The Slippery Memory of Men

East Central and Eastern

Europe in the Middle Ages,
4501450

General Editor
Florin Curta

Volume 21

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ecee

The Slippery Memory of Men

The Place of Pomerania in the

Medieval Kingdom of Poland

By

Paul Milliman

Leidenboston
2013
Cover illustration: Prussia from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, sive Atlas Novus in quo Tabul et
Descriptiones Omnium Regionum, Edit a Guiljel et Ioanne Blaeu, 1645. University of California
(Blaeu AtlasEuropae Septentrionalia & Orientalia)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Milliman, Paul.
The slippery memory of men : the place of Pomerania in the medieval Kingdom of Poland /
by Paul Milliman.
pages cm. (East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 4501450, ISSN 1872-
8103 ; volume 21)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-18274-5 (hardback : acid-free paper) ISBN 978-90-04-24380-4 (e-book)
1.Pomerania (Poland and Germany)History.2.PolandHistory14th century.3.Teutonic
KnightsHistoryTo 1500.4.BorderlandsPolandHistoryTo 1500.5.Borderlands
GermanyHistoryTo 1500.6.Pomerania (Poland and Germany)RelationsPoland.
7.PolandRelationsPomerania (Poland and Germany)I. Title.
DK4600.P6765M55 2013
943.8022dc23
2012041308

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 Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................................... vii
List of Abbreviations....................................................................................... xi
Maps..................................................................................................................... xiii

Introduction . ................................................................................................. 1

1.. A iugo principum Polonie, a iugo Theutonicorum:

Pomerania and the South Baltic Frontier of Latin Christendom
in the Early Thirteenth Century........................................................ 23

2..Dealing with the Past and Planning for the Future:

Contested Memories, Conflicted Loyalties, and the Partition
and Donation of Pomerania in the Late Thirteenth Century..... 65

3.. The Restorations of the Kingdom of Poland and

the Foundation of the Teutonic Ordensstaat at the Turn of the
Fourteenth Century.................................................................................. 94

4.. Immortalis Discordia: Eternal Enmity, Massacre,

and Memorialization in the German-Polish Borderlands............ 139

5.. Pomerania between Poland and Prussia: Lordship,

Ethnicity, Territoriality, and Memory................................................. 196

Conclusion........................................................................................................ 255

Appendix 1.The Procurator-General of the Teutonic Knights

Pleads His Case to the Papal Curia Concerning the Gdask
Massacre, 1310.......................................................................................... 263
Appendix 2.The Claims Submitted by the Polish Procurators
in 1320......................................................................................................... 267
Appendix 3. The Claims Submitted by the Royal Procurator
in 1339......................................................................................................... 269

Bibliography..................................................................................................... 279
Index................................................................................................................... 313
 Acknowledgments

I owe a great deal to a great many people and institutions, far more than I
could ever hope to repay or fully acknowledge here. But, I will do my best,
because I truly appreciate all the help I have received over the years.
First, I would like to thank all of the organizations that funded my
research, travel, and language training. The Cornell Institute for European
Studies provided FLAS fellowships to help me develop my Polish language
skills. The History Department at Cornell provided funding for language
training in Germany and research in Poland, as well as funding to start
work on a first draft and revise the final draft of my dissertation. I also
want to thank the American Council of Learned Societies, whose grant
of a Dissertation Fellowship in East European Studies afforded me the
time to collect my thoughts and share my research on a topic unfamil-
iar to most scholars outside of East Central Europe. An additional grant
from ACLS allowed me to travel to Poland to get feedback on my work
from experts on this topic. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars provided invaluable resources for me to continue researching and
revising, including a diligent research assistant, Jakub Olszowiec. At the
University of Arizona I am deeply grateful to the Deans of the College of
Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Head of the History Department,
Kevin Gosner, who ensured that I would have the time and resources to
finish revising this book.
I also want to thank all of the individuals who helped make this book
possible. First I want to thank my former adviser at Cornell, Paul R. Hyams,
both for his confidence in me and for his willingness to allow me to leave
the friendly confines of Western Europe to pursue my own interests. I
also want to thank Susanne Pohl, David S. Powers, and E. Wayles Browne,
from whom I also learned so much at Cornell, as well as my friend, Alizah
Holstein, who showed me that it is possible to finish a dissertation. I am
also grateful to all of the other outstanding teachers I have had over the
years, in particular Stephanie Frank at Parkersburg Catholic High School.
Thank you for your patience and guidance and for helping to make me
both a better scholar and a better person. This task was continued by all
of the excellent teachers I had at Ohio Wesleyan University who made me
want to become a professor and encouraged me to go to graduate school.
To James Biehl, Jan Hallenbeck, Donald Lateiner, Mark Gingerich, Rich-
ard Spall, Cynthia Bland, Carol Neumann de Vegvar, and so many others,
viii acknowledgments

I want to say thank you. I hope I can inspire my students as much as you
inspired me. I was fortunate as an undergraduate to be able to work with
real medieval manuscripts, and for this (as well as for her friendship and
generosity) I want to thank Hilda Wick in Special Collections. I also want
to thank all of the other librarians at OWU for allowing me to learn from
you. Libraries are the centers of universities, and my experiences working
with you deepened my commitment to scholarship. I also want to thank
the Interlibrary Loan staffs at Cornell and the University of Arizona for
helping me track down articles from obscure Polish journals, as well as
the wonderful librarians at the Wilson Center, the Library of Congress,
and Polska Akademia Nauk Biblioteka Gdaska.
I am also grateful to Piotr Grecki, Anna Adamska, and Emilia Jamro-
ziak, all of whom took time to share their work with me and offer com-
ments on my research. I am deeply grateful in particular to Paul Knoll,
who paved the way for me. Without his research, the idea of studying
medieval Poland would have been too daunting a task. His encourage-
ment and guidance over the years have meant the world to me. I also
want to thank Florin Curta for encouraging me to publish my book in this
series. Wiesaw Sieradzan and Aleksandra Lenartowicz were kind enough
to invite me to the international conference they organized on the trials
between Poland and the Teutonic Knights in 2009 in Poland, where they
were gracious hosts. I also want to thank Karol Polejowski and his family
for sharing their home with me during one of my stays in Gdask and also
for obtaining research materials for me which are difficult, if not impos-
sible, to find in the US.
I especially want to express my gratitude to my colleagues and friends
in the History Department at the University of ArizonaKevin Gosner
(again), Susan Karant-Nunn, Steve Johnstone, Doug Weiner, Ute Lotz-
Heumann, Alison Futrell, Martha Few, Susan Crane, and everyone else.
I cannot imagine a more supportive and nurturing environment for junior
faculty. I also want to thank everyone in the History Department at Lake
Forest College for making me feel so welcome and helping me to transi-
tion from graduate student to professor during a one-term lectureship.
I also want to thank my students over the years at Cornell, Lake Forest,
and Arizona, and in particular several graduate students in the Division
for Late Medieval and Reformation StudiesSean Clark, Paul Buehler, and
Adam Duker. Teaching and research go hand-in-hand, and I was able to
develop my skills as a scholar through working with all of youdocendo
discimus. I also owe an enormous debt to my wonderful editors at Brill,
 acknowledgments ix

Julian Deahl and Marcella Mulder, for their help in guiding me through an
unfamiliar process and for their seemingly inexhaustible patience.
Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank my family, especially my
wife and son. Kate and Bram, this book is dedicated to you.
Thank you one and all for your generous support, careful guidance, and
remarkable understanding. (Please forgive me if I have forgotten anyone
here. I will make it up in the next book.)
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CDPrCodex Diplomaticus Prussicus, ed. Johannes Voigt. 6 volumes.

Knigsberg: Borntrger, 18361861.
DusburgPeter von Dusburg. Chronica terre Prussie, ed. Max Tppen,
SRP I 3219; reprinted with German translation and annotation by
Klaus Scholz and Dieter Wojtecki. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch-
gesellschaft, 1984.
KDWKodeks dyplomatyczny Wielkopolski, ed. Ignacy Zakrzewski, et al.
11 Volumes. Pozna: Nakadem Biblioteki Krnickiej and Pastwowe
Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 18771999.
Labuda, HP I/1Gerard Labuda, ed. Historia Pomorza. Tom I do roku 1466.
Part 1. Pozna: Wydawnictwo Poznaskie, 1972.
Lites I (2)Lites ac res gestae inter Polonos Ordinemque Cruciferorum,
ed. Ignacy Zakrzewski. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Pozna: Nakadem Biblioteki
Krnickiej, 1890.
Lites I (3)Lites ac res gestae inter Polonos Ordinemque Cruciferorum.
Tomus I: Causa Junivladislaviae et Brestiae-Cujaviae Anno 13201321, ed.
Helena Chopocka. Wrocaw: Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk,
1970.
Lites IILites ac res gestae inter Polonos Ordinemque Cruciferorum, ed.
Ignacy Zakrzewski. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Pozna: Nakadem Biblioteki Krnickiej,
1892.
MPHMonumenta Poloniae Historica, ed. August Bielowski, et al.
6 Volumes. Lww: Nakadem Wasnym / Krakw: Nakadem Polskiej
Akademii Umiejtnoci, 18641893. Reprint, Warszawa: Pastwowe
Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 19601961. Series nova, Warszawa: Pastwowe
Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1962.
PlUBPommerellisches Urkundenbuch, ed. Max Perlbach. Danzig: Bertling,
1882. Reprint, Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1969.
PrUBPreussisches Urkundenbuch, ed. Rudolph Philippi, August Sera-
phim, Max Hein, et al. 6 Volumes. Knigsberg: Hartungsche Verlags-
druckerei, 18821944 / Marburg: NG Elwert, 19642000.
SRPScriptores rerum Prussicarum, ed. Theodor Hirsch, Max Tppen,
and Ernst Strehlke. 5 Volumes. Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 18611874;
reprint, Frankfurt am Main: Minerva GMBH, 1965.
xii list of abbreviations

TheinerVetera Monumenta Poloniae et Lithuaniae gentiumque finiti-

marum historiam illustrantia. Tomus Primus: Ab Honorio Pp. III usque
ad Gregorium Pp. XII. 12171409, ed. Augustin Theiner. Rome: Typis Vati-
canis, 1860.
 MAPS

17 18 19 20
55 55

Bialogarda

Slupak
Oliwa
Slawno
Gdask
Zukowo
Elblag
Tczew
Gorzedziej
54 Malbork 54
Santyr
Gniew

Nowe

Sartowice
Swiecie
Chelmno
Bydgoszcz
Naklo Wyszogrod

53 Toru 53

Inowrocaw
Wocawek
Dobrzyn
Gniezno
Poznan

17 18 19 20
km
0 50 100
Map 1:The Pomeranian-Prussian-Polish Borderland (Created at:
http://www.aquarius.geomar.de/omc/make_map.html)
xiv maps

15 20 25

Riga

55 55
Vilnius
Gdask
Malbork

Gniezno Plock
Poznan Warsaw
Frankfurt
Uniejw
Glogow

Wrocaw
Sandomierz

Prague Krakw
50 50
Olomouc

Visegrd
Budapest

15 20 25
km
0 200 400
Map 2: East Central Europe (Created at: http://www.aquarius.geomar.de/
omc/make_map.html)
 maps xv

Source: Paul W. Knoll, The Rise of the Polish Monarchy: Piast Poland in East Central Europe,
13201370 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 53.

Map 3:Poland in the Fourteenth Century

 INTRODUCTION

This book approaches the issue of medieval state formation by analyzing

how the people living within two nascent states in the early fourteenth
centurythe kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Ordensstaat
understood their shared histories and how their memories of this past
informed their sense of belonging to recently created political communi-
ties. It focuses on processes rather than structures, representations rather
than manifestations. The nuts and bolts of administration and lawyerly
arguments about the state have a place in what follows, but the main
topic of analysis is the rapid transformation of relations between Poles
and the Teutonic Knights in the 1320s and 1330s. Within a generation, a
century of cooperation between the Knights and Poles was forgotten, as
both sides began to see their former allies as their eternal enemies.
Talking about medieval states has its perils. Many modernists scoff
at the idea of medieval states, and medievalists also disagree about the
applicability of this term to the Middle Ages.1 Yet, far more dangerous
than such academic disputes is what could be called pernicious medieval-
ism, i.e. the use of the distant past to justify modern atrocities. Although
many scholars, most notably Joseph Strayer, have shown that state forma-
tion in the Middle Ages had a profound impact upon the development of
modern states,2 there have been several unfortunate side effects to this
type of analysis, especially teleological concerns with tracing the origins
of modern states and nations backward.3 These problems have been par-
ticularly striking in the historiography of East Central Europe, in which
the traditional conceptual framework of a thousand-year-long Drang nach
Osten lends itself to a preoccupation with scouring the source materials
for anecdotal medieval evidence to explain modern ethnic and national

1 For example, see the debate in the Journal of Historical Sociology between Rees Davies
and Susan Reynolds: R.R. Davies, The Medieval State, the Tyranny of a Concept? Journal
of Historical Sociology 16 (2003), 280300; Susan Reynolds, There Were States in Medieval
Europe: A Response to Rees Davies, Journal of Historical Sociology 16 (2003), 550555.
2 Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970).
3 Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002).
2 introduction

conflicts.4 The historical events in this ethnic, religious, and political bor-
derland were not always characterized by conflict,5 and as Benedykt Zien-
tara cautions, even when conflicts did occur, they were certainly not based
on the same concepts of contention that emerged in the modern era.6 Yet,
keeping these caveats in mind, as a number of medievalists have pointed
out, the hardening of identities and social and political boundaries is not
entirely a modern phenomenon.7 In the late Middle Ages, people chose or
were forced to choose to identify themselves according to linguistic, legal,

4There is a huge literature on this topic in Polish and German, which was until recently
lumped together with a whole host of other topics (including the peaceful settlement in
East Central Europe of Germans and other western Europeans, who had been invited
by Slavic lords) as the Drang nach Osten. Because of this terms associations with nine-
teenth-century nationalism and twentieth-century Nazism, it has for the most part been
scrapped, only to be replaced by the deceptively benign Ostsiedlung or the even more
problematical Ostkolonisation, which has tempted some scholars, including Jan Piskor-
ski, the leading Polish scholar on the historiography of this topic, to try to apply post-
colonial theory to German-Slavic interactions in the Middle Ages [Jan M. Piskorski, After
Occidentalism: The Third Europe Writes Its Own History, in Historiographical Approaches
to Medieval Colonization of East Central Europe: A Comparative Analysis against the Back-
ground of Other European Inter-Ethnic Colonization Processes in the Middle Ages, ed. Jan M.
Piskorski (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 723]. Certainly most of the earlier
works (and unfortunately too many of the later ones) were polemical and nationalistic,
and equally unfortunately most anglophone scholars either have been turned off by the
unfamiliar and unpronounceable names of people and places or are just not particularly
interested in what happened outside of western Europe. Yet, it is unlikely that a post-
colonial discourse culled from disparate twentieth-century experiences is going to pro-
vide a more useful framework to explore these complex medieval issues. In fact, appeals
to post-colonialism might just undermine the advances made in this field by reorienting
the emigration of Germans to the east within an imperialist project once again. While I
share Piskorskis frustration at the removal by western Europeans of significant parts of the
European peninsula from Europe, as recent events have shown, the concept of Europe
(geographically, culturally, historically, ethnically, legally, religiously, etc.) is still part of a
contentious, constantly changing, and continuing debate.
5Paul W. Knoll, Economic and Political Institutions on the Polish-German Frontier in
the Middle Ages: Action, Reaction, Interaction, in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert
Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 151174.
6Zientara also draws attention to the equally prevalent fallacy espoused by some
historians that contemporary nations are a direct continuation of the medieval lineage of
ethnic communities [Nationality Conflicts in the German-Slavic Borderland in the
13th14th Centuries and Their Social Scope, Acta Poloniae Historica 22 (1970), 209].
7Richard C. Hoffman, Outsiders by Birth and Blood: Racist Ideologies and Realities
around the Periphery of Medieval European Culture, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance
History 6 (1983), 324; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and
Colonial Change, 9501350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); John Gillingham,
The Beginnings of English Imperialism, Journal of Historical Sociology 5 (1992), 391409;
Rees R. Davies, Presidential Address: The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 11001400, Trans-
actions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series I. Identities 4 (1994), 120; II. Names,
Boundaries and Regnal Solidarities 5 (1995), 120; III. Laws and Customs 6 (1996), 123;
IV. Language and Historical Mythology 7 (1997), 124.
 introduction 3

cultural, historical, political, and biological categories that in some ways

corresponded to modern notions of ethnicity, or as some scholars would
have it, nationality (although the use of the latter term in a medieval
context seems even more problematical because of the knee-jerk reac-
tion of identifying modern nations with medieval ones).8 For this reason,
one should bear in mind that this type of identity was also informed by
chronologically and geographically specific factors, which need to be con-
sidered in order to avoid any facile comparisons between modern and
medieval concepts of group identity formation.9 Because these processes
played out primarily on the borderlands of Europe, however, the role of
group identity is often omitted from traditional state-formation historiog-
raphy. The methodological orientation of traditional studies of state for-
mation lends itself to focusing on the success stories of the Middle Ages,
i.e. sovereign, territorial nation-states (read England and France), thereby

8In addition to the above authors, see especially Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and
Alan V. Murray, eds., Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages (Leeds: Leeds Studies
in English, 1995), a collection of essays written in response to Benedict Andersons over-
simplified views of political community in the Middle Ages [Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and
New York: Verso, 1991)]. For the applicability of the term nation in pre-modern history,
see the essays in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer, eds., Power and the Nation in European
History (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), particularly the
essays by Susan Reynolds, The Idea of the Nation as a Political Community, 5466, and
by John Breuilly, Changes in the Political Uses of the Nation: Continuity or Discontinu-
ity? 67101. Also see Alfred P. Smyth, ed., Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity
and National Perspectives in Medieval Europe (Houndmills, UK and New York: Palgrave,
1998), and Claus Bjrn, Alexander Grant, and Keith J. Stringer, eds., Nations, Nationalism
and Patriotism in the European Past (Copenhagen: Academic Press, 1994). Compare these
to earlier writings on nationalism in the Middle Ages: C. Leon Tipton, ed., Nationalism in
the Middle Ages (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972); Halvdan Koht, The Dawn
of Nationalism in Europe, American Historical Review 52 (1947), 265280; Gaines Post,
Public Law, the State, and Nationalism, in Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law
and the State, 11001322 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 434493; Ernst H.
Kantorowicz, Pro patria mori in Medieval Political Thought, American Historical Review
56 (1951), 472492.
9An illustrative example of the need to look beyond modern ethnic labels is the strug-
gle of the Lbeck merchants in the Prussian city of Elblg (German: Elbing) to gain their
own particular form of German law (ius teutonicorum), Lbeck town law, instead of the
type of German law that the Teutonic Knights had developed for the towns in their state,
Chemno (German: Kulm) town law. As Edwin Rozenkranz points out, with all the restric-
tions imposed by the Teutonic Knights on Lbeck law, the Lbeckers would have been
better off just accepting Chemno law. Yet, the law that one chooses (or is forced) to live
under has more than just economic implicationsit is a central feature in defining ones
identity [Edwin Rozenkranz, Prawo Lubeckie w Elblgu od XIII do XVI wieku, Rocznik
Gdaski 51 (1991), 535].
4 introduction

marginalizing the rest of Europe and minimizing the roles of competing

structures of identity formation and variant paths to state formation.10
In order to overcome these methodological obstacles in an attempt to
shed some new light on what Robert Bartlett has called the making of
Europe in the Middle Ages, this book analyzes the formation of two states
on the frontier of Latin Christendom. More specifically, it analyzes the
history of a disputed borderland between these two statesthe duchy
of Pomeraniain order to analyze how this duchy was pushed from the
political periphery into an ideologically central place within the historical
consciousness of the populaces of the two emerging states that contended
over it.11 The difficulty with this approach is that this medieval borderland
state, roughly corresponding to the areas of the Polish Corridor and Free
City of Danzig / Gdask that divided Germany during the interwar years,
came to symbolize modern Polish-German conflict, and these later dis-
putes inevitably had an impact on how scholars have viewed the medieval
history of this region.12

10 This is more the case for France than for England. A number of British scholars have
recently begun to analyze in detail the role of Englands Celtic Fringe in the formation of
the medieval English state. See in particular R.R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power
and Identities in the British Isles 10931343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
11 I use the term Pomerania to refer to the region between the eba and Wisa
(Vistula) rivers in modern Poland, which in Polish is called Pomorze Wschodnie (East
Pomerania) or Pomorze Gdaskie (Danzig Pomerania); in German it is called Pom-
merellen or Westpreuen (West Prussia), whereas Pommern denotes west Pomerania.
Although the dukes of west Pomerania did refer to the region they governed as Pomera-
nia in the early thirteenth century, later in the century they more commonly referred
to it as Slavia. The boundaries between these two halves of Pomerania shifted several
times during the course of the Middle Ages, as the duchies fragmented between various
members of the ducal families, or else were incorporated into larger polities. In addition,
west and east Pomeranian dukes, as well as the kings of Denmark and the margraves of
Brandenburg fought over the central Pomeranian lands of Sawno and Supsk throughout
the thirteenth century.
12 Problems of different peoples at different times using different languages to refer
to the same places can seemingly be easily overcome (at least in scholarshippolitics
aside), by just providing all of the relevant names. Unfortunately, this can quickly become
unwieldy. I have tried to provide both Polish and German names for many places (unless
an English one exists), but by no means for all. This has not always been easy. It is fine for
precisely defined natural entities like bodies of water, but man-made entities, like Pomera-
nia, present a more difficult task, because the supposedly common assumptions about
the natural boundaries of regions are often not shared. Therefore, the different languages
demarcate areas with boundaries which are sometimes coterminous, but often not. This
problem also persists for individuals, who often had overlapping political identities and
spoke several languages. I have tried to refer to people according to modern orthographic
representations in whatever ethnic identifier they seem to have used most often.
 introduction 5

Until relatively recently both Polish and German scholars approached

the issue of Polands and the Teutonic Knights rights to Pomerania along
nationalistic lines.13 The reasons for this depended upon both the intellec-
tual and the political currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. First, the formation of a united Germany and the reemergence
of Polish nationalism coincided with the creation of scientific historiog-
raphy in the nineteenth century.14 As a result, a historiographical conflict
developed in which both sides scoured the archives to prove the historical
validity of their claims to this land. While this conflict widened our textual
knowledge of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Pomeranian history, it
also obfuscated our understanding of these texts by viewing the medieval
documents through the lens of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century conflicts. Polish and German scholars appeared as modern advo-
cates of their respective states historical rights to this land, employing
documents which had either been unavailable to or deemed unimport-
ant by fourteenth-century litigants to prove their cases for their medieval
compatriots. Assuming that the medieval disputants had the same per-
fect knowledge of the past that they did, these modern historians accused
the other side of presenting deliberately mendacious or tendentious argu-
ments and inventing histories which bore no relation to history wie es
eigentlich gewesen. In the past few decades, however, both Polish and
German scholars have taken a more objective approach to this topic, and
the following analysis builds upon the contributions of these historians.
Yet, these modern historiographical biases perfectly illustrate one of the
central issues that this book examines. The fact that this historiographical
dispute over Pomerania lasted so long is also an indication of just how dif-
ficult this conflict was to judge in the Middle Ages. This was not simply a
matter of the two sides spinning the facts to present the best possible case.
This of course happened in the Middle Ages, just as it does todaythere
are (at least) two sides to every story. Sometimes this was the result of an
intentional desire to make the past conform to the needs of the present,
but this process of remembering and forgetting was not necessarily always

13For an analysis of German nationalists appropriation of the history of the Teutonic

Knights see Michael Burleigh, The Knights, Nationalists, and the Historians: Images of
Medieval Prussia from the Enlightenment to 1945, European History Quarterly 17 (1987),
3555.
14This was by no means limited to modern Polish-German historiographical disputes.
Patrick J. Geary analyzes the employment of history and philology as tools of nationalism
in The Myth of Nations.
6 introduction

mendacious or tendentious. The two parties constructed their arguments

from an imperfect history of the past. There was some selection inherent
in the process of writing an accusation and a defense, but there was also
an earlier stage of selection, a natural selection of the social memory.
This structural amnesia buried the memories of some past events that
no longer made sense in the present, while privileging other memories
that might now seem irrelevant or insignificant to the modern historian.
I will return to this issue of social memory below. For now it suffices to
say that just as in modern national (or nationalistic) historiography biases
can be implicit or explicit, and the tension and interplay between these
factors are of vital significance for understanding how the contemporary
political situations in early fourteenth-century Pomerania, Poland, and
Prussia helped to inform and transform these peoples remembrances of
past events.
The title of this book comes from the introduction to a chronicle written
in the mid-fourteenth century by the abbot of the Cistercian monastery
at Oliwa, which had been founded by the dukes of Pomerania, was briefly
controlled by the kings of Bohemia and Poland, and was at the time of
the chronicles composition subject to the Teutonic Knights. The abbot
tells his readers that he is writing his chronicle because of the slippery
memory of men [propter lubricam hominum memoriam], which com-
peted with his need to preserve the possessions and privileges granted to
his monastery by contenders to the memory of the duchy of Pomerania.15
The modern disputes over Pomerania just add more layers to what had
already become a contentious topic by the fourteenth century.
Before discussing the overall shape of this book and the methodology
employed, the briefest of historical outlines is necessary to introduce the
reader to a region that is most likely unfamiliar groundthe southern
Baltic littoral. By the late twelfth century, the former kingdom of Poland
had become a fragmented political landscape of small duchies ruled by
various branches of the royal Piast dynasty. In this political borderland
society, these Polish dukes cooperated or contended with each other or
with the neighboring German, Slavic, and Baltic rulers as the situation
demanded. In the region of Pomerania, where the Piasts exercised only
nominal control, an independent duchy, ruled by native aristocrats, began
to emerge. In the 1220s, on the left bank of the Vistula River, one of these

15Chronica Olivensis, ed. Wojciech Ktrzyski, in MPH 6: 310.

