that period, I may dedicate a future episode to the conditions not just during the council, but more generally. We have not done a Germany in the year 1400 episode yet, so this may be a good one.

But for now we leave the cramped conditions behind and go back to the high politics.

The pope was here, but the emperor had not yet arrived. The reason for the delay was that Sigismund had been elected three years earlier but had not yet been crowned, not even as king of the Romans. That had to happen before he went toe to toe with the pope. So on November 8, 1414 he was crowned in Aachen and then progressed south towards Constance. In Strasburg he told everyone that he and John were like totally aligned on everything. From there he took the road along the Neckar valley to Stuttgart and then down to the lake where he arrived in Űberlingen at midnight on the 24th of December.

He had called ahead and asked for transport to cross the lake. So in the middle of Christmas eve the boatmen of Konstance set off across the lake to bring their emperor into their city. It was  3 in the morning when he finally arrived with his wife, several princes and their attendants all loaded up on torchlit boats. The city council came to the harbor to greet him and led him to the town hall where he was given a drink. And then they dashed across the square to the cathedral where – and that is still hard to believe – the pope was waiting for him. John XXIII had halted Midnight Mass for the emperor. And not only that, he had allowed Sigismund to do what the Luxemburg rulers have been doing since Karl IV, he let him read the gospel according to Luke where it says “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.” He read this whilst wearing his crown and holding the imperial sword. No previous pope, not even the king of France had allowed such a display to go ahead. Nobody wanted to be reminded that even the bible acknowledged that the empire was an institution older than the papacy and one that was meant to rule the whole of the Roman world.

John XXIII left no record of his thoughts that night.

The council had started debating before Sigismund had arrived, but as the cardinal Fillastre noted, nothing of substance had yet been discussed, because nobody aka the pope himself, wanted to touch on the actual subject, the unity of the church and the continued schism.

That being said, the council wasn’t stalling. If you think about the sheer scale of what was going on. These thousands of delegates are pushed together into this mid-sized medieval town. The grand debates take place in the Münster, the cathedral, but few delegates get the chance to address the whole council. So they start to meet in smaller groups to debate specific issues, initially spontaneously and after a while in a formal structure of committees and working groups. But what also happened was that factions were forming. And these did not form around political programs or theological perspectives, but along geographic and cultural lines.

The council was establishing nations. The idea of nations came from the way medieval universities were organised as we have heard about Paris and Prague in previous episodes. And since most delegates had studied at university or were practicing academics, these divisions appeared natural. They were also a way to break up the hierarchy structure of the church that monopolised decision making in the hands of the pope and his college of cardinals.

But is not just that, it is also a sign of a changing world. Whilst on the outset it looked as if the council was resurrecting the idea of a unified Christendom under one pope and one emperor, the reality was that this concept was fading away not just as a political structure but also as a cultural entity. Instead the peoples of europe were developing separate identities. We are still centuries away from people seeing nationality as one of their primary defining characteristic and source of belonging, but there is clearly something shifting.

The vernacular has taken over from Latin on much of the cultural and administrative output of the times. For instance our chronicler Richental writes his work in German, more precisely in his native dialect. It’s not that he does not know Latin, more that he does not feel he needs to use it to be taken seriously. In Italy we have Dante and in England Chaucer who elevate the vernacular to a literary language, whilst French has become the language at the court of the Valois. I am not that familiar with developments in Poland and Hungary, but as we have seen last week, the Czech language has become a crucial marker of belonging in Bohemia.

Still the nations that form in Constance were not yet as rigidly defined by etymology and culture as modern nations are. The conciliar nations are created through a mixture of political significance, compass orientation and language. There were in the end five. There was Italica, Gallicana, Germania which included Scandinavia, Poland, Lithauania, Croatia, Hungary and Bohemia, Anglca which was England, Scotland and Ireland and Iberica, which comprised the various Spanish kingdoms and Portugal.

There were discussions about the structure of these nations, but interestingly from the Iberian side. Aragon wanted to be its own nation. That was turned down because in that case Castile and Portugal would also have their separate nations. And if that happened the Germanica nation would splinter as well, making the whole concept of nations unworkable.

Do you remember the cardinal Fillastre, the one who had been moaning that nothing was moving forward in this great church council? Well, in January 1415, two months into the debates he had had enough. He issued an treatise stating that all three popes should resign. And that the council had the power to force all three popes to step down if that was in the interest of the unity of the church.

The response from John XXIII and his supporters was the obvious. Sorry, last time we did that and deposed two popes, we got three. Why do you think by deposing three you will not end up with four? And what was wrong with me as pope?

Well on the last question, quite a lot, an awful lot. Most it were rumours at the time, but still. He might have been a pirate in his youth, after all his brothers had definitely been. Pope Alexander V, the one the council of Pisa had chosen had died only days after having lunch at the house of the man who became his successor. Then the bribes that were paid to the cardinals at his election were legendary, almost as legendary as his income from the sale of church benefices once he was made pope.

John XXIII’s opponents put together a list of 18 accusations, each one of them pretty damning.

But that would not have meant that he was done for. He had made sure that the majority of the participants at the council were Italians and the Italians would be very wary to opening up the ballot again, potentially ending up with a Frenchman who could take the church back to Avignon.

But that line of defence crumbled when Sigismund used his immense charm and power of persuasion to introduce a change in the voting process. No longer should it be by heads or by rank, but by nation. Each of the five nation was to have one vote, as would the college of cardinals.

Voting by nations totally undermined the church hierarchy, because suddenly the archbishops and bishops find themselves acting alongside the priests, monks and doctors of their nation, rather than with their brother bishops. And where it was even harder to take was for the cardinals. They had become accustomed to being a sort of cabinet of the church that would make all the major decisions along with the pope. But here in the council, they were relegated to having just one vote that ranked equal to any one of the nation’s votes.

John was a smart politician and he realised the non-Italian nations had a majority. His line of defence had crumbled and the game was up. So to avoid the publication of the 18 accusations he agreed to resign. Conditions were negotiated over for another 2 weeks but then, at the end of February 1415, three months after he had seen the fox trap from his vantage point above Bludenz, that trap had snapped shut. Pope John XXIII declared his resignation.

Immediately after that Sigismund put Constance into lockdown. The deposed pope must not be able to escape. Because if he escaped and gathered new supporters he could dissolve the council that he had called in the first place. And if he did that, the horror scenario of four popes would almost certainly materialise.

And what happened, well, what do you think? The pope escaped. Disguised as a groom and sitting on – for added humiliation – on a tiny horse.

As we heard at the beginning, John had had had his premonitions when he crossed the alps. So he took out life insurance. With Frederick of Habsburg, the duke of Austria. Frederick promised to help and protect him should the worst happen.  And the worst had happened. So it was to neighbouring Schaffhausen, one of the duke’s possessions that ex-pope John XXIII or to give him his correct name, Baldassare Cossa went. The helpful duke immediately came to his side to face down Sigismund and the council members.

Sigismund did not waste a second. He gathered the imperial princes who were in Constance anyway and formed an imperial court. The court gave Frederick 3 days to show and defend himself and when he failed to come they condemned him. They put duke Frederick of Austria in the imperial ban. He was made an outlaw, his vassals released from their oaths and an imperial army was gathered. 10 days after the spectacular flight of the pope, Sigismund’s forces oved on the gates of Schaffhausen.

Baldassare Cosssa fled on to Laufenburg another 30 miles down the Rhine but that was no solution, so on he ran towards Basel. But before he left Laufenburg, he issued a papal bull revoking his resignation and dissolving the council.

At that point the future of the church and the future of Sigismund hung in the balance. If the majority of the council attendants recognised his dissolution order it was over.

At that point the church and the universities had been discussing the role of the council and its relationship with the pope for decades. The schism created by the selfishness of cardinals and popes had undermined Holy mother church to a point a Gregory VII or an Innocent III would barely have recognised her any more. It was time for the congregation of the faithful to put their foot down. The council agreed the decree Haec Sancta which became a sort of Magna Carta of the church. Its opened with (quote)

“First [the council] declares that, legitimately assembled in the holy Spirit, constituting a general council and representing the catholic church militant, it has power immediately from Christ; and that everyone of whatever state or dignity, even papal, is bound to obey it in those matters which pertain to the faith, the eradication of the said schism and the general reform of the said church of God in head and in members.” (end quote)

It banned the pope from dissolving the council, from moving the curia from Constance or to do anything that would undermine its power.

