Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/663

 Rh the Vistula, together with Dantzig, Chev, Gniev, and Sviet. The Order of Livonian Knights stretched out after Russian lands; and those two Orders moved forward, like the first gigantic wave of a German sea, which was covering Slav lands with an ever-widening deluge.

Suddenly the sun of the German Order was obscured behind a cloud. Lithuania had received the Cross from Poland, and Yagello had received the throne at Cracow with the hand of the marvellous Yadviga. The Order, it is true, had not lost a single land through this, or a single castle, but it felt that against its power a power was now arrayed, and it lost the reason of its existence in Prussia. After the baptism of Lithuania the Order had only to return to Palestine and guard pilgrims on their way to the Holy City. But to return would be to renounce wealth, rule, power, dominion, cities, lands, and whole kingdoms. So the Order began to squirm in rage and terror, like a monstrous dragon in whose side the barbed shaft has sunk deeply. The Grand Master Conrad feared to risk all on one cast of the die, and trembled at the thought of war with Yagello, the ruler of Polish and Lithuanian lands and of those broad Russian regions which Olgierd had dragged from the throat of the Tartar; but the greater number of the Knights of the Cross urged on to war, feeling that they must light a life-and-death battle while their forces were intact and before the halo of the Order should grow pale, while the whole world was hastening to give aid to them, and before the thunders of the Papacy could fall upon that nest of theirs. It was a question of life and death then for the Order not to spread the Christian faith, but to uphold the heathen.

Meanwhile, among nations, and at the courts of Europe, they accused Yagello and Lithuania of having performed a baptism that was false and counterfeit, declaring it impossible that that could be done in a single year which the sword of the Knights had not done in generations. They incensed against Poland and its sovereign, kings and knights, as against guardians and defenders of Pagan institutions; and their complaints, which were disbelieved in Rome alone, went through the world in a broad wave, and brought to Malborg princes, counts, and knights from the west and south of Europe. The Order gained confidence and felt itself allmighty. Marienburg, with its two tremendous castles and its First Castle, dazzled men through its strength more than ever. They were dazzled by its wealth and its seeming

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