 introduction 7

Pomeranian dukes, witopek, began to build a state at the expense of the

neighboring Polish dukes. At roughly the same time, the Teutonic Knights
(a military order formed in the Holy Land in the late twelfth century) were
settled in the region of Chemno, on the right bank of the Vistula, by one of
the Polish dukes, Konrad of Mazovia. Initially the Teutonic Knights were
treated as any one of the other religious orders in the region. The Polish
dukes made pious donations to the Knights, granting them large tracts of
land, from which they could fund their crusade against the neighboring
pagans. By the early fourteenth century, though, the historical memories
of these two states had been entirely reversed. The Pomeranian dukes,
who had been presented in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Polish chron-
icles as apostates and predatory lords, were remembered as loyal subjects
of an imagined kingdom of Poland, while the Teutonic Knights, who had
been presented in thirteenth-century Polish chronicles as a shield of Latin
Christendom, had become the eternal enemies of Poland, who had been
illegally appropriating Polish lands for a century. How and why had these
new historical traditions been constructed and accepted?
The nature of the documentary evidence concerning the reemergence
of the kingdom of Poland at the turn of the fourteenth century provides
a unique opportunity to analyze how people living within this state con-
structed and reconstructed their views of the past to fit their present
circumstances. Most surviving records of the formation of historical con-
sciousness in the Middle Ages preserve only the views of elites without
any recognition of how their ideas were transmitted to, received by, and
transformed within the communities whose voices they were supposed
to represent. For medieval Poland, however, we have the opportunity to
examine how communities within the Polish realm constructed their own
views of their collective identity and history as well as how the views of
these communities helped to inform the views of the elites who tradi-
tionally appropriated the role of preserving memories and propagating
identities.
In 1320 and 1339, in the aftermath of two periods of conflict between
Poland and the Ordensstaat, the papacy commissioned legates to conduct
inquiries into the claims by the Polish kings that the Teutonic Knights
had illegally appropriated lands belonging to Poland. The lengthy tes-
timonies of over 150 witnesses from these two trials provide evidence
about how representatives of different social and cultural groups in
Poland (from peasants through the great ecclesiastical and secular mag-
nates, men and women, Poles and Germans) thought about the history
8 introduction

of Poland, particularly about the historical place of Pomerania within

this state.16 Although the witnesses were asked by the judges-delegate to
respond to articles proposed by royal lawyers who presented the kings
version of history, the witnesses often took this opportunity to talk about
whatever they felt relevant, sharing their personal memories of events or
memories which had been passed on to them by family members, friends,
lords, peasants, or other members of the various secular and ecclesiastical
communities to which they belonged. They also presented reasons that
went well beyond the scope of what they were askedtheir own views on
history, ethnicity, language, law, and custom, and what role these played
in defining where and what the kingdom of Poland was.
Several historians have rightly criticized earlier scholars for using these
testimonies anecdotally and injudiciously.17 Heeding their advice, I pres-
ent a detailed analysis of the discourse of this trial testimony, as well as
the contemporary chronicles and charters (which are of vital importance
for understanding the Teutonic Knights side of the story, since they chose
not to participate in the trials) to explore how the judges, disputants, and
witnesses thought about identity, territoriality, and sovereignty. I also use
studies of social memory to explain how and why the fourteenth-century
memories of the borderland society of the thirteenth century were buried
under recently created memories of bordered lands,18 as hardened politi-
cal and cultural identities began to coincide with rigidly defined secular
and ecclesiastical borders.
In recent years Patrick Geary, Chris Wickham, Matthew Innes, and other
medievalists have shown how useful sociological and psychological work
on social memory can be in helping us to understand medieval percep-
tions of the past.19 These studies of memory have shown that the acts of

16It should be noted that neither women nor peasants actually testified at the trials,
but several witnesses cited them as sources of information about the past.
17Sawomir Gawlas argues that these testimonies were not comprehensively analyzed,
serving usually as a source of quotations for already prepared theses [Verus heres: Z
bada nad wiadomoci polityczn obozu Wadysawa okietka w pocztku XIV wieku,
Kwartalnik Historyczny 95 (1988), 80]. Similarly, William Urban notes that these sources
have often [been] used naively [The Teutonic Knights: A Military History (London: Green-
hill Books / St. Paul: MBI Publishing), 2005].
18I borrow this terminology, with some modifications in its usage, from Jeremy Adel-
man and Stephen Aron, From Borderland to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the
Peoples in between in North American History, American Historical Review 104 (1999),
814841.
19I have relied primarily upon Matthew Innes definitions of social memory and struc-
tural amnesia presented in Memory, Orality, and Literacy in an Early Medieval Society,
Past and Present 158 (1998), 336. Innes defines social memory as the shared views about
 introduction 9

remembering and forgetting were active, complex processes, which were

often contingent upon particular, and to us seemingly trivial, circum-
stances of the moment.20 I want to emphasize that, following Matthew
Innes, I am using the term social memory as a category of knowledge
that exists beyond [and not in opposition to] formal historiographical
writing.21 I also want to make it clear that I am using the concept of social
memory neither as an antonym nor as a synonym for history.22 Rather, I
have been influenced by the discourse of social memory studies because
it provides a methodology that attempts to understand the processes of
historical consciousness beyond the confines of the traditional subjects
of historiographical analysis, which is particularly useful in the case of
witness testimony. The testimonies from the Polish-Teutonic Knights
trials allow us to examine the production, transmission, and reception
of knowledge in a way that is not possible simply by extrapolating from
traditional historiographical accounts alone. Nevertheless, the fact that
we have these charters and chronicles for comparison makes these tes-
timonies even more valuable and helps us to better understand the

the past [beyond formal historiographical writing] which inform the identity of a social
group and thus act as a potent guide to action in the present (5); he defines structural
amnesia in oral tradition as that which has no utility in terms of current social institu-
tions, which cannot legitimate, explain, or educate, [and thus] is forgotten in a process
of natural selection (31). For other medievalists uses of the concept of social memory
see Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the
First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); James Fentress and Chris
Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Chris Wickham, Gossip and Resis-
tance among the Medieval Peasantry, Past and Present 160 (1998), 324; Elizabeth A.
Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004); Lucie Dolealov, ed., The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages
(Leiden: Brill, 2010); the leading Polish historian of these trials, Helena Chopocka, refer-
enced Maurice Halbwachs seminal study [On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A.
Coser (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992)], but she does not explicitly explain
her methodological assumptions in the use of this concept [Comments on the Historical
Culture of the Polish Nobility in the 14th Century, in The Polish Nobility in the Middle Ages,
ed. Antoni Gsiorowski and trans. Aleksandra Rodziska-Chojnowska (Wrocaw: Zakad
Narodowy im. Ossoliskich, 1984), 246].
20 Geary, Phantoms, 178.
21 Innes, Memory, 5.
22 In On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse, Kerwin Lee Klein criti-
cizes scholars for misusing memory in both of these ways: In preface after preface, an
author declares that it would be simplistic to imagine memory and history as antitheses
and then proceeds to use the words in antithetical ways in the body of the work. [...]
Instead of simply saying history (perhaps for the thousandth time in the lecture or the
monograph), we may substitute public memory or collective memory with no theoreti-
cal aim other than improving our prose through varying word choice [Representations 69
(2000), 4546].
10 introduction

complex processes that produced expressions of historical consciousness

in various forms.
Some critics of social memory methodology have justly criticized the
removal of the individual from the study of social memory.23 In an essay
addressing this issue, Jeffrey K. Olick has attempted a rapprochement
between individualist and collective approaches to memory by differ-
entiating collective from collected memory.24 In his schema, collected
memory is the aggregated individual memories of members of a group,25
whereas collective memory refers to public discourses about the past as
wholes or to narratives and images of the past that speak in the name of
collectivities.26 This point ably illustrates canon law concepts of proof
and so makes social memory a particularly useful framework for analyz-
ing these documents, because the judges were interested in both what an
individual knew and what the community knew. They asked each witness
for his own recollections of the past, but they also wanted to establish
that this information was common knowledge [publica vox et fama].
This, however, is not what we would think of today as hearsay evidence.
In fact, by the turn of the fourteenth century it was established that if
a crime were notorious, (which the royal procurators argued and the
judges asked the witnesses about in 1320 and 1339), the judges were per-
mitted to proceed in a summary fashion in some parts of the process...
[bound to preserve only] the summons to court (citatio) and a judgment
(sententia).27 Because the Knights refused to participate in the trials or to

23In Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory, Susan A. Crane makes an
argument that is well worth keeping in mind as we think about how the witnesses viewed
their own roles in the trials: It should not be an exaggeration to tell students (or any audi-
ence) that they become historians the moment they begin to think about historythat
part of their learning experience constitutes participation in the transmission of historical
memory, which they translate into personal experience as soon as they speak or write
about it. Perhaps the practice of history, redefined as the active participation in remem-
bering and forgetting within collective memory by each member, can become character-
istic of historical consciousness, rather than simply reference to the knowledge of history
[American Historical Review 102 (1997), 13841385].
24Jeffrey K. Olick, Collective Memory: The Two Cultures, Sociological Theory 17 (1999),
333348.
25Olick, Collective, 338.
26Olick, Collective, 345.
27Kenneth Pennington, Due Process, Community, and the Prince in the Evolution of
the Ordo iudiciarius, Revista internazionale di diritto comune 9 (1998), 947; also available
online: http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/Law508/procedure.htm (accessed 21 June 2012).
 introduction 11

recognize the competency of the courts, the judges were at pains to estab-
lish the notoriety of their crimes, so they could proceed in their absence.
Some of the witnesses had legal training, and this influenced their
understanding of these terms of art. For instance, Archdeacon Maciej of
Pock (who had received a Masters degree in Parisone of three wit-
nesses with a university degree),28 gave a very legalistic and revealing
response to the judges question about the definition of notoriety: this
is notorious, because it requires no proof and because it is manifest to
everyone.29 Most of the witnesses, however, were not knowledgeable
about canonical concepts of proof. Some tried to emphasize the validity
of their beliefs by employing hyperbole. One witness remarked that the
whole world knows,30 while another stated that he heard it not from
100, but from 1000, and it is said by everyone.31 Still, the witnesses did
not claim that there was common knowledge when they did not know
that it existed. One witness said that he did not know [common knowl-
edge] to be expressed about ten of the articles.32 In addition, although
the majority of the witnesses did not know Latin, and so the lawyers argu-
ments and judges questions had to be translated into Polish or German,
it is apparent from their testimonies that they understood what com-
mon knowledge was, as it was expressed in a variety of ways and not as a
generic statement crafted by the notaries. The witnesses were aware that
they were speaking not only for themselves, but also for the various com-
munities to which they belonged. They were in a sense writing history,
placing their personal experiences and those of their family and friends
within the larger framework of the social and political communities to
which they belonged. In A History of Polish Culture Bogdan Suchodolski
somewhat dismissively states that in the early modern era the history
of Poland was shrunk into household gossip.33 The same could be said
about late medieval Poland, but this is a very good thing for our purposes.
As Jan Vansina persuasively argues, Rumor is the process by which a

28 Andrzej Radzimiski, Kanonicy poccy w wietle zezna na procesie polsko-

krzyackim w Warszawie w 1339 r., Studia Pockie 13 (1985), 136137.
29 ...hoc est notorium, quod nulla indiget probacione et omnibus est manifestum...
[Lites I (2), 163].
30 ...totus mundus scit [Lites I (2), 187].
31 ...non a centum, sed a mille et ab omnibus dicitur... [Lites I (2), 210].
32 ...nescivit exprimere [Lites I (2), 210].
33 Bogdan Suchodolski, A History of Polish Culture, trans. E.J. Czerwiski (Warsaw: Inter-
press, 1986), 80. I want to thank Dan Vaillancourt for this reference.
12 introduction

collective historical consciousness is built.34 Gossip and rumor might

be pejorative terms today, things we are better off ignoring, but the histo-
rian of the Middle Ages cannot do so, because there is perhaps no better
way to discover the development of widespread historical consciousness
than to study publica vox et fama. In late medieval Europe this was accept-
able as proof not only in a court of law, but also in the court of public
opinion. The consensus of the community was proof enough: everyone
knows this is true, so it is true.
Representations of the past, including both written and oral histories,
were informed and transformed by each other. These memories were
also influenced by the particular circumstances in which they were col-
lected. The testimonies of the witnesses at the two trials were collected
and written down within the framework of a particular political and legal
discourse, as were the stories about the past collected and written down
in chronicles. At the same time, these written accounts were retold and
combined with new interpretations of the past to form new narratives.
Even official histories in the forms of chronicles, charters, and court
documents were malleable and subject both to the machinations of dis-
putants and the structural amnesia of the social memories of the societies
represented by the disputants.35
What we see in the witnesses testimonies is not such an expression
of the collective memory of the Polish regnum and ecclesia as the Polish
kings would have perhaps liked, but rather the collected memories of
more than 150 individuals, each presenting his own testimonial chronicle,
his own interpretation of the publica vox et fama that informed his his-
torical, geographical, and political knowledge of the kingdom of Poland.36

34 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 6.
35For more on this, see the discussion of orality and literacy in chapter 5.
36Both Helena Chopocka and Wiesaw Sieradzan have pointed out the formal similari-
ties between the witnesses testimonies and chronicles. Chopocka first referred to these
testimonies as kleine chronikalische Werke von Personen, and Sieradzan latter developed
her ideas. Although the similarities in structure are interesting, neither author analyzed
the similarities in process in acquiring and transmitting knowledge between the testimo-
nies and chronicles [Helena Chopocka, Chronikalische Berichte in der Dokumentierung
der Prozesse zwischen Polen und dem Deutschen Orden, in Geschichtsschreibung und
Geschichtsbewusstsein in spten Mittelalter, ed. Hans Patze (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke
Verlag, 1987), 471481; Wiesaw Sieradzan, Aussagechroniken in der Quellensammlung
Lites ac res gestae inter polonos ordinemque cruciferorum, in Die Geschichtsschreibung in
Mitteleuropa. Projekte und Forschungsprobleme, ed. Jarosaw Wenta (Toru: Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu Mikoaja Kopernika, 1999), 277289].
 introduction 13

Through these testimonies we can observe and analyze the making of

polities (to use John Watts phrase)37 in ways that traditional historio-
graphical and legal sources simply do not permit. Rather than a polished,
lawyerly reason of state argument, the witnesses present a warts-and-all
representation of what living in a kingdom meant to people who were
not yet fully cognizant of all the rights and responsibilities that this
new form of political organization was based upon. These testimonies
provide a snapshot of a society in transition from political fragmentation
to political centralization. For modern researchers, the value of these tes-
timonial productions of the state is, in fact, in the very diversity of the
views expressed.
In the Middle Ages, as today, people belonged to numerous overlap-
ping and sometimes conflicting social groups, which presented multiple
identities to choose from or be cast into. I have tried to keep this in mind
so as not to privilege political consciousness as the main indicator of iden-
tity. At the same time, though, one of the main aims of this study is to
analyze the development of widespread political consciousness in an age
in which its traditional conveyers (print and electronic media, public edu-
cation, professional armies, etc.) were absent.38 Large, public ceremonies,
like these trials or the intermittently convened assemblies of the great
men of the realm, were the one form of mass communication that existed
at this time. One of the main questions I seek to answer is how people
from different social communities expressed their sense of belonging to
a large-scale political community. Similarly, I explore why these people
believed that they had a common identity and history not only among
themselves, but also with people whom they had never met in lands most

37John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 13001500 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2009).
38Although these and other modern technologies can help to form and spread public
opinion, publica vox et fama also played an important role in communities with more
limited technologies, as several historians of the Middle Ages have demonstrated: Bernard
Guene, Lopinion publique la fin du Moyen ge (Paris: Perrin, 2002); Christian Krtzl,
Fama Publica, Fama Sanctitatis: Zu Kommunikation und Information im Sptmittelalter,
in Roma, Magistra Mundi: Itineraria Culturae Medievalis, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-
la-Neuve: Federation des Instituts dEtudes Medievales, 1998), 493501; Thelma Fenster
and Daniel Lord Smail, ed., Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Julien Thry, Fama: lopinion publique comme
preuve judiciaire Aperu sur rvolution mdivale de linquisitoire (XIIeXIVe sicle), in
Les lites rurales dans lEurope mdivale et moderne, ed. Jean-Pierre Jessenne and Franois
Menant (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2007), 119147.
14 introduction

of them had never visited. In other words, what did it mean to be part
of a kingdom, and how did these perceptions change in the two decades
between the restoration of the kingdom of Poland in 1320 (a few months
before the commencement of the first trial against the Teutonic Knights)
and the second trial in 1339?
From a historiographical standpoint, I am working within a much larger
tradition than the political history of the south Baltic littoral in the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries. The early fourteenth century produced
several important collections of witness testimonies, which historians
have ably mined (or excavated la Le Roy Ladurie) for insights into how
people in the Middle Ages (especially non-elites, whose voices are gener-
ally silenced in traditional historical documents) thought about religion
and transgression, gender and sexuality, space and time, and the produc-
tion and transmission of knowledge, among other topics. The most famous
of these testimonies come from the records of the inquisitions of heretics
in southern France (especially the Cathars)39 and the trials against the
Templars,40 although in recent years testimonies from canonization trials

39For analyses of these sources possibilities and limitations see John H. Arnold, Inqui-
sition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 115 and Louisa A. Burnham, So Great a Light,
So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008),
16. For other studies using these sources see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The
Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: George Braziller, 1978); Megan
Cassidy-Welch, Testimony from a Fourteenth-Century Prison: Rumour, Evidence and
Truth in the Midi, French History 16 (2002), 327; Alan Friedlander, The Hammer of the
Inquisitors: Brother Bernard Dlicieux and the Struggle against the Inquisition in Fourteenth-
Century France (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Alan Friedlander, ed., Processus Bernardi Delitiosi: The
Trial of Fr. Bernard Dlicieux, 3 September8 December 1319 (Philadelphia: American Philo-
sophical Society, 1996).
40For the Templar trials in general see Jochen Burgtorf, Paul F. Crawford, and Helen
Nicholson, eds., The Debate on the Trial of the Templars (13071314) (Burlington: Ashgate,
2010); for France see Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2006); for Iberia see Alan Forey, The Fall of the Templars in the
Crown of Aragon (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001); for Cyprus see Anne Gilmour-Bryson,
The Trial of the Templars in Cyprus: A Complete English Edition (Leiden: Brill, 1998); for
Italy see Anne Gilmour-Bryson, The Trial of the Templars in the Papal State and the Abruzzi
(Citt del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1982); for the British Isles, see Helen
J. Nicholson, The Knights Templar on Trial: The Trial of the Templars in the British Isles,
13081311 (Stroud: The History Press, 2009), and The Trial of the Templars in the British
Isles, Sacra Militia: Rivista di Storia degli Ordini Militari 4 (2004), 2959.
 introduction 15

from throughout Europe41 and proofs of age in England42 have also been
analyzed in detail. The testimonies from the Polish-Teutonic Knights tri-
als deserve the same sort of attention.
There are of course countless methodological problems with accepting
testimonies at face value, whether they are based on publica vox et fama,
witnessing the events, or reading about these events in official documents.
Such testimonies are limited by the very aspect that makes them so fas-
cinating for the historianthe need to historicize events and create a
plausible narrative. Jan Vansina explains: Memory typically selects cer-
tain features from the successive perceptions and interprets them accord-
ing to expectation, previous knowledge, or the logic of what must have
happened, and fills in the gaps in perception.43
Yet, despite these limitations (or perhaps because of them) these rich
sources are valuable resources for helping historians understand early
fourteenth-century mentalities. They provide us with a unique oppor-
tunity to analyze orality and literacy, memory and forgetting, how law
is understood by non-professionals, the development of historical con-
sciousness, group identity formation, territoriality, sovereignty, and a
host of other topics of great interest to historians in general and medieval-
ists in particular. Unfortunately, despite the fact that they are written in
good Latin and have been available to scholars for more than a century,44
they remain unknown to most historians outside of Poland. German

41Robert Bartlett, The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the
Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Michael Goodich, Violence and
Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation (Chicago: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1995); Michael Goodich, Microhistory and the Inquisitiones into
the Life and Miracles of Philip of Bourges and Thomas of Hereford, in Medieval Narrative
Sources: A Gateway into the Medieval Mind, ed. Werner Verbeke et al. (Leuven: Leuven
University Press, 2005), 91106; Krtzl, Fama Publica; Laura A. Smoller, Miracle, Mem-
ory, and Meaning in the Canonization of Vincent Ferrer, 14531454, Speculum 73 (1998),
429454; Jussi Hanska, The Hanging of William Cragh: Anatomy of a Miracle, Journal of
Medieval History 27 (2001), 121138; Ronald C. Finucane, The Rescue of Innocents: Endan-
gered Children in Medieval Miracles (New York: St Martins Press, 1997); Gran Brnhielm
and Janken Myrdal, Miracles and Medieval Life: Canonization Proceedings as a Source
for Medieval Social History, in Procs de canonization au Moyen ge: aspects juridiques et
religieux, ed. Gbor Klaniczay (Rome: Ecole Franaise de Rome, 2004), 101116.
42John Bedell, Memory and Proof of Ages in England 12721327, Past and Present 162
(1999), 327.
43Vansina, 5.
44Lites ac res gestae inter Polonos Ordinemque Cruciferorum vol. I, 2nd ed., ed. Ignacy
Zakrzewski (Pozna, 1890); also available online: http://kpbc.umk.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?
id=22383&from=publication&tab=3 (accessed 21 June 2012).
16 introduction

historians before the Second World War tended to regard the trial records
as historiographically worthless,45 while German scholars after 1945 have
largely ignored these documents altogether.46 Paul W. Knoll used these
sources in his magisterial The Rise of the Polish Monarchy,47 and Anna
Adamska has analyzed these sources in her continuing work on literacy
in the Middle Ages,48 but these and the work of French historian Sylvain
Gouguenheim49 represent the extent of secondary sources available to
non-Polish speakers, except for a handful of translated essays by Polish
scholars.50 Conversely, these documents have been analyzed in great
detail by a number of Polish historians, particularly Helena Chopocka,51

45For the most extended critique of the shortcomings of these testimonies see Irene
Ziekursch, Der Proze zwischen Knig Kasimir von Polen und dem deutschen Orden im Jahre
1339 (Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1934).
46One notable exception is Hartmut Boockmann, Der Deutsche Orden und Polen im
14. Jahrhundert, in Der Deutsche Orden: Zwlf Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte (Munich: Beck,
1981), 138150.
47Paul W. Knoll, The Rise of the Polish Monarchy: Piast Poland in East Central Europe,
13201370 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972).
48Anna Adamska, The Kingdom of Poland versus the Teutonic Knights: Oral Tradi-
tions and Literate Behaviour in the Later Middle Ages, in Oral History of the Middle Ages:
The Spoken Word in Context, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter (Krems: Medium
Aevum Quotidianum / Budapest: Department of Medieval Studies, Central European Uni-
versity, 2001), 6778.
49Sylvain Gouguenheim, Le process pontifical de 1339 contra LOrdre Teutonique,
Revue historique 647 (2008), 567603; Sylvain Gouguenheim, Les Chevaliers Teutoniques
(Paris: Tallandier, 2007).
50Sarah Layfield also used evidence from the 1320 trial in her recent Ph.D. thesis, The
Papacy and the Nations of Christendom: A Study with Particular Focus on the Pontificate
of John XXII (13161334) (Durham University, 2008), 5880.
51Helena Chopocka, O protokoach procesw polsko-krzyackich w XIV i XV wieku,
in Venerabiles, nobiles et honesti. Studia z dziejw spoeczestwa Polski redniowiecznej.
Prace ofiarowane Profesorowi Januszowi Bieniakowi w siedemdziesit rocznic urodzin i
czterdziestopiciolecie pracy naukowej, ed. Andrzej Radzimiski, Anna Supruniuk, and Jan
Wroniszewski (Toru: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikoaja Kopernika, 1997), 421431;
Helena Chopocka, wiadkowie procesu polsko-krzyackiego w 1339 r., Pamitnik Bib-
lioteki Krnickiej 23 (1993), 2335; Chopocka, Chronikalische; Helena Chopocka, Die
Zeugenaussagen in den Prozessen Polens gegen den Deutschen Orden im 14. Jahrhundert,
in Der Deutschordensstaat Preuen in der polnischen Geschichtsschreibung der Gegenwart,
ed. Udo Arnold et al. (Marburg: N.G. Elwert, 1982), 165188; Helena Chopocka, Gal-
hard de Carceribus i jego rola w sporze polsko-krzyackim w XIV wieku, in Europa
SowiaszczyznaPolska. Studia ku uczczeniu profesora Kazimierza Tymienieckiego,
ed. Czesaw uczak (Pozna: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewcza w Poznaniu, 1970),
135143; Helena Chopocka, Procesy Polski z Zakonem Krzyackim w XIV wieku: Studium
rdoznawcze (Pozna: Pastwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1967); Helena Chopocka,
Losy wyroku wydanego w 1321 r. na procesie polsko-krzyackim w Inowrocawiu, Rocz
niki Historyczne 31 (1965), 153182; Helena Chopocka, Tradycja o Pomorzu Gdaskim w
zeznaniach wiadkw na procesach polsko-krzyackich w XIV i XV wieku, Roczniki His-
toryczne 25 (1959), 65142.
 introduction 17

Janusz Bieniak,52 and Wiesaw Sieradzan.53 These excellent studies have

served as able guides, but what I attempt below is something rather dif-
ferent from my predecessors. First, I have analyzed these sources within a
larger European context, rather than just concentrating on developments
within Poland. Also, whereas Polish historians have tended to focus either
on one trial or on both the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century trials, I have
chosen to concentrate exclusively on the two fourteenth-century trials to
better analyze the dramatic changes in Poland within a single generation.
I have also provided a detailed analysis of the Polish-Pomeranian-Prussian
borderland of the thirteenth century based on contemporary charters and
chronicles, which helps to place the events described in the trial records
within their proper historical context.
The purpose of the analysis of this borderland society in the first part
of the book is to evaluate the thirteenth-century evidence in order to situ-
ate this conflict within a historical framework of thirteenth-century rela-
tions between Poland and the Teutonic Knights. This does not mean that
one should regard this section as the real history against which to judge

