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Description
The Teutonic Knights are the youngest of the knightly orders we typically associate with that awkward medieval fad of table-flipping the lives of everyone previously just minding their own damn business in the Holy Land. I've already gone over their earliest foundations in my blurb on Sibrand, so I'll try to keep it abridged here. It's September 1191 and the big problem occupying everyone's time is the turducken meat grinder that was the Siege of Acre. In Guy of Lusignan's camp, a field hospital had been set up along the coast dedicated specifically to German-speaking soldiers of the Crusader army. Nowadays that sort of German favoritism rings all sorts of alarm bells, but that wasn't the deal here. The hospital didn't practice to the exclusion of other soldiers, German patients just understandably preferred a doctor who could communicate fluently with them. You'd find a similar arrangement in the French and English camps just the same. For whatever reason, though, Guy showed particular favoritism to the German hospital's leader, Sibrand, after Richard the Lionheart came in and lifted the siege. Guy rewarded Sibrand with a more respectable base of operations, a building in Acre run by a handful of merchants from Bremen and Lübeck. This would become the Hospital of St. Mary of the German House in Jerusalem, and you may be thinking: well wait, why's it called that if it's in Acre and not Jerusalem?

…

Anyway, Sibrand is traditionally referred to as the first Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights for this reason, despite falling out of the historical record immediately afterwards, and the hospital not being reorganized into a military order until 1198. By this criteria, their first real Grand Master was Heinrich Walpot von Bassenheim. He was in charge of the hospital during a time of great upheaval among the German troops. See, when Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI kicked the bucket in 1197, most of the German Crusaders just kinda went meh, we've done our part, and fucked off back to Europe. Oh no, this hospital thought, but if all the soldiers go home to their lives and families, no one will be around to slaughter all these innocent people! Something must be done! Heinrich Walpot therefore took it upon himself to swap the hospital’s scalpels for swords in order to fill in the vacuum. But aw shucks, he's just a simple medicine man, he doesn't know the first thing about leading a knightly organization! How's he gonna aquire all the structure and discipline it takes to manage such a responsibility? Ehhhh fuck it, just copy the Templars’ homework. No like for real, Heinrich just went up to Gilbert Horal, Grand Master of the Templars at the time, Horal just kinda handed him a copy of the Templar rulebook, and Heinrich was seemingly satisfied with this. I know I've joked before about the Crusader orders just being reskins of each other, but come on man.

Clearly, the first Teutonic Knights were a little too big for their britches. It wasn't really until Hermann von Salza became Grand Master in 1210 that they'd come into their own. Hermann realized that crusading in the Holy Land wasn't going to be as profitable as everyone else thought it would be, so instead he turned the Order northwards. King Andrew II of Hungary invited the Knights to eradicate the pagan Cumans from his land in 1211, basically affording them full autonomy in Transylvania to do so. In fact, they were given a bit too much autonomy. The Knights turned out to be terrible house guests who broke more than they fixed, getting them kicked out of Hungary by 1225. “Ah gee willikers, Mr. Wilson,” Hermann waffled, or some variation thereof, “I sure am sorry. I'll make sure to give my knights a stern talkin’ to so that they never ever ever act this way again.” If you're the drinking game sort, this is where you take the first shot.

Just one year later, Polish duke Konrad of Mazovia called upon the Teutonic Knights to assist the Livonian Brothers of the Sword with decimating those pesky Baltic pagans still holding out in Prussia. With the permission of his buddy Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, Hermann established an autonomous state in Chełmno, with the goal of conquering Prussia and converting its populace in the name of the Father the Son and the bla bla bla. Evidently, those Livonian Brothers were so abysmal at their job that when they got trounced at the Battle of Saule in 1236 they had to be sphlorped into the Teutonic Order just to stay afloat. You know, you'd think failure after failure would eventually make the Crusaders ponder hmm, maybe God doesn't approve of us murdering infidels in His name?