The ecumenical council continued and Baldassare Cossa kept running. Until he could run no more. He was caught near Radolfzell and brought back to Constance to stand trial. The ruling was no surprise. He was convicted and declared unworthy, useless and dangerous and stripped of all his church offices. The next four years he spent as a prisoner of the count Palatinate in a customs tower at Mannheim. In 1419 he paid an enormous ransom and was allowed to return to Rome where he submitted to the new pope Martin V  who made him a bishop and cardinal again. He died shortly afterwards in Florence. His memorial in the great Baptistery is a spectacular piece created by the renaissance masters Donatello and Michelozzo. Who paid for it? Not Baldassare Cossa, but Florentine bankers including the Medici family who one can only assume owed the pope their rise to the top of the financial industry in Italy. And yes, the name John XXIII was taken off the official list of popes, which is why we have two popes called John XXIII, the last one reigning from 1958 to 1963 as one of the most popular and sympathetic figures of recent church history and – ironically – a pope who presided over a church council.

That left the council with still two false popes, Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, who needed to be removed before a new, universally recognised pope could be elected and unity of the church could be restored.

Gregory XII was relatively easy. He was already a thousand years old, had lost all support in Italy and had been elected with the explicit provision to resign when asked. All he demanded was that he would not be deposed by a council that had been called by his enemy, the no longer pope John XXIII. So a weird charade took place. Two of Gregory’s ambassadors arrived in Constance and formally called a council in the name of Gregory XII. The council then reconstituted itself, now as one called by Gregory XII. It endorsed all previous decisions. And then they read a letter from Gregory resigning as pope. That was it. Gregory XII stepped back into the college of cardinals and died two years later. His much more modest memorial is in the small town of Recanati in the Marche. But he remained on the list of canonical popes.

One effect of this strange castling was that Sigismund was no longer the president of the council. He had taken that role during the proceedings against Baldassare Cossa, but now that a viable pope had resumed the reigns, if only for a technical second, he was no longer needed.

The task he took up instead was to rail in the last of the popes, the Avignon pope Benedict XIII. This was the most stubborn of the whole lot, who never yielded, not even when he had lost the support of the French. By 1415 he was living in Aragon, enjoying the support of his last remaining ally, king Alfonso V.

Benedict XIII agreed to meet with Sigismund who had come to Perpignan to speak to him directly. But this time the legendary charmer failed. Yes, Benedict XIII promised to resign but only under one condition. Since he was the only surviving cardinal who had participated in the election of Urban VI, back in 1378, he was the only truly legitimate cardinal in the whole world. All other cardinals have been appointed by contested popes. Therefore he was the only person in Christendom entitled to elect the new pope. He promised would do so within 24 hours and promised not to elect himself. Let’s say, argument was compelling, but there wasn’t the resounding support that Benedict might have expected.

Sigismund gave up on the stubborn Spaniard. Instead he worked on the Iberian monarchs and by December 1416 King Alfonso V of Aragon abandoned his pope and submitted to the council of Constance.

And that was all that really mattered. Benedict went to Peniscola a town and castle overlooking the sea between Valencia and Barcelona where he would spend the next 8 years ranting and raving against the council, the king and everybody else. When he died his ragtag band of cardinals elected a new pope they called Clement VIII. It took until 1429 before this pope finally resigned. The last negotiator who brought this sorry tale to an end was an Aragonese bishop by the name of Alfonso de Borgia. He would later rise to become pope Calixtus III who paved the way for his nephew Roderigo Borgia, Alexander VI the most notorious of the Renaissance popes.

Hurrah – we have done it. The Schism is over. Three popes are gone. But we still need a new one, and ideally one that everybody will agree on. Spoiler alert, they will find one. But the council is not done. There are still many other matters to discuss, including the matter of a certain Jan Hus, a complaint from the Teutonic Knights and some Frenchmen wanting clarification on the term Tyrannicide. So, there will be a part 2 of the Council of Constance which I hope you will join us again next week.

And before I go just a quick reminder, the website to make a one-time donation or sign on for Patreon is historyofthegermans.com

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Jan Hus and the Seeds of Reformation: A Tale of Faith and Revolt

Jan Hus emerges as a pivotal figure in the early Reformation, representing the clash between the burgeoning calls for reform and the entrenched power of the Catholic Church. Born around 1372 in what is now the Czech Republic, Hus began his journey as a humble student at the University of Prague, eventually becoming a prominent preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel. His growing influence was fueled by his criticisms of clerical corruption, particularly the practice of simony and the Church’s exploitation through indulgences. As tensions escalated between the Czech reformers and the German-speaking clergy, Hus found himself increasingly at odds with both the Church and the monarchy, leading to his eventual excommunication. The episode delves into how Hus’s teachings and the socio-political climate of Bohemia set the stage for a rebellion that would reverberate through the subsequent centuries, culminating in his fateful summons to the Council of Constance.

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TRANSCRIPT

Quote “Master Jan Hus, preacher of the Holy Scriptures from the chapel of Bethlehem, was also present at this council, who in his preaching continuously criticized and exposed the hypocrisy, pride, miserliness, fornication, simony, and other sins of the clergy, in order to bring the priesthood back to the apostolic life. He was immensely hated by these pestiferous clerics.”

This is how Laurence of Brezova introduced the great reformer and Czech national hero Jan Hus in his 15th century chronicle of the Hussite uprising.

Why should we care about the trials and tribulations of another holy man railing against corrupt prelates and the subsequent “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”.

Well, that quote itself should be reason enough. It is from Neville Chamberlain speech of September 27, 1938 weighing the importance of protecting Czechoslovakia against an expansionist Nazi Germany.

But Jan Hus is interesting beyond his status as a towering figure in Czech history. When he came to Prague in 1390 he was just another ambitious young man from a modest background who wanted to rise up in the world on the back of intelligence and hard work. But by the time he leaves for his fate at the Council of Constance in 1414 he has been excommunicated, exiled and unwillingly or willingly become he face of a brewing revolt against king and clergy. This is a story about collapsing certainties and emerging truths, about individual beliefs and institutional order. About what the community of the faithful is supposed to be and who is in and who is out.  And its tentacles reach deep into the next centuries…

Before you can meet master Jan Hus and his fellow Bohemian reformers I will now subject you to a brief treatise on history podcasting. There are now 3.5 million podcasts, though only 380,000 are classed as active. That means if you were inclined to give every one of these active shows a 5 minute listen you would be listening all day all night for 3 years and 7 months, 11 days and 8 hours and 42 minutes. And that is why so many great shows give up, they simply cannot find anyone willing to invest five minutes to find out whether it is any good. So how do people find podcasts? Simple, 30% of podcast listeners come to a show on a personal recommendation from friends and family. So, if you know anyone in your wider circle who may enjoy the History of the Germans, tell them about the show. It makes a huge difference. As does the generous support of our patrons who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support. This week we thank Ryan B., Mick, fan of my singing voice, Mark G., Tim T of knightly crusader stock, Tiia Reinvald and CS.

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And then we have a few corrections. Last episode I said that Wenceslaus IV was Sigismunds stepbrother. That was obviously wrong, they were half brothers. An even more significant error was picked up by listener Raluca and some others. Vlad the impaler, aka Dracula was Mircea the elder’s illegitimate grandson, not his son as I stupidly claimed. And it was also not Mircea’s honor but Vlad’s father’s membership of the order of the dragon that brought about the nickname “little dragon”. I should just stop trying to pointlessly spice things up with random facts I picked up from secondary literature. Again I promise to do better next time and will fail again.

And with that – back to the show

Jan Hus was born probably around the year 1372. His father was called Michael, but we do not know what he did as an occupation. Of his mother we do not even know her name. Even his own name is an invention, he called himself after his home village of Husice, Goosetown which is why his surname is actually goose, uncomfortably prophetic.