52Janusz Bieniak, Udzia duchowiestwa zakonnego w procesie warszawsko-uniejows-

kim w 1339 roku, in Klasztor w kulturze redniowiecznej Polski: Materiay z oglnopolskiej
konferencji naukowej zorganizowanej w Dbrowie Niemodliskiej w dniach 46 XI 1993
przez Instytut Historii WSP w Opolu i Instytut Historyczny Uniwersytetu Wrocawskiego, ed.
Anna Pobg-Lenartowska and Marek Derwich (Opole: Wydawnictwo w. Krzya, 1995),
467490; Janusz Bieniak, Przebieg procesu polsko-krzyackiego z 1339 roku, Pamitnik
Biblioteki Krnickiej 23 (1993), 522; Janusz Bieniak, Geneza procesu polsko-krzyackiego
z lat 13201321 (inowrocawsko-brzeskiego), in Balticum: Studia z dziejw polityki, gospo-
darki i kultury XIIXVII wieku ofiarowane Marianowi Biskupowi w siedemdziesit rocznic
urodzin, ed. Zenon Hubert Nowak (Toru: Wydawn. Towarzystwa Naukowego, 1992),
4959; Janusz Bieniak, Postanowienia ukada kpiskiego (15 February 1282), Przegld
Historyczny 82 (1991), 209232; Janusz Bieniak, Geneza procesu polsko-krzyackiego
z 1339 roku, Acta Universitatis Nicolai Copernici. Historia 24 (1990), 2450; Janusz Bien-
iak, rodowisko wiadkw procesu polsko-krzyackiego z 1339 r., in Genealogiakrgi
zawodowe i grupy interesu w Polsce redniowiecznej na tle porwnawczym, ed. J. Wroniszew
ski (Toru: Uniwersytet Mikoaja Kopernika, 1989), 535; Janusz Bieniak, Milites w pro-
cesie polsko-krzyackim z 1339 roku, Przegld Historyczny 75 (1984), 503551; Janusz
Bieniak, Litterati wieccy w procesie warszawskim z 1339 roku, in Cultus et cognito: stu-
dia z dziejw redniowiecznej kultury, ed. Stefan Kuczyski et al. (Warszawa: Pastwowe
Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1976), 97106.
53Sieradzan, Aussagechroniken; Wiesaw Sieradzan, Rycerstwo kujawsko-dobrzy-
skie w procesie polsko-krzyackim w Warszawie w 1339 r., Ziemia Dobrzyska 3 (1995),
722; Wiesaw Sieradzan, Das nationale Selbstbewutsein der Zeugen in den Prozessen
zwischen Polen und dem Deutschen Orden im 14.-15. Jahrhundert, in Nationale, ethnische
Minderheiten und regionale Identitten in Mittelalter und Neuzeit, ed. Antoni Czacharowski
(Toru: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikoaja Kopernika, 1994), 161170; Wiesaw Siera
dzan, wiadomo historyczna wiadkw w procesach polsko-krzyackich w XIVXV wieku
(Toru: Wydawnicto Uniwersytetu Mikoaja Kopernika, 1993).
18 introduction

the memories which emerged in the early fourteenth century. Instead,

one should view this section as a separate analysis of how the Teutonic
Knights and their neighbors and benefactors sought to reposition them-
selves in the ever-changing world of the thirteenth-century political, reli-
gious, and social borderland that was the south Baltic littoral. In order
to provide continuity with the second part of the book, I have chosen
to examine this world through the prism of a series of disputes between
the Teutonic Knights and their neighbors which were settled by papal
legates. Yet, there are important differences between the thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century trials. First, the thirteenth-century documents are
not nearly as detailed as those from the fourteenth century. In addition,
the thirteenth-century litigants were forced to respond to ever-changing
political circumstances, while the participants in the fourteenth-century
trials had a chronological distance from events which allowed them to fit
the earlier narratives of dispute into a broader historical framework. Yet,
even though these events were far fresher in the minds of the thirteenth-
century disputants than those in the early fourteenth century, they were
still open to contestation as both sides attempted to forge a history of the
past conducive to their present goals and changing memories. This juxta-
position of the trials from these two centuries is intended to provide the
historical background necessary to understand the profound changes that
took place in relations between the Teutonic Knights and their neighbors
and benefactors over the course of a century.
The first two chapters of this book analyze the competing state-forma-
tion activities of the dukes of Pomerania and the Teutonic Knights dur-
ing the thirteenth century by examining a series of trials and mediated
settlements, which ended two periods of conflict between these emerging
states. This section situates Pomerania within an early thirteenth-century
south Baltic littoral that was both a religious frontier and a political bor-
derland of Slavic, Baltic, and German lordships, which contended with
or cooperated with each other not on the basis of ethnicity, but rather as
the situation demanded. When at the end of the thirteenth century, the
last native duke of Pomerania died without a son, the surrounding Ger-
man and Slavic lords fought to control not only the physical landscape of
Pomerania, but also the memory of Pomeranias historical place within
their states. As noted above, the purpose of this section is not to provide
a benchmark against which to judge the veracity of the memories of the
fourteenth-century disputants, but rather to examine the history of this
duchy beyond the competing modern teleologies of a German Drang nach
 introduction 19

Osten or a Polish restoration of a unified kingdom in order to provide the

historiographical distance necessary to analyze the fourteenth-century
disputes.54
The first chapterA iugo principum Polonie, a iugo Theutonicorum:
Pomerania and the South Baltic Frontier of Latin Christendom in the
Early Thirteenth Centuryexamines how Duke witopek of Pomerania
created an independent duchy by cultivating relationships with western
translocal organizations (Cistercians, Dominicans, Lbeck merchants)
as well as with the papacy in order to legitimize his revolt against his
Polish overlords. At the turn of the thirteenth century the Vistula River
served as a boundary demarcating the eastern frontier of Latin Christen-
dom. Missionaries and merchants began flooding into this frontier in the
first decades of the thirteenth century to reap the spiritual and economic
bounties of this land. witopek, whose duchy was located at the mouth
of the Vistula and was therefore uniquely placed as a bridgehead for the
incorporation of Prussia into Latin Christendom, positioned himself as a
permanent crusader for the papacy and attempted to establish his main
city of Gdask (German: Danzig) as the entrept for this region. How-
ever, when the frontier was pushed further east by the successes of one of
the translocal organizations that witopek had sponsored, the Teutonic
Knights (who were also expanding into lands that witopek thought of
as his own), this bridgehead became a roadblock for the merchants and
missionaries in Prussia. The duke of Pomerania, abandoned by his former
allies, led an insurrection of the Prussian neophytes, which had important
implications for both the Pomeranians and Prussians, as a series of papal
legates recognized the authority of the Teutonic Knights to direct the
Prussian mission, to the detriment of witopeks own state-formation
activities.
The second chapterDealing with the Past and Planning for the Future:
Contested Memories, Conflicted Loyalties, and the Partition and Donation
of Pomerania in the Late Thirteenth Centuryanalyzes the ephemeral
nature of political entities and alliances on the south Baltic littoral. In the

54My approach is in some ways similar to Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinskis use of the con-
cept imaginaire / Vorstellungswelt, which I have found particularly useful. As she explains:
What we look for, then, is not necessarily objective history but the self-interpretation
of an epoch. That is, although we try to pin down the facts of a given event, the way the
event was processed and represented by contemporaries is equally important [Renate
Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 13781417 (Univer-
sity Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 13].
20 introduction

series of internecine wars that broke out immediately after witopeks

death, the dukes two brothers and two sons scrambled to ally themselves
with one or more of the surrounding predatory lordships. Although they
tried to take advantage of the existing rivalries among their neighbors to
strengthen their own positions, in the end, all of them had promised parts
or the entirety of their lands to their allies. In the end, the Pyrrhic victor
of this warwitopeks eldest son, Mciwjwas left to deal with his
neighbors competing claims on his newly acquired lands, as well as with
the fact that because he did not have a son, he would have to choose and
have the secular and ecclesiastical magnates of his duchy approve of an
heir. These unfinished narratives of dispute would lay the foundation for
the fourteenth-century claims to this duchy made by the Teutonic Knights
and the kings of Poland. However, because both the fourteenth-century
disputants and their modern advocates used these contending and con-
tradictory claims to argue for either the Polish or German affiliation of
this duchy, this chapter will analyze all of these agreements within their
particular historical circumstancesa contentious, ethnically diverse
borderland society in which the Pomeranian dukes appealed to both their
German and Slavic neighbors for help.
The third chapterThe Restorations of the Kingdom of Poland and
the Foundation of the Teutonic Ordensstaat at the Turn of the Fourteenth
Centuryserves as a bridge between the first two and last two chapters.
It provides the historical background to an important transitional period
in the history of East Central Europe. The turn of the fourteenth century
saw not only the emergence of the Teutonic Ordensstaat and the res-
toration of the kingdom of Poland, but also the extinction of the ruling
dynasties in the other powers of the region. The kingdoms of Bohemia
and Hungary and the mark of Brandenburg came to be ruled by dynasties
that were intimately involved in the conflicts between the papacy and
the empire concerning the right to supreme authority over Latin Chris-
tendom. Therefore, this chapter will present the history of the formation
of the kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Ordensstaat at the turn of the
fourteenth century and their military and legal conflicts during the first
half of this century within a larger European context.
The final two chapters analyze the testimonies from more than 150 wit-
nesses in the two trials between Poland and the Ordensstaat as well as
letters, chronicles, and annals written by the secular and regular clergy
in Poland, Prussia, and Pomerania. I employ the methodologies of social
memory studies outlined above to analyze how the memories of coopera-
 introduction 21

tion between Poles and Germans in the Prussian mission were replaced
by recently constructed memories of eternal enmity between these two
peoples. This analysis of social memory is particularly useful in ensuring
that the voice of the individual is not buried by a determinist discourse of
state-sponsored historical consciousness, which is particularly important
considering the disconnect that often existed between the judges ques-
tions, the witnesses testimonies, and the royal procurators arguments in
the trials.
The fourth chapterImmortalis Discordia: Eternal Enmity, Massacre,
and Memorialization in the German-Polish Borderlandsanalyzes the
evolution of the story of the Teutonic Knights sack of the town of Gdask
during their conquest of Pomerania in 1308. In the three decades between
the Knights conquest of Pomerania and the second trial between Poland
and the Knights in 1339, new conflicts broke out between the disputants,
which located the memory of the Gdask massacre within a larger frame-
work of a discourse of wrongs promulgated by both sides. Both parties
presented themselves as the victims in these conflicts and both sides
attempted to instrumentalize the memory of the past to legitimize their
claims to disputed territories. However, within these various official ver-
sions of the past, we can also discern how the emerging historical con-
sciousness of the subjects of these two states made the broad outlines
presented to them by their rulers conform to their own views of the past.
Through a critical reading of these various histories, especially the wit-
nesses testimonies, this chapter examines how the changing political
circumstances of the three decades between the massacre and the 1339
trial affected the formation of social memory within these two states by
exploring the tension and interplay between the crusading culture which
united the two states as shields of Latin Christendom and an emerging
ethnic and political enmity which divided them.
The fifth chapter Pomerania between Poland and Prussia: Lordship,
Ethnicity, Territoriality, and Memory explores how memories of thir-
teenth-century Pomerania changed during the course of the early four-
teenth century in response to the conflicts between the Teutonic Knights
and Poland. As the thirteenth-century borderlands were transformed in
the early fourteenth century through a complex process of remembering
and forgetting into bordered lands of strictly demarcated political bound-
aries, many people living in these borderlands came to understand that
identity, like memory, was a slippery concept. As an increasingly statist
discourse came to challenge the discourse of mission and crusade, these
22 introduction

people were forced to choose sides as the shield of Latin Christendom

fractured. This chapter also examines how the relationship had become
so bitter by 1339 that the king of Poland sought to reclaim all of the lands
ever given by Polish rulers to the Teutonic Knights. In their articles of
dispute the royal procurators tried to present a version of history that
legitimized this royal depiction of the past, but their attempt at historio-
graphical lawyering met with limited success, because the witnesses did
not easily consume legal arguments based the concept of ratio regni, the
inalienability of the lands of the kingdom and the historical rights of the
rulers of Poland to all of the lands of the ancient Polish regnum.55 This
chapter also analyzes the witnesses views of ethnicity and their political
and geographical knowledge in more detail. Finally it analyzes the role of
orality and literacy in memory and forgetting.
Even though these conflicts played out on the periphery of Europe,
their records, particularly the witnesses testimonies, provide us with illu-
minating insights into the history of medieval mentalities regarding some
of the most important developing ideologies of medieval European states.
However, unlike the traditional studies of the emergence of medieval poli-
ties, which focus on lawyerly arguments and canned histories written by
propagandists, these testimonies provide us with the means to examine
how both rank-and-file administrators and those who had no role in gov-
ernance conceived of the state. By taking the discourse of medieval state
formation away from the exclusive purview of lawyers and studying it if
not from-the-bottom-up, then at least from-the-middle-out, we can see
that royal propagandists clever theories were not always easily consumed
by those who ran the state, much less by those they governed. Finally, I
hope that these insights into the processes of state formation in medieval
East Central Europe might also shed some new light on similar processes
in the rest of medieval Europe and perhaps on the role of social memory
in group identity formation today. In many ways, the turn of the four-
teenth century was just as important for the Europeanization of Europe
as the turn of the twenty-first century, and in both periods this process
takes place as much at Europes frontiers as in its center.56

55I owe the concept of historiographical lawyering to Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Col-
lective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick: Transactions Publishers, 1997).
56Bartlett, Making, 269291.
 CHAPTER ONE

A IUGO PRINCIPUM POLONIE, A IUGO THEUTONICORUM:

POMERANIA AND THE SOUTH BALTIC FRONTIER OF LATIN
CHRISTENDOM IN THE EARLY THIRTEENTH CENTURY

The conflict between Duke witopek of Pomerania and the Teutonic

Knights, which grew out of western European missionary activities on the
south Baltic littoral, has traditionally been characterized in Polish scholar-
ship as the first in a series of conflicts between Poland and the Teutonic
Ordensstaat, despite the fact that Polish dukes fought with the Knights
against witopek.1 A similar view can be found in early twentieth-
century German historiography, only instead of simply a Polish-German
conflict, it is presented as a Slavic-German conflict, another episode in the
Drang nach Osten.2 All Polish and German historiography on this topic
should not be characterized this way.3 For the most part, however, even

1One of the leading twentieth-century Polish historians of the Teutonic Knights, Mar-
ian Biskup, is a proponent of this view. He argues that only the duke of Gdask Pomera-
nia, witopek, who ruled in the middle of the 13th century, saw the danger inherent in
the fact that the Teutonic Knights had settled on the Baltic [The Role of the Order and
State of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia in the History of Poland, Polish Western Affairs
2 (1966), 347]. Similarly, Andrzej Wojtkowski takes Helena Chopocka to task for calling
the 1320 trial the oldest acts of the Lites [ac res gestae inter Polonos Ordinemque Crucif-
erorum], because he argues that both the dispute between witopek and the Knights
(the subject of this chapter) and the dispute between his son, Mciwj, and the Knights
(the subject of the next chapter) were the first Polish-Teutonic Knights trials [Procesy
polsko-krzyackie przed procesem z lat 13201321 (Olsztyn: Osrodek Badan Naukowych
im. W. Ktrzynskiego, 1972), 35, quoting Helena Chopocka, Wstp, in Lites ac res ges-
tae inter Polonos Ordinemque Cruciferorum. Tomus I: Causa Junivladislaviae et Brestiae-
Cujaviae Anno 13201321 (Wrocaw: Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1970), xi].
2Franz Engelbrecht, who wrote one of the first and still most complete German his-
tories of the duchy of Pomerania in this period, characterized this conflict as ein Nation-
alkampf des pommerschen Slawentums gegen das Deutschtum [Das Herzogtum Pommern
und seine Erwerbung durch den Deutschorden 1309 (Potsdam: Robert Mller, 1911), 18].
3Stella Maria Szacherska, for example, has explored in great detail the role that
Denmark played in the formation of the duchy of Pomerania and the Prussian mission
[Valdemar IIs Expedition to Pruthenia and the Mission of Bishop Christian, Mediaeval
Scandinavia 12 (1988), 4475]. Similarly, in his study of west Pomerania, Jrgen Petersohn
has pointed out that this area was not the subject of a unitary push to the east by either
Germandom or Christendom, but was instead a borderland contested by various Polish,
German, and Danish secular and ecclesiastical forces [Der sdliche Ostseeraum im kirchlich-
politischen Krftespiel des Reichs, Polens und Dnemarks vom 10. bis 13. Jahrhundert: Mission,
Kirchenorganisation, Kultpolitk (Kln: Bhlau, 1979)]. The Baltic crusades and colonization
24 chapter one

the most nuanced historians have tended to deny agency to the peoples
living on the south Baltic littoral, as their histories were incorporated into
the medieval states that came to rule over them. Rather than focus on how
these peoples were acted upon by western Europeans (including Poles),
this chapter instead examines how the peoples living on this periphery
of Latin Christendom were able to take advantage of the new economic
and diplomatic technologies introduced from the West to modernize and
legitimize their own state-formation activities.4 The main transmitters of

of the south Baltic littoral have also been the subject of a number of recent studies in
English: Elspeth Jane Carruthers, Making Territories in the High Middle Ages: The Role
of Foundation Charters in the German Colonization of the Vistula River, in Migration in
History: Human Migration in Comparative Perspective, ed. Marc S. Rodriguez and Anthony
Grafton (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 134; Elspeth Jane Carruthers,
Christianization and Colonization on the Medieval South Baltic Frontier, Ph.D. diss.,
Princeton University, 1999; Alan V. Murray, ed., The Clash of Cultures on the Medieval Bal-
tic Frontier (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); Alan V. Murray, ed. Crusade and Conversion on
the Baltic Frontier, 11501500 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001); Nils Blomkvist, The Discovery
of the Baltic: The Reception of a Catholic World-System in the European North (AD 10751225)
(Leiden: Brill, 2005); Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades 11471254
(Leiden: Brill, 2007); Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, new ed. (London: Penguin,
1997); Mikoaj Gadysz, The Forgotten Crusaders: Poland and the Crusader Movement in the
Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
4I have found particularly thought-provoking Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron,
From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between
in North American History, American Historical Review 104 (1999), 814841. I want to
emphasize, however, that I am using some of the concepts developed in their essay as
heuristic tools. The North American borderlands were complex and to a certain extent sui
generis, and I do not intend to draw facile comparisons between the borderland regions
of medieval Europe and those in North America. Historians in general and medievalists
in particular have used the concepts of frontier and borderland in a number of ways
over the years, so I think it is appropriate and important for me to explain exactly how
I am using these concepts. For the purposes of this book, the frontier is a zone of interac-
tion between two or more supranational, territorially defined entities, in this case Latin
Christendom and lands controlled by pagans and Orthodox Christians. A borderland is
a space of overlapping claims of political jurisdiction between two or more states. Bor-
dered lands, a concept employed in the second part of this book, refers to strictly demar-
cated state boundaries, i.e. hard boundaries, as opposed to the soft boundaries inherent in
borderlands. Medievalists were among the first proponents of the use of frontier studies
for comparative history [James Westfall Thompson, Profitable Fields of Investigation in
Medieval Studies, American Historical Review 18 (1913), 490504] and have continued to
employ and adapt this concept to study areas of cultural interaction, especially on the
periphery of Latin Christendom. For some recent theoretical and historiographical essays
by medievalists about frontiers, see David Abulafia, Introduction: Seven Types of Ambi-
guity, c. 1100c. 1500, in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. David Abulafia
and Nora Berend (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 134; Nora Berend,
Medievalists and the Notion of the Frontier, Medieval History Journal 2 (1999), 5572;
William Urban, The Frontier Thesis and the Baltic Crusade, in Crusade and Conver-
sion on the Baltic Frontier 11501500, ed. Alan V. Murray (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 4571;
Daniel Powers and Naomi Standen, Introduction, in Frontiers in Question: Eurasian
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 25

these new technologies were papal legates and the translocal organiza-
tions of merchants and missionaries who flooded this frontier in search
of political, economic, and spiritual rewards.5
These westerners also brought another new technology, one that played
an important role in how witopeks actions in the early thirteenth cen-
tury would be remembered by later generationswriting.6 This chapter

orderlands, 7001700, ed. Daniel Powers and Naomi Standen (New York: St. Martins,
B
1999), 131; Giles Constable, Frontiers in the Middle Ages, in Frontiers in the Middle Ages,
ed. Outi Merisalo (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fdration Internationale des Instituts dtudes
Mdivales, 2006), 328; Nikolas Jaspert, Grenzen und Grenzenrume im Mittelalter: For-
schungen, Konzepte und Begriffe, Grenzrume und Grenzberschreitungen im Vergleich:
Der Osten und der Westen des mittelalterlichen Lateineuropa, ed. Klaus Herbers and Nikolas
Jaspert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 4370.
5I have chosen to call groups like the Cistercians, Dominicans, and the Lbeck mer-
chants translocal rather than international or transnational, because they are rooted spe-
cifically, at least at this time in East Central Europe, in the local contexts in which they
are established, rather than in any national framework [Richard Southern referred to the
Cistercians as the first effective international organization in Europe. Western Society
and the Church in the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1970), 255; cited in Robert Bartlett,
The Making of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 228]. Although both
the mendicants and military orders were grouped into larger territorial organizations, the
boundaries of which were sometimes highly contested by the end of the thirteenth century
[see for example Karl Borchardt, The Hospitallers in Pomerania: Between the Priories of
Bohemia and Alamania, in The Military Orders. Volume 2: Welfare and Warfare, ed. Helen
Nicholson (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 295306; John B. Freed, The
Friars and the Delineation of State Boundaries in the Thirteenth Century, in Order and
Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer, ed. William C. Jordan,
et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 3140, 425428], in the early thirteenth
century, these networks were too sparse to matter much. Similarly, I have chosen not to
refer to these organizations as non-governmental, because they did have rules and regula-
tions through which they were governed, and they fought hard to preserve their govern-
mental structures, as the example of the Lbeck merchants attempts to have the Teutonic
Knights recognize Lbeck law for Elblg demonstrates [see below and Edwin Rozenkranz,
Prawo Lubeckie w Elblgu od XIII do XVI wieku, Rocznik Gdaskie 51 (1991), 535]. In
fact it is not a lack of governmental organization that characterized these organizations,
but rather a lack of territorial organization. Although these organizations did possess sub-
stantial territories throughout Latin Christendom, they were united by institutional rather
than territorial connections. This being said, however, these organizations were not averse
to territorialization. Both Cistercian bishops and Lbeck merchants attempted to establish
territorial states along the south and east Baltic littoral in the thirteenth century, and the
Teutonic Knights actually succeeded in doing so by the early fourteenth century. The ter-
ritorial demands and ambitions of these translocal organizations would have a profound
impact on the development of the south Baltic littoral.
6The majority of early written records come from the translocal organizations that
were the recipients of the grants. The Pomeranian dukes did not develop chanceries
until later in the thirteenth century, so at this time they were dependent upon translocal
organizations to communicate directly with Western Europe. For discussions of recent
developments in the study of medieval literacy in East Central Europe, see Anna Adam-
ska, The Study of Medieval Literacy: Old Sources, New Ideas, in The Development of
26 chapter one

takes its title from two fourteenth-century chroniclers interpretations of

thirteenth-century events in the formation of an independent duchy of
Pomerania. The first, written by the abbot of the Cistercian monastery
of Oliwa near Gdask, praises Duke witopek, the nephew of the mon-
asterys founder, for freeing the duchy of Pomerania from the yoke of the
princes of Poland.7 The second chronicle, written by a priest of the Teu-
tonic Knights, imagines an arrogant witopek badly miscalculating the
strength of his enemies and telling his Pomeranian and Prussian troops
that they would be forever free from the yoke of the Germans, just before
the Teutonic Knights cut them to pieces.8 As these two very different
expressions of a similar theme illustrate, the memory of the independent
duchy of Pomerania occupied a problematic place in later medieval con-
ceptions of the south Baltic religious, ethnic, and political frontier.
Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Polish and Teutonic Knights
chroniclers, however, attempted to simplify this frontier by directly link-
ing witopeks rebellion against the Polish dukes in 1227 with his part
in the Prussian uprisings against the Teutonic Knights, which began more
than a decade later. The Chronicle of Great Poland,9 written at the turn of
the fourteenth century, states:

Literate Mentalities in East Central Europe, ed. Anna Adamska and Marco Mostert (Turn-
hout: Brepols, 2004), 1347; for general developments in the study of medieval literacy,
see Leidulf Melve, Literacy-Aurality-Orality: A Survey of Recent Research into the Oral-
ity/Literacy Complex of the Latin Middle Ages (6001500), Symbolae Osloenses 78 (2003),
143197.
7Erat enim vir bellicosus et adversus omnes sibi infestos victoriosus, qui se victrici
manu excussit a iugo principum Polonie se et sua viriliter defendendo (Chronica Olivensis,
ed. Wojciech Ktrzyski, in MPH 6: 311312).
8Crastina die faciemus, quod Pomerani et Prutheni a iugo Theutonicorum in per-
petuum absolventur (Dusburg III.55). I have elected to use the older edition of Peter von
Dusburgs chronicle [ed. Max Tppen, in Scriptores rerum Prussicarum (Leipzig: Verlag von
S. Hirzel, 1861), 1: 3219] because it is widely available in libraries and online, while the
new edition by Jarosaw Wenta and Sawomir Wyszomirski [Petrus de Dusburgk, Chronica
Terrae Prussiae (Krakw: Nakadem Polskiej Akademii Wyszomirski, 2007)] has unfortu-
nately had limited circulation outside of Poland. However, I refer to Dusburgs work using
book and chapter numbers so that the reader can consult either edition.
9There were and still are two Polands within PolandWielkopolska (Great or Greater
Poland), which is the region around Gniezno and Pozna) and Maopolska (Little or Lesser
Poland), which is the region around Krakw. For a discussion of the origins of these dist-
inctions see Gerard Labuda, W sprawie pochodzenia nazw: Wielkopolska i Maopolska,
Przegld Zachodni 10 (1954), 112119.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 27

Thus, witopek, the traitor, who shamefully and nefariously installed him-
self in the duchy of Pomerania, caused the baptized Prussians living under
the rule of the bearded ones [the Teutonic Knights] to rise up....10
This chronicle makes it clear that his wicked counsel caused the Prus-
sians to rebel against their lords, just as witopek had rebelled against
his lords.11
Similarly, the thirteenth-century Teutonic Knights account of the
Translatio et miraculum sanctae Barbarae, while blaming witopeks
revolt against the Polish dukes on his ancestors, still juxtaposes this event
with the Prussian rebellion witopek led against the Knights:
...there was a certain duke named witopek, a desperate tyrant and
pseudo-Christian, who, while he was...born from progenitors who were
simple knights, his said progenitors killed their lord and prince...violently
usurping for themselves the duchy and the name of duke of Pomerania....
This witopek...joining with the said neophytes [Prussians] frequently
caused the brothers [Teutonic Knights] men and other Christians...to be
killed or captured.12
This thirteenth-century account situates Pomerania within the Polish
political landscape before the arrival of the Teutonic Knights on the
Baltic.

