Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/198

 174 the Order of the Brothers of the Sword, that a final conquest was effected. The new confraternity was modelled on that of the Templars, though less directly ruled by the Pope. It had a Grand Master, who resided at Riga, and a Chapter, including five chief Masters, and all the members of the Order were bound in equal submission to the episcopal authority. It thus constituted a strongly centralized power. But the regular and the secular element soon fell out of harmony, and in the course of the struggle that swiftly ensued, the Order was led to develop the material and political side of its organization, to the detriment of its spiritual calling. This brought it face to face with fresh rivals, and involved it in ruin.

In Prussia, and hard by these knights with red crosses on their white mantles, dwelt the Black Cross Knights of Hermann von Salza, created an Order of Hospitallers by the Pope in 1191, converted into a religious Order by German Princes in 1198, and endowed with an establishment on Slav territory by Conrad, Duke of Mazovia and Cujavia, who, as ill-luck would have it, appealed to these knights, in 1225, to put down and convert the Prussian idolaters. In the following century St. Bridget was to denounce, and prophesy terrible chastisement for, the misdeeds of these false apostles, 'who only fight to feed their own pride and gratify their covetousness.' Greedy and overbearing, they felt hampered within their own dominions, and the neighbouring country of Livonia struck them as a desirable prize. In 1236 an unhoped-for chance favoured their ambition—the almost total destruction of the Brothers of the Sword in a fight with the Lithuanians at the Saula. Rome, solicited by both Orders, decided on their fusion, and the Red Cross Knights disappeared.

But in this new arrangement the neighbours had to be considered. In 1238, Denmark received Revel, Harrien, and Wirland. In 1242, after a desperate encounter with Alexander Nevski's Russians on the Peipus, the Black Cross Knights, who had begun to spread along the Finnish coasts, were forced to retire, and give up their most recent conquests. At the close of the thirteenth century the Order had to reckon with yet another hostile element—the burgher class in the towns, which was growing very powerful, and which made common cause with the Bishops against the knights. The knights won the day and towards the middle of the fourteenth century they celebrated a greater triumph still: Courland, Livonia, and. Esthonia fell under their exclusive rule, Denmark only preserving a nominal claim, to be put forward at a later date, to her ancient conquests.

It was but a short-lived triumph. In the next century, Poland came upon the scene, and on September 1, 1435, the troops of