Product of The Crusades: Teutonic Knights

by Lucas Dié in History, February 12, 2011

The Christian crusades into the Holy Land brought forth several monastic orders which counted battling knights amongst its members. One of these orders became known as the Teutonic Knights. Their beginning lay in a field hospital at the gates of the city of Acre during the Third Crusade.

In 1189, the Third Crusade was started in reaction to the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in the Battle of Hattin. Jointly led by Richard I the Lionheart, Philip II Augustus of France, and Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, the Third Crusade was no success. In that, it resembled any other crusade since the First Crusade (and no, there wasn’t only a Second Crusade but many more in the intervening 100 years).

During the siege of Acre, hygiene in the camp of the crusaders was abysmal. Diarrhoea and other sicknesses were rife, and medical help was urgently needed. Crusaders arriving from Bremen and Lübeck therefore erected a large field hospital in the camp.

The hospital was institutionalised after the conquest of Acre. The crusaders running it called it St. Mary’s Hospital of the Germans in Jerusalem. The name was memorial and future program in one. Before the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, there had been a German St. Mary’s Hospital in Jerusalem, and the crusaders planned to reinstate it after the taking of Jerusalem and make it their headquarters.

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Frederick I Barbarossa had died during the crusade and his successor Henry VI intervened with Pope Clement III to make the field hospital an official order of the church under the rules of St. Augustine. The order quickly gained in importance through the donations it received from Count Henry of Champagne who became King of Jerusalem by marriage to Queen Isabella in 1192.

After the German Crusade instigated by Henry VI, the crusaders Wolfger von Erla (Bishop of Passau) and Konrad von Querfurt (Bishop of Hildesheim) interceded with the newly elected Pope Innocence III in 1198. Due to their initiative, the hospital order was promoted to knightly order on a par with the Order of St. John and the Order of the Temple. The newly created Teutonic Knights adopted the rules of the Order of St. John for their civilian division and those of the Knights Templar for their combatant forces.

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The first Grandmaster of the order was Heinrich Walpot von Bassenheim. Little is known about this first Grandmaster and all information offered by historians is pure conjecture. The order continued to run hospitals and charitable institutions besides its military duties. Full membership was only offered to Germans of noble descent. The new order was a necessity for German nobles, as the older Order of St. John and the Knights Templar were heavily dominated by the French and more often than not rejected German candidates.

The German crusade had started badly with the death of Emperor Henry VI while still in Messina in Sicily. All the important German nobles were still in Sicily at that time and preferred to return home to defend their interests in the upcoming imperial election. The infantry and the lower nobility, on the other hand, were already at sea and continued with the crusade. The newly established order, therefore, became a receptacle for younger sons mainly from the lower German nobility who would dominate it and its interests for a long time.