In 1390 he started his studies at the university of Prague. He would later say that he spent far too much time playing chess and that he occasionally participated in carnival processions. That is the medieval equivalent of running through a field of wheat – a reference for our British listeners. For the rest of you, Jan Hus was a bit of a swot. Not that much of a surprise given he was a poor boy from the provinces trying to get a job in the church. An ambition he was certainly not alone in. After all, the church was one of, if not the largest employer in a city like Prague and many coveted a comfortable vicarage or – even better – just the income from a parish without doing anything. And he had come to the right place.

Prague in 1390 was a city on the move.

Thanks to emperor Karl IV’s grand plans his capital of Prague had grown from about 10-15,000 inhabitants to one of northern Europe’s largest cities with a population of nearly 40,000. Building work on the New Town had begun in 1347 but was still ongoing in 1390.

The emperor had endowed the new city’s churches with some of the greatest pieces of his immense collection of relics. These included such items of reverence like a fragment of the staff of Moses, a finger of St. Nicholas, the head of St. Wenceslaus, half of St. Sigismund and the most venerated of them all, the breastmilk of the Virgin Mary. That was on top of the imperial regalia that included the holy lance and purse of St. Stephen to name just two.

These holy objects attracted pilgrims by the thousands, even tens of thousands. Praying before a holy relic was one of the few ways one could cut down the thousands and thousands of years in purgatory the average sinner had to endure. But it also attracted a lot of permanent residents who sought not just work and advancement but also spiritual nourishment from the presence of so many objects of veneration. Prague had become a holy city, a second Rome, just as Karl IV had intended.

The other major draw of the city and the reason Jan Hus had come to the shores of the Vltava was its university, the first to be founded in central Europe. Thanks to the sponsorship of Karl IV and then even more significantly, his son Wenceslaus IV, it had become one of the great centers of learning in Europe. Students from the lands of the crown of Bohemia as well as Germans and Poles came to train with some of the great doctors of theology and law.

The purpose of the university had been two-fold. One was simply to elevate the status of the city of Prague. If Paris, the capital of the French monarchs had a university then the home of the emperor needed one too. The other, more prosaic objective was to produce a class of well-educated bureaucrats and clergymen that could be deployed in the increasingly sophisticated management of the Bohemian state. As for Jan Hus, he was very much in this latter category.

Organizationally, the university of Prague, like all medieval universities, was split into different nations. These nations were usually established along linguistic and cultural lines. In Prague there were four of them, Bohemians, Bavarians, Poles and Saxons. Since the Polish nation was mainly staffed with German speaking Silesians, three out of the four nations were actually German speaking, giving them dominance over the Czech speaking members of the university.

The situation at the university was replicated across much of Prague. German-speaking immigrants had come on the invitation of king Ottokar II in the 1250s and had gradually obtained leadership positions in civil society. They dominated trading and manufacturing, as they did across much of central europe. The German speaking merchants had developed efficient trading networks based on trust and cultural affinity, if not intermarriage. Goods and money moved across these networks comparatively efficiently based on a system of mutual trust and social control. We did a couple of episodes about that in the season on the Hanseatic league, particularly Episode 119 if you want more detail on how these networks functioned. Access to the network was extremely difficult for anyone not speaking German and not being immersed in the culture. And competing against these networks as a sole trader was even more difficult.

Beyond just trading, these German merchants also provided loans to the government and the church. These loans were secured by pawns, often estates, mines and other money generating assets, which then gradually shifted into the hands of this German-speaking upper class. Being the source of finance, the bankers also had ready access to the king who would bend the state to their will.

Bottom line, many Czechs outside the nobility, felt as second class citizens in their homeland and language was an important marker of this division. That occurred despite both Karl IV and Wenceslaus IV making a point of speaking Czech as well as German and French at court.

If you combine these three things, a religiously motivated citizenship, a university that churns out progressive ideas and a population chafing up against a linguistically and socially superior group and you have a medieval powder keg.

The long fuse that will ultimately explode the device was lit a long time before Jan Hus first set foot into the golden city. It all began in a notorious brothel on a street called Venus street. That is where John Milic, a canon of St. Veits cathedral who had an epiphany, began dissuading the prostitutes from their illicit lifestyle and offered them shelter. Milic became a very popular paster, much admired for relentlessly laying out the hypocrisy of the official church. Having good contacts amongst the ladies of the night, he exposed their clerical customers, one of whom had even built a separate entrance to his house to facilitate his partying. But where he really hurt the clergy was when he exposed the rampant simony in its ranks, the purchase of spiritual appointments for money. That was something the population hated even more than the lack of sexual probity.

Despite or maybe because of his relentless criticism and demands for reform, Milic was popular with the highest ranks of society, even with the emperor himself, so popular indeed that Karl overlooked that Milic had once called him the antichrist.

Under imperial protection, Milic built up a community of preachers, often laymen rather than trained clergy who spread his ideas. This community moved into the brothel where Milic had started preaching and that had now become a home for rescued women. He called this community his new Jerusalem and acquired more and more of the surrounding buildings.

Milic preached not just in Latin as was commonplace at the time. He firmly believed that the faithful should understand the word of god and should hence be preached to in their own language, namely Czech and German, the two main languages used in Prague. Milic also demanded that the bible should be translated into Czech, though he never got round to doing it. Another of his ideas was that everyone should receive the sacraments as often as possible, in particular the eucharist, to be closer to the spiritual body of Christ. This focus on the spiritual body then led him to question whether all these dusty relics had any real relevance, and even the veneration of saints was in his eyes a distraction from the true faith.

His community of the new Jerusalem did however not survive its founder’s death in 1374. But his ideas continued to circulate. One of his disciples, a certain Matthew of Janov pushed Milic’s ideas even further. Matthew was another one of those ambitious men who had studied at university, in his case, even at the famed university of Paris, and had returned to Prague in the hope of a plumb job with the church. But that did not work out and instead he became a radical critic of the holders of such offices.

He embraced Milic’s criticism of the worldly clergy, the focus on regular prayer, the eucharist and the use of the colloquial language. But by now the schism had happened and many of the ideas we discussed in our episode about the impact of the schism on European thought had begun circulating. When he was in Paris he witnessed the debates at the university about whether a church council was superior to the pope and by 1390 he had heard that the French church had subtracted itself completely from papal obedience.

This terrified him and he was looking for reasons why the church had ended up in such a calamitous place. He zoomed in on the year 1200 when the church abounded in the greatest riches and glory and when “magna Mulier formicaria” the whore of Babylon took her seat upon the scarlet beast, and antichrist extended his swollen body throughout the church. What he meant was the pontificate of Innocent III , the most powerful of the medieval pope and convener of the fourth Lateran council – and initial sponsor of emperor Frederick II – Episode 75 if you are interested.  

According to Matthew of Jenov the primitive church of the apostles who had been poor and dedicated to the people had been distorted by “Greek rules, Aristotelic justice and Platonic sanctity”. What he meant by that were the rules and regulations of canon law and scholastic theology that obfuscated the true faith and in the process made its practitioners rich and powerful. His opposition was against the lawyers who had taken hold of not just the papal administration but the papal throne itself.

Into this already febrile climate of anticlerical, anti-papalist sentiment dropped the teachings of John Wycliff. Wycliff was an Englishman, a professor in Oxford whose theories we have already encountered in episode 168. His thoughts travelled down to Prague through the entourage of Anne of Bohemia, the sister of Wenceslaus and Sigismund who had married King Richard II of England in 1382.

Wycliff’s ideas poured oil on the fire of the Bohemian reform movement. Bohemian scholars would travel to Oxford and bring back treatises that members of the Prague university debated, translated into Czech and adapted into their own thinking.

They zoomed in on one particular element of Wycliff’s investigation, the question of what the church was. The sanctioned view was that the church was the community of the faithful and that Christ had put St. Peter in charge of this community when he said that Peter was the rock on which he built his church. And St. Peter had thereby inherited all of Christ’s powers in the temporal world, to bind and to loose. And that power passed through him to every one of his legitimate successors. That was the justification for Gregory VII’s claim that all monarchs are to kiss his feet and that he could depose them, even the emperor and Boniface VIII statement that there was no salvation outside the Roman church.

