1410 AD: The Battle of Grunwald

Five hundred and ninety five years ago today, July 15, 1410 The Battle of Grunwald forever changed the religious faith of Europe. On that historical battlefield the Teutonic Knights “a German crusading military order under Roman Catholic religious vows formed at the end of the 12th century in Acre in Palestine”, lead a massive army against an even larger group of Polish and Lithuanian fighters. It was the decisive battle culminating 200 years of border skirmishes between Catholic Europe and non-Christian populations east and south of the Baltic Coast.

“The Teutonic Knights achieved excellent diplomatic relations with other western countries, and developed a particularly good relationship with the papacy. They seemed destined to control and occupy the whole of Eastern Europe, and acted under a commission signed by the Pope, ordering them to Christianise the pagan lands in the Baltic Region. No matter how they behaved, they could always claim that they acted under Papal authority, and with the approval of God Himself.

Their first Christianising mission in the 13th century involved the Prussians, a tribe which controlled the amber trade along the Baltic. The Teutonic knights dealt with them in a most effective way: they eliminated them almost completely.”

The Teutonic Knights continued their occupations and captured Pomorze (1308-1309), Chelmno, Kujawa, Dobrzyn, and Kalisz in Poland. Every time Polish land was captured, the population was massacred, and Germans were brought to live in the captured lands. For example, in 1308 when the knights marched on Gdansk singing "Jesu Christo Salvator Mundi" they killed most of the Polish citizens, about ten thousand in number, and replaced them with German immigrants, who gave them full allegiance.”

By the late 14th Century the Krzyzacy (Knights of the Cross) attacks focused on Lithuanian lands and in 1385 Lithuanian Grand Duke Wladyslaw Jagiello married the Queen of Poland and two years later converted all his lands to Christianity. The conversion by decree was insufficient to deflect the all the political desires of the Teutonic Knights with their Papal backing and by 1410 the entirety of Europe picked a side and went to war. What one side calls Grunwald, the other calls Tanneberg.

July 15,1410 The Battle of Tanneberg: “The knights, on the other hand, with only 83,000 men were outnumbered two to one. Despite this handicap, the outcome of the engagement at what is known as the battle of Tannenberg on July 15, 1410 was by no means certain. Early in the conflict the knights made great advances, destroying the right wing of the Lithuanian forces but they were gradually beaten back. When their courageous Grand Master, Ulrich von Jungingen was killed in the center of the melée, dying from wounds inflicted in both the front and back of his chest, the fight was lost. In addition to their leader, they lost two hundred knights and forty thousand soldiers including the Grand Commander”.

For about 300 years Christianity included a warrior aspect. From the first Crusade in 1096 through the defeat of the Teutonic Knights in 1410 there was an influential Christian faction accepting the killing of non-believers as justified. The catastrophe which befell the Order this long ago summer day did not immediately purge Christianity of the false belief of divinely justified killing, however, it removed so much of the key leadership that the remaining adherents could never believe in their divine favor with quite the same certainty.