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 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. The Order was from the first, therefore, of a national character, unlike the cosmopolitan orders of the Templars and Hospitallers; but in other respects it was modelled upon the same lines, and shared in the same development. Like the knights of other orders, the Teutonic knights lived a semi-monastic life under the Augustinian rule; and in the same way they admitted priests and half-brothers (servientes) into their ranks. Like the other two orders, the Teutonic Order began as a charitable society, developed into a military club, and ended as something of a chartered company, exercising rights of sovereignty on the troubled confines of Christendom. Even in its last phase, the Order did not forget its original purpose: it maintained several great hospitals in its new home on the south-east shore of the Baltic, in addition to an hotel des invalides at Marienburg for its sick or aged brethren.

For a hundred years (1191–1291) the headquarters of the Order were at Acre; nor was it until 1309 that, after a brief sojourn at Venice, the seat of government was transferred to Marienburg on the Vistula. But long before that date the Order had begun to find that its true work lay on the eastern frontiers of Germany. Perhaps it was Hermann von Salza, the first great grand master of the Order (1210–1239), who originally conceived the idea of transplanting the Order to the west. At any rate it was he who accepted the invitation of Andrew of Hungary that the Order should aid him with its resources against the Comans by whom he was threatened. In 1211 the Order received from the king the district of Burzenland in Transylvania. Towns arose and agriculture began to flourish; but seeking to make itself independent, the Order lost its lands, and disappeared from Transylvania. A new opportunity almost immediately arose on the banks of the Vistula. Here Christian, bishop of Prussia, who had received from the Polish duke of Masovia a part of Kulmerland as a fief, had founded the knightly Order of Dobrzin, and was attempting with its aid 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 Kuim and some of the frontier towns in his territory, with such lands as it should conquer (1228). 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 that Drang nach Osten, which is perhaps the vitally important 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 Lübeck, and monks of the Cistercian Order all played their parts, had been spreading German influence from the Oder to the Vistula, from the Vistula to the Dwina—to Prague, to Gnesen, and even to Novgorod the Great. Of this movement the Teutonic Order became, along with the Hanse, the chosen representative. It was not, indeed, the first knightly Order to gird itself for the task. Besides the knightly Order founded by Christian, there was already another still farther east, which had served as Christian's model, the Knights of the Sword of Livonia. This was an order founded by Albert, 3rd bishop of Riga, in 1201, to serve as an instrument, under his control, for the conquest of the land. But in 1237 the Knights of the Sword were merged into the Teutonic Order, and Livonia became a province of the Order, with a master of its own under the grand master's control, just as, two years before, the Order had also absorbed the Knights of Dobrzin.

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. Frederic II. gave the Order the rights of a prince of the Empire in its territories: Conrad of Masovia gave it the whole of Kulmerland in 1230; while in 1234 the Order established its independence of all authorities except the Papacy, by surrendering its territories to the Holy See and receiving 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. By 1260 they ruled the eastern bank of the Vistula from Kulm to its mouth, and the northern shore of the Baltic from the mouth of the Vistula to Konigsberg. Livonia they held after 1237; and during the 14th century they gained the Lithuanian territory of Samogitia, which lay between Livonia and their Prussian dominions, while they also added, to the west of the Vistula, Pomerellen and the Neumark (see under Prussia). Already by the beginning of the 14th century these conquests had fundamentally changed the character of the Order. It lost any connexion 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. 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 districts of the Order was set a commander (Komtur), with the brethren of his house at his side as advisers. The commander was bound by the advice of his brethren; and in the same way the general chapter of the Order, consisting of the landmeisters and the great dignitaries, formed an advisory board to the grand master in matters such as treaties and internal legislation. It was government by an aristocracy almost Venetian in character. The individual was merged in the Order: each brother must pray four times in the day, and four times at night, and he must at all times pay an unquestioning obedience to his superiors. The Order was at once supreme ecclesiastical and political authority. There were no struggles of Church and State in its dominions: the state was also the church: the bishops and the canons of the four bishoprics (with the exception of Ermeland) were priests of the Order. The lay subjects of the Order consisted of two classes; on the one hand there were the conquered Prussians, in a position of serfdom, bound in time of war to serve with the brethren in foreign expeditions; on the other hand there were the German immigrants, both urban and rural, along with the free Prussians who had voluntarily submitted and remained faithful. The towns were large and flourishing; as many as sixty arose in the period between 1233 and 1416, including Thorn and Elbing, Danzig and Königsberg (named after Ottocar of Bohemia, who took part in the campaign during which it was founded). The towns possessed the rights of Magdeburg, or (like Elbing) those of Lübeck; the most important of them soon came to join the Hanseatic League. The Order only imposed customs duties: it levied no tolls within the land; and though its consent was necessary to any change in municipal ordinances, it allowed the towns a large amount of self-government. The concord of the Order with the towns and the Hanse was one great cause of its prosperity