This stringent argument fell apart when the Western schism appeared. We now have two popes, but only one could be the true successor of St. Peter. As the schism progressed and the popes refused to yield as we discussed, the only viable solution was to call a church council that would decide who was the true pope and depose all the false popes, which is what they did in 1409 in Pisa.

Now by doing this the church council claimed to represent the community of the faithful, the holy church itself, that ranked above false and corrupt popes. If these popes could be ousted on account of their sinful claim on St. Peter’s throne, then they weren’t members of the Holy Church any more. Which leads to the next question, which is – who is a true member of the holy church?

That will only be conclusively revealed at the last judgement, when the faithful are admitted to heaven and the sinful are cast down to hell. That does not help because we need to find out right here and now who is one of the faithful and hence a member of holy church with a vote on who should be pope and who is a black sinner who can be ignored. And that runs into a major problem. It would not be just preposterous but outright blasphemous to preempt the final judgement by stating that John was a faithful and Jack was a sinner. So the only thing we can do right now is to look for the signs. Someone whose demeanor and actions emulates the teachings of Christ is more likely to be predestined to heaven, whilst someone living a dissolute life was more likely to end up in hell.

That makes a lot of sense, but is totally explosive. Because if you come across a drunken, fornicating bishop, who acquired his post through simony,  well that guy is unlikely to be one of the faithful. If he is not one of the faithful, then he is not a member of the church. If he is not a member of the church he cannot tell me what to preach or who to preach to. Meanwhile someone with an impeccable lifestyle and deep faith but no church license would be not just entitled to preach but should be listened to above the debauched prelate.

What Wycliff proposed would lead to a complete dissolution of discipline in the church in its current state of corruption, which is why he proposed a fallback. The temporal authorities, the kings and princes were to maintain the discipline in the church until such time that it was completely reformed.

That was grist to the mill of the Bohemian reformers, who had been looking for the theological justification for their rejection of the corrupt prelates at the top of the church.

Jan Hus was one of these Bohemians who picked up and digested Wycliff’s theses. There is a tremendously complex debate about what of Wycliff’s theses Hus exactly endorsed and which ones he did not. That mattered for the legality of the judgement that led to his execution at Constance, but did not matter much for what went down in Bohemia. Bohemia embraced much of Wycliff’s theses.

But I am jumping ahead.

Last we saw Jan Hus the person was in 1390 when he arrived in Prague. He studied at university and by 1401 was ordained as a priest and took holy orders. He preached in a number of churches in the Old Town before he was appointed the main preacher at the Bethlehem chapel. The Bethlehem chapel was an unusual set-up. Though called a chapel, it was huge, able to take 3,000 worshippers. The reason it wasn’t a full church was because it was a private chapel created and funded by two pious Prague merchants. That made it on the one hand less prestigious than a full parish appointment, but left Jan Hus with a  lot more freedom than an ordinary priest.

When he took up the role in 1402, Jan Hus was well within the mainstream of the Bohemian clerical set-up. Though many ideas the reformers promoted were radical and not in line with general church doctrine, the majority of the established church, all the way up to the archbishop were supportive of their demand for reform. They even tolerated the preaching in Czech practiced by the reformers and something Jan Hus did very much from the beginning.

But though he had helped translate some of Wycliff’s works, his theological writings of that time were fairly tame.

What radicalized him were a sequence of events that unfolded over the coming decade.

In 1405 he became part of a commission to investigate a miracle a parish priest of a burned down church claimed to have witnessed. Something about a bleeding host. What Hus uncovered was a greedy priest who had made the whole thing up to raise money for the rebuilding of his church and the recovery of his main income stream. That investigation led him then to doubt not just the veracity of some of the relics but also whether any relics, in particular those directly physically related to Christ himself were compatible with scripture.

At the same time his career as a preacher was going great. Bethlehem chapel filled up with worshippers not just on Sundays but also on workdays. Jan Hus was a gifted orator and had a knack to convey rather complex theological ideas in a way the common people could understand. His most famous quote is: “Seek the truth, hear the truth, learn the truth, love the truth, speak the truth, hold the truth and defend the truth until death.” And at another point he said “Love the truth. Let others have their truth, and the truth will prevail.” This made it even into the national motto of the Czech Republic “truth prevails”.

When I first read this I stumbled over the term “their truth” which is one of my bugbears. There is no such thing as my truth. There a facts and fiction. But then I do not think that Jan Hus was talking about the modern idea of “my truth”. For him, like his contemporaries faith was truth and truth was faith. There was no differentiation between scientific truth and faith as we see it today. So the correct interpretation of these statements would be to replace the word truth with faith. And then these statements take on a different and a much more amenable connotation. Hus was prepared to die for his truth, his faith, when he said “defend the truth until death”but he did not want to do harm to those who held different beliefs. He demanded “Let others have their truth, their faith”. Because he believed that they would come around to his beliefs sooner or later. And there is another one of his statements I like: quote “From the very beginning of my studying I made it a rule that whenever, in any matter, I heard a sounder viewpoint, I abandoned the one I had – since I know well that we know far less than what we do not know.” Or to say it with Keynes, if the facts change I change my opinion, what do you do? So whatever his teachings are later used for, he himself was no fanatic.

I like that and so it seems did many inhabitants of the city of Prague. And what they also liked was that he would celebrate the eucharist almost every time as Milic and his reformers had demanded. That went straight against church rules that wanted to restrict the sacrament to only once a month.  Hus responded quote: “if ever a pope should command me to play on the flute, build towers, to mend or weave garments, and to stuff sausages, ought I not reasonably judge that the pope was foolish in so commanding” end quote.

Alongside this thriving business, Hus kept a role at the university. He published further treatises which now incorporated elements of Wycliff’s thinking. How much and how far away from the official doctrine these views were is again ultimately irrelevant. What mattered was that Hus was increasingly seen as one of the followers of Wycliff.

In 1409 tensions at the university boiled over. The Czechs who were the most numerous nation kept getting voted down by the three German-speaking groupings. And this was not just a linguistic and social conflict but also a theological one. Whilst the Czechs embraced Wycliff and became increasingly radical, the Germans stuck with the orthodoxy. When it became clear that the squabbling parties could not reach compromise, they brought their case before King Wenceslaus IV. By now Wenceslaus had succumbed to full on alcoholism, so it is unclear how much of the proceedings he really understood. But his wife Sophia was very much on the side of the Czech reformers. The crown also needed the university’s support as they wanted to transfer their allegiance from the Roman pope Gregory XII to the Pisan pope Alexander V. The Germans were leaning to the Roman pope, the Bohemians to the Pisan. So the crown passed a decree that from now on the Czech nation’s vote would count as much as the vote of the other three nations combined. That outraged the German-speaking nations and they simply walked out. Many of these doctors and students left for the recently founded universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg, which propelled these schools up the European academic rankings, whilst the university of Prague turned into a more provincial institution catering for Bohemians only.

What also happened was that the king appointed Jan Hus as rector of the University. And since the university was now free to embrace Wycliff’s theories, Jan Hus as its rector became the face of Wycliff’s theories in Bohemia, irrespective of his personal conviction.

Over the next 3 years the university doctors embraced more and more radical ideas. That triggered a backlash by the archbishop who referenced 45 Wycliffian theses that had been declared heretic. In this debate the king sided again with the reformers against the archbishop. This time it was mainly for monetary reasons. In the tradition of Matthew of Janov, the reformers supported the idea that the king should not only maintain discipline in the church, but should also cleanse it from the swollen body of antichrist, aka take away all the church’s lands and estates. And that was exactly what Wenceslaus did. He took the reins of the church, forced the archbishop into submission and diverted the church funds into his own pocket.

This alliance between king and reformers fell apart, as one would expect, over the same thing it had kept it together in the past – money. The new Pisan pope, John XXIII had declared a crusade against king Ladislaus of Naples, the one who had attempted to take the crown of Hungary from Sigismund and whose father had died trying. To fund this most Christian effort John was selling indulgences all across the lands of his obedience, including Bohemia. As we mentioned in episode 168, indulgences had become key to papal finances now that the church was split into three and many obediences regularly refused to pass through tithes and other incomes. The  indulgences of 1412 were so egregious, they truly shocked Jan Hus. Already deeply skeptical of saints and relics, this blatant money grab pushed him over the edge. He began to equate John XXIII with antichrist and declared all prelates selling these papers corrupt. And when he found out that Wenceslaus was supporting the indulgences because he had been promised a cut of the profits, he condemned his king as well.

