Again, with the accession of large territories, the Order became a governing aristocracy; the original care for the sick, and even the later crusading zeal of the period of conquest, gave way, when conquests were gained and administration was needed, to the problem, half military, half political, of governing a frontier state. The statutes of the Order were altered to suit the new conditions, and a whole system of administration arose. At Marienburg the grand master maintained a magnificent court ; round him were the five great dignitaries of the Order, the Grand Commander, the Marshal, the Hospitaller, the Treasurer (Tressler) and the Keeper of the Wardrobe (Trapier) to see to the clothing of the Order. There was a Landmeister for Livonia, and another (the Deutschmeister) for the German province, with his seat at Mergentheim in Swabia. Over each of the twenty dis tricts of the Order was set a commander (Komtur), with the brethren of his house at his side as advisers.
The concord of the Order at this time with the towns and the Hanse was one of the great causes of its prosperity until the close of the 14th century; and the rupture of that concord in the 15th century was largely responsible for its fall. This political and material strength enabled the Order to weather the storm by which the Templars were destroyed at the beginning of the 14th century. For a time, indeed, the Order lay under papal sentence of excommunication ; but the transference of his seat to Marien burg at this time (1308) gave the grand master a basis from which he was able to make easy terms with the pope. Nor was the Order, during the 14th century, at all unfaithful to its original calling. Particularly under the grand' master Winrich of Kniprode (1351 1382) it was the school of northern chivalry, engaged in unceasing struggle to defend Christianity against the heathen Lithuanian.
At the height of its glory irretrievable ruin descended upon the Order. The defeat which the Polish king Ladislaus inflicted upon the knights at Tannenberg in 1410 was crushing. It brought Ladislaus little immediate gain; but it stimulated the elements of unrest in Prussia to fresh activity. The discontented clergy, especially in Livonia; the towns, such as Danzig; the native aris tocracy, organized in a league (the Eidechsenbund, or League of the Lizard), all sought to use their opportunity. It was in vain that the heroic grand master, Henry of Plauen sought to stem the tide of disaster; he was deposed by the chapter of the Order for his pains. The success of the Hussite raids in Germany gave fresh confidence to the Slays of Poland. The Order was at variance within itself ; some of the houses of the brethren refused to obey the marshal, and the grand master quarrelled with the German master. Above all, there arose in 1440 the Prussian League (Preussischer Bund), in which the nobles and towns joined together, nominally for common protection of their rights, but really against the Order. The League naturally sym
pathized with Poland, not only because Poland was the enemy of the knights, but also because under Poland it hoped to enjoy the practical liberty which Polish anarchy already seemed to offer. The ultimate result was that in 1454 an embassy of the League offered Prussia to the Polish king, and that, after many years of war, the Peace of Thorn (1466) gave to Poland West Prussia, with Marienburg, Thorn, Danzig and other towns, in full possession, and, while leaving East Prussia to the Order, made the Order the vassals of Poland for the territory which it re tained. Henceforth the grand master was to sit in the Polish diet on the left of the king, and half of the knights were to be Polish.
Henceforth the Teutonic Order lived in Germany and in Livonia. The master of the latter province had beaten off an attack of the Russians in 15o2, and secured a fifty years' peace. But in 1561 another master followed the example of Albert, and received Courland as an hereditary fief from Poland. Henceforth the Order was confined to Germany alone. Nevertheless, it clung to its rights with the conservatism of an ecclesiastical corporation, still maintained its claims to East Prussia and pressed them tenaciously even against the electors of Brandenburg themselves, when they inherited the land on the failure of Albert's descendants in 1618. The French Revolution finally deprived the Order of all its estates, and for a while of its existence. In 18o1 the bailiwicks to the west of the Rhine were absorbed by France; in 1809 the Order was entirely suppressed, and its lands went to the secular principalities in which they lay. But in 1840 the Order was resuscitated in Austria as a semi-religious knighthood, closely con nected with the Habsburgs. But its real heirs were the Hohen zollerns of Prussia. When Frederick the Great gained West Prussia by the first partition of Poland (1772), he was uniting together once more the dominions of the Order, sundered for 30o years.