10Swanthopelcus itaque proditor, qui se ipsum pudorose et nepharie in ducem Pomo-

ranorum creaverat, Pruthenos baptizatos sub dicione barbatorum constitutos...insurgere
fecit [Chronica Poloniae Maioris, ed. Brygida Krbis, Monumenta Poloniae Historica (War-
saw: Pastwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1970), n.s. 8: 88]. Interestingly, in this account
witopek is called a capitaneus. While this could just be a generic term for leader, it
is more probable that this account was influenced by the introduction of this office (Pol-
ish: starosta) into Poland by the absentee Bohemian kings in 13001306. Similarly, in the
early fourteenth-century chronicle written by a Franciscan named Dzierzwa or Mierswa,
witopek is called procurator Maritime regionis of a Polish kingdom which did not
exist (Miersuae Chronicon, MPH 3: 47). See chapter five for an analysis of this interpolation
of fourteenth-century political conceptions back into a thirteenth-century world in which
they did not exist.
11 ...ab eorum fidelitate suo pravo consilio subtrahens... (Chronica Poloniae Maioris,
n.s. MPH 8: 88).
12...fuit quidam dux nomine Swantopolcus desperatus tyrannus et pseudocristianus
qui cum esset...natus a progenitoribus suis de simplicibus militibus, dicti progenitores
sui dominum et principem proprium...interfecerunt, usurpantes violentes sibi ducatum
vel nomen ducis Pomeranie.... Hic Swantopolcus...dictis neophitis se confederans hom-
ines fratrum et alios christianos...pluries fecit occidi et captiuari [Translatio et miracula
sanctae Barbarae, ed. Max Tppen, in Scriptores rerum Prussicarum, ed. Theodor Hirsch,
Max Tppen, and Ernst Strehlke (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1863; reprint, Frankfurt am
Main: Minerva GMBH, 1965), 2: 404405.]
28 chapter one

By the early fourteenth century, however, the Teutonic Knights had

conveniently forgotten about Polands historical rights to Pomerania,
which they then possessed and over which they were fighting with the
kingdom of Poland both on the battlefield and in the courtroom. The
Knights chronicler, Peter von Dusburg, writing in the 1320s, did still link
the political and religious perfidy of witopek, the son of the devil, only
now it was entirely against the Teutonic Ordensstaat, rather than against
Poland, and the murder of the Polish Duke Leszek has been replaced by
the slaughter of 4000 Christian (and perhaps understood by Dusburg and
his audience also to be German) inhabitants of Prussia.13 Yet, despite their
differences, all of these chronicle accounts make it clear that in the minds
of both the Polish dukes and the Teutonic Knights, witopeks actions
had threatened to rend asunder not only the frontier of Latin Christen-
dom, but also the two new states that were emerging on this frontierthe
kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Ordensstaat.
Polish and German historians have long debated the related issues of
the emergence of an independent duchy of Pomerania, the simultaneous
intensification of the Prussian mission, and the invitation of the Teutonic
Knights to Prussia. There is not room here to offer a comprehensive,
nuanced analysis of development of this rich and contentious historiog-
raphy. Suffice it to say that one result of the parameters set by this his-
toriographical dispute has been that the emergence of an independent
duchy of Pomerania in the thirteenth century has not been adequately
considered outside of the framework of the restoration of the kingdom
of Poland and development of the Teutonic Ordensstaat. As explained in
the introduction, this issue was further problematized by the fact that this
patch of land at the mouth of the Vistula, which roughly corresponds to
the interwar Polish Corridor and Free City of Danzig, was also the sub-
ject of disputes between the modern states of Poland and Germany. Add
to this mix the fact that this region is home to a large ethnic minority (the

13Dusburg, III.35: Non longe postea idem Swantepolcus filius dyaboli congregavit ite-
rum dictos neophitos apostatas, et ingredientes armata manu hostiliter partes superiores
scilicet terram Pomesanie et Colmensem rapina et incendio devastabant expugnantes et
penitus destruentes omnia castra et municiones preter tria scilicet Thorun, Colmen et
Redinum. De populo eciam Dei ad laudem et gloriam eius ibi habitante trucidaverunt IIII
milia, sic quod tota terra Prussie videbatur Cristianorum sanguine rubricata (Dusburg
III.35).
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 29

Kaszb) and it is easy to understand how anachronistic admixtures of

nationalism have made their way into the medieval disputes.14
These anachronisms, however, were not entirely modern constructs. At
the turn of the fourteenth century, the then defunct duchy was incorpo-
rated first into the kingdom of Poland and then into the Teutonic Ordens-
staat. Both polities attempted to appropriate its history through the writing
and propagation of chronicles and especially through the legal documents
of two trials between these states in 1320 and 1339, which included the
testimonies of more than 150 witnesses. Anachronistic representations of
thirteenth-century views on ethnic identity, political and ecclesiastical
affiliation, and the right to rule figured prominently in these fourteenth-
century disputes, as chapters four and five demonstrate.
My purpose here, however, is not to delve into the dark ages of ethno-
genesis, against which Patrick Geary has so ably warned us,15 nor to favor
one dispute narrative over another, as both of these methodologies have
blinded some researchers to the local and translocal political, religious,
and economic forces at work in the Vistula delta.
In order to understand the early thirteenth-century history of the Vistula
delta, it is important to consider the true frontier nature of this region:
it was a religious (pagan, Latin, Orthodox), ethnic (Germanic, Slavic,
Baltic), political (German, Polish, Danish, Prussian) frontier. For a more
complete understanding of the competing interests and complex motiva-
tion of the inhabitants of this frontier, one must explore not just how the
western superiors (the papacy, the grandmaster of the Teutonic Knights,
the general chapters of the Cistercians and Dominicans, and the Lbeck
town council) attempted to use their agents to impose their own vision
of this frontier on the locals, but also how the indigenous peoples, in this
case the Pomeranian dukes, built and legitimized an independent state

14Brunon Synak, The Kashubes Ethnic Identity: Continuity and Change, in The Ethnic
Identities of European Minorities: Theories and Case Studies, ed. Brunon Synak (Gdask:
Uniwersytet Gdaski, 1995), 155166; James Minahan, Kashubians, in Encyclopedia of the
Stateless Nations: Ethnic and National Groups around the World (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2002), 2: 960965. For an analysis of how this ethnic minority was used in early
twentieth-century disputes over Pomerania see Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns East-
wards: A Study of the Ostforschung in the Third Reich (London: Pan Books, 2002; 1st ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 53, 122, 186.
15Patrick Geary refers to the nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical
attempts to directly link modern nations with medieval peoples as toxic waste [The Myth
of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002),
3537].
30 chapter one

by manipulating the new avenues of authority provided by the translocal

religious and economic organizations that flooded into the region to stake
their claims to the spiritual and economic bounties offered by what they
considered to be a virgin land. First it is necessary to analyze how Latin
Christians perceived Pomerania in the twelfth century.

The Conquest of Pomerania and Christianization of the

South Baltic Littoral in the Twelfth Century

The conquest and conversion of the Baltic littoral from the twelfth to the
fourteenth centuries was carried out not only by Germans and Scandina-
vians, but also by Slavs, particularly the Polish Piast dukes, who sought to
expand their own domains at the expense of the neighboring Slavic and
Baltic pagans. Their primary fields of operation were Pomerania (the sec-
tion of Baltic coast bounded by the Oder and Vistula rivers) and Prussia
(between the Vistula and Memel rivers). The Polish dukes turned their
attention first to Pomerania.
In a series of campaigns in the first decades of the twelfth century,
Duke Bolesaw Krzywousty (11021138) subjugated the whole of Pomera-
nia to his rule.16 Almost a century later, the Polish chronicler Wincenty
Kadubek presented this as a reconquest, an expansion of Polands natu-
ral boundaries to the Baltic, which were acquired at the time of Polands
moment of primary acquisition17 during the reign of Polands first two
rulersMieszko I (ca. 960992) and Bolesaw Chrobry (r. 9921025).
Yet, there is nothing in the contemporary sources to suggest that early
twelfth-century Poles thought in these terms.18 The first chronicler of the
Poles, Gallus Anonymus, writing during the time of Bolesaw Krzywoustys

16Tadeusz Manteuffel, The Formation of the Polish State: The Period of Ducal Rule, 963
1194, trans. Andrew Gorski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 105118.
17Patrick Geary explains that modern nationalists have distorted modern states rela-
tionships with polities in the past by claiming that this moment of primary acquisition
...established once and for all the geographical limits of legitimate ownership of land
[...]...when their people...established their sacred territory and their national iden-
tity (Geary, Myth, 12, 156). Medieval propagandists were also aware of the utility of these
claims. R.R. Davies has studied in detail how Edward Is conflict with Britains Celtic
Fringe produced one of the most remarkable medieval examples of the deployment and
distortion of the past in the service of the present [The First English Empire: Power and
Identity in the British Isles 10931343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35].
18For an analysis of the changing place of Pomerania in Polish chronicles written over
the course of two centuries, see Jacek Hertel, Pomorze w myli politycznej kronikarzy
Polski piastowskiej (Anonim Gall, Wincenty Kadubek, kronikarz wielkopolski), in Prace
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 31

campaigns against the Pomeranians, calls them and the Prussians most
savage nations of pagan barbarians.19 Pomeranians, separated from the
Polish duchies to the south by dense forests and vast wetlands that fed
the Note River, were the other.20 Even though Poles and Pomeranians
were similar in one of the key markers of identitylanguagetwelfth-
century Poles (at least as represented by a western European chronicler
living in Poland) regarded the Pomeranians as a different people, because
like their Baltic neighbors, the Prussians, they were pagans and therefore
savages.21
Part of the motivation for Wincentys arguments for the antiquity of
Polands rights to Pomerania might have been that Polands political and
ecclesiastical authority in the region was quickly declining. In 1124, a new
bishopric was established in Wocawek in Kujawy, including the archdea-
conate of Pomerania, which covered the eastern part of this land.22 In the

z dziejw pastwa i zakonu krzyackiego, ed. Antoni Czacharowski (Toru: Uniwersytet

Mikoaja Kopernika, 1984), 947.
19 ...barbarorum gentilium ferocissimas nationes... [Gallus Anonymus, Gesta Prin-
cipum Polonorum, trans. by Paul W. Knoll and Frank Schaer (Budapest: Central Euro-
pean University Press, 2003), 1213]. It should be pointed out that Gallus does talk about
Bolesaw Chrobrys conquest and conversion of the Pomeranians and Prussians, but he
makes it clear that by the time he was writing, they had reverted to paganism. In fact,
Gallus describes many conflicts between the Polish rulers and the pagan Pomeranians. For
more on Gallus see Krzysztof Stopka, ed., Gallus Anonymus and His Chronicle in the Con-
text of Twelfth-Century Historiography from the Perspective of the Latest Research (Krakw:
Polska Akademia Umiejtnoci, 2010).
20Kazimierz laski, Granica wielkopolsko-pomorska w okresie wczesnego feudalizmu,
Przegld Zachodni 12 (1954), 91; Herbord, an author of one of the vitae of Otto of Bamberg,
recounts the difficulties of crossing from Poland to Pomerania in the early twelfth century,
due to the horrible and vast forest and the marshes that hindered their carts [...nemus
horrendum et vastum, quod Pomeraniam Poloniamque dividit. [...]...loca palustria
quadrigas et currus praepedientia... Herbordus, Herbordi Dialogus de vita Ottonis epis-
cope babenbergensis, ed. Rudolf Kpke and Georg Heinrich Pertz (Hannoverae: Impensis
Bibliopoli Hahniani, 1868), chapter 2.10, at page 60].
21 Jan Powierski, Die Stellung der pommerellischen Herzge zur Preuen-Frage im 13.
Jahrhundert, in Der Deutschordensstaat Preuen in der polnischen Geschichtsschreibung
der Gegenwart, ed. Udo Arnold, et al. (Marburg: N.G. Elwert, 1982), 104. Interestingly Gallus
also links the Pomeranians with another border people with whom the Poles had linguistic
affinity and with whom they would briefly be united at the turn of the fourteenth century
for this very reasonthe Bohemians. See Gallus, 181184 and Edward Skibinski, Identity
and Difference: Polish Identity in the Historiography of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Cen-
turies, in Birth of Identities: Denmark and Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. Brian Patrick
McGuire (Copenhagen: Medieval Centre, Copenhagen University, 1996), 96.
22Peter Kriedte, Die Herrschaft der Bischfe von Wocawek in Pommerellen: von den
Anfngen bis zum Jahre 1409 (Gttingen: Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht, 1974); Hermann Frey-
tag, Das Archidiakonat Pommerellen der Dizese Wloclawek im Mittelalter, Altpreussi-
sche Monatsschrift 41 (1904), 204233.
32 chapter one

west, ecclesiastical control was first granted to the missionary Bishop Otto
of Bamberg (the Apostle of the Pomeranians, as one of his hagiographers
called him),23 while in 1140 another new bishopric, subject to the Polish
metropolitan at Gniezno, was established for west Pomerania.24 In the
years following Bolesaws death in 1138, however, Poland fragmented into
numerous duchies ruled by various branches of the royal Piast dynasty.
As these duchies came to be consumed by internecine warfare, the west
Pomeranians broke away from the suzerainty of the Polish dukes.25 Fol-
lowing this manifestation of political independence, the bishop of Kamie
(the see for west Pomerania) was also able to secure his independence
from the Polish church in 1188.26
The rulers of east Pomerania, while remaining subject to the Polish
church, also attempted to exercise a greater degree of independence.
Although technically under the suzerainty of various Polish dukes, by the
late twelfth century the members of the leading Pomeranian noble fam-
ily began to style themselves dukes and carry out such ducal functions
as the foundation of monasteriesthe most famous of these being the
Cistercian monastery at Oliwa, just outside of Gdask, which was founded
in 1186.27 Oliwa became the mausoleum of the ducal family, and its monks
functioned as the preservers of the memory of their founders and bene-
factors. These monks also, as Gerard Labuda has argued, alongside the
formal church, constituted a second path of international contacts, in
particular with the papacy, being at the same time an indispensable orga-
nizing factor of political life....28 The fact that the Pomeranian rulers

23For Ottos missionary work in Pomerania see Charles H. Robinson, trans., The Life of
Otto, Apostle of Pomerania, 10601139, by Ebo and Herbordus (New York: Macmillan, 1920);
see also Klaus Guth, The Pomeranian Missionary Journeys of Otto I of Bamberg and the
Crusade Movement of the Eleventh to Twelfth Centuries, in The Second Crusade and the
Cistercians, ed. Michael Gervers (New York: St. Martins Press, 1992), 1323.
24Jerzy Koczowski, A History of Polish Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 16.
25Micha Sczaniecki, Political Ties between Western Pomerania and Poland, up to
the 16th Century, in Poland at the XIth International Congress of Historical Sciences in
Stockholm, ed. The Polish Academy of Sciences Institute of History (Warsaw: Pastwowe
Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1960), 81101.
26Koczowski, History, 16.
27There is a huge bibliography on this monastery in both Polish and German. For a
brief English introduction to its founding see Szacherska, Valdemar, 4549; in German,
see Heinz Lingenberg, Die Anfnge des Klosters Oliva und die Entstehung der deutschen
Stadt Danzig (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982); in Polish see Kazimierz Dbrowski, Opactwo
cystercw w Oliwie od XII do XVI wieku (Gdask: GTN, 1975).
28Labuda, HP I/1, 403.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 33

intended this monastery to function as a window to the west can also be

surmised from the fact that they recruited monks from the west Pomera-
nian monastery at Kobacz, which had been founded by Danish monks
affiliated with Clairvaux, rather than from a Polish monastery, all of which
were affiliated with the Morimund branch of the Cistercians.29
While we do not know a great deal about the genealogy or activities of
the Pomeranian dynasty during the twelfth century, the picture becomes
clearer in the early thirteenth century. The paterfamilias at this time was
Duke Mciwj I. While earlier members of the family might have just been
calling themselves dukes, Mciwj was widely regarded as the duke of
Pomerania by both the Polish clergy whose charters he witnessed and
the invading King Valdemar II of Denmark, to whom he did homage in
1210.30 As Labuda points out, even though the dependence on the Danes
had a temporary character, it nevertheless subverted the previous legal-
political relation of the rulers of Gdask to the Polish principate.31 Even
before Mciwjs death in 1219 or 1220, his eldest son, witopek, had
begun to take over his fathers policies of building an independent state
on the strategically and economically important lands at the mouth of the
Vistula River. However, as we will see below, witopeks younger broth-
ers would come to develop their own ideas about what this state should
look like.
Following the Danish incursion into Pomerania, witopek accepted
again the Polish dukes claims to suzerainty over his land by performing
homage to Duke Leszek of Krakw in the principal Pomeranian city of
Gdask in 1217.32 At this same time witopek also married into the Pol-
ish Piast dynasty through his union with Eufrozyna, the sister of Duke
Wadysaw Odonic of Kalisz.33 With these two acts, witopek was more
closely drawn into the political machinations of his neighbors to the south.
These relations would become even closer in the following years. After
his brother-in-law, Wadysaw Odonic, was expelled from his lands by his
uncle, Duke Wadysaw Laskonogi of Great Poland, he eventually sought
refuge at witopeks court, where in 1219 he married his brother-in-laws

29David H. Williams, East of the Oder: An English Introduction to Its Medieval Cister-
cian Settlement and Economy, Cteaux 29 (1978), 243.
30PlUB #15; Szacherska, Valdemar, 44.
31Labuda, HP I/1, 405.
32Labuda, HP I/1, 406.
33Labuda, HP I/1, 406; liwiski, Poczet, 29.
34 chapter one

sister, Jadwiga.34 witopek was now doubly bound to the interests of

Wadysaw Odonic.
In addition to cultivating alliances with Poles, witopek also began to
look for additional allies from the west. During the 1220s he strengthened
Gdask by installing in it two emerging translocal organizations. First, he
granted extensive privileges to a colony of Lbeck merchants, 35 who were
quickly supplanting the Scandinavians as the chief traders on the Baltic
and had already established colonies in other Baltic ports.36 Next, on the
advice of his ecclesiastical superior, Bishop Micha of Kujawy, he founded
a convent for another emerging translocal organization that was taking a
great interest in the Baltic frontier of Christendomthe Dominicans
who came to Pomerania apparently to fulfill St. Dominics intentions to
lead a mission in Prussia.37 Both of these translocal organizations pro-
vided witopek with additional avenues of communication with West-
ern Europe, which he immediately used to strengthen and legitimize his
own state-formation activities.
witopek apparently blamed Wadysaw Laskonogi for instigating the
Prussian invasion of Pomerania in 1226, which had laid waste large areas
of his duchy, including Oliwa, so he asked the Dominicans to help him in
his dispute with the duke of Great Poland.38 In May 1227, in a response to
a request written by the Dominicans in Gdask, Pope Gregory IX praised
witopeks devotion to the Prussian mission and asked some Polish cler-
ics to look into accusations that certain unnamed princes of Poland had
cooperated with pagans in injuring witopek and his brothers.39 Despite
this papal support, however, the Polish dukes still considered themselves

34Labuda, HP I/1, 406; liwiski, Poczet, 29.

35PlUB #33.
36For the early development of Lbeck and the Hanse, see Philippe Dollinger, The Ger-
man Hansa, trans. and ed. D.S. Ault and S.H. Steinberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1970); for the early role of Lbeck merchants in Polish and Pomeranian trade, see Henryk
Samsonowicz, Lubeczanie z ziemi Polski w XIII w., Acta Universitatis Nicolai Copernici.
Historia 24 (1990), 144153; see also Henryk Lesiski, Pocztki i rozwj stosunkw polsko-
hanzeatyckich w XIII wieku, Przegld Zachodni 5/6 (1952), 130145.
37PlUB #34; Jerzy Koczowski, Dominicans of the Polish Province in the Middle Ages,
in The Christian Community of Medieval Poland: Anthologies, ed. Jerzy Koczowski (Wrocaw:
Ossolineum, 1981), 86; Dariusz Aleksander Dekaski, Pocztki zakonu dominikanw prow-
incji polskoczeskiej (Gdask: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdaskiego, 1999), 84117; see
also Jerzy Koczowski, Dominikanie polscy nad Batykiem w XIII w., Nasza Przeszo 6
(1954), 83126; Christoph T. Maier, Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the Cross
in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 47.
38Labuda, HP I/1, 406; Chronica Olivensis, MPH 6: 353.
39PlUB #35 and Theiner #304.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 35

the Pomeranian dukes superiors, and still expected them to submit to

their judgment.40
When later in the same year war broke out again between the two
Wadysaws, the three other leading dukes of PolandDuke Leszek the
White of Krakw, Duke Henry the Bearded of Wrocaw, and Duke Kon-
rad of Mazoviasummoned the Wadysaws and witopek to an assem-
bly at Gsawa, on the Polish-Pomeranian border, to settle the dispute.
Wadysaw Laskonogi showed up as expected, but on 23 November 1227
Wadysaw Odonic and witopek arrived at the head of a large army,
and in the ensuing battle, Duke Leszek was killed. Although contem-
poraries and modern historians differ in their assessment of blame for
what is known in Polish scholarship as the Gsawa tragedy, the imme-
diate result of this battle was the de facto independence of the duchy of
Pomerania.41 As the surviving Polish dukes quickly turned on one another
in an attempt to claim Leszeks lands, witopek was free to continue
expanding his state without interference from Poland.
Yet, at the same time that witopek was asserting his independence,
a new translocal organization was making its presence felt on this fron-
tierthe Teutonic Order. What made this organization different from the
ones that witopek had been supporting is that during the course of
the thirteenth century they attempted to create a territorial state in the
Vistula delta, in the process claiming lands that witopek considered
his own. Such border conflicts would eventually lead to fifteen years of
intermittent legal and armed conflict between witopek and the Teu-
tonic Knights. In the beginning, however, their relationship was defined
by cooperation rather than contention, as witopek viewed them as
just another translocal organization taking part in the Prussian mission.
In order to understand how their interests came to diverge, it is first nec-
essary to take a step back and analyze the development of the Prussian
mission up to the arrival of the Teutonic Knights.