The pope immediately excommunicated Hus. The king was still more interested in continuing the cooperation and first tried to calm him down. But Hus kept preaching against indulgences, called the archbishop a Simoniak, which was true, and just generally turned from a useful tool of royal politics to a genuine nuisance.

After Wenceslaus had tried several time to get Hus back on side, he sent a brutal message. Three of Hus’ young supporters had protested against the selling of indulgences and stopped the pardoners from going about their business. The king had them arrested and the next day, he had them hanged. Meanwhile the  pope had declared an interdict over the city of Prague, banning all church services and sacraments for as long as Jan Hus was allowed to preach.

That was too much for Jan Hus. To protect his friends and fellow citizens, he went into exile.

In the following 2 years, from 1412 to 1414 he did write like a man possessed. He published no fewer than 15 books, the culmination of the previous decade of thought. The most important one was de ecclesia, about the church.

There he compared the church to a field where wheat and weeds grow together. But only the wheat, the good parts belongs to the actual church. And if the church itself was unable to pull out the weeds, it falls to the king to do that, and if the king was unwilling or unable to do it, it was down to the laity to clean up the field. And since most of the weed, the corruption in the church stems from the property they had obtained over time, that should be all be given over to the secular authorities.

This is where the rubber hit the road. Dietrich von Niem, a German chronicler called Hus’ ideas as great a threat to Christendom and papal power as the Qur’an. And it was this book that the judges in Constance used most extensively to prove the heresy of Jan Hus.

These books, but even more the relentless persecution by the church had made Hus the face of the Bohemian dissent, a dissent that was about to tip over into revolt. As early as 1412 pamphlets were circulating that mixed religion with violence. They declared that all those intended to be Christian were to take up swords and be prepared to wash their hands in the blood of God’s enemies. Jan Hus they declared was no longer a timid goose, but a ferocious lion prepared to confront the papal antichrist and all its wickedness. There is no evidence that Hus endorsed or encourages such talk, nor is there evidence that he made efforts to stop it.

It is in late 1414 that Jan Hus is summoned to the council of Constance that had gathered since November of that year. He was asked to come and subject his teachings to review by the doctors and senior clergy at the greatest of church councils. Sigismund, by now elected king of the Romans and presiding over the council promised Hus safe conduct.

One cannot know whether Hus believed Sigismund’ promise or whether he willingly walked straight into his martyrdom. This again mattered as much or as little as the question whether or not he was guilty of heresy. Because what mattered was what the people back in Prague believed happened and what actions these beliefs triggered.

Some of that we will find out next episode when we finally talk about the great council of Constance. I hope you will join us again.

In the meantime, should you feel so inclined, listen back to some of the older episodes when we talked about Bohemia, for instance way back in episode 26 when we look at the murderous Bohemian succession crisis in the early 11th century, episode 54 when a Bohemian ruler tilts Barbarossa’s campaign in Italy in favour of the Germans, or some of the more recent ones, like episode 140 about the fight between Rudolf of Habsburg and the Golden King Ottokar II. And what you could also do is make a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support, just in case you feel like it.

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A Battle of many Names

This week we look at the reasons the golden age of the Teutonic knights came to an abrupt end at the beginning of the 15th century. It is a sequence of events that involve some remarkable Polish and Lithuanian princes, the Templars, and  of course – The brothers of the house of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem. Ah, and a very famous battle.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 134 – Tannenberg

This week we look at the reasons the golden age of the Teutonic knights came to an abrupt end at the beginning of the 15th century. It is a sequence of events that involve some remarkable Polish and Lithuanian princes, the Templars, and  of course – The brothers of the house of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem. Ah, and a very famous battle.

But before we start, in the unlikely event you are unaware of it, the History of the Germans Podcast and all its offshoots are advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons and one-time contributors. I know these inserts are irritating to some of you, but would you prefer me espousing the advantages of various crypto coins, a mildly dodgy online mental health service or a meal plan? I wouldn’t and so be so kind to thank George O., CM Bo, Fabian G. and Katie who are valiantly protecting us from these impositions by becoming a patron at patreon.com/historyofthegermans.

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Back to the show.

Last week we heard about the great chivalric adventure holidays the Teutonic knights staged for their wealthy aristocratic guests. These were nominally crusades against the pagan Lithuanians, but their military benefit paled into insignificance compared to the economic impact these free spending tourists had on the order’s state.

These Lithuanian crusades or Preussenreisen did serve however another important purpose, a purpose that was even more crucial for the survival of the order than the economic or military benefit. And that has to do with something that happened, not in Northern europe, not in the empire, but way over on the other side, in Paris in 1307. That event was the suppression of the Knights Templars.

For those very few of you who may not have heard about that, the story goes roughly as follows. King Philipp IV of France was short of money due to the incessant wars with the English, or more precisely with his main vassal who also happened to be the king of England.  Not only was he short of money, he was also heavily in debt to Knights Templars.

What he lacked in money he made up for in ruthlessness. Some of you may remember Episode 92 – The Papal Epilogue. That was the story of the slap of Agnani when soldiers in the pay of Philipp IV allegedly slapped Pope Boniface VIII in the face, and with that simple act brought down the whole edifice of the imperial papacy. Under French pressure the popes moved to Avignon and came under de facto French control.

Philip IV used the fact that he had a pet pope in Clement V to get him to issue an order to all monarchs in europe to apprehend the Templars. The biggest hammer fell in Paris where the grand master of the order had his headquarter. He and his main officers were arrested and put on trial. They were accused of satanic rituals and various forms of blasphemy including kissing a black cat’s anus. Once duly condemned they were burned at the stake and most importantly all their assets were confiscated by the crown.

As you probably know, pretty much any wacko conspiracy theory sooner or later traces their story back to the Knights Templar, their link to the Holy grail, the Cathars, rose crucians and ultimately the CIA, albino monks and god knows what other nonsense.

No worries, I will not talk about that. Instead we will look at the truly interesting question at the heart of this story. And that is why Philip IV got away with destroying an organization that only 50 years earlier had literally been drowning in donations from extremely powerful men all across europe and had been seen as a crucial component in Christendom’s most important political project, the reconquest of Jerusalem.

Part of it was that the Templars had become filthy rich. At their peak they owned 870 estates and castles across europe. Moreover they had become bankers who were best placed to transfer money across their vast network of commanderies. They also lent money to royalty and famously accepted the crown of France as collateral for one such loan. As so often with bankers their willingness to lend to unreliable borrowers is regarded as avarice, rendering them evil in the eyes of many people.

But that alone is unlikely to be enough. The Knights Hospitallers too were extremely rich, as were the Teutonic Knights. And the Hospitallers in particular lent money too, admittedly on a more modest scale.

So here is the question, why did the persecution of the Templars not lead to a persecution of the other two orders?

The answer lies in their original purpose. The chivalric orders were founded mainly to protect the Holy Land. The crusader state in Palestine had fallen in 1291. But that did not spell the end of all the Latin states in the region. Cyprus was still standing and that is where the Hospitallers went. They then conquered the island of Rhodes which they turned into a massive fortress. They even maintained a foothold on the mainland at Halicarnassus, modern day Bodrum in Turkey. That way they re-created themselves as the bulwark of Christendom against the advances of Islam. That new purpose was enough to protect them from persecution.

Now what about our friends, the Teutonic Knights? They too had left the Holy Land, in fact even earlier than the Templars. But they could at least argue that they were engaged in crusading in the North, bringing pagans into the faith.

But that argument was beginning to sound a bit hollow. Once Prussia and Livonia had been conquered and the pagan rebellion were suppressed, there weren’t that many pagans left, except for the Lithuanians.

