Denmark and Norway remained united under the Oldenburg dynasty until the latter was combined with Sweden by the |Christian I. recovers Sweden.| decision of the allies in 1815. It would probably have been better if Christian I. had abandoned all idea of recovering Sweden. But the Union of Kalmar was not to perish without giving rise to a long and exhausting struggle. Many of the Swedish nobles were jealous of the elevation of Karl Knudson to royal rank, and the archbishop of Upsala headed an opposition party which appealed for Danish intervention. Christian could not resist the temptation of gaining a third crown. In 1457 Karl Knudson was forced to flee to Danzig. Christian was crowned at Upsala, and his son John or Hans was acknowledged as his heir. This success was followed by another conspicuous triumph. In 1459 the death of Adolf of Holstein |Schleswig and Holstein.| and Schleswig extinguished the male line of the chief branch of the House of Schauenburg. Christian could advance a double claim to the vacant county and duchy. He was the nearest relative of his uncle Adolf on the female side, and he could contend that Schleswig as a Danish fief escheated to the overlord on the extinction of the family to which it had been granted. On the other hand, the surviving Schauenburg princes claimed to be the nearest male heirs, and they could point to Christian’s own pledge in 1448 that Schleswig should never be united to the Danish crown. The dispute enabled the estates of the two provinces to exercise powers which had never hitherto belonged to them. On condition that Schleswig and Holstein should remain united, and that they should be free to elect any member of the family and not be bound to take the successor to the Danish throne, they accepted Christian as duke and count in March 1460. The Schauenburg princes were bought off by a money payment. In 1479 the Emperor Frederick III. raised Holstein from a county to a duchy, and granted the formal investiture to Christian I.
Good fortune had suddenly raised the House of Oldenburg to an extraordinary preponderance of territorial power in the north. No previous ruler had succeeded in uniting the |Independence of Sweden.| three Scandinavian kingdoms with two considerable provinces on the mainland. But the real strength of Christian I. was in no way proportioned to its appearance. He had purchased every state by concessions which sapped the very foundations of the central authority. In Sweden especially his kingship was merely nominal. The strong national sentiment of the Swedes objected to the Union of Kalmar because, in spite of stipulated equality, it made their state little more than a province of Denmark. The archbishop of Upsala, whose quarrel with Karl Knudson had given the crown to Christian, was really more powerful than the king. Disputes were inevitable, and in 1467 Karl was invited to quit his exile in Danzig and to resume possession of the crown. On his death in 1470, his nephew, Sten Sture, was proclaimed regent of Sweden. Christian led an army to compel his submission, but was completely defeated and driven from the kingdom. For the next half century a succession of Stures ruled Sweden in practical independence.
Sweden was not the only territory that was lost to Christian I. In 1469 his daughter Margaret was married to James III. of Scotland; and the Orkneys and Shetlands, which had been in the hands of Denmark since the tenth century, were pledged to the Scottish king as security for the princess’s dowry. As the pledge was never redeemed, the islands were to all intents and purposes ceded to Scotland. The death of Christian in 1481 left his dominions to his eldest son John. The new king was weakened by having to divide Schleswig and Holstein with his younger brother Frederick, and by an unsuccessful war which he carried on to extort the submission of the independent peasants of Ditmarsh. Thus though he was able for a time to recover Sweden and to assume the crown, he could not retain his hold upon the kingdom. Sten Sture regained the government in 1500, and after his death it was transmitted to his successors, Svante Sture and a younger Sten. The desperate effort of the next Danish king, Christian II., to restore the Kalmar Union, and the cruelty which he displayed in the famous ‘blood-bath of Stockholm’ only led to the final vindication of Swedish independence by Gustavus Vasa.
