Teutonic Knights

JJohnson

Banned
Hi everyone,
I was reading about the Teutonic Knights, and found this map on Wikipedia of Teutonic lands. By this time, they were all on the way to Germanization...so, what would happen if the Teutonic Knights had not fallen, and were still around today? How would Germany, and further, Europe differ?

James
 

Philip

Donor
what would happen if the Teutonic Knights had not fallen, and were still around today?

Do you intend to have them survive as a monastic state? Remain Catholic? Do they avoid the secularization of their lands?

IIRC the order is still around as (non-militaristic) German Order in the Catholic Church. Maybe that is one of the other orders. It's been a while since I looked.
 
Feh...the Poles and the Lithuanians wouldn't have permitted it.

It still drives me to distraction that it was a Polish noble that invited the damned knights into Poland/Old Prussia.
 

Titus_Pullo

Banned
Hi everyone,
I was reading about the Teutonic Knights, and found this map on Wikipedia of Teutonic lands. By this time, they were all on the way to Germanization...so, what would happen if the Teutonic Knights had not fallen, and were still around today? How would Germany, and further, Europe differ?

James


They are still around today. The order declined but didn't really fall like the Templars. They were disolved as a military order by Napoleon but continued to exist as purely a Roman Catholic religious order. The Nazis tried to ban the Teutonic Order but they also survived the Third Reich. Today they run charity organizations.
 
Basically, by the time the Teutonic order saw its historic defeat, the whole Drang nach Osten thing had run its course. Germanisation was feasible when the local population was rural, scattered, little organised and largely confined to light soils while the settlers were urbanised, highly organised and could meliorate land and use heavier soils to grow grain crops. The military edge provided bycrossbows, fortifications and heavy cavalry also helped, but nowhere near as much (many a Western Slav leader inflicted serious military reverses on the Germans, but never lasting political ones). By the 1300s, there were no places left in East Central Europe where Slavic populations lived in their tribal settlements and worked the soil with light ploughs and skinny oxen. Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Novgorod, Moscow and even still-pagan Lithuania were stratified, urbanised, monetised and technologically about equally advanced societies. The Teutonic order could have kept going militarily for a few more decades, given enough things going werong for Poland, Lithuania and Moscow, even indefinitely, but there was no more room for German settlement expansion.
 
Basically, by the time the Teutonic order saw its historic defeat, the whole Drang nach Osten thing had run its course. Germanisation was feasible when the local population was rural, scattered, little organised and largely confined to light soils while the settlers were urbanised, highly organised and could meliorate land and use heavier soils to grow grain crops. The military edge provided bycrossbows, fortifications and heavy cavalry also helped, but nowhere near as much (many a Western Slav leader inflicted serious military reverses on the Germans, but never lasting political ones). By the 1300s, there were no places left in East Central Europe where Slavic populations lived in their tribal settlements and worked the soil with light ploughs and skinny oxen. Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Novgorod, Moscow and even still-pagan Lithuania were stratified, urbanised, monetised and technologically about equally advanced societies. The Teutonic order could have kept going militarily for a few more decades, given enough things going werong for Poland, Lithuania and Moscow, even indefinitely, but there was no more room for German settlement expansion.

Samogitia was still tribal, more so than the rest of Lithuania. And it was pagan until the 1410s. It was Christianized after it was recaptured by the Lithuanians when the Order was defeated at Grunwald/Tannenberg. So if the Order had held on to Samogitia, they could have potentially Germanized it.

Another possibility: if Livonia wins the Battle on the Ice, in the 13th century IIRC. That could lead to a more Germanized Muscovy.
 
Samogitia was still tribal, more so than the rest of Lithuania. And it was pagan until the 1410s. It was Christianized after it was recaptured by the Lithuanians when the Order was defeated at Grunwald/Tannenberg. So if the Order had held on to Samogitia, they could have potentially Germanized it.

Another possibility: if Livonia wins the Battle on the Ice, in the 13th century IIRC. That could lead to a more Germanized Muscovy.
Lithuania got back Samogitia in 1409, after Teutonic knights were expelled by rebellious Samogitians. This was main cause of war of 1410 - 1411 vears.

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Kosovic

Banned
They are still around today. The order declined but didn't really fall like the Templars. They were disolved as a military order by Napoleon but continued to exist as purely a Roman Catholic religious order. The Nazis tried to ban the Teutonic Order but they also survived the Third Reich. Today they run charity organizations.

And after 700 years, they became what they supposed to be from the beggining.
 
Lithuania got back Samogitia in 1409, after Teutonic knights were expelled by rebellious Samogitians. This was main cause of war of 1410 - 1411 vears.

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So if the knights won, they would have annexed Samogitia.
 
They are still around today. The order declined but didn't really fall like the Templars. They were disolved as a military order by Napoleon but continued to exist as purely a Roman Catholic religious order. The Nazis tried to ban the Teutonic Order but they also survived the Third Reich. Today they run charity organizations.

The same goes for the Hospitallers (The Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem).
 
And after 700 years, they became what they supposed to be from the beggining.

Not quite - the Teutonic knights were founded as an offshoot of the previous Crusader orders, including the Hospitallers and Templars. The T. knights were practicaly the only order of crusaders, which had a sort of national character and was reserved only for people of German descent or German ancestry.
 
And after 700 years, they became what they supposed to be from the beggining.
More like, became what they were originally for a brief period, with a thousand-year militant space in between. IIRC the knights were founded only to run hospitals for German-speakers in the Crusader states.

The same goes for the Hospitallers (The Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem).

There's a little bit of difference, because the Knights Hospitaller have their own sovereign nation (the Sovereign Military Order of Malta).
 

Susano

Banned
Not quite - the Teutonic knights were founded as an offshoot of the previous Crusader orders, including the Hospitallers and Templars. The T. knights were practicaly the only order of crusaders, which had a sort of national character and was reserved only for people of German descent or German ancestry.

Not in theory, where the Order also at least officially also recruited in Italy, but yes, de facto it was wholly German. Indeed Ordo Teutonicus was supposed to mean German Order, with "teutonicus" as one way to translate "German" into Latin, so "Teutonic Order" is something of a mistranslation - it should be German Order, really.

rcduggan said:
There's a little bit of difference, because the Knights Hospitaller have their own sovereign nation (the Sovereign Military Order of Malta).
While Italy does treat the SMOMs buildings in Rome as exterritorial areas, and hence the Order has some souvereign rights, it does not constitute a souvereign nation.
 
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