The Teutonic Knights: A Military History (review)

The Teutonic Knights played an exceptionally important role in the history of the crusading movement and in the political, economic, and cultural development of northeastern Europe. Nevertheless, they have received very little attention in Anglophone scholarship, especially when compared to the Templars and Hospitallers, the contemporaries and rivals of the German Order. William Urban, who has published widely on the Baltic crusades over the past four decades, has essayed to redress this imbalance in the literature with a military history of the Teutonic Knights from their foundation in the late twelfth century until the dissolution of their independent state in the sixteenth. Urban's thorough knowledge of the relevant source materials as well as his familiarity with the scholarship that has been published in a wide range of modern languages, including German, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian, make him uniquely qualified to take on this task.

The volume is divided into thirteen chapters of uneven length following a brief introduction, and is equipped with fifteen useful maps, two short appendixes that list the major figures in the history of the Teutonic order and the grandmasters down to 1525, and a brief bibliography. The work follows a generally chronological organization that presents the military campaigns and political history of the order over a period of three long centuries. Each chapter, however, has frequent excurses that deal with a wide range of questions, including, for example, a brief discussion of the nature of a military order, the architectural designs of fortresses constructed by the Teutonic Knights, and the nature of chivalry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Urban presents this work specifically as a military history of the Teutonic Knights. To this end, he records the numerous military campaigns and undertakings of the Knights, primarily in the regions of West Prussia, Livonia, Lithuania, and Poland. The bulk of the information regarding these campaigns appears to have been drawn from narrative sources with only very occasional references in the text (there are no notes) to the great store of surviving administrative documents and charters that deal with the activities of the Teutonic Knights. Urban does not, however, deal with the thorough-going aristocratic parti pris of the narrative sources and their focus on the "chivalric" exercise of arms by the "mounted knights."

This work is a useful general introduction to the activities of the Teutonic Knights over three centuries, and the only work of its kind available in English. However, it is very far from being a proper military history. Urban's omission of a critical treatment of the biases of the narrative sources toward their aristocratic patrons leads him to over-emphasize the importance of "mounted knights" in the campaigns of the German Order at the expense of the far more numerous foot soldiers who played a central role in all military campaigns during the three centuries covered in this work. In addition to the misleading focus on knighthood and chivalry, Urban does not address in a systematic manner questions that are now seen as central by leading specialists in medieval military history, including military administration and organization, technology, and logistics.

In sum, this work provides a useful introductory survey of the history of the Teutonic Knights to an audience that is limited to Anglophone scholarship. The readers of the Journal of Military History should know, however, that this book does not cover in detail the broad spectrum of subjects that are now expected in the writing of military history. Perhaps in a second volume, Urban, who is the scholar best able to do so in English, will deal with these matters in a thoroughly documented manner.