Having completed the survey of the vain efforts for the Holy Land, it will be well to glance at the contests springing up elsewhere on the same fanatic belief that orthodoxy was a matter of life and death.[a]
Though the Crusades met with failure in the East, in the West they achieved their purpose; that is, certain expeditions were highly successful; for example that of the Teutonic knights and sword-bearers into Prussia and the neighbouring regions, where they founded a new state; also Simon de Montfort’s war against the Albigenses which destroyed an ancient civilisation; and the struggle between the Spaniards and the Moors, as a result of which the latter were forced to surrender the peninsula over to Christianity and the civilisation of Europe.
It will be observed that the scene of action of the European Crusades was the two extremities of the continent; around the mouths of the Niemen the pagans of the Baltic were to be converted, and in the country washed by the Tagus, the Moslems of Spain.
THE TEUTONIC CRUSADE
In the interval between the First and Second Crusades some citizens of Bremen and Lübeck had journeyed to the Holy Land and there founded a hospital for their compatriots, which was exclusively under the management of Germans. In Palestine all benevolent institutions were obliged to assume the form of military organisations; thus the Hospitallers, or officials in charge of the hospitals, became the knights of St. John, and the inmates of the temple of Solomon, the knights Templar. The German hospitallers also became transformed into an armed religious body that was called the Teutonic order. Like both the others, this order soon acquired vast properties in Europe, especially in Germany, and the emperor Frederick II raised its grand-master to the rank of prince of the realm. In 1230 a Polish prince made use of their zeal and arms, which could no longer be employed in the Holy Land, by despatching them on a mission to subjugate and convert the Prussians, a people who have since become so closely identified with the Germans settled in the country as to be no longer distinguishable from them. It was this idolatrous people, established between the Niemen and the Vistula, whose language, history, and religion have now completely disappeared, that gave its name to one of the largest and most prosperous states of modern Europe.
The Teutonic order took up its station first at Kulm, whence it proceeded to conquer the Prussians by the use of the means employed by Charlemagne against the Saxons; that is, by destroying one portion of the population and then building fortresses to contain the rest. It was this purpose that Königsberg and Marienburg were intended to serve.
Several years earlier a prelate of Livonia had founded the order of the Brothers of the Sword, known still as the knights of Christ, and the body of the sword-bearers, which subdued Livonia and Esthonia. Disputes with the bishops of Riga caused these organisations to unite in 1237 with the Teutonic order, whose forces were thus doubled. Marienburg became the capital of the order in 1309, and its grand-masters, who reigned over Prussia, Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland, caused these countries to hold communion with the rest of Europe, and planted in them the germs of civilisation. They remain to-day the richest and most progressive of the Russian provinces. As late as the fifteenth century the Teutonic knights retained the preponderance of power in northern Europe, all the countries between the lower Vistula and Lake Peipus being subject to them except Samogitia, a Lithuanian province which separated the original possessions of the two orders.