40For an extended discussion of the political relationship between the dukes of

Pomerania and Poland at the turn of the thirteenth century, see Gerard Labuda, Stanow-
isko prawno-polityczne ksit Pomorza Nadwilaskiego na przeomie XII i XIII wieku,
Zapiski Historyczne 66 (2001), 195226.
41 Labuda, HP I/1, 407. For a summary of the various chroniclers accounts of and
modern historiographical debates on the Gsawa tragedy, see Monika Bruszewska-
Gombiowska, Biskup wocawski Micha: Dziaalno kocielna, gospodarcza, polityczna
(12201252) (Gdask: Wydawnictwo Marpress, 2002), 103121. For the immediate after-
math in Great Poland see Sawomir Pelczar, Wojny Wadysawa Odonica z Wadysawem
Laskonogim w latach 12281231, redniowiecze Polskie i Powszechne 5 (2009), 100126.
36 chapter one

The Development of the Prussian Mission:

From Episcopal State to Ordensstaat

witopek was not the only person who saw an opportunity to create
a new state on the frontier of Latin Christendom. While he was carv-
ing out an independent duchy for himself, the papacy was beginning to
take a greater interest in the expansion of this frontier across the Vistula
River into Prussia. Papal involvement in the conversion of Prussia had
been erratic until the beginning of the thirteenth century. The missionar-
ies, Bishop Adalbert (Polish: Wojciech) of Prague and Bishop Bruno of
Querfurt, found martyrdom there around the year 1000. Bishop Otto of
Bamberg and Bishop Henry of Moravia had planned missions there in the
mid-twelfth century.42 But real attempts to convert the Prussians were not
made until the first decade of the thirteenth century.
As in the mission that had taken root a few decades earlier in Livo-
nia, the preaching of the Prussian mission was entrusted to the Cister-
cians, who took the leading role in the missionary program of the Church
before the introduction of the mendicant orders later in the thirteenth
century.43 In the first decade of the thirteenth century the Prussian mis-
sion was conducted by the Cistercians of the Polish monastery of ekno
under the direction of the archbishop of Gniezno.44 It seems that at this
time the archbishop of Gniezno was actively propagating the cult of
St. Adalbert, who had been martyred in Prussia in 997 and whose death is
intimately linked to the foundation of the Polish church and state.45 Part
of this program included the casting of monumental bronze doors for the

42Lszl Psn, Prussian missions and the invitation of the Teutonic Order into Kul-
merland, in The Crusades and the Military Orders. Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval
Latin Christianity, ed. Zsolt Hunyadi and Jzsef Laszlovszky (Budapest: Central European
University, Department of Medieval Studies, 2001), 429; for Adalbert and Bruno, see Ian
Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 4001050 (Harlow: Pear-
son, 2001), 207244.
43See Louis J. Lekai, The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality (Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press, 1977), 5264.
44The main events of this mission have been recounted in varying degrees of detail in
a number of places; in English, see Szacherska, Valdemar, and Psn.
45For the story about the relationship between Adalbert and Poland, see Michael Bor-
golte, ed, Polen und Deutschland vor 1000 Jahren. Die Berliner Tagung ber den Akt von
Gnesen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002); Teresa Dunin-Wsowicz, St Adalbert: Patron
Saint of New Europe, in Europes Center around AD 1000, ed. Alfried Wieczorek and Hans-
Martin Hinz (Stuttgart: Theiss, 2000), 551552; Jerzy Strzelczyk, The Gniezno Assembly
and the Creation of the Gniezno Archbishopric, in Europes Center around AD 1000, ed.
Alfried Wieczorek and Hans-Martin Hinz (Stuttgart: Theiss, 2000), 319321.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 37

archiepiscopal cathedral in Gniezno, which depicted Adalberts mission-

ary activity and martyrdom among the Prussians.46
By the end of the first decade of the thirteenth century, however,
Christian, a west Pomeranian monk from Oliwa, had replaced the abbot
of ekno as leader of this mission. Zenon Nowak has speculated that this
change of leadership might have arisen from a dispute in the Cistercian
chapter general between the Morimund and Clairvaux branches, because
Abbot Gottfried of ekno was condemned for fraudulently acting like a
bishop and leading monks away from their monasteries.47
Christian quickly enlisted the help of both Duke Mciwj I of Pomera-
nia and King Valdemar II of Denmark, whose invasion of east Pomerania
and Prussia in 1210 Stella Maria Szacherska has linked with Danish plans
to colonize Prussia. According to Szacherskas theory, Valdemar pressured
Mciwj and some Prussian lords to donate Santyr on the right bank of
the Vistula and a fort at the mouth of the Pregola river in eastern Prus-
sia to demarcate the boundaries of his intended future conquests.48 In
any event, Valdemar never returned to Prussia, concentrating instead on
Estonia before he was defeated and imprisoned in 1223.49
Tadeusz Manteuffel took a different approach to Christians involvement
in the Prussian mission. Comparing his activities to the state-formation
activities of the bishops of Riga, he argued that Christian was attempting
to found an ecclesiastical state in Prussia, led by the Cistercians.50 There

46Jadwiga Irena Daniec, The Bronze Door of the Gniezno Cathedral, in Studies in
Polish Civilization, ed. Damian S. Wandycz (New York: Institute on East Central Europe,
Columbia University, 1971), 482489.
47De monacho quondam Lugdunensi [ekno] abate qui fraudulenter se fingit epis-
copum, committitur domino Cistercii, et super hoc domino papae scribat. Monachi autem
qui cum eo inordinate vagantur, nisi usque ad Pascha ad domos proprias revertantur, pro
fugitivis habeantur [Statuta capitulorum generalium ordinis Cisterciensis ab anno 1116 ad
annum 1786, ed. Josephus-Mia Canivez (Louvain: Bureaux de la Revue, 1933), 1: 373; quoted
in Zenon Nowak, Milites Christi de Prussia. Der Orden von Dobrin und seine Stellung in
der preussischen Mission, in Der geistlichen Ritterorden Europas, ed. Josef Fleckenstein
and Manfred Hellmann (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1980, 341)]. This was appar-
ently a common problem in the missionary activities of the Cistercians, because as Lekai
notes, the records of the General Chapter abound in restrictive and punitive measures
against vagabond monks and unauthorized preachers (Lekai, Cistercians, 62).
48Szacherska, Valdemar, 75.
49For Denmarks role in the conquest of Estonia see William Urban, The Baltic Crusade
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1975), 2nd ed. (Chicago: Lithuanian Research
and Studies Center, 1994)the references below are to the first edition; see also Grethe
Jacobsen, Wicked Count Henry: The Capture of Valdemar II (1223) and Danish Influence
in the Baltic, Journal of Baltic Studies 9 (1978), 326338.
50Tadeusz Manteuffel, Prba stworzenia cysterskiego pastwo biskupiego w Prusach,
Zapiski Historyczne 18 (1952), 157173.
38 chapter one

are some problems with this theory, however. First, as Szacherska has
pointed out, neither the Cistercians at Oliwa nor those in Poland were
particularly helpful, prompting Innocent III to complain to the chapter
general in 1212 about their uncooperativeness.51 In addition, Christian also
complained to the papacy that the Pomeranian and Polish dukes adjacent
to Prussia were attempting to cash in on the mission by subjecting the
Prussian neophytes to their rule.52 Christian maintained his close con-
nections with Rome, attending the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Here
he demonstrated the fruits of the mission to Innocent III by bringing with
him Prussians to be baptized. He was rewarded for his efforts by being
consecrated as bishop of Prussia.53 In the first years of Honorius IIIs
pontificate, Christian was given even greater control over the Prussian
mission, obtaining the rights to call a crusade, to consecrate additional
bishops and build cathedrals, and perhaps most importantly, the arch-
bishop of Gniezno was stripped of his legatine powers over the mission.54
The main problem that faced Christian, however, was that he needed
an armed force to help defend the proselytized lands. As had happened
in the early years of the Livonian mission, Christian constantly had to
leave his bishopric to recruit crusaders.55 This problem was exacerbated
following the battle at Gsawa in 1227, as the neighboring Polish dukes
spent their energy fighting each other instead of leading crusades. In Man-
teuffels opinion, in order to create a truly independent episcopal state,
Christian needed a force like the Swordbrothers of Livonia, who had
emerged as a military order in Livonia at the beginning of the thirteenth
century.56 The dukes of Pomerania had founded monasteries for two
western military orders on the left bank of the Vistulathe Hospitallers
and the Knights of Calatrava.57 Neither of these orders proved to be very

51Szacherska, Valdemar, 66; PrUB I/1 #6.

52Szacherska, Valdemar, 66; PrUB I/1 #7.
53Szacherska, Valdemar, 67.
54Szacherska, Valdemar, 6869; PrUB I/1 #15, #19, #30.
55Szacherska, 7273; Henry of Livonia begins each of the chapters covering the first
years of Bishop Alberts reign with him coming from or going to Germany [James A.
Brundage, trans., The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1961; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)].
56See Urban, Baltic, 5359; Friedrich Benninghoven, Der Orden der Schwertbrder. Fra-
tres Milicie Christi de Livonia (Kln: Bhlau, 1965).
57The Hospitallers were founded in Pomerania in 1198 (PlUB #9). For the history of
this foundation and the role of the Hospitallers in East Central Europe, see Paul Vincent
Smith, Crusade and Society in Eastern Europe: The Hospital and the Temple in Poland
and Pomerania, Ph.D. diss. (University of London, School of Slavonic and East European
Studies, 1994). The presence of the Knights of Calatrava in Pomerania remains a puzzle.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 39

effective in the mission because of the small size of the houses, so most
likely following the example of the bishop of Riga, Christian decided to
found a new military orderthe Knights of Christ. This new order (also
known as the Knights of Dobrzy, because this land was granted to them
by Duke Konrad of Mazovia) was composed mostly of knights from Chris-
tians native Mecklenburg.58 Despite the endowment of this new order
with fairly extensive lands by the Polish and Pomeranian dukes, it was
still too small to have much of an effect on the mission.59 At the same

There is no record of when they were founded or how the Pomeranian dukes heard about
this Spanish military order. The Knights of Calatrava first appear as witnesses to a charter
granted to Oliwa in 1224, which makes sense considering their association in Spain with
the Cistercians. It is tempting to see this as a form of medieval modeling, where the Cis-
tercians tried to apply the same successful formula in Prussia that had worked in Iberia.
There are two problems, however, with the theory that the Knights of Calatrava were put
in place to protect the Cistercian monastery at Oliwa. First, they were located some dis-
tance away from Oliwa. Second, they were associated with the Morimund branch of the
Cistercians, while Oliwa belonged to the Clairvaux branch [Francis Gutton, LOrdre de
Calatrava (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1955), 220222]. In any event, they did not prevent the sack
of Oliwa and the murdering of its monks by the Prussians in 1226 (MPH 6: 353), and after
appearing as witnesses in another charter in 1230 (PlUB #43), they disappear from the his-
torical record. A brief article from the nineteenth century remains the only work devoted
exclusively to this orders activities in the Prussian mission [Ronuald Frydrychowicz, Der
Ritterorden von Calatrava im Tymau bei Mewe, Altpreussische Monatsschrift 27 (1890),
315320; see also Gerard Labuda, Ze studiw nad najstarszymi dokumentami Pomorza
Gdaskiego, Zapiski Historyczne 18 (1953), 130135].
58PrUB I/1 #67; Nowak, 349; Manteuffel tried to place their founding considerably
earlier, but Nowak has demonstrated that this did in fact take place in 1228, the year of
the papal recognition of this order (PrUB I/1 #68, #69; see also PrUB I/1 #66, #67, #70).
It should be pointed out, however, that not all historians agree with Nowak. In a recent
essay, Maria Starnawska, a leading Polish historian of the military orders in Poland, dated
their foundation to 12161217 [Military Orders and the Beginning of Crusades in Prussia,
in The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Chris-
tianity, ed. Zsolt Hunyadi and Jzsef Laszlovszky (Budapest: Central European University
Press, 2001), 420]. In addition to Manteuffel, Nowak, and Starnawska, the following Polish
and German historians have also studied the role played by the Knights of Dobrzy in
the Prussian mission: Walter Kuhn, Ritterorden als Grenzhter des Abendlandes gegen
stliche Heidentum, Ostdeutsche Wissenschaft 6 (1959), 2642; Stella Maria Szacherska,
Pierwsi protektorzy biskupa Prus Chrystiana, in Wieki rednieMedium Aevum. Prace
ofiarowane Tadeuszowi Manteuffel w 60 rocznic urodzin, ed. Aleksander Gieysztor, et al.
(Warszawa: Pastwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1962), 129141; Gerard Labuda, O nada-
niu biskupa Chrystiana dla Dobrzycw z roku 1228, Roczniki Humanistyczne 20 (1972),
4349; W. Polkowska-Markowska, Dzieje Zakonu Dobrzyskiego. Przyczynek do kwestii
krzyackiej, Przegld Historyczny 2 (1926), 145210.
59Nowak explains that even though the Teutonic Knights chronicler, Peter von
Dusburg, states that there were only 15 knights, if their support personnel were included,
this number could be pushed up to 150, but this was still a very small force (Nowak,
Milites, 348). Even the Livonian bishops, who could rely on the help of the much larger
Swordbrothers, still went to Germany every year to recruit crusaders.
40 chapter one

time that Duke Konrad and Bishop Christian were founding this new mili-
tary order, they also began talks to found another military order, one that
had experience fighting in the Levant, an order that would profoundly
alter the political landscape of the eastern Baltic littoralthe Hospital of
St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem [Hospitale sancta Marie Theutonico-
rum Jherosolimitani], better known in English as the Teutonic Knights.
The exact events surrounding the extent of Duke Konrad of Mazovias
grants to the Teutonic Knights has been one of the most contentious
subjects in Polish and German scholarship since the middle of the nine-
teenth century. Part of the problem results from the fact that as men-
tioned above, both the kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Ordensstaat
attempted to manipulate the memory of their historical relationship dur-
ing the course of their military and legal disputes in the early fourteenth
century. Another problem, pointed out by both German and Polish schol-
ars, is that thirteenth-century contemporaries were already at work on
the manipulation of reputation and memory through the production of
forgeries intended to expand their rights and privileges.60 One recent Pol-
ish historian, Tomasz Jasiski, who attempts to sort through both levels
of manipulation, points out in a reevaluation of the thirteenth-century
sources that:
Both Polish and German historiography look at the beginnings of the Teu-
tonic Knights in Prussia from the perspective of later events. This leads to an
oversimplification and schematization of the complicated relations which
occurred in reality.61
As Jasiski correctly observes, this is an extremely complicated issue and
what follows, due to the necessities of space, is only a very brief outline.
My goal here is simply to position the arrival of the Teutonic Knights in

60Historians, however, disagree as to which documents were forgeries. For the specif-
ics of this debate, see Gerard Labuda, ber die angeblichen und vermuteten Flschun-
gen des Deutschen Ordens in Preuen, in Flschungen im Mittelalter IV: Diplomatische
Flschungen (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1988), 2: 499522; Tomasz Jasiski,
Okolicznoci nadania ziemi chemiskiej Krzyakom w 1228 roku w wietle dokumentu
owickiego, in Balticum: Studia z dziejw polityki, gospodarki i kultury XIIXVII wieku
ofiarowane Marianowi Biskupowi w siedemdziesit rocznic urodzin, ed. Zenon Hubert
Nowak (Toru: Wydawnictwo Towarzystwa Naukowego w Toruniu, 1992), 151163; Tomasz
Jasiski, Kruschwitz, Rimini und die Grundlagen des preussischen Ordenslandes: Urkunden-
studien zur Fruhzeit des Deutschen Ordens im Ostseeraum (Marburg: N.G. Elwert, 2008);
Marian Dygo, The Golden Bull Allegedly Issued in 1226 by Frederick II for the Teutonic
Order, Questiones Medii Aevi Novae 3 (1998), 221244.
61 Jasiski, Okolicznoci, 151.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 41

Poland within the main topic of this chapterwitopeks state-forma-

tion activities.
In 1226 Wadysaw Odonic, witopeks brother-in-law, donated
some lands to the Knights.62 Around the same time Konrad and Chris-
tian approached the Knights with the offer of granting them the land of
Chemno, a region previously granted to Christian by Konrad in 1222.63
From 1228 to 1230, both Konrad and Christian, with the consent of Kon-
rads family, the Mazovian magnates, and the neighboring Polish bish-
ops and dukes, donated to the Teutonic Knights extensive possessions,64
which were confirmed by Pope Gregory IX.65 In 1230 Gregory also con-
firmed the Knights rights to whatever pagan lands they could conquer.66
This issue of rights to conquered lands would eventually lead to conflict
between Christian and the Knights. But in the early years of the arrival
of the Knights in Prussia, the relationship between all of the participants
in the Prussian mission was characterized by cooperation rather than
contention.67
If Christian was attempting to carve out a Cistercian state in Prussia
modeled on the Livonian ecclesiastical state, as Tadeusz Manteuffel has
argued, then he did so, initially at least, with the support of the surround-
ing Polish bishops, the Polish and Pomeranian dukes, and the other reli-
gious and military orders in region. Although there were certainly tensions
between the Polish and Pomeranian dukes, as well as between the various
translocal organizations, Bishop Christian managed to coordinate their
efforts. Even the abbots of ekno and Ld, whom Christian had pushed
out as directors of the Prussian mission, now supported the bishop, argu-
ing that the Teutonic Knights should march into battle under Christians
banner rather than their own.68 This situation, however, would rapidly
deteriorate during the 1230s for a number of reasons. Among these were

62Psn, 437; Urkunden und erzhlende Quellen zur Deutschen Ostsiedlung im Mittel-
alter, ed. Herbert Helbig and Lorenz Weinrich (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell-
schaft, 1970), 2: #49.
63PrUB #41.
64PrUB I/1 #64, #65, #71, #73, #75, #76, #77, #78.
65PrUB I/1 #72.
66PrUB I/1 #80.
67Most of the relevant historical analyses of the Knights arrival in Prussia are in Pol-
ish and German. Psn provides a good analytical account that places this event in larger
European contexts; also see William Urbans narrative account, The Prussian Crusade (Lan-
ham, MD: University Press of America, 1980), 2nd ed. (Chicago: Lithuanian Research and
Studies Center, 2000). The references below are to the first edition.
68PrUB I/1 #74.
42 chapter one

the arrival of the papal legate, William of Modena, the capture of Bishop
Christian by the Prussians, and the state-formation activities of the Teu-
tonic Knights, which put them at odds with both Bishop Christian and the
neighboring Polish and Pomeranian dukes.
In the early years of the Prussian mission, the archbishop of Gniezno
functioned as the papal legate to Prussia.69 On 31 December 1224, how-
ever, Pope Honorius III appointed Bishop William of Modena as his legate
for Prussia and Livonia as well as many other lands on the Baltic littoral.70
This commission was followed three days later by a bull directed to the
Livonian and Prussian converts informing them that the papacy was tak-
ing them under the protection of St. Peter.71 On 9 January, the pope also
informed William that his commission included not only caring for the
faithful, but also the evangelization of the barbarous nations.72 These
three bulls indicate that the papacy had decided the missions on the
eastern Baltic littoral had become too important to be left to the locals.
Honorius would now directly control the mission through his legate, Wil-
liam. Williams first stop was Livonia, because the mission there had been
endangered by years of fighting between the German and Danish coloniz-
ers and missionaries.73 During Williams time in Livonia, his interpreter,
Henry, prepared a chronicle informing him of the history of the Livonian
mission.74 Henry also recorded Williams achievements, describing how
everyone in the region respected his authority, how he forced the Danes
to give the Germans disputed lands,75 made peace between these two

69Rozenkranz, Wojna, 205, n. 10.

70PrUB I/1 #53
71 PrUB I/1 #54.
72PrUB I/1 #55. In November of the same year, Honorius further showed his commit-
ment to the Prussian and Livonian missions by taking Lbeck under the special protection
of the apostolic see so that it could function as the main port of departure for crusaders to
the eastern Baltic (PrUB I/1 #57).
73These two activities of baptism and subjugation went hand-in-hand, as Danish and
German missionaries raced against one another to baptize as many pagans as possible,
eventually handing out holy water to some neophyte leaders, so that they could baptize
neighboring villages before competing missionaries could arrive there: [The Danes] bap-
tized some villages and sent their men to the others to which they could not come so
quickly, ordering great wooden crosses to be made in all the villages. They sent the rustics
with holy water and ordered them to baptize the women and children. They tried thereby
to anticipate the Rigan priests and sought in this manner to put the land into the hands
of the king of the Danes (Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, 189).
74James A. Brundage, The Thirteenth-Century Livonian Crusade: Henricus de Lettis
and the First Legatine Mission of Bishop William of Modena, Jahrbcher fr Geschichte
Osteuropas ns 20 (1972), 19.
75Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, 234.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 43

parties,76 settled disputes between the Germans and the neophytes,77 and
always admonished the Germans not to hurt their subjects by excessive
exactions or undue harshness.78 By the time that William arrived in Prus-
sia in 1228, he apparently found the situation to be well managed, because
he spent the following five years in Silesia, Germany, and Italy, before
returning again to Livonia in 1234.79
During his brief stay in Prussia, however, William apparently cultivated
the friendship of Duke witopek and his son, Mciwj, because in a bull
from June 1231, Pope Gregory IX took the duchy of Pomerania under the
protection of the apostolic see on the recommendation of both the legate
and the Dominicans of Gdask.80 In addition to the de iure recognition
of witopeks sovereignty, the pope also promised the duke spiritual
rewards:
We, therefore, entreat your nobility, enjoining you for the remission of your
sins, to resist the pagans in Prussia and defend the neophytes, equipping
yourself thus powerfully and manfully, so that thereafter the mighty Roman
church would be bound to you, and you could gain the reward of eternal
life from God.81
Gregory was, in effect, authorizing witopek to become a permanent
crusader, whose lands (like those of other crusaders), would be protected
so that he could advance the Prussian mission and defend its accom-
plishments. Although this chapter focuses on the pragmatic aspects of
witopeks policy of using the Prussian mission to forward his own state-
formation goals through his patronage of military orders as well as the Cis-
tercians and Dominicans, it is entirely possible that he imagined himself
to be creating a crusader state, a bulwark to help defend the boundaries
of Latin Christendom. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, later
Polish and Teutonic Knights chronicles depicted him as a pseudo-Chris-
tian and apostate, but one must not ignore this dukes genuine religious
motivations. All the contemporary evidence suggests that witopek saw
himself as a full partner in the Prussian mission. His problem was that his

76Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, 235.

77Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, 233.
78Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, 234.
79Regesten des Bishofs Wilhelm von Modena, in SRP 2: 122124.
80PlUB #44.
81 PlUB #44: Rogamus igitur nobilitatem vestram in remissionem vobis peccaminum
iniungentes, quatenus ad resistendum paganis in Prussia et defendendum neophitos vos
ita potenter et viriliter accingatis, quod exinde vobis Romana ecclesia fortius obligetur et
a deo possitis eterne vite stipendia promereri (PlUB #44).
44 chapter one

neighbors, especially the Teutonic Knights, had a very different idea about
the direction of this mission.
When William finally returned to Prussia in 1234, the situation had
changed dramatically. In 1233 Bishop Christian was captured by the
Prussians,82 and the strained alliance of competing territorial and spiri-
tual ambitions that he had held together quickly began to crumble. The
following year the papacy attempted to fill the power vacuum left by
Christian. In August Gregory placed the Teutonic Knights lands directly
under the protection of the papacy.83 In September he wrote bulls plac-
ing the Knights in Williams custody,84 notifying Duke Konrad of Mazovia
and the bishops of Kujawy and Mazovia about this change in leadership
of the Prussian mission,85 authorizing the preaching of a crusade,86 and
promising indulgences to those already fighting in Prussia87 as well as to
the Prussian neophytes88 if they helped the Teutonic Knights. This final
crusade conducted jointly by the Polish and Pomeranian dukes and the
Teutonic Knights took place in the winter of 12341235.89 However, this
year marked a sea change in relations between the participants in the
Prussian mission, as the various parties fell into numerous legal and mili-
tary disputes which would last most of the next two decades.
In the fall of 1235, William had to arbitrate a dispute between Kon-
rad and the Knights, which broke out as a result of the union of the now
leaderless Knights of Dobrzy with the Teutonic Knights.90 The Teutonic
Knights wanted to keep Dobrzy, but Konrad argued that he had given
this to an organization that was now defunct, so it should be returned to
him. William was able to arbitrate a settlement, in which in exchange for
certain other possessions, the confirmation of those grants already made,
and the payment of 300 marks of silver, the Teutonic Knights agreed to

82Powierski, Stellung, 111.

83PrUB I/1 #108.
84PrUB I/1 #111.
85PrUB I/1 #110, #112.
86PrUB I/1 #114.
87PrUB I/1 #115.
88PrUB I/1 #116.
89Dusburg notes that Duke Konrad of Mazovia, his son, Duke Kazimierz I of Kujawy,
Duke Henryk I Brodaty (the Bearded) of Krakw and Wrocaw, Duke Wadysaw Odonic
of Great Poland, Duke witopek, his brother Sambor, and many other noblemen and
potentates from between the Vistula, Oder, Bbr, and Note rivers [i.e. Poland], took part
in a crusade, which included building a castle for the Knights at Marienwerder (Polish:
Kwidzyn) on the right bank of the Vistula (Dusburg III.10).
90PrUB I/1 #119.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 45

restore Dobrzy to Konrad. In the following year the Knights also turned
against their other founder in Prussia, the imprisoned Bishop Christian.
First, the Knights began to dismantle the physical infrastructure of
Christians episcopal state by conquering his episcopal see of Santyr.91 On
30 May 1236, it looked like they had succeeded in the complete eradi-
cation of Bishop Christian from the political landscape of Prussia, when
Pope Gregory IX told his legate, William, to divide Prussia into dioceses
and de consilio et assensu of the Teutonic Knights to consecrate three
Dominicans as bishops of those dioceses.92 By now William was obviously
and incontestably in charge of the Prussian mission, and his two closest
collaborators were the Knights and the Dominicans.93 Bishop Christian
and the Cistercians had been removed from their leadership role of the
mission.
By the time that Christian finally managed to ransom himself from the
Prussian Sambians in 1238,94 competing interests had already driven the
former collaborators too far apart, leaving him as the bishop of Prussia in
name only. In this same year, witopek began to pursue a policy that
was at odds with other participants of the Prussian mission. The follow-
ing section analyzes how the relations with translocal organizations that
witopek had so carefully cultivated over the previous decade quickly
collapsed as the disputes between himself and his former alliesthe
Teutonic Knights, the duke of Kujawy, the bishop of Wocawek, and his
younger brothersescalated into fifteen years of intermittent warfare.