Meanwhile the fifteenth century had been a period of difficulty and stress to the Hanseatic League. The Union of Kalmar in itself constituted a serious danger |Gradual decline of the Hanseatic League.| to the north German towns. The privileges which they had extorted from the Scandinavian rulers amounted to a practical monopoly of trade and fishing rights along their coasts. The obvious interest and duty of a really strong ruler would impel him to repudiate such restrictions on the freedom of his subjects. Fortunately for the League, the Union was never much more than nominal. The policy of the Wendish towns was steadily directed to place difficulties in the way of the Scandinavian rulers, and to encourage every tendency to independence in the subject provinces. Thanks to the weakness of the successive kings and the turbulent opposition of the Swedes to the Union, this policy was successful, and the Hanse towns were enabled to retain for a time their political and mercantile ascendency in the north. But in spite of this the century was on the whole a period of decline in the history of the League. The weaknesses which were inherent in the coalition from the first became more and more visible. Foreign competition, especially that of the English, was a constant and increasing source of trouble. In the fourteenth century the Germans still had a preponderant share of the import and export trade of England. In the fifteenth century the native traders steadily set themselves to get the better of the privileged foreigners, and by the reign of Henry VII. the English had established a considerable direct trade, not only with Flanders and Norway, but also with the countries on the Baltic. But foreign competition was a less serious danger than internal weakness and disruption. In the course of the fifteenth century a notable change began in the balance of northern trade. At first the western towns of the League had been for the most part engaged in trade in the North Sea, whereas the eastern towns had carried on their trade in both the North Sea and the Baltic. In the fifteenth century the western towns, and especially those of the Netherlands, began to encroach upon the Baltic trade and entered into rivalry with Lübeck, Rostock, Stralsund, and Danzig. This growing importance of the western and non-Baltic merchants was completed by two changes which could neither be foreseen nor controlled. For more than a century the gregarious herrings had made the coast of Skaania their favourite summer resort, and in consequence this had been the scene of the largest and most lucrative fishing industry in Europe. In the middle of the fifteenth century the fish made one of those sudden and inexplicable changes of habitat, which have more than once affected the social and economic relations of the northern states. They ceased to enter the Baltic in any large numbers, and transferred themselves to the coast of Holland. The privileged position in Skaania for which the Hanse towns had struggled so long and so successfully became all at once almost valueless, and the gains of the Dutch were measured by the losses of the Wendish and other Baltic towns. This change was followed by the great geographical discoveries which began at the end of the century. These had the effect of transferring the great trade routes from European waters to the outlying oceans, and this proved as fatal to the towns on the Baltic as it was to those on the Mediterranean.
Commercial jealousy and the growth of wholly separate interests of their own impelled the towns of the Netherlands to independent political action, which in the end led to the severance of their connection with the League. Thus in the war waged by King Eric to gain possession of Schleswig the chief Hanse towns supported Holstein, but the Netherlanders sent assistance to Eric in order to gain a share in those commercial privileges in the Scandinavian kingdoms which Lübeck and its immediate associates tried to keep in their own hands. Also it must be remembered that the Netherlands became less German as they fell under the rule of the Valois dukes of Burgundy. There was no formal rupture of vassalage to the empire, but practically there was complete independence of control, and the new rulers directed the conduct of their subjects to suit their own ends. This points to the fundamental weakness of the Hanseatic League, which led to its gradual dissolution in the course of the next century and a half. If Germany could have been made into a single united state, the League, as the champion of common German interests, might have had a prolonged existence. But Germany became a very loose federation of territorial princes, and in such a state there was no room for an active and efficient league of towns. The local prince would not allow the burghers within his dominions sufficient independence to make their membership of such a league a reality. As the provinces became more compact, the towns were withdrawn from their federal allegiance and tied down to their direct duties as subjects of the prince. This gradual process destroyed the Hanseatic League. A few imperial cities, as Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen, retained the name of Hanse towns till the present century, but the name was used to express independence rather than union.
