Ordensburg Marienburg (now referred to in English as Malbork Castle, from its full Polish name, Zamek w Malborku), was a major castle of the Teutonic Order (or Teutonic Knights) from the 13th through 15th centuries. As the original Wikipedia article notes, the Order made Marienburg their ad-hoc capital in 1308.
The establishment of the Order’s political headquarters at Marienburg marked the conclusion of an important shift westward in the Knights’ geographic orientation. Despite the Order’s direct roots in the German kingdom, its territory – initially granted by Duke Konrad I of Mazovia in 1226 – did not originally border German lands. Only in the decades prior to the shift Marienburg did the Order actually expand its in territory into the German-Prussian borderlands; an expansion which the Knights accomplished through ruthless fighting and finally subjugation of the Prussian peoples.
Marienburg’s status as a political center, vis-à-vis the political status of the Teutonic Knights as a “religious military order,”[1] makes for a rather unusual case. The Teutonic Order was a monastic organization; as such, its constituent members—knights—were required to take monastic vows of “poverty, chastity, and obedience.”[2] However, the Order’s position as a monastic state was unlike any other in medieval European geopolitics (save for other Baltic crusading organizations which it subsumed, see: Livonian Sword Brothers[3]), as it held vast territories in the Baltic region, and maintained an army, treasury, and administrative core that rivaled its neighboring duchies and kingdoms. Furthermore, the Order was not politically beholden to any secular ruler. As historian Peter H. Wilson notes, the grandmasters of the Order successfully kept their state separate from their German homelands: “The [Holy Roman] emperor was hardly involved in either colonization or the Northern Crusades… Although [emperor] Frederick II issued his own authorization to the Teutonic Knights, the Order acted independently in carving out its own state.”[4] The only authority from which the Order directly drew its legitimacy was the Pope, who granted the Knights their written or unwritten charter. Many of the Order’s central holdings, such as the cities and castles of Marienburg and Königsberg, rose as a direct result of the Golden Bull of Rieti.
The position of Marienburg Castle as an institution of the Teutonic Knights is thus rather difficult to place. As a fortress, Marienburg formed perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the Knights’ military identity. Emerging out of the forests and fields along the river Nogat, the castle’s uniquely German-Baltic red brick gothic (German Backsteingotik) flaunted the weight of the German Catholic presence rising in the face of those “enemies of Christendom,” the Prussian-Slavic peoples of the Baltic coast. Historian William Urban argues for the centrality of the Order’s fortresses in the cultural psychology of those who entered the Teutonic territories: “the extravagant entertainment of this era took place in lavishly furnished fortresses. No professional warrior could fail to be impressed by the castles in Prussia, especially by the huge castles at Marienburg and Königsberg.”[5]
As a monastic holding, Marienburg Castle also formed a religious headquarters for the Order and its operations. Stephen Turnbull notes that one section of the castle was dedicated largely to refectories, as well as lodgings for crusading warriors. Turnbull describes another of the Knights’ castles, Allenstein (Olsztyn), as looking like a “fortified cathedral”[6]; this description is perhaps just as apt for Marienburg itself.
If Marienburg held within its architecture and symbology the might of the Teutonic Knights, it also certainly held the brutal weight the Order’s crusade on the Prussians. The Order’s dual religious and military identities came together in its physical and cultural violence against the pagan Baltic peoples – a violence so deeply rooted in the psychology of the region that many 19th– and 20th-century German nationalists, culminating in the Nazis themselves, held the German Teutonic mission as the core of their expansionist ideology.[7]
Unfortunately, very little English-translated sources on the experiences of the pagan Baltic peoples seem to exist, making it difficult to center the narrative on the localities of those peoples without further language ability. Without those tools, then, it is the historian’s job to at least bring to the narrative fore the brutality and violence that the Teutonic Knights perpetrated outwardly from their center in Marienburg. Furthermore, it is the historian’s role to remind all who engage with this history that the activities of the Order did not form a benevolent “civilizing mission,” but rather a crusade—an attemped, and often a successful, cultural and literal genocide.
But Marienburg also stands as a marker of the violent end of the Order’s religious and military control over the region. When the Knights suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of an allied Polish-Lithuanian force (which included even some regiments from the Turko-Mongol Ulug Ulus) at Tannenberg in 1410, only Marienburg and its defenders held off the victors long enough for German reinforcements to arrive and (temporarily) prevent the immediate destruction of the Order as an autonomous political entity. And, when Marienburg did finally yield to Polish forces in 1457-1460, the castle’s fall “symbolized the end of the Order’s hegemony over the chain of red-brick crusader castles that had dominated the military life of Prussia for over two centuries.”[8] Symbolically or not, the fate of the Teutonic Order in the end became rather synonymous with that of Marienburg Castle.
For further reading on the complex local identities held by the Knights in Prussia, please see Kaspars Kļaviņš’s “The Ideology of Christianity and Pagan Practice among the Teutonic Knights: The Case of the Baltic Region.” Kļaviņš discusses the complex religio-philosophical space of the Order’s adoption of the pagan rituals and practices of the peoples they fought or conquered.
[1] Kaspars Kļaviņš, “The Ideology of Christianity and Pagan Practice among the Teutonic Knights: The Case of the Baltic Region,” Journal of Baltic Studies 37, no. 3 (2006): 260-76. Accessed February 21, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43212723.
[2] William Urban, “The Teutonic Knights and Baltic Chivalry,” The Historian 56, no. 3 (1994): 519-30. Accessed February 21, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24448704.
[4] Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, Cambridge: Belknap, 2016, 97.
[5] William Urban, “The Teutonic Knights and Baltic Chivalry,” The Historian 56, no. 3 (1994): 519-30. Accessed February 21, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24448704.
[6] Stephen Turnbull, “Castles of the Thirteen Years War: The Red-brick Strongholds of the Teutonic Knights,” Medieval Warfare 2, no. 2 (2012): 22-27. Accessed February 21, 2021. doi:10.2307/48577941, 24.
[7] See Wilson, 94-95. Wilson does not specifically refer to the Order here, but he does refer to the broader eastward push by German settlers and lords in the medieval period – German expansion or movement eastward manifested in a variety of different ways, and the Teutonic Knights’ formal military conquest formed a key part of that movement.
[8] Turnbull, 27
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “Local History in Tibet” at Columbia University, February 2021
Haus Lilienfeld 