Pffft, nah, come on Ava you filthy pagan, what sort of Heathen devil-book did you pull that “Love thy neighbor” bullshit out of? Clearly they just need to spend the next thirty years murdering more Lithuanians! It cures all ails: the Samogitians score a major victory over the Crusaders in 1259? Deus vult! That victory get the Prussian pagans all riled up and ready to revolt again the next year? Deus vult! King Władysław asks you to oust his rivals claiming the completely Christian territory of Pomerelia? Deus vult! Er… wait, pump the brakes on that last one. Wait, I said wait! Ohhhh fuck… that's a lot of blood-

Welllll. Shit.

So Władysław quickly learned the same lesson that the Hungarians had: inviting the Teutonic Knights causes more damage than it resolves. The Knights agreed to take the territory in 1308, under the condition that they could hold up in a fort outside of Danzig. That's fair enough in itself, but once they actually had the city, they refused to vacate. They refused so hard, in fact, that they massacred a significant chunk of the city's population, which… shock of shocks, kinda destroyed their good standing with the Polish king basically overnight. As if they didn't have enough bridges to burn, the next year the Knights bought the claim to Pomerelia from the king's rivals they had been sent to evict in the first place. That is such a batshit play of an Uno reverse card that I can't decide if the Knights were just petty opportunists or genuinely off their meds.

As this cut off Poland's access to the Baltic Sea… and you know, was also just a major dick move in general, war broke out between them and the Knights. The war did not go well for Poland, dragging on well into the reign of Władysław’s successor, Casimir III, who was ultimately forced to concede to the Treaty of Kalisz in 1343. Poland was basically stuck with this incredibly toxic divorcee to their north, though I guess in an odd twist of fate that did finally bring about unity with the pagan Lithuanians. Sharing an equal aversion to the Knights, Female-King Jadwiga of Poland married the freshly converted Jagiełło of Lithuania in 1384. On paper, this should've brought harmony to the region, but not everyone was happy with the agents of that harmony. Jagiełło’s cousin, Vytautas, made his bid for the throne in 1389, igniting a civil war and calling upon the Teutonic Knights to help. Now how do you think asking the Teutonic Knights for help will go this time? Let's spin the fucking wheel.

Well as part of their agreement, Vytautas loaned Samogitia (Europe's last pagan stronghold) to the Knights in 1390, and oh look at that, as soon as Vytautas reached an agreement with his cousin in 1392, the Knights refused to fucking leave and made life absolutely miserable for the Samogitians. I have never seen anyone play the just-make-enemies-with-everyone game and get away with it for this long, it's honestly kind of fascinating. The Knights refusing to be friends with literally anybody did, again for what it's worth, unite everybody against this singular obnoxious pest. The pagans of Samogitia rebelled against the Teutonic Knights in 1409, and Christian Lithuania immediately said “oh hell yeah, we've got your back, brother!” with their buddy Poland following close behind. They were there in spirit, not in arms, because they knew the Knights were in bed with the Holy Roman Emperor and feared the retaliation that would result in attacking first. But hey, they didn't have to worry about that for long! Because the Teutonic Knights were a bunch of self-righteous fart-sucking assholes who made the first move for them. This final slip-up was the perfectly gift-wrapped excuse for Poland-Lithuania to trounce the Knights unopposed. Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen was slain at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, a stunning Polish-Lithuanian victory which, while ultimately did little to shift the borders, you know must've felt reeeeeeally satisfying.

Despite getting to keep Prussia in the end, the Teutonic Knights pretty much fell off the world’s chessboard after Grunwald. They were forced to cede Samogitia back to Lithuania in 1422, and following the Thirteen Years’ War, had to give Pomerelia back to Poland in 1466. The Knights remained Poland's little bitch until 1525, when Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg converted to Protestantism and secularized their remaining territories under Polish rule once and for all. Any holdouts in Livonia were subsumed into Russia, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania in 1558, leaving only pockets of Teutonic Knights with any meaningful claims to statehood scattered throughout the Holy Roman Empire until Napoleon came along to clean everything up in 1809. The Order did technically survive past that, being revived as an ecclesiastical institution by Emperor Francis in 1834, but nowadays they're clearly just a ceremonial old man's club like everyone else claiming to be the descendants of the Crusader organizations. I have no clue if they're still playing the just-make-enemies-with-everyone game in some form or another, but their image was heavily utilized as anti-Polish propaganda by the Germans during World War II, and that's certainly no way to make friends.