And there was another problem. One may sometimes get the impression that the medieval theology was monolithic with the pope at the top determining what was right and what was wrong. But that was not at all the case. Even an overbearing figure like Bernhard of Clairvaux had to face stringent opposition from the scholastics at the university of Paris, from Abaelard, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. It was one of them, Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar and all round fascinating individual who took umbrage of Bernhard’s notion that conversion by fire and sword was doing God’s work. And he singled out the Teutonic Knights saying that quote “pagans like the Prussians [..] would become Christians very gladly if the Church would permit them to retain their liberty and enjoy their possessions in peace. But the Christian princes who labor for their conversion, especially the brothers of the Teutonic Order desire to reduce them to slavery” end quote. In 1274 at the Council of Lyon Humbert of Romans, the former general of the Dominican order made the point that quote “the idolators who still live in the northern parts, the Prussians, and those like them may be converted in the same way as their neighbors, the Poles, Danes, Saxons and Bohemians. [meaning by missionary efforts]. In any case [he goes on] they are not in the habit of attacking us, nor can they do much when they attack, ..and so it is quite enough for Christians to defend themselves manfully when they invade.” end quote.

If these arguments were taking hold amongst the members of the Curia, the entire existence of the Teutonic Knights could be in danger.   

Around the time of the suppression of the Templars, these humane voices got support from Livonia itself. Other than in Prussia, in Livonia the bishops, in particular the archbishop of Riga were  powerful, so were the burghers of the great cities, Riga, Dorpat and Reval. These different parties were almost constantly in conflict which occasionally turned into actual fighting. In this struggle the church authorities in Livonia sought support from the pope, after all the direct superior of the order. They accused the Teutonic Knights of all sorts of crimes, waging war against Christians, even the bishop himself, which was true, unwillingness to fight the pagans, burning their dead, killing the wounded and witchcraft, which wasn’t true. But the most damning accusation was that they were hindering the conversion of the pagans by their “savagery, cruelty and tyranny” as the archbishop of Riga wrote.

The Grand Master was summoned to come to the Curia to defend himself and his order. The situation was certainly precarious. But Pope Benedict XI decided that whatever crime the Teutonic Knights may have committed, it was more important to reconcile the parties in order to defend Livonia. So, he replaced the archbishop of Riga and sent a harsh indictment to the order, demanding they sort themselves out.

In response the grand masters ordered a sharp tightening of discipline, moved to Marienburg to be far away from any monarch keen on seizing and burning them, and began constructing a new narrative for the order’s purpose.

Conversion of the pagans was still a major objective. But alongside it stood a new threat to Christendom. These pagans beyond the frontier weren’t peaceful villagers who may be misguided but otherwise harmless. No, they were a terrifying foe who intended to break into the Latin world forcing their faux religion on not just the recently converted Prussians, Estonians, Letts ,Livs and Courlanders, but were intending push all the way west into Poland, the Empire and ultimately Rome itself. These hordes were the Lithuanians, but also the successor states of the Kyivan Rus with their orthodox heresy and behind them their overlords, the Mongol Khans. It was they, the Teutonic Knights who formed the bulwark of the west against this existential threat.

And to make this story stick they needed to make these adversaries sound terrifying. As it happened, that was not that difficult. The Lithuanians had always been a worthy opponent and there was a good reason why the precious crusading tourists never spent too much time in Lithuania itself.

After Mindaugas had united the various Lithuanian tribes, the entity remained coherent, even though Mindaugas himself was murdered in a coup. The incessant warfare with the Teutonic knights  helped the Lithuanians to become an advanced military. They did however not copy the model of the armored knight. Their cavalry tended to be lightly armed which made them more maneuverable in the challenging terrain they inhabited. They took some inspiration from the Mongol horse archers, though they preferred spears to bows and arrows. Their infantry adopted the crossbow from the Latins but they were mostly free men and held in much higher esteem than infantry in the west which was sometimes times ridden down by their own side.  This military prowess left them in good stead to acquire some of the successor states of the former empire of the Kyivan Rus. In 1321 the Grand Prince Gedimas captured Kyiv itself and as his successors kept pushing on, in 1430 the grand principality of Lithuania extended all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

As this went on, defeating and forcibly converting the Lithuanians became an ever more improbable prospect for the Teutonic Knights. And in a perverse way, that was to their benefit. Had they been successful in converting the Lithuanians, they would have lost their raison d’etre. There would not have been any more pagans to convert or to defend Christendom against. They could have directed their forces against the Principalities of Novgorod and Moscow, though these were less impressive at the time, Christian, if orthodox, and given to the Swedes as their special crusading task.

That event, the conversion of the Lithuanians to Christianity did happen, though not thanks to the efforts of the Teutonic Knights. For that story we have to go back again to the beginning of the 14th century and take a look at the other neighbor of Prussia, Poland.

Before I do that I have to ask my Lithuanian and Polish listeners for forgiveness. I am trying to get all these events right, but as I do not speak either Lithuanian nor Polish, I am reduced to German and English language sources. That means I may not get many of the subtleties and I will end up blanking out quite important events that do not directly affect the story of the Teutonic knights. There are some excellent podcasts that dive a lot deeper into these stories and are done by people much more knowledgeable than myself. I will put links to those in the show notes.

With that caveat, lets take a look at Poland in the 13th and 14th century.

Poland has been founded by the Piast dynasty,  Miesco and Boleslaw the Brave in the 10th century, and in particular under the latter  became a hugely powerful entity that amongst other things defeated the emperor Henry II as we talked about in episode 18. But after that Poland, like so many other medieval kingdoms, went through waves of fragmentation and unification as possessions were split amongst sons who then vied for supremacy. One of the most momentous fragmentations happened after the death of King Bolelsaw Wrymouth in 1138. Wrymouth had five sons, each of whom were given a duchy. These sons in turn split their lands upon their death, creating even more and smaller entities. In principle the dukes of Maropolska (Lesser Poland), based in Krakow were supposed to have some sort of overlordship over the others, though that was rarely of any practical relevance. The fragmentation of Poland left them extremely vulnerable to external threats. Some came from the west, namely from the Margraves of Brandenburg who expanded eastwards and northwards into Pomerania and even took Gdansk in 1271. Another were the Bohemians who targeted Silesia and on occasion took Krakow. Then there were the pagan neighbors, the Prussians and Lithuanians who became increasingly hostile to the point that the duke of Mazovia called in the Teutonic Knights in 1226, a story you are now quite familiar with.

The real shock to the system came when the Mongols invaded in 1241. Though several of the dukes tried to mount some resistance, they were comprehensively defeated at the battle of Legnica/Liegnitz in April 1241. Though the Mongol invasion did not continue into western europe, Poland was not so lucky. They were attacked again in 1259 and 1287, sacking Lublin, Sandomierz, Bytom and even Krakow.

By the end of the 13th century the various Piast dukes realized that their existing structure was not sustainable. None of them was able to fend off any of these invaders on their own. Calling in the Teutonic Knights had resulted in replacing the hostile but ultimately not life threatening Prussians with the well ordered powerful militarized state of the Teutonic Knights. The defeats of the Pomerelian dukes who had supported the Prussian uprisings brought home to them the relative superiority of the Knight brothers.

What then followed was a protracted process of reunification. It was in part driven by simply military success as ambitious dukes managed to eject the rulers of rival duchies. Then there was a lot of luck involved as several of the dynasties died out and the last of their line took the enlightened decision to pass their lands to the most powerful of the dukes at the time. And one has to assume that to a degree the ruling families decided that they would rather submit to one of their own family than to some foreigner. I will not go through all of them, but it is certainly worth to mention some.

Przemysl II had already achieved some consolidation by bringing together Wielkopolska (Greater Poland around Gniezno) and Pomerelia. He was the first ruler in a while who was crowned king of Poland in 1295. His successor Wladislaw the Short from the line of the dukes of Mazovia was off to a difficult start. The king of Bohemia invaded, took Krakow and threw Wladislaw out. When King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia was crowned King of Poland in Gniezno in 1300, the cause of the Piast dukes seemed to be at its lowest point.

In 1306 Wladislaw the short was back in Krakow. He had become a key beneficiary of a grand papal strategy to bring the kingdoms of central europe, Hungary, Bohemia and Poland under new management. In Hungary the dynasty of the Premislids was replaced by the Anjou, the French dynasty that had already taken the kingdom of Sicily from the Hohenstaufen. The plan was to also replace the king Wenceslaus III in Bohemia and in Poland. The Bohemian project did not work, but with Hungarian help Wladislaus the short was able to throw the Bohemians out of Poland. In 1320 he was solemnly crowned king of Poland in Krakow.