A Divergence of Interests: The Fifteen Years War, 12381253

The multivalent political, ecclesiastical, and economic forces at play in

the Prussian mission had provided witopek with the allies he needed
both to develop his state economically and to defend it against the politi-
cal claims of the Polish dukes. The duchy of Pomerania was positioned as

91 Powierski, Aspekt, 269.

92PrUB I/1 #125.
93In the winter of 12351236 Gregory authorized the Dominicans to preach another
crusade against Prussia (PrUB I/1 #121). By 1238 the Dominicans had two convents in
Prussia, in Chemno and Elblg [Janusz Trupinda, Wizerunek dominikanw w kronice
Piotra z Dusburgaobraz rzeczywisty czy oficjalna propaganda polityczna Zakonu Nie-
mieckiego? in Dominikanie. GdaskPolskaEuropa, ed. Dariusz Aleksander Dekaski,
Andrzej Goembnik, and Marek Grubek (Gdask: Dominkaskie Centrum w. Jacka / Pel-
plin: Wydawnictwo Diecezji Pepliskiej Bernardium, 2002), 535].
94Powierski, Stellung, 115.
46 chapter one

a bridgehead to Prussia, and the new legal discourse of papal protection

under the aegis of a permanent crusade led by a papal legate had provided
witopek with the opportunity to legitimize his state in an international
forum. As the Teutonic Knights took over the Prussian mission, however,
and made the transformation from a translocal organization to a territo-
rial state, this frontier of Latin Christendom quickly turned into a border-
land pressed by predatory Polish dukes and the Teutonic Knights. Such
a borderland environment made witopek a less appealing ally to the
translocal organizations he had previously supported. He was abandoned
by Lbeck and the Dominicans when both the surrounding territorial and
ecclesiastical rulers attempted to impose their authority on him, while at
the same time his younger brothers attempted to break away from his
dominion. In such an environment, he turned to the only other border-
landers who were in a similar situationthe Prussian neophytes subject
to the unduly burdensome lordship of the Teutonic Knights.
As the Knights took over Bishop Christians lands and began to expand
the boundaries of their holdings to the north, the ensuing conflict between
witopek and the Knights over possession of the Vistula delta would
come to reflect how this frontier of Latin Christendom was quickly turn-
ing into a contentious borderland of competing Christian states. The con-
flict between these two emerging states quickly drew into its orbit all of
the surrounding secular and ecclesiastical rulers, the pagan and neophyte
Prussians, and the translocal organizations that were staking their claims
to positions on this frontierthe Cistercians, Dominicans, Franciscans,
Lbeck, and the papacy. This was not a frontier in which a superior west-
ern power acted upon a backward society, but rather an arena of conflict
in which the competing political, economic, and religious forces brought
to bear by various parties were defined by ever-changing boundaries of
influence and shifting alliances in an attempt to remake the political and
religious landscape.
The series of legal and military conflicts which Edwin Rozenkranz has
labeled the Fifteen Years War,95 resulted from the competing state-forma-
tion activities of witopek and the Teutonic Knights, as both parties tried
to establish hegemony over the Vistula delta. witopek saw the Knights
conquest of Bishop Christians see at Santyr in 1236 as a direct threat to
his duchy, while Sambor, witopeks younger brother, saw this as an

95Edwin Rozenkranz, Wojna pitnastoletnia: Pomorze Gdaskie w walce z Zakonem

Krzyackim w latach 12381253, Gdaskie Zeszyty Humanistyczne 10 (1967), 202238.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 47

opportunity to strengthen his own position within Pomerania.96 The

Knights helped Sambor fortify his castle at Gorzdziej, but witopek
marched with an army from Gdask and defeated his brother and the
Knights.97 Sambor fled to his in-laws in Mecklenburg to try to obtain
reinforcements, while the Knights went back to trying to conquer Prussia.
witopek, however, still faced the revolt of his youngest brother, Raci-
bor, as well as a dispute with his ecclesiastical superior, Bishop Micha of
Kujawy, who excommunicated him in 1237.98 Duke Kazimierz of Kujawy
used this as a pretext to invade Pomerania and conquer the town of
Bydgoszcz, which lay on the border between Pomerania and Kujawy.99
witopek compensated for this loss by capturing his brothers and seiz-
ing their lands and by concluding an alliance with the Prussians, which
resulted in the sack of Elblg and the release of Bishop Christian in 1238.100
By 1238, however, most of the parties were ready to make peace. First,
witopek made peace with his youngest brother, Racibor.101 Baej
liwiski speculates that their sister, Witosawa, might have played the
role of peacemaker in this dispute, because in 1238 Racibor made a grant
to the Premonstratensian convent at ukowo, where she was a nun.102
Sambor was not released until March of the following year,103 but it
should be pointed out that witopek also made a substantial donation
to ukowo in November 1239, which was witnessed by Sambor, as well as

96Powierski, Stellung, 113. It is difficult to say why exactly the brothers fell out. Inter-
necine warfare was certainly common in Poland, usually resulting from inheritance dis-
putes. But, witopek appears to have had a good working relationship with his younger
brother Warcisaw I, before he died between 1227 and 1233. Perhaps this was because
Warcisaw and witopek were around the same age, while Racibor and Sambor were
almost 20 years younger. It is entirely possible that he continued to treat them more
like his children than his brothers, even after they attained their majority. In fact, both
Peter of Dusburg and Sambors own grandson would remember Sambor and Racibor as
witopeks sons [Dusburg III.213; Lites I (2), 282].
97Powierski, Stellung, 114; Rozenkranz, Wojna, 209; PlUB #113.
98Peter Kriedte, Die Herrschaft der Bischfe von Wocawek in Pommerellen: von den
Anfngen bis zum Jahre 1409 (Gttingen: Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht, 1974), 76.
99Powierski, Stellung, 115.
100Powierski, Stellung, 115.
101 Racibor witnessed his brothers treaty with the Knights in June 1238, so he must
have been freed before then (PlUB #65).
102liwiski, Poczet, 43; PlUB #67. In 1246 Witosawa (then Abbess of ukowo) also func-
tioned as a peacemaker in witopeks dispute with the bishop of Kujawy. ...illam com-
positionem, que mediante sorore mea magistra de Succow inter me et venerabilem patrem
Michaelem episcopum Cuiauie et Pomeranie fuerit habita... (PlUB #93). Bishop Micha
also apparently rewarded Witosawa with a grant to her convent for her help (PlUB #91).
103Powierski, Stellung, 117.
48 chapter one

by their mother, Zwinisawa.104 It seems that the women in this family

were doing their best to keep the three brothers from killing each other.
When their mother died in 1240, Sambor also made a grant to this con-
vent pro salute anime matris mee.105 Nothing was said about his broth-
ers, perhaps because Sambor was already planning to break the peace his
sister and mother had made. In any case, he was not the only one who
was preparing for war.
witopek also concluded peace treaties with both the Teutonic
Knights and the bishop of Kujawy in 1238, but both of these treaties left
the path open for further hostilities. In the treaty made with the Knights in
June, witopek promised not to make any alliance with the pagan Prus-
sians, but it did not prevent him from allying with the Prussian neophytes.
He also promised that he and the Knights would resolve their bound-
ary dispute at a later time.106 According to witopeks treaty with the
bishop, concluded in November, witopek was forced to pay indemni-
ties for withholding the episcopal revenues from his lands.107 witopeks
infringements of episcopal rights, however, were not limited to the eco-
nomic realm. In addition to his presumed right to assent to the appointing
and discharging of priests, he also thought that he had the right to render
judgment and punishment on matrimonial cases.108 This treaty is interest-
ing, however, not only because of its demonstration of the level at which
witopek tried to micro-manage the affairs of his state, but also because
it was arbitrated by the two mendicant orders. In fact, this dispute was
arbitrated in the Franciscan convent in Inowrocaw, in Kujawy, which had
been recently founded by Duke Kazimierz of Kujawy.109 The introduction

104PlUB #69.
105PlUB #71, #72.
106PlUB #65; the designation for boundaries used in this treaty [metis...que vulgariter
graniza dicuntur] is interesting, because the German word Grenze is derived from the
Slavic granica. The inhabitants of the Baltic littoral were thinking in terms of territorially
defined space with boundaries of varying degrees of precision long before the Teutonic
Knights and other German settlers surveyed the landscape. For an extended analysis with
many detailed examples of how boundaries functioned both on the ground and in the
minds of the inhabitants of East Central Europe, see Hans-Jrgen Karp, Grenzen in Ost-
mitteleuropa whrend des Mittelalter (Kln: Bhlau, 1972); for a detailed analysis of how
medieval Poles marked these boundaries, see Ryszard Kiersnowski, Znaki graniczne w
Polsce redniowiecznej, Archeologia Polski 5 (1960), 257287.
107PlUB #66.
108Nec instituat nec destituat sacerdotes nisi cum consensus eius. Item causas matri-
moniales non iudicet et uxores pro delictis maritorum... (PlUB #66).
109Dariusz Karczewski, Konwent franciszkanw inowrocawskich w redniowieczu,
Ziemia Kujawska 10 (1994), 1317.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 49

of the Franciscans into the Prussian frontier would have a profound

impact on the relations between witopek and the Dominicans, because
it introduced a challenger to the Dominicans preeminent place as mis-
sionaries to the Prussians. This relationship was already strained because
the Dominicans had just founded a convent in Elblg, which witopeks
Prussian allies had sacked, and one of the provisions of the settlement
included witopek making amends to the Dominicans of Gdask.110 Jan
Powierski argues that the founding of the Dominican convent in Elblg
signified that the Dominicans had already chosen to side with the Knights
as leaders of the Prussian mission.111 This argument is further supported
by the fact that the Knights had also founded a Dominican convent in
Chemno in the mid-1230s,112 and that the papal legates 1236 mandate
to consecrate three Dominicans as the new bishops of Prussia depended
upon the counsel and assent of the Knights.113 In light of this, the Prus-
sian sack of Elblg had not only harmed the convent in that town, but also
hindered the Dominicans endeavors to control the ecclesiastical struc-
ture of Prussia due the reappearance of Bishop Christian. The fact that
the Knights founded a Franciscan convent in Toru in 1239 might also
have given the Dominicans pause for concern that their position in Prus-
sia might be undermined if they continued to support witopek.114
The sack of Elblg also strained relations with witopeks other
translocal allyLbeck, which had founded a colony there in the 1230s.115
witopek took pains to try to retain Lbecks support. Around 1240,
causa perpetue amicicie, he significantly lightened and simplified the
tolls the Lbeckers had to pay in the port of Gdask, and he also freed
the merchants completely from ius naufragii.116 In the 1220s the Lbeck-
ers and witopek had negotiated a complex system of tolls and duties
depending upon the size of the ships and whether they were sailing up

110Item precipimus, ut Predicatoribus de Gdanzc, secundum quod promisit, satisfa-

ciat (PlUB #66).
111 Powierski, Stellung, 114.
112Trupinda, 535.
113PrUB I/1 #125.
114Labuda, Dzieje, 226227.
115Henryk Samsonowicz, Elblg w zwizku miast hanzeatyckich w XIII i XIV w., Rocz-
nik Elblski 12 (1991), 920.
116PlUB #74; Ius naufragii, also called the right of wreck, was the right of a ruler of a
territory to the shipwrecked goods that washed ashore. For an analysis of the evolution of
this concept in a European context, see Rose Melikan, Shippers, Salvors, and Sovereigns:
Competing Interests in the Medieval Law of Shipwreck, Journal of Legal History 11 (1990),
163182.
50 chapter one

or down the Vistula. The Lbeckers also had to pay a fee for the return of
their shipwrecked goods and sailors, which varied depending on the size
of the ship.117 While these concessions significantly lessened the amount
of income derived from the Lbeckers, they were far better than the eco-
nomic and political disaster that would result from Lbeck fighting against
witopek. The Knights, however, could promise more. In December 1242
the Prussian landmaster promised the Lbeckers extensive territorial pos-
sessions in Prussia in exchange for their military support.118
By this time, the Knights had also recruited additional allies. witopeks
brothers had turned to the Knights by 1242 for aid, and in September Duke
Konrad of Krakw (formerly of Mazovia) and his sons, Duke Bolesaw of
Mazovia and Duke Kazimierz of Kujawy, signed an alliance directed explic-
itly against witopek, which Bishop Micha of Kujawy witnessed and
sealed.119 The inclusion of Konrad and his sons in this alliance is somewhat
surprising, considering that just two years earlier Konrad and Bolesaw
had complained to the papal legate, William, that the Knights were trying
to take the land of Lubawa from them, a land they claimed their ancestors
acquired from the hands of the Prussians with their sword and shield.120
The Knights responded to this by reminding the dukes that they had been
invited to Prussia because the dukes were too weak to defend even their
own patrimony, so it was unlikely that they actually possessed these other
lands.121 The fact that this dispute was finally resolved only in their treaty
with the Knights against witopek demonstrates just how much of a
threat the dukes of Mazovia considered him to be. The main reason for
this coalition seems to be that witopek was trying to control navigation
on the Vistula. In order to fill the ducal coffers and take advantage of the
strategic location of his duchy, witopek built a fort along the Vistula at
Sartowice, and began collecting tolls from ships traveling on the Vistula.122
The two main towns in the OrdensstaatChemno and Toruwere
upstream of this fort, so the Knights would have to pay tolls on all the

117 PlUB #33.

118 The Knights promised that not only could they found a town in Prussia, but that
they could also have half of the still unconquered land of Sambia (Rozenkranz, Prawo,
89; PrUB I/1 #140).
119PlUB #78.
120...parentes eorum et ipsi acquisissent eam de manibus Prutenorum cum gladio et
clipeo suo (PrUB I/1 #132).
121 Ad quod respondebant fratres et Pruteni, qui erant ibi, hoc non esse verisimile
neque uerum, cum nec Mazouiam, que est ducum hereditas, a Prutenis potuerint defen-
sare (PrUB I/1 #132).
122Labuda, HP I/1, 446.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 51

ships going to and from these towns to western Europe. This annoyed the
Polish dukes as well, who were also upstream of witopeks duchy. In
addition, both Duke Kazimierz and the Teutonic Knights had captured
some of witopeks castles on the Vistula in the previous conflict, so it
seems that both parties were concerned with the free movement of goods
and people along this river. This is stated explicitly in the treaty: We [the
Polish dukes] promise truly to the mentioned brothers [the Knights], that
their men...should be immune from all exactions both in the waters and
the lands in the duchy of Pomerania.123 The Vistula River, which had just
a decade earlier demarcated the boundary between Latin Christendom
and paganism, had now become a vital economic and military artery,
which all the surrounding rulers were eager to control.
There were still two other figures with claims to both jurisdiction over
the Vistula delta and direction of the Prussian missionthe papal legate,
William of Modena, and Christian, the titular bishop of Prussia. Chris-
tians release from captivity had placed William in an awkward position.
William had supported the Knights as the military and spiritual leaders of
the mission in Christians absence, and after his release Christian began
to complain to the pope about not only the injustices the Knights had
inflicted upon himseizing Santyr and usurping his episcopal rights
but also how they were hindering the Prussian mission by preventing
pagans from being baptized and oppressing the neophytes.124
Gregory seems to have been troubled by Christians complaints, and
he appointed several clerics to investigate these charges in 1240.125 Unfor-
tunately for Christian, Gregory died a year later, and his successor was
not as receptive to his complaints. In July 1243, one month after ascend-
ing the papal throne, Pope Innocent IV ordered William to divide Prussia
into four dioceses.126 At the same time he also informed Christian of what
he had done, and told him to pick one of the dioceses as his new bish-
opric.127 In the fall of 1243, Christian prepared a vidimus of all the rights
granted to him by Innocent IVs predecessorsInnocent III, Honorius III,
and Gregory IXwhich was witnessed by the abbots of eleven Cistercian

123Promisimus vero fratribus memoratis, quod homines eorum tam per aquas quam
per terras in ducatu Pomeranie ab omni exactione...sint immunes... (PlUB #78).
124PrUB I/1 #134.
125PrUB I/1 #134.
126PrUB I/1 #142, #143; Innocents election actually took place almost two years after
Gregorys death, a period in which the papal throne sat vacant after the two-week reign of
Celestine IV in the fall of 1241.
127PrUB I/1 #144.
52 chapter one

monasteries in France, Germany, and Poland, and then sent to the pope.128
Curiously, the abbots of both Christians former monastery of Oliwa and
Oliwas mother house of Kobacz were absent. In fact, all of the abbots
were from monasteries belonging to the Morimund branch of the order,
including Morimund itself. It is difficult to tell why Oliwa had refused to
take part. Perhaps Oliwa had already felt enough of the destructive effects
of witopeks conflict with the Knights.129 Or perhaps, they were just
ready to cede the role that they had previously held in the mission. At
the same time that Christian and the Cistercian abbots were submitting
their complaint to the pope, Innocent IV was entrusting the preaching
of the Baltic crusade exclusively to the Dominicans.130 Three years later
the Cistercian chapter general decided that monks of the Order were to
recite the Seven Penitential Psalms and seven Our Fathers for the success
of the Dominican and Franciscan missions, effectively marking the end
of the Cistercian missions.131
In spite of the declining position of the Cistercians in the Prussian mis-
sion, Christian apparently still commanded the respect of some of the
Prussian neophytes. Jan Powierski has suggested that Christian might
have played a role both in inciting the Prussians to rebel and in having
them submit to witopeks leadership.132 In the winter of 12421243 war
broke out between witopek and his allies (the Prussian neophytes) and
the Teutonic Knights and their allies (the dukes of Poland, witopeks
brothers, and Lbeck). Duke Kazimierz of Kujawy and Duke Przemys I of
Great Poland invaded Pomerania from the south and seized the border-
land castles of Wyszogrd and Nako respectively.133 Przemys, however,
abandoned the war after capturing Nako, and despite Kazimierzs contin-
ued support, witopek and the Prussians still managed to capture most
of Prussia from the Teutonic Knights in 12431244.134 At this stage in the
conflict, Lbecks aid proved to be invaluable to the Knights, who had lost
all of their holdings except for five centers on the Baltic coast and the Vis-
tula River.135 The Lbeckers fleet kept these isolated centers supplied and
disrupted communications between witopek and his Prussian allies on

128PrUB I/1 #153.

129Chronica Olivensis, MPH 6: 353.
130PrUB I/1 #146, #148, #151.
131 Lekai, Cistercians, 62.
132Powierski, Stellung, 120.
133Powierski, Stellung, 121.
134Powierski, Stellung, 121.
135Rozenkranz, Prawo, 910.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 53

the other side of the river. By 1244, with Lbecks help, the Knights had
recovered most of their lands. Unfortunately for the Lbeckers, however,
the Prussian landmaster who had signed the agreement promising them
lands in Prussia was removed from his post, and now that the danger had
passed his replacement was unwilling to bestow such generous grants.136
These events set off a series of disputes between Lbeck and the Knights,
which are beyond the scope of this chapter but are of great interest for
studying competing forms of German law.137 In any event, at this time
the Lbeckers appear to have given up on both of their former allies. They
set out for Sambia in 1246, conquering for themselves the pagan lands
promised to them by the Knights, and returned to Lbeck with pagans
whom they baptized in the Church of St. Mary, broadcasting their rights
to this land in a large public spectacle.138 The Lbeck town council also
sent a letter to the Knights boasting about these events.139
At this same time, relations between the Knights and the papacy were
also beginning to break down, because William had been recalled to
Rome to prepare for the First Council of Lyon.140 At first it appeared that
this change in leadership of the Prussian mission would not affect the
Knights relationship with the papacy. In the first week of February 1245,
Pope Innocent IV decided to deal with both witopek and Christian.
He wrote a letter to the new papal legate, Henry, a Dominican who had
served as Williams chaplain,141 telling him to inform Christian that he
had to take possession of one of the new Prussian bishoprics within two
months, or else lose his episcopal rights.142 In addition, he wrote a letter
to the Knights, praising them for fighting for the faith in Prussia,143 and he
also informed them that Williams chaplain, Henry, would be taking over
Williams duties, because his presence was needed at the papal curia.144
What he did not tell them, however, was that he had instructed Henry
and the archbishop of Gniezno to lift the sentence of excommunication

136Rozenkranz, Prawo, 10.

137See Rozenkranz, Prawo, 1016.
138Urban, Baltic, 178; Lbeckisches Urkundenbuch (Lbeck: Asschenfeldt, 1843), 1 #194.
139PrUB I/1 #189.
140Urban, Baltic, 179.
141 PlUB #82.
142PrUB I/1 #166.
143PlUB #83 and PrUB I/1 #162.
144PrUB I/1 #164.
54 chapter one

that had been imposed on witopek and his Prussian allies if they did
penance for their sins.145
Innocent also wrote a letter to witopek himself, condemning him for
the fact that even though he had been excommunicated for eight years
(he was excommunicated by the bishop of Kujawy in 1237), he contin-
ued to ally himself with pagans against the Knights and crusaders, stating
that those who hear about the excess of such an error are astounded.146
After this condemnation, however, the tone of the letter changes, as he
implores witopek to change his ways:
Thus, we entreat you by the cross and blood of the lord Jesus Christ...to
return to the pious bosom of mother Church and to the business of Christ,
which is carried out in Prussia...so that from this you will position yourself
favorably with the king of heaven and the apostolic see....147
Despite all of witopeks transgressions, Innocent still thought of him as
a partner in the Prussian mission, and despite referring to him in his let-
ter to the archbishop of Gniezno as an enemy of God and persecutor of
the faith,148 the pope still appealed to the spiritual rewards that awaited
witopek if he once again joined the Prussian crusade [negotium Christi,
quod in Pruscia geritur]. Apparently witopek took Innocents words to
heart, because the Knights chronicler, Peter von Dusburg, noted that
witopek, who the day before was so hard-headed and obstinate in his
perfidy, now wanted to return to the bosom of holy mother Church.149
Although this was a common enough expression, and Dusburg was writ-
ing 80 years after the fact, witopek might have genuinely feared that his
soul was in danger. After all, getting a letter from the pope was a pretty
big deal for a minor duke like witopek, and in addition to the heav-
enly rewards, Innocent had also promised his special graces [speciales
gratias].150 In any event, this treaty was not confirmed until October of

145PlUB #82, #84.

146Stupent, qui audiunt tanti erroris excessum... (PlUB #81).
147Te itaque per domini Jhesu Christi crucem et sanguinem obsecramus...ad pium
rediens matris ecclesie gremium negotium Christi, quod in Pruscia geritur...ut ex hoc celi
regem constituas tibi propritium et apostolica sedes... (PlUB #81).
148hostis dei et fidei persecutor (PlUB #84).
149...pridie tam dure cervicis fuit et obstinatus in perfidia...vellet redire ad sancte
matris ecclesie gremium... (Dusburg III.39).
150PlUB #84.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 55

the following year,151 after Innocent had dispatched a new legate to Prus-
sia, Abbot Opizo of Mezzane.152
As Jan Powierski and William Urban have pointed out, 1246 marked a
sea change in relations between the papacy and the Knights. Jan Powier-
ski has argued that not only did Opizo release witopek from the ban of
excommunication imposed by the bishop of Kujawy,153 but he also might
have excommunicated the Knights.154 At the First Council of Lyon in 1245
Innocent had excommunicated and deposed Emperor Frederick II, who
had been a staunch supporter of the Knights. During this conflict between
Frederick and Innocent, the Knights occupied a precarious place, because
both men believed that the Knights were working as the agents of their
enemy. As a result, Frederick seized their possessions in Sicily, while Inno-
cent pressured them in Prussia.155
The Knights also experienced an illusory victory when Bishop Christian
of Prussia died in December 1245, as Innocent then decided to establish
an archbishopric in Prussia, to be governed by the then archbishop of
Armagh, Albert Suerbeer.156 Because the Knights did not want to sub-
mit to an archbishop, they told him it was unsafe in Prussia, so he went
to Lbeck, the staging ground of the Baltic missions, and occupied the
vacant bishopric there.157 His treatment by the Knights encouraged Albert
to become witopeks ally. However, because he was kept away from
Prussia, the duke of Pomerania had to deal with another new papal repre-
sentative, Archdeacon Jacques of Laonthe future Pope Urban IV (1261
1264), who would take a much harsher stance on witopeks activities
than Opizo had done.158

151PlUB #93.
152Innocent wrote to Henry on 7 October 1245 informing him that Opizo was taking
over control of the Prussian mission (PrUB I/1 #170).
153As noted above, this was made possible because witopeks sister had mediated
an agreement between her brother and the bishop (PlUB #93).
154Powierski, Stellung, 122; Tabulae ordinis Theutonici, ed. Ernst Strehlke (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1869; reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975) #499, #504, #507.
155Klaus Militzer, From the Holy Land to Prussia: The Teutonic Knights Between
Emperors and Popes and their Policies until 1309, in Mendicants, Military Orders, and
Regionalism in Medieval Europe, ed. Jrgen Sarnowsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 73. See
also Nicholas Morton, The Teutonic Knights in the Holy Land 11901291 (Woodbridge: The
Boydell Press, 2009).
156Powierski, Stellung, 123; PrUB I/1 #176; see also Urban, Prussian, 199213.
157Urban, Prussian, 201; Urban, Baltic, 180.
158Innocent had appointed Cardinal-Deacon Peter Capocci of St. George as his legate
to Poland and Pomerania in March 1247 (PlUB #94), but he apparently never made it
there, because Archdeacon Jacques of Laon was appointed legate of Poland, Prussia, and
56 chapter one

In October 1247, before the appointment of the new legate, the arch-
bishop of Gniezno and the bishop of Chemno had met on an island
in the Vistula (which separated their two provinces) to try to arbitrate
a more permanent settlement for the dispute between witopek and
the Knights.159 This agreement would serve as a guide for Jacques, who
had been commissioned by the pope to make a long-lasting truce.160 It
should be underscored that witopeks Prussian allies are now referred
to as neophytes, whereas previously they had been called pagans.
Although, as noted above, the fourteenth-century chronicles of the Poles
and the Teutonic Knights depicted witopek as an enemy of the faith
who encouraged his Prussian allies to apostatize, there is little contem-
porary evidence to support this view. The papacy never once used its
main weaponthe crusadeagainst witopek. Although there were
plenty of crusaders in Prussia who certainly participated in the conflict
against the duke of Pomerania, crusading privileges were never granted
explicitly to fight witopek. Instead, the popes treated him as they did
any intransigent Christian ruler, with threats of excommunication. This
weapon would have been of little use against an apostate. In fact, as noted
above, the pope did not just want witopek to stop fighting the Knights.
He was recruiting him to take an active part in the Prussian crusade once
again. As for witopeks allies, the true nature of their religiosity was
revealed by the Peace of Christburg, in which they were represented as
true Christians. This lengthy document, which the legate and the bishop
of Chemno negotiated with witopeks Prussian allies in February 1249,161
served as something of a constitution for the Prussian inhabitants of the
nascent Teutonic Ordensstaat. It guaranteed the Prussian neophytes
expansive rights and privileges and protected them from the undue exac-
tions that Bishop Christian had complained about and which had prob-
ably prompted the Prussians to rebel.
witopek, however, did not fare as well. This was due in large part
to the fact that the issue that had alienated the Knights from the pope
the Knights longstanding support for Emperor Frederick IIwas not as

Pomerania in November (PlUB #97, #98, #99, #99a, #99b). Peter was appointed legate to
Spoleto, Ancona, Tuscany, and Campagna-Marittima in April 1249 [D.P. Waley, Constitu-
tions of the Cardinal-Legate Peter Capocci, July 1249, English Historical Review 75 (1960),
660664].
159PrUB I/1 #194 and PlUB #96.
160PlUB #100.
161 PrUB I/1 #218; for a discussion of the privileges granted to the neophytes see Urban,
Prussian, 209212.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 57

pressing for Innocent after Fredericks army was defeated in the battle
of Parma in February 1248.162 In the peace settlement mediated by the
papal legate in November 1248, witopek was forced to give several dis-
puted borderland territories to the Knights and was denied the right to
claim any indemnities from the Knights for the lands he lost to the Polish
dukes.163 It was a humiliating peace, and to make matters worse, the fol-
lowing month Jacques excommunicated witopek because of his mis-
treatment of his brothers, who were awarded the lands that witopek
had seized from them.164
Having failed in his attempt to use translocal organization to accom-
plish his expansionist goals, witopek now turned to the only other
people who seemed to be dissatisfied with the Knights leadership of
the Prussian mission, the displaced members of the Prussian ecclesias-
tical hierarchyArchbishop Albert of Prussia and Bishop-elect Tetward
of Sambia.165 Tetwards bishopric was still unconquered by the Knights,
while the archbishop was still sitting in exile in Lbeck. Because of these
two ecclesiastics associations with both Lbeck and the Dominicans,
witopek also attempted to use these men to reestablish relations with
his original allies from the 1220s. Albert was both a Dominican and the
bishop of Lbeck, while the Dominican Tetward was the titular bishop
of Sambia, the region of Prussia that had been promised to Lbeck by
the Knights in exchange for their help fighting witopek. The duke of
Pomerania hoped to resolve his dispute with Lbeck in order to reestab-
lish Gdask as an entrept for the region, just as he also hoped that by
winning over the Dominicans to his cause, they might plead his case to the
papacy in order to ease the harsh conditions of the peace imposed on him
by the papal legate. But, at the same time, his dispute with Bishop Micha
of Kujawy had taught him that the only way to be truly independent from
the Polish dukes was to remove the archdeaconate of Pomerania from the
bishopric of Kujawy, so that he could more easily control the ecclesiasti-
cal revenues. It seems, therefore, that he also sought to take advantage of
the changing episcopal system that was emerging in the Baltic to free his
duchy from the Polish church.166