Design notes, so this is rare. Normally when I do these faction sheets, I get more burnt out and less satisfied the further to the right I work. In this case, though, I actually think the left side of the sheet is the weaker side. I mean just look at that mad bastard on the far right. I love him, he's fuckin’ pumped. To be fair, I do think I ultimately cleaned up the left side fairly well by the end too. At first I thought it would end up being really difficult not to just make these guys reskins of the Templars (and I almost did so just for the joke of it), but I did eventually come across a new palette of traits I liked which set them apart. Usually in media, the Teutonic Knights are just reskins with the major exception being their very unique helmets. I was kind of skeptical at first. Everyone seems to have an idea of how those headdresses looked… the exact same idea in fact. It's the kind of exactness that usually tips me off to some basis in a single archaeological find like how Sutton-Hoo is kinda the go-to for any Saxon helmet. In fact, I couldn't help but wonder if this had some relation to the whole screaming match about vikings not actually wearing horns on their helmets. The Teutonic Knights later being used as a symbol of German nationalism similarly reeks of Wagner, afterall. Turns out though, my hunch was only kind of right. As far as I can tell, that iconic wing/frill thing derives from the arms of Tannhäuser, a semi-historical German musician whom Wagner did indeed draft an opera about. The 14th century Codex Manesse illustrates Tannhäuser in Teutonic Knight garments and seems to be the first depiction of those helmet crests that I could find. While nothing in his story is expressly connected to the Knights, it does seem that his get up in the Codex is what eventually got extrapolated to the entire rest of the organization. In fact, it wouldn't be uncommon for any wealthy douchebag to charge into battle peacocking these exact types of heraldic structures, it's just for some reason (probably just the oldest reason in the book: it looks cool), we in the modern age have come to associate them specifically with the Teutonic Knights to set them apart from other reconstructions. It's not inaccurate, so I decided there wasn't any reason not to roll with it. It does, to be fair, look hella cool.

Description
The Teutonic Knights are the youngest of the knightly orders we typically associate with that awkward medieval fad of table-flipping the lives of everyone previously just minding their own damn business in the Holy Land. I've already gone over their earliest foundations in my blurb on Sibrand, so I'll try to keep it abridged here. It's September 1191 and the big problem occupying everyone's time is the turducken meat grinder that was the Siege of Acre. In Guy of Lusignan's camp, a field hospital had been set up along the coast dedicated specifically to German-speaking soldiers of the Crusader army. Nowadays that sort of German favoritism rings all sorts of alarm bells, but that wasn't the deal here. The hospital didn't practice to the exclusion of other soldiers, German patients just understandably preferred a doctor who could communicate fluently with them. You'd find a similar arrangement in the French and English camps just the same. For whatever reason, though, Guy showed particular favoritism to the German hospital's leader, Sibrand, after Richard the Lionheart came in and lifted the siege. Guy rewarded Sibrand with a more respectable base of operations, a building in Acre run by a handful of merchants from Bremen and Lübeck. This would become the Hospital of St. Mary of the German House in Jerusalem, and you may be thinking: well wait, why's it called that if it's in Acre and not Jerusalem?

…

Anyway, Sibrand is traditionally referred to as the first Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights for this reason, despite falling out of the historical record immediately afterwards, and the hospital not being reorganized into a military order until 1198. By this criteria, their first real Grand Master was Heinrich Walpot von Bassenheim. He was in charge of the hospital during a time of great upheaval among the German troops. See, when Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI kicked the bucket in 1197, most of the German Crusaders just kinda went meh, we've done our part, and fucked off back to Europe. Oh no, this hospital thought, but if all the soldiers go home to their lives and families, no one will be around to slaughter all these innocent people! Something must be done! Heinrich Walpot therefore took it upon himself to swap the hospital’s scalpels for swords in order to fill in the vacuum. But aw shucks, he's just a simple medicine man, he doesn't know the first thing about leading a knightly organization! How's he gonna aquire all the structure and discipline it takes to manage such a responsibility? Ehhhh fuck it, just copy the Templars’ homework. No like for real, Heinrich just went up to Gilbert Horal, Grand Master of the Templars at the time, Horal just kinda handed him a copy of the Templar rulebook, and Heinrich was seemingly satisfied with this. I know I've joked before about the Crusader orders just being reskins of each other, but come on man.

