“As long as the world is the world, a German will never be a brother to a Pole”

The long, fraught history of Polish-German relations is rarely far from the headlines in Europe, and recent years, with the two countries repeatedly clashing over issues such as migration, extradition and reparations, have been no exception. It can be tempting to assume that these tensions are just the latest example of an “ancient hatred”, a cultural chasm stretching back centuries - marked in the Polish-German case by examples like the eighteenth-century Partitions of Poland and the genocidal German occupation during the Second World War. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular, discourse among modern nationalists of both groups drew heavily on the medieval past to promote this idea. This post aims to clarify and demystify the reality of one influential element of this discourse: the relationship of the Teutonic Order in Prussia with Poles and Poland.

In the 1230s, the Order, a group of Christian warrior-monks, aided a Polish duke whose lands were being raided by Prussians, some of Europe’s last pagan peoples. The Order used this as the pretext to establish a bureaucratic, militaristic state on the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea. They waged an ‘eternal crusade’ against the region’s pagans with the periodic support of Western knights – including the future King Henry IV of England - for nearly two centuries.

By the fifteenth century, however, the Order, which had long had a tense relationship with the Polish lands to its south, had also alienated many of its own subjects, due to a combination of its tight control over the Prussian economy and its reluctance to recruit Prussian notables (whether Polish, native or even German) into its own ranks. This led to a series of wars against Poland in which the Order was ultimately defeated, including most notably the Battle of Grunwald (or Tannenberg) of 1410, where many of the Order’s leadership were killed on the field. In 1466 the Order, reduced to a rump state, was forced to become a vassal of Poland.

Tannenberg has since occupied an outsized role in historical memory of the period, seen as the climactic moment of a centuries-long clash of civilisations - or, as Kaiser Wilhelm II put it in 1902, the Order’s “struggle against Slavic non-culture”. [2] A major German victory against the Russian Empire in 1914 was named after Tannenberg in a conscious rebuke of the earlier defeat. This later battle, along with its medieval ‘predecessor’, was commemorated during the Weimar era with a huge, castle-like memorial funded by public subscription, which subsequently hosted multiple Nazi propaganda ceremonies. Plans to use the memorial in the Nazis’ tenth-anniversary celebrations in 1943 were put on hold due to developments on the Eastern Front. (The memorial was demolished after the Second World War.)

The reality of intercommunal life in medieval Prussia was more complicated than one-sided accounts focused on either German greatness or German perfidy would suggest. Both the Order and the region’s lay German population had complex, sustained relationships with Poles and Poland which evolved over the course of the period. At the same time, Poland was itself home to many Germans, who played an important role in the economic development of the country and populated many of its cities.

From the outset, Poles were crucial to the construction of the Order’s state. Polish knights who had lost their lands to Prussian raids formed a key element of the Order’s armies in the early years of the Prussian crusade. [3] The Order rewarded them for their contribution by restoring their lands, using them as an important early building block of settlement and control in its new state. Although never as numerically significant as German migration, Poles continued to receive land in Prussia throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries - including land near the sensitive frontier with Poland itself.

This is not to imply that the Order’s rule was without bloodshed. The conquest of Prussia itself was protracted and often brutal, and the Order’s seizure of Danzig (Gdańsk) and the wider region of Pomerelia in 1308-9 earned widespread condemnation and became a black legend in later Polish historiography in particular. This is shown most notably in the fifteenth- century work of Poland’s pre-eminent medieval historian, Jan Długosz, who passed down lurid accounts of the Order’s atrocities.

Curiously, there is nevertheless no evidence that the sack of Danzig poisoned inter-ethnic relations in Prussia more generally. The Polish aristocracy in Pomerelia were retained by the Order after the conquest and remained a key part of the Order’s administration in the area, regularly featuring as witnesses to urban foundation charters, resolutions of disputes and grants of land.

This involvement in government continued even during and after a long, bitter struggle between Poland and the Order over the Dobrzyń Land frontier region in the early fourteenth century; the antagonism defining the conflict was that of two clashing and mistrustful governments rather than two ethnicities. Although the Order frequently bought up parts of the Pomerelian nobility’s estates, it did so as part of its general drive to minimise the power of the nobility as a whole in Prussia; there were no German magnates in the Order’s state either.

The continued significance of Poles in rural Prussian society contrasted with the region’s towns, which were both numerically and politically dominated by Germans throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although neither Poles nor native Prussians were officially barred from urban institutions like guilds in this period, it is clear that German hegemony was taken as a given in the region; there was relatively little explicit discrimination in part because German burghers simply did not deem it necessary. [4]

Yet, when the towns’ relationship with the Order began to sour in the early fifteenth century, it was Poland to which their German upper classes turned for aid, and the Polish king to whom they pledged allegiance at the onset of the Thirteen Years’ War (1454-1466).

The burghers were joined in this by many German knights, who were more concerned with gaining privileges under a less demanding government than they were with the ethnicity of their overlord, and who had even in some cases been suspected by the Order of betrayal at Tannenberg in 1410. Many Prussian-born Germans seem to have seen the Order, which excluded the local nobility by recruiting its members from Germany proper, as practically foreigners in any case. [5]

The Order’s loyalists, on the other hand, included Poles among their ranks - even from regions which were otherwise anti-Order. The Order was, as its name suggests, fundamentally a German-dominated organisation, but neither its supporters nor its enemies in this period saw conflict with it as an ethnic issue.

It is undeniable that, to quote Tazbir, ‘a strong German-Polish antagonism was evident at the close of the Middle Ages’. This antagonism was, however, an antagonism of states rather than a clash of ethnicities. Although Polish diplomats denounced the Order to the Pope as treacherous and bloodthirsty, and the Order responded in kind, the Order built its state with a core of Polish support which it could (and did) count on throughout its existence, while the Polish crown drew much of its wealth from German-dominated towns.

The misdeeds and wars of this period have fuelled many later historical grievances, but the deadly hostility which has driven much of the two countries’ modern history largely is just that – modern, rather than medieval in origin, a product of the Partitions and their aftermath rather than the Order and its government.

Freddy Potts is a final-year PhD candidate in medieval history with the School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities, funded by WRoCAH. He works on questions of colonialism, migration and settlement in the late medieval Eastern Baltic, and can be contacted at fjpotts1@sheffield.ac.uk.

References

[1] The proverb is cited in works as varied as John Connelly, From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton NJ, 2020), p57; Janusz Tazbir, ‘Polish National Consciousness in the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10.3-4 (1986), pp. 329-30; and Józef Feldman, Antagonizm polsko-niemiecki w dziejach (Toruń, 1934), p8. The proverb rhymes in the original Polish.

[2] Marian Biskup and Gerard Labuda, Dzieje zakonu krzyżackiego w Prusach. Gospodarka - Społeczeństwo - Państwo - Ideologia (Gdańsk, 1986), p18.

[3] Mikołaj Gładysz, The Forgotten Crusaders: Poland and the Crusader Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Leiden, 2012).

[4] Fritz Gause, ‚Die Forderung deutscher Abstammung der Lehrlinge in den altpreußischen Gewerksrollen‘, Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 9.1 (1960), pp. 57-64.

[5] For an overview of the topic, see Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, ‘The relations of the Teutonic Order in Prussia with the local nobility in the 13th-early 16th century. Scope of issues, research state and research perspectives’, Cahiers de la Méditerranée 104 (2022), pp. 119-46.

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