162See Joseph R. Strayer, The Political Crusades of the Thirteenth Century, in A His-
tory of the Crusades. Volume 2: The Later Crusades 11891311, ed. Robert Lee Wolff and Harry
W. Hazard (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 355.
163PlUB #110, #111.
164PlUB #114.
165Powierski, Stellung, 126; Labuda, HP I/1, 527; PrUB I/1 #225.
166For an analysis of Tetwards activities see Bruszewska-Gombiowska, 173178.
58 chapter one

Unfortunately for him, his attempts to use these men to renegotiate a

settlement with the papal legate, reestablish friendly relations with the
Dominicans and the Lbeckers, and found an autonomous bishopric
in Pomerania all proved to be unsuccessful. To begin with, Albert was
a highly divisive figure, who refused to negotiate with the Knights leg-
ates. When one legation came to Lbeck in July 1249, Albert stayed out of
town for over a week, because he was occupied with other business, and
both the Dominicans and Franciscans witnessed the legates complaint
about the archbishops intransigence.167 In October, Innocent informed
both parties that they had to appear before him in Lyon by the following
Easter.168 The settlement reached by the judges-delegate in this dispute,
including the former papal legate in Prussia, Bishop William of Modena,
did not really settle anything. William and his colleagues essentially told
Albert and the Knights to lump their losses and get on with the business of
running the crusade [crucis et fidei negotium].169 Nothing was said about
the fact that Albert was prevented from taking up his office in Prussia.
In fact, this settlement was designed to bury the past in order to plan for
the future. One of the provisions of the settlement was that if pagans of
any land want to convert to the faith, the same archbishop with the bish-
ops and above said brothers [the Teutonic Knights] should receive them
kindly and benevolently under tolerable and decent conditions.170 The
papacy, in fact, already knew which people would be converted, because
Mindaugas, the ruler of Lithuania had approached the Teutonic Knights
about the possibility of an alliance with them against a rebellious prov-
ince in exchange for his conversion to Christianity.171 The dispute between
Albert and the Knights was hindering the Lithuanian mission. In order to
end it, the pope agreed in March 1251 that Albert would be given Riga in
Livonia as his see after the death of the bishop there.172 The attention of
the papacy as well as Archbishop Albert was now focused further east on

167The Knights legate had Lbecks mendicants bear witness to the fact that Albert
had made no attempt to contact him during his stay in the city (PrUB I/1 #223).
168PrUB I/1 #225.
169PrUB I/1 #240.
170...si pagani alicuius terre ad fidem converti voluerint, idem archiepiscopus cum
episopis et fratribus supradictis eos comiter et benigne suscipiet sub conditionibus tol-
lerabilibus et honestis (PrUB I/1 #240).
171 S.C. Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: a Pagan Empire in East-Central Europe, 12951345
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 51.
172PrUB I/1 #241; Urban, Baltic, 186.
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 59

Livonia and Lithuania, which meant that witopek was losing his lever-
age as defender of the Prussian mission.
witopek then turned to Tetward, the Dominican bishop-elect of
Sambia, whom the Knights were still preventing from entering his bish-
opric.173 The duke of Pomerania hoped for a great deal from his alliance
with Tetward. First, he wanted Tetward to help him reestablish friendly
relations with the Dominicans and through them with the papacy. He
also saw in him the possibility of reestablishing friendly relations with
the Lbeckers, who as mentioned above had conquered part of Sambia,
despite the fact that the Knights reneged on their promise to grant this
land to them. Finally, he granted Tetward all of the bishop of Kujawys
possessions in Pomerania in hopes of securing an autonomous bishopric.174
None of these actions succeeded. Instead, they led to witopeks final
settlement with the Knights in 1253.
As noted above, the Dominicans had succeeded in replacing the Cister-
cians as the papacys directors of the Prussian mission in the 1230s and
1240s. By the 1250s, however, their preeminent position was beginning to
be challenged by both the Franciscans, who came to Prussia a decade after
the Dominicans, and the Teutonic Knights themselves. Although Arch-
bishop Albert was a Dominican, as were Bishops Heidenrich of Chemno
and Ernst of Pomezania, in 1249 Innocent IV named Heinrich von Stritt-
berg, a priest of the Teutonic Knights, as bishop of Warmia.175 Heinrich
was replaced in 1251 by Anselm von Meissen, another priest of the Teu-
tonic Knights.176 Also, despite the fact that the Dominican Heidenrich
crowned Mindaugas king of Lithuania in 1251, the Knights also succeeded
in getting a priest from their order installed as bishop of Lithuania.177 In
this climate, there was little that Tetward could do, and in February 1253
he, in fact, lost his own office to the Franciscan John of Diest178 after the

173Labuda, HP I/1, 527.

174Labuda, HP I/1, 527.
175PrUB I/1 #219.
176Gerard Labuda and Marian Biskup, Dzieje zakonu krzyackiego w Prusach:
gospodarkaspoeczestwopastwoideologia (Gdask: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1986),
169.
177Koczowski, Dominicans, 87; PrUB I/1 #273.
178Labuda, Dzieje, 169; Urkundenbuch des Bistums Samland, ed. C.P. Woelky and
H. Mendthal (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1891), 1: #18. For more on John, see Williell R.
Thomson, Friars in the Cathedral: The First Franciscan Bishops, 12261261 (Toronto: The
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975), 5257.
60 chapter one

Franciscans in Toru complained about witopeks alliance with pagans

and acts of violence against the Prussian neophytes.179
Tetwards attempts to make amends with Lbeck in witopeks name
had, however, met with some interest at meetings in Wismar in June 1251,180
and Lbeck in April 1252.181 Nevertheless, a Lbeck colony would not
return to Gdask until 1263.182 The Lbeck merchants had begun to look
further east, and witopek had lost his connection to the city after Tet-
ward was charged in June 1253 with unjustly occupying lands belonging to
the bishop of Kujawy.183 Already removed from his bishopric in Sambia,
he was then denied his claim to found a new bishopric in Pomerania.
After this, he disappears from the historical record.
In 1253 witopek was reminded that he must live alongside not only
Poles and Germans, but also the Slavic rulers of west Pomerania, when
Duke Barnim I invaded his western frontier in an attempt to recover
Sawno and Supsk,184 which witopek had taken in the 1220s and 1230s.185
In 1253 witopek also received his last papal bull. In this letter Innocent
reminded him that finally after the divisions of wars, the massacre of
many, and much damage, his legate, Jacques, had made a peace which he
had sworn to and signed with his seal, but which he broke all the same.186
There was no attempt to reenlist witopek in the Prussian crusade, and
the peace treaty that he did finally sign with the Knights in July 1253 all
but precluded him from participating in any more crusades, because if he
entered the Knights lands with a force of 100 knights or more, he would
have to cede Gdask to the Knights.187 It was unlikely that witopek
would take the chance that his knights would be interpreted as crusaders
rather than invaders or that the Knights would even ask for his help. This
was the end of witopeks career as a crusader.
In the end, witopeks associations with the emerging translocal orga-
nizations that would come to dominate the Balticthe Teutonic Knights,

179PrUB I/1 #259.

180PlUB #133.
181 PlUB #137.
182PlUB #204.
183PlUB #138.
184Powierski, Stellung, 126.
185Labuda HP I/1, 405406.
186...tandem post guerrarum discrimina, multorum stragem et plurima dampna...(PlUB
#144 and PrUB I/1 #264).
187...si nos deinceps terram predictorum magistri et fratrum cum centum viris equiti-
bus vel pluribus hostiliter invaserimus...castrum Danense et terra cum pertinentiis omni-
bus ad predictorum fratrum dominium devolvatur... (PlUB #156 and PrUB I/1 #271).
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 61

the Dominicans, and Lbeckersproved to be an unsatisfactory path

to state formation. While witopek did eventually normalize relations
with Lbeck ten years after the end of the war, his brother, Sambor, had
already cultivated relationships with all of the economic powers of the
region. Sambor founded his own Lbeck colony in his port city of Tczew
and also granted the burghers from towns in the OrdensstaatChemno,188
Toru,189 and Elblg190freedom from tolls in his lands. In addition, he
rewarded the Teutonic Knights with extensive lands in the Vistula basin.191
Needless to say, witopek no longer supported the Knights. Nor did he
fight against them, however. When the Prussians rebelled again in 1260,
he sat on the sidelines, letting the Knights determine the development of
this new Christian land.192 Instead, he chose to further endow his ances-
tral monastery of Oliwa,193 which had also given up on playing any role in
directing the Prussian mission. Oliwas association with witopek would
continue to cause the monks many problems, even after he had made peace
with the Knights, because Sambor tried to take lands belonging to what he
thought of as witopeks monastery in order to found his own Cistercian
monastery and further develop his own nascent duchy.194 This led to a long-
lasting dispute, but it was one that was left to his eldest son, Mciwj, to
resolve. In 1266 witopek died and was buried with his ancestors at Oliwa.

Conclusion: The Closing of the Vistula Frontier195

The frontier duchy of Pomerania had loomed large in the ambitions of

the westerners who flooded into the pagan-Christian frontier in the first

188PlUB #136 and PrUB I/1 #257.

189PrUB I/1 #258.
190PlUB #161 and PrUB I/1 #318.
191 PlUB #134 and PrUB I/1 #254, PlUB #145 and PrUB I/1 #263; PlUB #159 and PrUB I/1 #283.
192Powierski, Stellung, 127; for the Great Prussian Uprising see Urban, Prussian, 243
268 and Christiansen, 208209.
193PlUB #202, #209.
194See chapter two.
195I borrow the title of the conclusion from Archibald R. Lewis [The Closing of the
Medieval Frontier 12501350, Speculum 33 (1958), 475483], but I am using this concept in
a very different way. Lewis comment that in Eastern Europe after 1250 one notices a simi-
lar contraction of Western European influence cannot be supported (479). The Teutonic
Knights continued to expand to the east in the late thirteenth century, and during this
same time the Lbeck merchants formed the Hanse, which linked the markets of Eastern
and Western Europe. In fact, it was the expansion of the frontier further to the east that
closed the Pomeranian frontier.
62 chapter one

decades of the thirteenth century. Within a generation, however, this for-

mer bridgehead had become a roadblock. Whereas the Vistula had been
the boundary of Latin Christendom, with the first Prussian episcopal see
located just across this boundary, within a few decades the conquests of
the Teutonic Knights and King Mindaugas of Lithuanias conversion to
Christianity in 1251 had pushed the bounds of Latin Christendom con-
siderably further east.196 By mid-century it looked to the papacy as if
paganism would be wiped out in Europe if not for troublemakers like
witopek, who were inciting the neophytes to revolt. witopek had
earlier managed to locate himself and his duchy at the vanguard of papal
plans for the then terra incognita, which resulted in the papacy legitimiz-
ing witopeks independence from the Polish dukes in 1227 and 1231. The
papacy continued to try to cultivate witopeks help in the Prussian cru-
sade throughout his conflict with the Knights, up until 1253. At this point
Pope Innocent IV came to view him as an impediment to the Teutonic
Knights further conversion of the pagan Baltic peoples, so he was com-
memorated in the final bull as an enemy of Christendom.
The memory of witopeks accomplishments also suffered at the
hands of the Teutonic Knights and the Polish rulers, who contended over
this duchy in the decades after his death. His role in the Prussian mission
was written out of their histories, as they attempted to bury the memory
not only of witopek, but also of the borderland society that had allowed
him to emerge as an independent ruler. Fourteenth-century Poles and
Teutonic Knights attempted to impose their own competing, simplified
visions of order on a complicated world of overlapping political, ecclesi-
astical, and economic jurisdictions and ever-changing markers of group
and individual identity.
By the time of the 1320 and 1339 trials, as we will see in chapter 5,
the Polish witnesses had completely forgotten about witopek, while
his son, Mciwj, was commemorated as a loyal Polish prince, who held
Pomerania in the name of an imagined kingdom of Poland, to which this
land had belonged ab antiquo. Similarly, as mentioned above, some early
fourteenth-century Polish chroniclers remembered the early Pomeranian
dukes as royal officials in a kingdom which did not actually exist.
At the same time, the Teutonic Knights, who since 13081309 had
been in possession of the duchy of Pomerania, vilified witopeks

196It should be pointed out that the Lithuanian mission was a complete failure, ending
with Mindaugas apostasy and eventual murder in 1263 (Rowell, Lithuania, 51).
 a iugo principum polonie, a iugo theutonicorum 63

s tate-formation activities. Peter von Dusburg, whose criticism of the duke

of Pomerania has been outlined above, has witopek imparting these
words to his heirs on his deathbed:
After the war arose between me on the one hand and the brothers of the
German House on the other, I always grew weaker; I fought against them
by fair means and foul and in all kinds of ways, but I accomplished nothing,
because God is with them and fights for them. Therefore my counsel is that
you never oppose them, but honor them with all reverence.197
Even this long-vanquished troublemaker had to be made to recognize the
Teutonic Knights destiny to found a territorial state on the Baltic littoral.
In the end the monks at Oliwa were the only ones to preserve
witopeks memory and the memory of the borderland society of the
thirteenth century, because in the fourteenth century they were still
affected by these memories. Although the Teutonic Knights were the
lords of Pomerania in the fourteenth century, many rulers from different
states had held it in between witopeks death in 1266 and the Knights
conquest in 13081309. In order to preserve the memories of the grants
made by all their former benefactors, the monks could not buy into the
emerging statist discourse of the kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic
Ordensstaat, which attempted to appropriate the memory of Pomera-
nia for political purposes. This is why Oliwas abbot wrote a chronicle
of his monastery in the middle of the fourteenth century which praised
witopek.198 Although the following chapters will furnish frequent illus-
trations of the ways that the abbots of Oliwa functioned as their lords
advocates during the Knights occupation of Pomerania, they were not

197Postquam inter me ex una parte et fratres domus Theutonice ex altera bellum cre-
vit, ego semper decrevit; per fas et per nefas et modis variis impugnavi eos et non profeci,
quia Deus cum eis est et pugnat pro eis. Unde consulo, quod nunquam vos eis opponatis,
sed cum omni reverencia honorate (Dusburg III.128).
198According to Jarosaw Wenta, the Chronica Olivensis (MPH 6: 290350) was writ-
ten down in the late 1350s or early 1360s [Studien ber die Ordensgeschichtsschreibung am
Beispiel Preuens (Toru: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikoaja Kopernika, 2000), 225],
while Christoph Friedrich Weber dates the chronicle ca 134851 [Chronica Olivensis,
in The Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, ed. Graeme Dunphy (Leiden: Brill, 2010),
381]. Wojciech Ktrzyski, the editor of this chronicle, points out that the author of the
chronicle was probably Polish, because he used Polish names for people and places rather
than their German equivalent, and was most likely the abbot of Oliwa, who had the Pol-
ish name Stanisaw (MPH 6: 284, 269). Pomeranian did not figure as a separate ethnic
identifier for Ktrzyski, but Baej liwiski has recently argued that the chronicler came
from the Pomeranian knighthood [Kilka uwag o autorstwie Kroniki oliwskiej i opacie
Stanisawie, Roczniki Historyczne 73 (2007), 129138]. Some scholars have argued that the
author of the chronicle was actually the prior of Oliwa, Gerhard von Brunswalde.
64 chapter one

pawns of the Teutonic Knights. Christoph Friedrich Weber is certainly

correct that this chronicle was produced to inform the Knights of Oliwas
rights and privileges.199 But, this required the author to remind the Knights
about the complexities of the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century
borderland society in which Oliwa had gained its rights and privileges,
the memory of which the Knights were doing their best to efface in their
own fourteenth-century chronicles. This perhaps explains why the author
of this chronicle went to such pains to reconcile the Knights memory of
witopek with the institutional memory of his monastery:
...and although the aforesaid prince, as is written above, had done so much
against the brothers and the order, I think, nevertheless, that he did not
do such things without good reason, especially since the ancient monks of
Oliwa in his day, who knew his life best, left behind in writing such things
concerning his virtues: that he was merciful, a lover of God and his servants,
especially the religious; moreover, he was a just judge, first of widows and
orphans, then of others; in addition, he was a doughty defender of his lands
and men, a clement judge, yet not so severe an avenger of wrongs done to
his own person.200
This monk represented witopek as the perfect lord, especially in the
eyes of his predecessors. Of course, it is difficult to determine whether
this author actually believed this, or whether he, like Peter von Dusburg,
was just instrumentalizing witopeks memory for his own purposes
in this case, to instruct his present lords, the Teutonic Knights, in the
requirements of good lordship, by demonstrating that even the Knights
most bitter enemy possessed these excellent qualities. Yet, as members of
a translocal organization charged with the preservation of witopeks
deeds and the salvation of his soul, the Cistercians of Oliwas spiritual and
temporal welfare depended on making sure that this dukes memory was
not buried by either the kingdom of Poland or the Teutonic Ordensstaat.
As we will see in the following chapters, the critical distance that these
Cistercians could take in these disputes over the memories of the past was
not often available to others.

199 Weber, 382.

200...et licet prefatus princeps talia, ut prescriptum est, contra fratres et ordinem
fecerit, estimo tamen ipsum sine racionalis motionis causa talia non fecisse, precipue
cum fratres antiqui monachi Olyvenses ipsius contemporanei, qui vitam ipsius optime
noverunt, de virtutibus suis talia reliquerunt in scriptis: quod fuit misericors et amator
Dei et servorum eius, maxime religiosorum; fuit eciam iustus iudex primo viduarum et
orphanorum, deinde aliorum; fuit insuper strennuus defensor terrarum suarum et homi-
num, clemens iudex nec severus ultor iniuriarum in personam suam illatarum (MPH 6:
305306).
 CHAPTER TWO

DEALING WITH THE PAST AND PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE:

CONTESTED MEMORIES, CONFLICTED LOYALTIES,
AND THE PARTITION AND DONATION OF POMERANIA
IN THE LATE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

The previous chapter has suggested ways in which witopek attempted

to take advantage of the duchy of Pomeranias position on the frontier of
Latin Christendom to build an independent state, which was legitimized
by his role as a leader of the Prussian mission. Yet, when the Teutonic
Knights quickly pushed the frontier of Latin Christendom further east, his
duchy was transformed into a borderland state, subject to his neighbors
predations. Although witopek maintained the peace with the Teutonic
Knights until his death and did not take any further military actions
against his brothers or participate in the Great Prussian Uprising of 1260,
he was left to deal with the internal and external complexities of ruling a
borderland duchy. He fought border wars with the neighboring Polish and
west Pomeranian dukes, and he had to contend with his brothers state-
formation activities in lands that bisected his own.
This contentious situation was exacerbated by witopeks division of
his possessions between his sons following his death in 1266. WarcisawII,
the younger son, was for some reason awarded the northern and more
prosperous lands of the duchy, centered on the port city of Gdask and
the familys ancestral monastery at Oliwa. Mciwj IIdespite the fact
that he was the eldest son, had fought beside his father for more than
two decades, and had been held as surety by the Teutonic Knights during
their dispute with his fatherwas relegated to the geographically more
extensive but economically and strategically weaker southern lands of the
duchy, centered on the recently founded city of wiecie. Historians have
long debated why witopek favored his younger son at the end of his life,
but whatever his motivations for doing so, they sowed the seeds for a new
period of internecine warfare along the south Baltic littoral.1 Mciwj was

1A number of historians have drawn attention to the fact that in the last year of his
life, witopek referred to Warcisaw as dilectissimus filius meus in the witness list of
a charter (PlUB #208), suggesting from the superlative that witopek had come to favor
66 chapter two

determined to capture the lands to which he thought himself entitled, just

as Warcisaw was determined to remove this pretender. The two brothers
uncles, Sambor and Racibor, whose lands bisected those of Mciwj and
Warcisaw, were unavoidably drawn into the ensuing conflict, and as in
the wars of the 1230s-1250s, so too were their neighbors.2
In the series of internecine wars that broke out almost immediately
after witopeks death, all four Pomeranian dukes scrambled to ally
themselves with one or more of the surrounding predatory lordships.
Although they tried to take advantage of the existing rivalries among their
neighbors to strengthen their own positions, in the end, all of them had
promised part or the entirety of their lands to their allies. When the wars
finally ended, Mciwj, the last man standing, was left to deal with his
neighbors competing claims on his newly acquired lands. These unfin-
ished narratives of dispute would lay the foundation for the fourteenth-
century claims to this duchy made by the Teutonic Knights and the kings
of Poland. In order to understand the complexities of these competing
claims, it will first be necessary to analyze the chain of events that set
them in motion.

The Pomeranian Civil War, 12661273

Even before witopeks death in January 1266, his sons and brothers
began cultivating relationships with the surrounding rulers to strengthen
their own positions. The first to do so were witopeks brothers. As the
previous chapter has illustrated, the Teutonic Ordensstaat was built not
only through conquest, but also through the pious donations of the sur-
rounding Polish and Pomeranian secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The
Knights did run afoul of some of their former benefactors (for example,
the dukes of Mazovia had disputes with the Knights in 1235 and 1240),3 but
most of the neighboring dukes still believed in the Knights cause, includ-
ing witopeks brothers, Racibor and Sambor, who rewarded the Knights

the only surviving son from his second and still living wife over his middle-aged son from
his previous marriage. See for example Baej liwiski, Poczet ksit gdaskich: Dynastia
Sobiesawicw XIIXIII wieku (Gdask: Wydawnictwo Marpress, 1997), 54; Jan Powierski,
Ukad kamieski (1264) na tle stosunkw midzy ksitami pomorski, Krzyackami i
Prusami w latach szedziesitych 13 wieku, Rocznik Olsztyski 8 (1968), 11.
2For the division of the territories, see Labuda, HP I/1, 529530.
3See chapter one.
 dealing with the past and planning for the future 67

for their help in their dispute with witopek by granting them extensive
lands in their recently restored possessions.
As described in the previous chapter, Racibor had joined Sambor in
his struggle against their elder brother. Racibor had been imprisoned by
witopek, but he was eventually released and given free possession of
his inheritance of Biaogarda on the eba River in the western part of the
duchy.4 While we do not know a great deal about Racibors life, we do know
that at some point before his death, which most likely occurred in 1272,
he joined the Teutonic Knights and donated the entirety of his property
to them.5 Some scholars have speculated that he might even have gone to
the Mediterranean to fight for the Knights.6 In any event, it is important
to stress here that the Teutonic Knights were not defined primarily as a
German political organization at this time. They were still regarded first
and foremost as a religious order, and the idea that a Pomeranian duke
would have given his lands in veram...elemosinam7 and pro suarum ac
parentum suorum animarum remedio8 should not be regarded cynically.
The fact that the Knights provided military aid in addition to spiritual
rewards must have been seen as an added bonus.9 Besides, many of the
members of the other religious orders in Poland, especially the mendi-
cants who preached in cities which contained large German populations,
were of German descent. The hard ethnic lines that would be drawn in
later centuries were still fluid at this time.10

4 For a brief biographical account of his life, see liwiski, Poczet, 4344.
5 We learn about this from the settlement Mciwj made with the Teutonic Knights in
1282: ...de quadam parte Pomeranie, que ad eosdem fratres devoluta fuerat, ut dicebant,
ex collatione quadam Ratyborii...qui per ingressum religionis eorundem fratrum se et sua
deo et ipsi domui sancta Marie dedicaverat... (PlUB #336; #337).
6 Mikoaj Gadysz, The Forgotten Crusaders: Poland and the Crusader Movement in the
Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 363; liwiski, Poczet, 44.
7 See PlUB #279; Dusburg III.213. Dusburg attempts to strengthen the Knights claims
to Pomerania by stating that each of witopeks four sons (actually two sons and two
brothers) gave the entirety of their possessions to the Knights, except for Mciwj. He also
mistakenly has Warcisaw, rather than Racibor (whose name he did not even remember)
joining the Teutonic Knights. I quote this passage in its entirety and analyze it in greater
detail below.
8 PlUB #280.
9 Attempts were made by the Knights, the Polish rulers, and the papacy to maintain
this position well into the fourteenth century, even after the relationship between the
Ordensstaat and the kingdom of Poland had degenerated into open warfare.
10These blurry lines are expressed in a 1278 letter written by the Teutonic Knights to
the Polish knights living in Chemno, reminding them (in German!) that they have to fight
in Poland and Pomerania as well as in Prussia (PlUB #298). In addition, in the 1339 trial,
several ethnic Poles who had fought with the Teutonic Knights against Poland testified for
the Polish side in the trial. Chapters four and five have extended discussions of ethnicity.
68 chapter two

Sambor had also allied himself with the Teutonic Knights, although
he was simultaneously cultivating relationships with the dukes of Poland
and Mecklenburg, as well as the king of Denmark and the town council
of Lbeck. In addition, his grants were not made exclusively to the Teu-
tonic Order,11 but also to their subjects. In April 1252 Sambor, who now
called himself duke of Pomerania, rewarded the burghers of Chemno
and Toru for their fidelitatis constantia in his conflict against his
brother with the free passage of goods throughout his lands.12 He also
looked further west for assistance. In 1248 he married his eldest daughter,
Magorzata (Margaret), to the future King Christopher I of Denmark, and
in 1260 he granted Lbeck law to his port city of Tczew.13 He also used
the connections with his in-laws in Mecklenburg14 to challenge the posi-
tion of the traditional ducal monastery at Oliwa.15 In 1260 he granted a
village in Pomerania to the abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Doberan
in Mecklenburg, and around the same time he founded his own Cistercian
monastery in lands that he had previously granted to Oliwa.16 Through
his own grants to the Teutonic Knights as well as witopeks grants to
the Dominicans, Sambor had learned that monasteries could be used as
weapons in disputes. They were markers of lordship that also provided
lines of communication with the rest of Latin Christendom. Unfortunately
for him, in this case, these connections proved to be a liability. Oliwa com-
plained to the papacy about this violation of its rights, and Pope Urban IV
appointed the abbots of two west Pomeranian, Premonstratensian monas-
teries in Usedom (Polish: Uznam) and Belbuk (Polish: Biaobok) as judges-