Clearly, the first Teutonic Knights were a little too big for their britches. It wasn't really until Hermann von Salza became Grand Master in 1210 that they'd come into their own. Hermann realized that crusading in the Holy Land wasn't going to be as profitable as everyone else thought it would be, so instead he turned the Order northwards. King Andrew II of Hungary invited the Knights to eradicate the pagan Cumans from his land in 1211, basically affording them full autonomy in Transylvania to do so. In fact, they were given a bit too much autonomy. The Knights turned out to be terrible house guests who broke more than they fixed, getting them kicked out of Hungary by 1225. “Ah gee willikers, Mr. Wilson,” Hermann waffled, or some variation thereof, “I sure am sorry. I'll make sure to give my knights a stern talkin’ to so that they never ever ever act this way again.” If you're the drinking game sort, this is where you take the first shot.

Just one year later, Polish duke Konrad of Mazovia called upon the Teutonic Knights to assist the Livonian Brothers of the Sword with decimating those pesky Baltic pagans still holding out in Prussia. With the permission of his buddy Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, Hermann established an autonomous state in Chełmno, with the goal of conquering Prussia and converting its populace in the name of the Father the Son and the bla bla bla. Evidently, those Livonian Brothers were so abysmal at their job that when they got trounced at the Battle of Saule in 1236 they had to be sphlorped into the Teutonic Order just to stay afloat. You know, you'd think failure after failure would eventually make the Crusaders ponder hmm, maybe God doesn't approve of us murdering infidels in His name?

Pffft, nah, come on Ava you filthy pagan, what sort of Heathen devil-book did you pull that “Love thy neighbor” bullshit out of? Clearly they just need to spend the next thirty years murdering more Lithuanians! It cures all ails: the Samogitians score a major victory over the Crusaders in 1259? Deus vult! That victory get the Prussian pagans all riled up and ready to revolt again the next year? Deus vult! King Władysław asks you to oust his rivals claiming the completely Christian territory of Pomerelia? Deus vult! Er… wait, pump the brakes on that last one. Wait, I said wait! Ohhhh fuck… that's a lot of blood-

Welllll. Shit.

So Władysław quickly learned the same lesson that the Hungarians had: inviting the Teutonic Knights causes more damage than it resolves. The Knights agreed to take the territory in 1308, under the condition that they could hold up in a fort outside of Danzig. That's fair enough in itself, but once they actually had the city, they refused to vacate. They refused so hard, in fact, that they massacred a significant chunk of the city's population, which… shock of shocks, kinda destroyed their good standing with the Polish king basically overnight. As if they didn't have enough bridges to burn, the next year the Knights bought the claim to Pomerelia from the king's rivals they had been sent to evict in the first place. That is such a batshit play of an Uno reverse card that I can't decide if the Knights were just petty opportunists or genuinely off their meds.

As this cut off Poland's access to the Baltic Sea… and you know, was also just a major dick move in general, war broke out between them and the Knights. The war did not go well for Poland, dragging on well into the reign of Władysław’s successor, Casimir III, who was ultimately forced to concede to the Treaty of Kalisz in 1343. Poland was basically stuck with this incredibly toxic divorcee to their north, though I guess in an odd twist of fate that did finally bring about unity with the pagan Lithuanians. Sharing an equal aversion to the Knights, Female-King Jadwiga of Poland married the freshly converted Jagiełło of Lithuania in 1384. On paper, this should've brought harmony to the region, but not everyone was happy with the agents of that harmony. Jagiełło’s cousin, Vytautas, made his bid for the throne in 1389, igniting a civil war and calling upon the Teutonic Knights to help. Now how do you think asking the Teutonic Knights for help will go this time? Let's spin the fucking wheel.

