TEUTONIC ORDER, THE, or Teutonic Knights of St. Mary's Hospital at Jerusalem (Der deutsche Orden, Deutsche Ritter) was one of the three great military and religious orders which sprang from the CRUSADES (q.v.). Later in birth than the Templars and Hospitallers, the Teutonic Order traces its first beginnings from the third Crusade. But it is amidst the priva tions and plague which attended the siege of Acre, during the third Crusade, that the first certain beginnings of the Order ap pear. In the winter of 1190-91 certain pious merchants from Bremen and Liibeck (towns with which the Order was still to be connected in the days of its later history) laid the foundations of a hospital in a vessel which they had drawn ashore. Within a few years the foundation apparently became attached to the German Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Jerusalem; and in March 1198 (there being present in the Holy Land a number of Germans, the relics of Henry VI.'s projected crusade), the great men of the army and the kingdom raised the brethren of the German Hospital of St. Mary to the rank of an order of knights. The original members were thus ennobled; and henceforth it was the rule that only Germans of noble birth could join the Order.
Like the other two great military orders, the Teutonic Order began with charity, developed into a military club and ended as something of a chartered company, exercising rights of sov ereignty on the troubled confines of Christendom. Even in its last phase, the Order did not forget its original purpose : it main tained several great hospitals in its new home on the south-east shore of the Baltic, in addition to an hotel des invalides at Marien burg for its sick or aged brethren. But long before that period the Order had begun to find that its true work lay on the eastern frontiers of Germany. In 1228 Christian, bishop of Prussia, who had received from the Polish duke of Masovia a part of Kulmer land as a fief, had founded the knightly Order of Dobrzin, and was attempting to subdue the heathens of Prussia. Unsuccessful
in his attempt, he invited the Teutonic Order to come to the rescue, and bestowed on the Order Kulm and some of the frontier towns in his territory, with such lands as it should conquer.
Thus the Order took its place as the founder of one of the marks on the eastern frontier of Germany, and began to play its part in the Drang nacli Osten, which is perhaps the vitally im portant thing in the history of Germany from the 12th to the 14th century. Since the days of Adolf of Holstein and Henry the Lion, a movement of German colonization, in which farmers from the Low Countries, merchants from Liibeck and monks of the Cistercian Order all played their parts, had been spreading Ger man influence from the Oder to the Vistula, from the Vistula to the Dwina—to Prague, to Gnesen and even to Novgorod. Of this movement the Teutonic Order became, along with the Hanse, the chosen representative.
In 1229 the Order began the conquest of Prussia, founding fortresses at each step to rivet its conquests (for instance, at Thorn, named after Toron in Palestine), much as the Anglo Normans had done in their conquest of Wales; and in 1234 the Order established its independence of all authorities except the Papacy, by surrendering its territories to the Holy See and receiv ing them back again as a fief. The pope gave to those who joined in the work of the Order the privileges of Crusaders; and the knights, supported by numerous donations and large accessions to their ranks, rapidly increased their territories. Already by the beginning of the 14th century these conquests had fundamentally changed the character of the Order. It lost any connection with the East: after the fall of Acre in 1291, the grand master (whose seat had been at Acre, while the German master [Deutschmeister] had controlled the Order in Germany) moved first to Venice, and then, in 1308, to Marienburg on the Vistula.