Did all the Teutonic Knights follow their vows of chastity as warrior monks like this? Hard to generalize but many of them likely did and the vow of chastity was taken seriously as the historian Eric Christiansen notes in the book The Northern Crusades. However... (thread)
Christiansen also notes how "the knight-brother was exposed to strong temptations, because war and power continually put women at his mercy. They were booty, and the expectation of raping them was what kept his native auxiliaries up to the mark."
These native auxiliaries were the Old Prussian Baltic pagans, former enemies of the Order now serving as their mercenaries. Most of the Baltic crusades revolved around brutal raids into enemy territory and these natives acted as guides and irregulars for the Teutonic Knights.
These local auxiliaries who terrorized the enemy lands together with the Teutonic Knights in these raids had no other motivation than plunder and were not under any sort of vow of chastity. There are some accounts that Teutonic Knights also sometimes participated in raping.
According to certain Polish accounts during their 1329-32 war with the Order, women were seen being dragged to the tents of the Knights who had according to these Polish accounts raped even more women than their Prussian auxiliaries!
On the other hand it has to be noted that Teutonic Knights lived their lives under strict community rules and there were punishments for breaking the vows of chastity. For many, it would not be easy to get away with this and discipline was enforced to keep the Order together.
There is a famous legend about the leaning tower of Thorn allegedly built by a Teutonic Knight who sinned and broke the monastic vows by having a love affair with a woman. He had to build a tilted tower as a punishment to symbolize his deviation from the monastic rules!
In general, the life of the Teutonic Knights was hard and brutal. They were in the state of continuous war with their pagan (and sometimes even Christian) neighbors while enjoying much less benefits of the chivalric culture of secular warriors knights.
For example the Teutonic Knights were not allowed to have individual shares of plunder and did not even own their horses. Someone who would seek great plunder for himself would have little motivation to join Teutonic Knights so the Order attracted men for different reasons.
For Teutonic Knights, fighting in war was a means of atonement, a penance for their sins, trying to achieve redemption and holiness by fighting against the pagans in the harsh conditions of the Baltic on the edge of civilization. Many definitely took religious vows seriously.
This would be strange for modern Christians, and not just modern Christians but also the "trad" Christians of few centuries ago, but in the middle ages they view Christianity as basically a warrior religion where crusades were a holy enterprise and many truly believed in this.
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Did you know? There is an old legend documented by chroniclers that one of the Teutonic Knights decided to test his commitment to chastity by ordering the prettiest virgin girl they could find to sleep next to him naked for entire year and he didn't touch her.
This Teutonic Knight was Bertold Brühaven hailing from Duchy of Austria. He served the Order in the Baltic crusades and was Komtur (commander) of Königsberg from 1289 to 1302. The chronicles praise him as a great warrior who conducted many successful raids deep in pagan lands!
For example Nikolaus von Jeroschin writes that in 1291 "that ever reliable warrior for God" Brother Bertold Brühaven attacked ferociously the area called Junigeda, burning and looting it and also killing or taking prisoner approximately 700 local Baltic heathen men and women!
Italian noblewoman Simonetta Vespucci (1453 - 1476) was so famous for her beauty that she earned the nickname La Sans Pareille, "The Unparalleled One"!
Born in Genoa as Simonetta Cattaneo, she moved to Florence after marrying important nobleman Marco Vespucci.
She was allegedly the model for many paintings by Sandro Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, and other Florentine painters!
When she died at only 22 years of age she was carried through the city of Florence in an open coffin "so that all might see her beauty, which was even greater in death than it had been in life." Many poets wrote poems grieving over the young beauty's tragic demise!
Yes and medieval universities were important because they set foundations for independent self-regulating institutions of higher learning, and for giving a lot of rights to students. That does not mean they were necessarily superior to non-Western institutions at the time.
No one denies that the likes of Byzantines and Arabs had superior institutions for a long time in the "middle ages", but the Western universities set up foundations for modern universities in terms of institutional concept, and over time became more and more important.
This is why the (Western) middle ages should be understood as a period of creativity, innovation and learning. They started from a very low position as a civilization but expressed a great desire to learn and implement a lot of new ideas that benefited over time.
A lot of people bringing up "university" of Constantinople "missing" on this map. The term university comes from Latin universitas and applied strictly to Western medieval corporations of students and teachers. Non-Western centers of higher learning were not called 'universitas'.
To use the term university outside of Latin Europe in the middle ages is misleading. That does not mean of course that centers of higher learning did not exist elsewhere, but the term university describes a very specific type of corporate and legal organization in the West.
Of course I won't even comment on the ridiculous notion of "University" of Constantinople missing on a map which doesn't even include the city of Constantinople, but I've had a lot of people bringing it up so I decided to comment on it.
Many peaceful looking towns in Europe have had very violent medieval past! One of such is the beautiful town of Fermo in Italy. The city was sacked, besieged and conquered many times in history and in renaissance it witnessed violent struggles among important local noblemen!
This town of Fermo was very important already in the Roman era. In the 5th century it suffered numerous barbaric invasions including by raids Attila. In the 6th century it witnessed the Gothic War, fell under Byzantine rule and then conquered by Lombards!
From the late 10th century on it became a frontier march of the Holy Roman Empire, the March of Fermo! In the 11th century these lands were under attack by the Normans. The men from Fermo fought against them for the Pope and lost at the famous battle of Civitate in 1055.
The story of Nicholas of Salm and his defense of Vienna against the Ottomans in 1529 is one of the most epic stories of European history yet totally forgotten and untold. Therefore It deserves the most epic battle thread from me so far to present this truly heroic and noble tale!
The First Siege of Vienna in 1529 is unjustly in the shadow of the more famous Second Siege of Vienna in 1683 due the spectacular hussar charge, even though the first one was even more heroic and even more crucial for the future of Europe and required a display of epic bravery.
Nicholas of Salm represented the best of European warrior aristocracy and of chivalry. His entire life was marked with war. He first fought at age of 17 during the Burgundian wars in 1476 and until the 1529 Siege of Vienna there was hardly a year of peace in his life in between.