CHAPTER XIX
THE TEUTONIC ORDER AND POLAND
Foundation of the Teutonic Order—Struggles of Germans and Slavs in the Baltic provinces—The Knights are invited to Prussia—Their conquests—Quarrel with the Papacy and complete transfer of the Order to Prussia—Further territorial acquisitions—The Order at the height of its power under Kniprode—Union of Poland and Lithuania—The Battle of Tannenberg—Decline of the Order—Internal discontent and disorder in Prussia—The Prussian League—Civil war and Polish conquest—The Peace of Thorn—End of the Teutonic Order and of the Order of the Sword.
The great Emperor Frederick Barbarossa died in Asia Minor as he was leading his forces to take part in the Third Crusade. The German army broke to |Foundation of the Teutonic Order.| pieces after the loss of its leader, and only a few scanty fragments reached Palestine to take part in the siege of Acre (1189). The besiegers were decimated by the diseases to which troops are liable in an unaccustomed climate, and complaints were made that the German sick were neglected in such scanty hospital arrangements as then existed. Under the pious care of some merchants from Lübeck and Bremen, an order was formed to combine the functions of soldiers and nurses. The ‘German Knights of St. Mary’ borrowed most of their rules from the Hospitallers or Knights of St. John, but some of their military regulations were adopted from the still more famous Order of the Temple. In 1191 the new crusading order received a bull of confirmation from Pope Clement III., and the first grand-master fixed his headquarters in Acre, which had now fallen before the assaults of the Crusaders. Its origin and its peculiarly national character were emphasised by the limitation of membership to men of German birth and speech. Like the Templars and Hospitallers, the Teutonic knights were the recipients of numerous gifts and bequests from pious benefactors, and acquired considerable estates in western Europe. But crusading ardour had begun to decline in the West, and the Germans had never taken quite as prominent a part in the movement as the Romance nations. If the activity of the Teutonic Order had been confined to Palestine, it is not likely that its existence could have been either prolonged or important. But within forty years from its foundation a new sphere was provided for its military exertions.
By the end of the twelfth century immense strides had been made by Christianity and German civilisation |Germans and Slavs.| among the Slavonic peoples to the south of the Baltic. Bohemia and Poland, the two outposts of the Slavs to the south-west, had been converted and brought into some sort of submission to the German Emperors. Their most thriving towns were filled with German settlers; and some of the border provinces, such as Silesia, had already received a preponderantly German element in their population. To the north-west the efforts of Henry the Lion and Albert the Bear had conquered and converted the Wends; Lübeck and other towns had been founded to serve as centres of German commerce and German influence; and bishoprics had been created for Mecklenburg and Pomerania. But from the valley of the Vistula to the Gulf of Finland there stretched an immense tract of dreary country, alternately sandy wastes and undrained marsh, in which a number of Slavonic peoples—Prussians, Lithuanians, Esthonians, and Livonians—still lived their primitive life, engaged in hunting, pasture, and rudimentary agriculture. They retained their heathen religion and their ancient customs, and were regarded by their more advanced neighbours as little better than savages. In the tenth century St. Adalbert of Prague had met with a martyr’s death as he sought to preach the Gospel to the Prussians, and ever since there had been a nominal bishopric on the eastern Baltic, but its holders had never ventured to reside in their diocese.
In the thirteenth century a vigorous effort was made to extend Christianity among these eastern Slavs. |Teutonic knights invited to Prussia.| The Bishop of Riga founded in 1200 the Order of the Sword to compel the acceptance of the faith by the people of Livonia. Soon afterwards Christian, a Cistercian monk of Oliva, undertook to preach the Gospel among the Prussians. The Pope gave him the title of Bishop of Prussia; and a Polish duke, Konrad of Masovia, who claimed the border district of Kulm, promised him active assistance. But the task proved beyond the powers of duke and bishop. The Prussians rose against the intruders, destroyed their settlements, and carried fire and sword into the Kulmerland and Masovia itself. This war between the Christian and the heathen Slavs gave occasion for the introduction of the Teutonic knights into Prussia. In 1226 an embassy from Konrad of Masovia appeared before the grand-master in Italy, and offered to cede the Kulmerland if the Order would undertake to defend him from the Prussians.