Well as part of their agreement, Vytautas loaned Samogitia (Europe's last pagan stronghold) to the Knights in 1390, and oh look at that, as soon as Vytautas reached an agreement with his cousin in 1392, the Knights refused to fucking leave and made life absolutely miserable for the Samogitians. I have never seen anyone play the just-make-enemies-with-everyone game and get away with it for this long, it's honestly kind of fascinating. The Knights refusing to be friends with literally anybody did, again for what it's worth, unite everybody against this singular obnoxious pest. The pagans of Samogitia rebelled against the Teutonic Knights in 1409, and Christian Lithuania immediately said “oh hell yeah, we've got your back, brother!” with their buddy Poland following close behind. They were there in spirit, not in arms, because they knew the Knights were in bed with the Holy Roman Emperor and feared the retaliation that would result in attacking first. But hey, they didn't have to worry about that for long! Because the Teutonic Knights were a bunch of self-righteous fart-sucking assholes who made the first move for them. This final slip-up was the perfectly gift-wrapped excuse for Poland-Lithuania to trounce the Knights unopposed. Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen was slain at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, a stunning Polish-Lithuanian victory which, while ultimately did little to shift the borders, you know must've felt reeeeeeally satisfying.

Despite getting to keep Prussia in the end, the Teutonic Knights pretty much fell off the world’s chessboard after Grunwald. They were forced to cede Samogitia back to Lithuania in 1422, and following the Thirteen Years’ War, had to give Pomerelia back to Poland in 1466. The Knights remained Poland's little bitch until 1525, when Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg converted to Protestantism and secularized their remaining territories under Polish rule once and for all. Any holdouts in Livonia were subsumed into Russia, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania in 1558, leaving only pockets of Teutonic Knights with any meaningful claims to statehood scattered throughout the Holy Roman Empire until Napoleon came along to clean everything up in 1809. The Order did technically survive past that, being revived as an ecclesiastical institution by Emperor Francis in 1834, but nowadays they're clearly just a ceremonial old man's club like everyone else claiming to be the descendants of the Crusader organizations. I have no clue if they're still playing the just-make-enemies-with-everyone game in some form or another, but their image was heavily utilized as anti-Polish propaganda by the Germans during World War II, and that's certainly no way to make friends.

Design notes, so this is rare. Normally when I do these faction sheets, I get more burnt out and less satisfied the further to the right I work. In this case, though, I actually think the left side of the sheet is the weaker side. I mean just look at that mad bastard on the far right. I love him, he's fuckin’ pumped. To be fair, I do think I ultimately cleaned up the left side fairly well by the end too. At first I thought it would end up being really difficult not to just make these guys reskins of the Templars (and I almost did so just for the joke of it), but I did eventually come across a new palette of traits I liked which set them apart. Usually in media, the Teutonic Knights are just reskins with the major exception being their very unique helmets. I was kind of skeptical at first. Everyone seems to have an idea of how those headdresses looked… the exact same idea in fact. It's the kind of exactness that usually tips me off to some basis in a single archaeological find like how Sutton-Hoo is kinda the go-to for any Saxon helmet. In fact, I couldn't help but wonder if this had some relation to the whole screaming match about vikings not actually wearing horns on their helmets. The Teutonic Knights later being used as a symbol of German nationalism similarly reeks of Wagner, afterall. Turns out though, my hunch was only kind of right. As far as I can tell, that iconic wing/frill thing derives from the arms of Tannhäuser, a semi-historical German musician whom Wagner did indeed draft an opera about. The 14th century Codex Manesse illustrates Tannhäuser in Teutonic Knight garments and seems to be the first depiction of those helmet crests that I could find. While nothing in his story is expressly connected to the Knights, it does seem that his get up in the Codex is what eventually got extrapolated to the entire rest of the organization. In fact, it wouldn't be uncommon for any wealthy douchebag to charge into battle peacocking these exact types of heraldic structures, it's just for some reason (probably just the oldest reason in the book: it looks cool), we in the modern age have come to associate them specifically with the Teutonic Knights to set them apart from other reconstructions. It's not inaccurate, so I decided there wasn't any reason not to roll with it. It does, to be fair, look hella cool.