His son, Kazimierz the Great (1333 to 1370) took over. Under his long and successful rule, Poland staged a tremendous recovery. He consolidated all these now almost unnumerable Piast duchies with the exception of Silesia, Pomerania and Pomerelia.

Kazimierz was an able administrator and forward thinking politician. To rebuild his depopulated lands he encouraged the immigration of foreigners, in particular of jews who had faced persecution in the wake of the Black Death. He codified the corpus of the existing laws and granted city rights under Magdeburg law. He launched a building program which, along with the cathedrals of Gniesno and Krakow and churches all across the land gave rise to 65 new fortified towns, the fortification of 27 existing ones and 53 new royal castles . He also rerouted the Vistula at Krakow and constructed a canal linking the salt mines at Wieliczka with the capital. He reformed a fiscal system with a central chancellery allowing the kingdom to raise taxes. He introduced new coinage accepted across the kingdom, dramatically facilitating trade. That trade was also supported by the banking skills of the Jewish immigrants who were given a significant degree of fiscal and legal autonomy which was the beginning of the Jewish culture that thrived for so long in the country.

The country was booming. It also benefitted from a dramatic improvement in agricultural production. In the series about the Hanseatic League we did talk about the Hinterland of Danzig as a source of grain that fed western europe all the way to Spain and even at times Italy. Importing vast amounts of grain became necessary for the major cities across western europe because the changing climate during the Little ice Age that began around 1300 had reduced crops to the point that the land surrounding the cities could no longer feed the populations. Some argue that Poland, Prussia and Lithuania had benefitted from a climate quirk that resulted in a warming of this region whilst the rest of Europe became cooler. I find the evidence for that inconclusive. What is however quite likely is that the import of agricultural techniques from the west, the use of horse-driven ploughs, the three field system etc. led to a material growth in productivity alongside the conversion of forest and fallow land into fields.

Kazimierz also pushed for education. The university of Krakow was founded in 1364, after Prague but before Heidelberg and Vienna.

All this prosperity also translated into increased military capability. Kazimierz did wage war against the traditional enemies of the Piasts, namely the Bohemians over Silesia and did score a major victory in 1345. But his main interest lay to his south-east. The disintegration of the Kyivan Rus had left a number of small principalities that looked extremely attractive. These were nominally under overlordship of the Mongols, but they too were on the retreat. Kazimierz took over the duchy of halicz, which is roughly modern day western Ukraine including Lviv and lands south east from there. The kingdom of Poland under Kazimierz therefore ended up looking very different to today. It was a roughly 450km wide and 900km long stretch from Prussia to Moldova.

Kazimierz died in 1370. Though married four times he had no children. So he gave his kingdom to his nephew, King Louis of Hungary. Louis himself came up to Krakow to be crowned but left the country to be run by Elisabeth, his mother, the sister of Kazimierz.

The Hungarian-Polish alliance lasted until the death of Louis who in turn also had no male heir. His two daughters became Europe’s most desirable heiresses. When Louis died his older daughter Maria who had married Sigismund of Luxemburg was to inherit Poland, whilst the younger one, Hedwig was to marry Wilhem of Habsburg who would then become king of Hungary.

The Polish lords did however not agree to this. They did not want to be tied to the Luxemburgers who ruled Bohemia. So they brought her sister, Hedwig or better known by her polish name, Jadwiga to Krakow and in an act of inspired gender bending crowned her king, not queen, of Poland in 1384. The Habsburg prince she was initially betrothed to and who she liked a lot came to claim her, but the Polish lords locked up, first her and then him. After some toing and froing, the dejected Austrian prince gave up and returned home.

At which point the question was, who Jadwiga should marry, if not the Habsburg. The Poles had come up with a most unexpected idea. Jadwiga was to marry Jogaila, the Grand Prince of Lithuania. From a Polish perspective this made a lot of sense. After the South-east expansion of both Poland and Lithuania, the two realms shared a nearly 900 km long border. Having rejected Sigimund and the Bohemians who stood along the other end of that same border meant they were vulnerable to attack with no-one there to help.

The main problem was that Jagielo was still a pagan. The only way this marriage could go ahead was if Jagielo would get baptized.

As it happened Jagielo was prepared to make that transition. Though the Lithuanians had spent the last 200 plus years defending their religion against the incursions of the Teutonic Knights, they had also expanded far and wide into lands that had already become Christian. Their principality included not just pagans but also orthodox Christians, Latin Christians and Jews. As part of an astute policy of playing one enemy against the other, the Lithuanians had often promised conversions or at least allowed missionaries to come in and proselytize. Hence at the time Jogaila was made the offer of the hand of Jadwiga, Lithuania was no longer fully pagan.

And Poland was an incredibly attractive opportunity. Thanks to Kazimierz success as a ruler, Poland was incredibly rich and cultured as well as militarily capable. All he had to do was to get his head wet and build a cathedral, and all of that was his.

No wonder he went for it. On February 12th Jogaila arrived in Krakow. Three days later he was baptized, on the 18th he married Jadwiga and on March 4 he was crowned king of Poland.

This is the beginning of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, at times the largest state in Europe that at its height stretched all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from Krakow almost all the way to Moscow.  

For the Teutonic Knights this was a major calamity. Their territory in Prussia was now surrounded on all sides by one hugely powerful neighbor. And not only that, the Lithuanians were no longer officially pagans bringing down the whole edifice of the Bulwark of Christianity that justified their existence.

And with at least one side, the Lithuanians, the order was already in a state of continued low intensity war.

Relations with Poland weren’t that great either. Initially the Teutonic Knights and the Piast dukes had a good relationship. After all it was the duke of Mazovia who had called them in for help. Many of the crusaders who came to conquer Prussia and suppress the revolts had come from Poland and many Polish settlers had helped cultivating the Prussian lands. Sure there was occasional conflict, in particular with the dukes of Pomerelia, Swentopolk and Mestwin who had played a major role in the Prussian uprisings.

But all in, it was in the Teutonic Knights interest that Poland was supportive as the crusaders had to travel through Polish lands or into Danzig to get to Prussia. At the same time the Polish dukes relied on Teutonic Knight support in keeping their Northern border safe from Lithuanian and Russian attacks.

Things went pear shaped when Mestwin II, the last duke of Pomerelia died in 1294. Mestwin had no heirs and made the king of Poland his heir. That meant the land became part of the conflict between the Bohemian pretenders and Wladislaw the Short. When Wladislaw the short came back from exile in 1306 with Hungarian help he also took Pomerelia with its capital Danzig back under his control. He placed a garrison into Danzig and then moved on to deal with other problems further south. In 1308 the margraves of Brandenburg thought they had an opportunity to take the territory on some of the usual dynastic pretenses. They were successful and occupied almost all of the territory. The Hanse merchants of Danzig opened their gates and the royal presence was now limited to the Danzig castle. The garrison asked Wladislaw the short for help but he could not do much at this point in time. He suggested they ask the Teutonic Knights for help.

In 1308 the grand master Heinrich von Ploetzke took his army to Danzig and drove the Brandenburgers out. He did this in part out of the generally friendly relationship with the king but also in the expectation to get paid 10,000 mark for his services.

The Teutonic Knights in Danzig were waiting for the money to arrive, but somehow the cheque got lost in the post. The citizens of Danzig, most of whom were German speaking traders and artisans did not like their new occupiers very much. They had got used to a much higher level of autonomy than the Knight brothers would allow them. A revolt broke out that was brutally suppressed. How brutal is a big debate, though the claims of 10,000 dead made by later Polish rulers is highly improbable.

The suppression of the revolt did not resolve the problem. King Wladislaw the Short was still not prepared to pay. It wasn’t just the lack of payment that irritated the knights, it was the assumption on the side of the king that he could call upon the Teutonic knights whenever he wanted, as if they were his vassals.

So to make clear what was what the Teutonic Knights decided to stay. They bought the rights to Pomerelia from the margraves of Brandenburg and formed an alliance. With that they now had a direct land bridge into the empire via the duchy of Pomerania and Brandenburg making them less dependent upon the Poles.  

This as it turn out was not just a crime, it was worse, it was a mistake. The disagreement over Pomeralia and the city of Danzig poisoned the relationship between the Poles and the Teutonic Knight that when reading the comments on my Facebook page continues to this day.

It also added to the pressure on the order in Rome and their general reputation. In 1320 and in 1339 the Poles accused the order of unlawfully waging war against Christians. And quite frankly, the facts of the matter were quite clear. Taking a Christian land was not what a chivalric order was meant to do. The order lost both cases and was required to hand back Pomerelia. The grand master refused and was excommunicated. But as it happened pretty much all of the empire was at the time under interdict and the moral suasion of the Avignon popes had nowhere near the weight of an Innocent IV, so nothing much came of it.

Strategically Pomerelia and Danzig in particular were extremely important to Poland. It was their access to the Baltic Sea. Danzig stands at the mouth of the great Polish river, the Vistula where grain wood, salt and metals were shipped to the markets of Flanders, England and Norway.

The loss of Pomerelia pushed the Polish rulers into a closer relationship with the Lithuanians. Poles and Lithuanians realised they had common enemies, the Mongols and the Teutonic Knights. The very beginnings of that alliance lay here in 1326 when Wladislaw’s successor, Kazimierz the great married Aldena a famously beautiful Lithuanian princess.

In response the Teutonic Knights began a PR campaign against king Wladislaw the Short, encouraging both external and internal enemies to topple him. One of them was king John of Bohemia, the famous blind knight whose ostrich feathers and motto still grace the Prince of Wales arms.

War broke out in 1328 when Wladislaw the short attacked Kulm whilst the Teutonic Orders were distracted by a large operation against the Lithuanians. In 1329 the order struck back supported by forces of the king John of Bohemia. Wladislaw the short now allied with the Hungarians and Lithuanians which led to the battle of Plowce in 1331. That battle everyone agreed was unusually fierce even for a period that was used to violence. Technically Wladislaw did win the battle and had 65 knight brothers executed. But when Teutonic Knight reinforcements arrived on the battlefield  the Poles fled back home. Wladislaw died shortly after in 1333 opening the room for negotiations. It took until 1343 before all parties involved, the Knights, the kings of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia and the grand Prince of Lithuania could come to a solution. That solution was a complex structure that maintained the notion that Pomerelia was still part of the Polish Kingdom but that the Teutonic Knights were in charge.

After that things calmed down until the marriage of Jadwiga and Jogaila in 1386. That was a double blow. A catholic Lithuania meant no more crusades and hence no more tourists and even worse no purpose to the organisation. A combined Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth meant it was only a matter of time before they would came for the Teutonic Knights militarily.

The Knights pursued a twofold strategy to counter this threat. One was to claim that the Lithuanian conversion was a scam. Jogaila they said continued to worship his pagan gods and had not suppressed the pagan temples, which is probably true. The other part of the strategy was to exploit internal conflict in Lithuania. Jogaila had a rival for the role of Grand Prince, Vytautas, the son of the previous grand prince who had been murdered by Jogaila. Vytautas had strong following in Lithuania with the order’s support threw out many of Jogaila’s vassals. Jogaila was reduced to his capital Vilnius and surrounding lands. In 1390 the Teutonic Knights supported by Vytautas attacked Vilnius. That was one of the few Rhyse that were actual proper military undertakings. It was also the fight that henry Bolingbroke the future king Henry IV of England took part in. Vilnius held out for five weeks and after  the weather turned the crusaders returned. There were further major operations in the three years that followed but it took until 1398 that both sides were making peace. By this time it was Vytautas, not Jogaila who was in control of Lithuania. Jogaila was king of Poland together with his wife and resided there. When Jadwiga died in 1399 he became the sole ruler of Poland. Jogaila and Vytautas reconciled but given their backstory were believed to mistrust each other profoundly.

The success of the Lithuanian campaign and the split between Vytautas and Jogaila gave the Grand master of the Teutonic Knights, Ulrich von Jungingen the impression that he was in a very strong position. Yes, the crusades as such were over and support from travelling knights could no longer be relied upon, but all in the Knight brothers were a superior force, easily able to take on the Poles and Lithuanians.

This is when we go from mistake to catastrophic mistake.

What ended the 10 years of relative calm was an uprising in Samogitia that the Teutonic Knights blamed on Vytautas. Ulrich von Jungingen demanded that Vytautas and Jogaila immediately ceased any further support to the Samogitians. That demand was seen as deeply insulting by both Poles and Lithuanians. In particular the Poles had come to trust Jogaila over the past 10 years and – contrary to expectations in Prussia – were willing to go to war for him.

Things weren’t improved when the matter was brought before king Wenceslaus of Bohemia who was asked to act as arbiter. Wenceslaus sided fully with the order, adding more fuel to the flames. One -on- one meetings between Jogaila and Jungingen also failed to resolve issues.

War was coming again.

Jogaila gathered his army at Plock, south of Kulm. One estimate said he gathered 18,000 Polish fighters and Vytautas brought him 11,000 men.  These included not just Poles and Lithuanians, but also Bohemian and Moravian mercenaries, tartars, Rus’ians and Moldovans.

Ulrich von Jungingen relied on only about 10,000 cavalry from the order plus some support from the king of Bohemia and the last contingent of crusaders, roughly 15,000 in total.

These numbers are as always inexact. What most estimates have in common though was that the Poles and Lithuanians outnumbered the order’s forces 2 to one. That being said, the order operated as a close unit of men who had trained and fought together for a long time, whilst Jogaila’s forces were a wild mixture who had little coherence, not even in weapons, training, tactics or even language.

This was not a slam dunk.

On July 2, 1410 Jogaila’s forces crossed the Vistula river and began an invasion of Prussia. His army followed along the Drewenz river, burning and plundering as was the habit of medieval armies.

Ulrich von Jungingen who had split his forces across the length of the frontier now brought his men together in pursuit. When they came to the burning ruins of the town of Gilgenberg the grand master lost his cool. The destruction he had witnessed along the way and he feared would be inflicted on his lands if he did not bring this to an end quickly urged him to double the pace and catch up with the Polish-Lithuanian forces.

At a place the Germans call Tannenberg, the Poles Grunwald and the Lithuanians Zalgiris the two armies came together. As you would expect from a confrontation that has mythical status in Polish, Lithuanian and in the past, German consciousness, quite a lot of it is disputed.

What seems to have happened is that the Teutonic Knights went for an all out attack on the position where they assumed Jogaila was standing. This may have been triggered by a feigned retreat or some other misunderstanding. What we know is that the Teutonic Knights, led by the grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen charged at the Polish centre driving a wedge into the Polish-Lithuanian forces. This charge came as far as the royal bodyguard but was held off. Meanwhile forces commanded by Vytautas attacked the knights’ flank. The result was a massacre. The grand master and his chief officers lay dead. His army fled along the narrow paths through the forest and were killed one by one. 8,000 soldiers died that day on either side, which suggests almost half the entire force of the Teutonic Knights had perished. Those who survived sought shelter in whichever castle they could find.

News of the defeat spread through europe and left people aghast. The mighty Teutonic Knights who many of the Europe’s aristocrats had met on their gap year and admired for their military skills had been all but wiped out. How was that possible? And what is going to happen next? Will the order collapse?

That is a story for another time, next week to be precise. I hope you will join us again.

Ah, and by the way, just in case you cannot remember, my Patreon account is at patreon.com/historyofthegermans and for one-time donations, go to historyofthegermans.com/support

Bibliography

Werner Paravicini Die Preußenreisen des europäischen Adels: Die Preußenreisen des europäischen Adels (perspectivia.net)

William Urban: The Teutonic Knights – A Military History

Eric Christiansen: The Nordic Crusades, Penguin Books, 1997

Klaus Militzer: Die Geschichte des deutsche Ordens, 2.Aufl, 2012

Jurgen Sarnowsky: der Deutsche Orden, 2.Aufl, 2012

A History of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia 1190-1331: The Kronike Von Pruzinlant by Nicolaus Von Jeroschin