11 PrUB I/1 #263; PlUB #133, PlUB #159.

12 PrUB I/1 #257, #258; PlUB #136.
13 Lbeck law was not granted to Gdask again until 1263 (PlUB#204). As discussed in
the previous chapter, witopek had asked the Dominican bishop-elect of Sambia to try
to patch things up between himself and the Lbeckers in 1251 and 1252, after Lbeck had
supported the Teutonic Knights in the wars of the previous decade, but his legation had
been unsuccessful (PlUB #133, #137).
14 He was married to Duchess Matylda (Mechtild) of Mecklenburg.
15 For the history of this new monastic foundation, see Romuald Frydrychowicz,
Geschichte der Cistercienserabtei Pelplin und ihre bau- und Kunstdenkmler (Dsseldorf:
L. Schwann, 1905).
16 See PlUB #183 and #184, although the latter is a later forgery and should be used care-
fully. Sambors daughter, Magorzata, also maintained close relations with the monastery
at Doberan, choosing it as her final resting place in 1282 (liwiski, Poczet, 60). For the his-
tory of Doberan, see Sven Wichert, Das Zisterzienserkloster Doberan im Mittelalter (Berlin:
Lukas, 2000).
 dealing with the past and planning for the future 69

delegate in 1262.17 Four years later, the papal legate in Poland, Cardinal
Guido, Presbyter of St. Lawrence in Lucina, authorized these two judges to
excommunicate Sambor.18 The fact that this sentence was delivered just a
few months after his brothers death did not bode well for Sambor, as his
nephews took this opportunity to invade his duchy and drive him from
it early in 1267.19 This began nearly a decade of intermittent, internecine
warfare between Sambor, Warcisaw, and Mciwj.20 The precise details
and chronology of events of this war need not concern us here, but the
shifting alliances and conflicting grants which took place during this con-
flict are complicated and need to be discussed more fully.
Mciwj had begun looking for allies even before his fathers death,
possibly because he already knew that he would not be receiving the
lions share of his fathers duchy. In 1264, in Camin (Polish: Kamie) in
west Pomerania, Mciwj, who had already become duke of wiecie,
made a rather curious arrangement with Barnim, his dear kinsman
[dilecto...consanguineo] and duke of west Pomerania.21 Mciwj prom-
ised Barnim not only his own lands after his death, but also the lands of
his brother and father, which would devolve to him after their deaths.22
As we will see later in this chapter and the next, it was common for Polish
and Pomeranian dukes who did not have a male heir to name successors.
We will also see that these testaments were seldom ratified, either because
of changing positions between the two men (for example, the birth of a

17 PlUB #191; Urban was perhaps more interested in this dispute than another pope
might have been, because of the years he spent in Pomerania as a papal legate (when he
was Archdeacon Jacques of Laon) trying to resolve the dispute between witopek and
the Teutonic Knights.
18 PlUB #212.
19 Powierski, Stellung, 127; PlUB #218.
20 For an analysis of this war see Kazimierz Jasiski, Wojna domowa na Pomorzu
Gdaskim w latach 1269/701272 ze szczeglnym uwzgldnieniem roli rycerstwa i
monowadztwa, Spoeczestwo Polski redniowiecznej 3 (1985), 135187; Edward Rymar,
Walka o Pomorze Gdaskie w latach 12691272, Rocznik Gdaski 47 (1987), 533.
21 PlUB #206; Barnims mother, Mirosawa, was witopeks sister (liwiski, Poczet,
2728). For a detailed analysis of this agreement, see Powierski, Ukad; see also Franz
Engelbrecht, Das Herzogtum Pommern und seine Erwerbung durch den Deutschorden 1309
(Potsdam: Robert Mller, 1911), 1924.
22 Igitur notum esse volumus tam presentibus quam posteris, quod nos de mera nos-
tra liberalitate dilecto nostro consanguineo domino Barnim illustri Slauorum duci ac suis
heredibus contulimus et donavimus totam terram nostram Scwecensem cum omnibus ter-
minis, iuribus aliisque suis attinentiis possidendum in omnibus et per omnia eo iure, quo
nos ipsam tenuimus ac possedimus, eiusdem terre possessione nobis, quamdiu vixerimus,
tantummodo reservata. Conferimus etiam ei suisque heredibus et donamus terras, castra,
civitates, villas et universa dominia, que ad nos devolvi poterunt vel devolventur a patre
nostro et a fratre, cum omni iure post obitum nostrum libere possidenda (PlUB #206).
70 chapter two

son or a falling out between them), or because the nobles in their lands or
the neighboring dukes opposed these inheritances. One should look upon
these agreements as provisional treaties that might give someone a claim,
but certainly not exclusive rights, to the promised lands. This is an impor-
tant point to keep in mind in this and the next chapter concerning the
series of events that led to the reappearance of the kingdom of Poland.
Scholars have debated who Mciwj had in mind as a possible enemy
when he made this treaty, because he ended up fighting against almost all
of his relatives and neighbors. Jan Powierski has convincingly argued that
Mciwj and Barnim were entering into an alliance against the Teutonic
Knights (Mciwjs perennial foes) and the margraves of Brandenburg
(who threatened both dukes and were beginning to take an active role
in the Prussian crusades),23 as well as against Sambor and his daughter,
Margaret, who was ruling as regent in Denmark.24 It seems that Barnim,
however, was unwilling to wait and hope that Mciwj and his brother
died without sons. Just after Mciwj and Warcisaw invaded Sambors
lands, Barnim invaded Sawno, in central Pomerania, just as he had done
in 1253, during witopeks conflict with the Knights.25 This would not be
the only time that the Pomeranian dukes allies capitalized on the interne-
cine Pomeranian warfare to carve out bits of the duchy for themselves.
Despite these apparently unilateral actions on Mciwjs part,26 rela-
tions between the two brothers did not break down immediately after
their fathers death in January 1266.27 They jointly conquered their uncle
Sambors territory with the help of the Prussian neophytes. Because of
Sambors close relations with the Knights, as well as Mciwjs traditional
alliances with the Prussians subject to the Knights rule, the Knights were
brought into the conflict. Facing Barnims invasion from west Pomerania,
Warcisaw made peace with the Knights in August 1267. This should not,
however, be viewed as a separate peace, because the treaty was drafted
in Mciwjs capital city of wiecie by Mciwjs chaplain and notary,

23In the winter of 12551256, Margrave John led a crusade to Prussia, but because the
winter was unusually warm, the swamps did not freeze over, making campaigning impos-
sible; a decade later he returned with his brother, and this time, the crusade was more
successful, resulting in the building of a castle, which was named Brandenburg in their
honor (Dusburg III.77, 125127).
24Powierski, Ukad, 20, 32.
25See chapter one.
26Neither witopek nor Warcisaw witnessed Mciwjs treaty with Barnim.
27Powierski, Stellung, 127.
 dealing with the past and planning for the future 71

Meinhard.28 Mciwj was also forced to make peace in January of the fol-
lowing year, when a large group of crusaders, led by King Pemysl Ottokar
II of Bohemia arrived in Prussia. In fact, the king of Bohemia mediated
the peace, which was sworn to by both parties in Chemno.29 While
these treaties with the Teutonic Knights would continue to be honored
for the remainder of the dukes lives, peace in Pomerania would prove
to be short-lived. By the end of the following year, all of the powers in
this region (except the Teutonic Knights) would be drawn into open con-
flict through an unrelated but interconnected series of internal revolts in
Pomerania and Kujawy.
Let us turn first to Pomerania. In April 1269 Mciwj enlisted the sup-
port of the margraves of Brandenburg by agreeing to hold his possessions
from them in fee.30 As Gerard Labuda remarks, this is one of the most
peculiar feudal arrangements in the history of Pomerania, because at first
glance it explained nothing of the reasons for Mciwjs behavior.31 It
does indeed appear that Mciwj is giving away everything and getting
nothing in return, but as Mciwjs 1264 agreement with Duke Barnim has
shown, he apparently thought of these arrangements as conditional and
provisional. His nobles, however, apparently did not. Later in the year he
was captured by his own barons and handed over to his brother.32 Edward
Rymar points out that the reason Mciwjs men turned against him was
because they did not want to submit to the margraves.33 But, neither his
earlier grant to the margraves nor his nobles reactions to it prevented
Mciwj from promising parts of his duchy to the Teutonic Knights, whom
he was able to contact during his imprisonment.34 Despite these prom-
ises, neither the margraves nor the Teutonic Knights came to Mciwjs

28 PlUB #222.
29 PlUB #225, #226; for more on the peace treaties of 12671268 see Gerard Labuda,
Pomorsko-krzyacki zatarg graniczny z roku 1267/1268. Przyczynek do migracji Prusw na
Pomorze Gdaskie, Zapiski Historyczne 50 (1985), 187194; Kazimierz Jasiski, Pomorsko-
krzyackie ukady pokojowe z 1267 i 1268 roku, Zapiski Historyczne 47 (1982), 103115.
30 PlUB #238.
31 Labuda, HP I/1, 530531.
32 ...captum et traditum ei per suos barones... (Rocznik kapituy poznaskiej, MPH
ns 6: 49).
33 Rymar, Walka, 23; for the margraves aspirations in Pomerania, see Hermann Krabbo,
Danzig und die askanischen Markgrafen von Brandenburg, Preussische Jahrbcher 177
(1919), 4754; see also Jzef Spors, Rzekome tytuy prawne Brandenburgii do Pomorza
Gdaskiego opierajce si na potwierdzeniach z 1231 i 1295 r., in Personae, Colligationes,
Facta, ed. Janusz Bieniak (Toru: Zakad Nauk Pomocniczych Historii Instytutu Historii i
Archiwistyki UMK w Toruniu, 1991), 240247.
34 Powierski, Stellung, 128.
72 chapter two

defense. He was instead saved by other Pomeranians, who, Rymar argues,

had been angered by Warcisaws decision to name his nephew, Duke
Wisaw II of Rgen, as his successor, because the west Pomeranian dukes
had consistently interfered in central Pomerania.35 Warcisaw fled first to
Elblg in Prussia and then to Kujawy.36
Sambor had already been looking for support in both of these states.
After he was chased out of Pomerania, he had sought to gain a new ally by
marrying his daughter, Salomea, to Duke Siemomys of Kujawy.37 Unfor-
tunately for him, his timing could not have been worse, because in 1269
Siemomyss men rose up against him.38 The reason for the revolt given by
the Chronicle of Great Poland is that Siemomys listened to the Teutonic
Knights instead of the great men of his duchy.39 However, as Kazimierz
Jasiski argues, this was not simply an example of ethnic conflict, but
rather the result of tensions between the great men of Kujawy, includ-
ing Bishop Wolimir, and their new duke, Siemomys, who succeeded his
father in 1267.40 The Kujawians asked for the help of Duke Bolesaw of
Great Poland, and by 1271 Siemomyss entire duchy had submitted to

35Rymar, Walka, 31.

36Wodarski, witopek and Mciwj II, 424425.
37liwiski, Poczet, 6465.
38Kazimierz Jasiski, Porozumienie kujawsko-pomorskie w 1280 r., Zapiski Histo-
ryczne 21 (1955), 1723.
39Anno denique predicto primates terre Cujauie cernentes, quod Semomisl dux
eorum ipsis spretis Fratrum Barbatorum [the Teutonic Knights] interim consiliis eorum
utebatur in omnibus sequens favores, adheserunt Boleslao duci Polonie. Semomisl vero se
tam confuse derelictum prospiciens Boleslao duci Polonie nobile castrum Cruszuiciense
dono assignavit, ut ipsius industrioso favore milicie Cuyauie reconciliatus ipsos ad sue
obediencie gremium revocaret (Kronika Wielkopolska, MPH ns 8: 124). Some scholars, like
Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz, have also seen broader ethnic implications for this
revolt, arguing that Siemomyss preferential treatment of the Germans also contributed
to the revolt [National Consciousness in Poland until the End of the Fourteenth Cen-
tury: A Sociological Approach, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 8 (1981), 256].
In the settlement drafted in 1278, Duke Przemys II of Great Poland, who was mediating
the dispute between Siemomys and his brother, Leszek, who had taken over control of
Kujawy, stated that German knights would be prevented from serving in his duchy until
the third generation: ...quod predictus Zem. dux Cuyavie frater noster, Teuthonicales
milites et filios militum Teuthonicalium in terra et curia sua servare denegaret (KDW
I #482). Kazimierz Jasiski, however, argues that there were probably very few German
knights in Kujawy; but this provision might have been made against the increasing num-
ber of German settlers in the villages and towns, because the document also says that
Siemomys would have to obtain the consent of his barons before locating towns in the
duchy: ...Zem. volens locare civitates vel villas cum consilio maturo baronum suorum...
(Jasiski, Porozumienie, 1920; KDW 1 #482).
40Jasiski, Porozumienie, 1718; Derwich, 228.
 dealing with the past and planning for the future 73

Bolesaws rule.41 Siemomys welcomed allies in this conflict and entrusted

to Warcisaw the castle of Wyszogrd on the Pomeranian-Kujawian-Great
Polish borderland.42 Because Mciwj was thus threatened from the south
by Warcisaw and from the west by Warcisaws ally, Duke Wisaw II of
Rgen,43 and the Teutonic Knights had been the traditional allies of his
uncles, Sambor and Racibor, Mciwj appealed to the margraves of Bran-
denburg for help, offering them Gdask as a reward.44 Yet, it is difficult
to believe that he actually intended to permanently cede this town to the
margraves, considering Mciwjs track record of making vain promises
and the fact that Pomerania was being torn apart because he had gone to
war with his brother over control of Gdask. When his brother unexpect-
edly (although probably not accidentally)45 died in Wyszogrd in 1271, he
no longer needed the margraves help. Nevertheless, this did not prevent
his ally from taking not only the promised reward of Gdask, but also
Tczew, the other major town in Pomerania, with the collaboration of the
German burghers in the two towns.46
In the 1271 letter promising Gdask to the margraves, Mciwj still
referred to the Lbeck colony in Gdask as burgensibus Theuthonicis
fidelibus.47 But when Mciwj recalled these events in 1283 and 1290,
he would refer to the German inhabitants of Pomerania as committing
treason [crimen lese maiestatis].48 Yet, as with the rebellion in Kujawy,
the reason for the burghers collaboration with the occupying margraves
was far more complicated than ethnicity alone. Mciwj was not opposed
simply because the German burghers preferred a German lord. Rather,
the Lbeck burghers preferred a lord who would be amenable to confirm-
ing their extensive privileges and perhaps granting new ones. The south
Baltic littoral might have become a borderland of contentious predatory
states, but as Sambors dispute with Oliwa illustrated, translocal organiza-

41 Powierski, Stellung, 128.

42 Krystyna Zieliska, Zjednoczenie Pomorza Gdaskiego z Wielkopolsk pod Koniec XIII
w.: Umowa Kpiska 1282 r. (Toru: Pastwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1968), 24. This
castle had been controlled by the dukes of Pomerania until, as mentioned in the previous
chapter, witopek lost it to Siemomyss father, Duke Kazimierz of Kujawy.
43 Rymar, Walka, 30.
44 PlUB #250.
45 liwiski states that although the exact cause of his death is unknown, he probably
died at the hands of Mciwjs supporters (Poczet, 55).
46 Wodarski, witopek, 426.
47 PlUB #250.
48 PlUB #365, #464.
74 chapter two

tions could still play an important role in the formation or destruction of

those states.
Warcisaw and Sambor had both proven themselves to be strong allies
of the Lbeck merchants. As mentioned above, Sambor had founded
a Lbeck colony in Tczew in 1260. Similarly, in the first two years of
Warcisaws reign in Gdask, he promised the Lbeckers freedom of move-
ment within his lands, freedom from ius naufragii,49 and a lifetime of
friendship.50 Now that Warcisaw had died and Sambor had been driven
out of Tczew, the Lbeckers had to wonder where they stood, especially
because Mciwj had taken part in his fathers wars against them.51 The
margraves of Brandenburg, on the other hand, had gone to Lbeck in
August 1272 to promise the town council that Lbeck merchants would
be free from all tolls and ius naufragii not only in Gdask, but throughout
Pomerania and along the Vistula River.52
Mciwj now turned to the only neighboring ruler who he had not
fought against, Duke Bolesaw of Great Poland. As described above, the
Kujawians had turned to Bolesaw when they rebelled against Siemomys,
and so if Bolesaw was not actually Mciwjs ally in his war against
Sambor and Warcisaw, he was at least the enemy of his enemies. It is dif-
ficult to determine what relationship these two entered into. The Annals
of the Pozna Chapter use the language of lordship [impetravit consilium
et auxilium], although there is no mention of Mciwj doing homage to
Bolesaw.53 However, considering Mciwjs earlier performance of hom-
age to the margraves of Brandenburg, this seems a possibility, although not
a prerequisite for his help. Bronisaw Wodarski correctly points out that
Bolesaw, who had long been at war with the margraves, probably feared
the strategic advantage that possession of Pomerania would have given to
Brandenburg.54 In any event, in January 1273 Bolesaw and Mciwj drove
the margraves men out of Pomerania.55

49 witopek had already promised this to the Lbeck merchants of Gdask in 1240.
See chapter one.
50 PlUB #220, #232. ...promittimus amiciciam vobiscum tempore vite nostre... (PlUB
#220); also worth mention is the fact that Warcisaw fled first to Elblg, where there was a
Lbeck colony. Perhaps he was trying to enlist the support of the Lbeckers as well as the
Knights before he joined forces with Sambor in Kujawy.
51 See chapter one.
52 PlUB #254, #255.
53 Rocznik kapituy poznaskiej, MPH ns 6: 50.
54 Wodarski, witopek, 426; Zieliska, Zjednoczenie, 1417.
55 Labuda, HP I/1, 532.
 dealing with the past and planning for the future 75

The nature of this borderland society, however, dictated that Mciwj

and the margraves would not remain enemies for long. In September 1273
Mciwj renewed his alliance with the margraves, receiving the central
Pomeranian lands of Sawno and Supsk from them in fee and promising
to aid the margraves against all of their enemies, except Duke Bolesaw.56
Yet, Mciwj gained little from this agreement, because Duke Wisaw II of
Rgen, Warcisaws heir-designate, maintained control of central Pomera-
nia until he sold it to the margraves in 1277.57 When the margraves did not
grant the lands to Mciwj, he campaigned with Duke Bolesaw against
them in 1278.58 The close relationship that developed between these
dukes lasted until Bolesaws death in 1279 and would be remembered by
Bolesaws successor, Duke Przemys II, who also succeeded to Mciwjs
duchy in 1294 and in the following year became the first king of Poland in
more than two centuries.
Although this has been a complicated narrative, a few major themes
should be underscored. First, the fluidity of amity and enmity is striking.
Alliances were dissolved as quickly as they were made. Second, ethnic-
ity did not determine the nature of these alliances. Poles fought for and
against Germans and vice versa. Finally, the success or failure of a dukes
policies depended upon the approval of the secular and ecclesiastical
magnates of the duchy. The arrangements made between the rulers of
the various states were not worth the parchment they were written on
without the consent of their men. It is important to keep all of these issues
in mind as the fallout from this civil war is analyzed.
During a decade of intermittent warfare, many promises were made to
the surrounding Polish and German rulers by all the dukes of Pomerania
in an attempt to gain superiority over the entirety of the duchy. In the
end, however, it was Mciwj who succeeded in driving his kinsman out
of the duchy and winning the war. The deaths of Sambor, Racibor, and
Warcisaw without male heirs in the years immediately after the reso-
lution of the conflict should have made Mciwjs authority in Pomer-
ania absolute. Yet, because of the promises made both by himself and
his relatives, this proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. The resolution of this
conflict was just the beginning of a new conflict, as the surrounding Pol-
ish and German rulers struggled for the next half century, both on the

56PlUB #256.
57PlUB #285.
58Labuda, HP I/1, 532.
76 chapter two

battlefield and in the courtroom, to gain control of Pomerania. In what

follows I shall analyze the course of the first phase of this dispute and its
repercussions.

Dealing with the Past:

Resolving Conflicting Claims in Pomerania, 12741281

By the time of Sambors death in 1276, much of Pomerania had been

promised elsewhere. The disputants had granted parts of the duchy to
the Teutonic Knights, and Mciwj had twice disposed of the entirety of
the duchy, first to the dukes of west Pomerania and then to the margraves
of Brandenburg. In addition, some of the lands granted by Sambor to the
Knights had previously been granted to his new Cistercian monastery of
New Doberan, which had itself been founded on lands taken from the
Cistercian monastery at Oliwa. Added to these conflicting grants was the
problem of inheritance. Warcisaw died without any children, but he had
designated Duke Wisaw II as his heir. Racibor also died childless, but
upon entering the Teutonic Order, Racibors property devolved to the
Knights. Sambor, on the other hand, was survived by five daughters, all
of whom had been dispossessed by Mciwj, and one of whom, Salomea,
was married to Duke Siemomys of Kujawy, who also had pretensions
to parts of the duchy of Pomerania. When the deposed duke of Kujawy
returned to power in 1278, he was committed to recovering not only the
lands taken from his wife and her sisters, but also the borderland castle
of Wyszogrd, which Mciwj conquered after Siemomys had entrusted
it to Warcisaw.59 Further compounding this problem was the fact that
Mciwjs first marriage had produced only daughters, and his second
marriage was to Eufrozyna, the middle-aged, widowed wife of Duke
Kazimierz I of Kujawy, who already had three young sons, including
Siemomys and the future king of Poland, Wadysaw okietek. Mciwj
had to spend the next six years trying to reconcile all of the promises
made by himself and his brother and uncles in these numerous conflict-
ing grants.
He had already begun to try to resolve the dispute between Oliwa and
New Doberan in 1274, a couple of years before his uncles death.60 The
document recording this is interesting for a number of reasons. First,

59Jasiski, Porozumienie, 2627.

60PlUB #260.
 dealing with the past and planning for the future 77

instead of just sending the monks back to Mecklenburg, Mciwj appro-

priated Sambors grant and positioned himself as the new founder of the
monastery, thus obliterating the memory of his uncle and legitimizing his
own position as the sole source of authority in Pomerania. Second, this
donation illustrates that through his alliance with Duke Bolesaw of Great
Poland, he might have started to see his activities as contributing to Polish
unity in the face of external aggression. He refers to founding the mon-
astery for the honor of Saints Mary, Benedict, and Bernard, but he also
adds the name of the martyr and bishop Stanisaw. Stanisaw had been
the bishop of Krakw during the reign of the last king of Poland, Bolesaw
the Bold, in the late eleventh century.61 According to the Vita maior that
was written by the Dominican Wincenty of Kielcza several years after
Stanisaws canonization in 1253, God cursed Bolesaw for murdering and
dismembering the bishop in 1079 with an appropriate punishmentthe
division of his kingdom.62 Yet, because the bishops body miraculously
healed without scars, Wincenty writes that one day the kingdom of Poland
will once again be unified.63 It should be pointed out, however, that this
saint might also have appealed to Mciwj because his own duchy had
been partitioned and reunited under his rule. It is difficult to know what
Mciwj made of the story, and it is only by viewing this event through a
teleological lens that we can think that the only possible interpretation is
that the son of the man who freed Pomerania from the yoke of the Polish
princes64 wanted in 1274 to reunite his duchy with Polish duchies and
thus take the initiative in the restoration of the kingdom of Poland.
Whatever his nephews views on who the patron saint of the monastery
should be, Sambor was not yet ready to relinquish his rights of patron-
age to the new Cistercian foundation, at least not to his nephew. Having
been chased out of Kujawy after the defeat of his son-in-law, Sambor had
taken refuge with the Teutonic Knights in Elblg. In March 1276 Sambor

61 Tadeusz Grudziski, Bolesaw the Bold, called also the Bountiful, and Bishop Stanis-
laus: The Story of a Conflict, trans. Lech Petrowicz (Warsaw: Interpress Publishers, 1985).
62 Agnieszka Ronowska-Sadraei, Pater Patriae: The Cult of Saint Stanislaus and the
Patronage of Polish Kings 12001455 (Krakw: Wydawnictwo UNUM, 2008), 6572; see
also Jerzy Koczowski, The Church and the Nation: The Example of the Mendicants in
Thirteenth-Century Poland, in Faith and Identity: Christian Political Experience, ed. David
Loades and Katherine Walsh (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 4755; Aleksandra Wit-
kowska, The Thirteenth-Century Miracula of St. Stanislaus, Bishop of Krakow, in Procs
de canonisation au Moyen ge: aspects juridiques et religieux, ed. Gbor Klaniczay (Rome:
cole Franaise de Rome, 2004), 149163.
63 Vita Sancti Stanislai Cracoviensis episcopi, ed. Stanisaw Ktrzski, MPH 4: 391392.
64 See chapter one.
78 chapter two

confirmed his earlier grants to New Doberan as well as Mciwjs grant,

showing that he was still in control of this monastery, and while he appre-
ciated the grant made by his dear relative [dilecti cognati nostri], his
confirmation was needed to validate the grant.65 A few days later he con-
ferred the land of Mewe (Polish: Gniew) on the Knights66 and promised in
a separate document to compensate the Knights if they were ever dispos-
sessed of this land by Oliwa or his son-in-law, Duke Siemomys, although
oddly he did not mention Mciwj.67 Jan Powierski has questioned how
voluntary this donation was, considering that Sambor left Prussia almost
immediately after signing these documents.68 Yet, whatever their rela-
tionship at this time, both Sambor and the Knights were well aware of
the contentious nature of this grant, assuming that it might very well be
invalidated by a trial. As such, one should consider the possibility that
Sambor was driven by genuine religious motivations, hoping to ensure
his salvation by providing a just and equitable settlement for both his
new Cistercian foundation and the long-time beneficiaries of his alms, the
Teutonic Knights.
In 1276 and 1277 Mciwj changed his strategy of dealing with the new
monastery. Instead of erasing Sambor from the historical record, Mciwj
now tried to put his uncle in his historical place. In 1276 Mciwj recon-
firmed his father and uncles grant of Mewe to Oliwa in 1229,69 while in
1277 he confirmed Sambors and his fathers grants to his [Mciwjs]
monastery.70 By pairing Sambor with his father, he relegated him to the
past, a past that was no longer relevant, because Mciwj was now the
only duke of Pomerania. Whether Sambor was already dead by 1277 or
if he died a year later is not terribly important, because whatever the
case, Mciwj had already appropriated Sambors memory for his own
purposes.71 Mciwj, however, did not comment on the grant that Sam-
bor had made in 1275 of a church in Tczew and some nearby villages to
the Cistercian nuns at Chemno in order to found a daughter-house in
Pomerania.72 If he had to take over the financial burdens of dealing with
Sambors grants, then he planned to reap the political rewards. Nothing

65 PlUB #277.
66 PlUB #278.
67 PlUB #280.
68 Powierski, Stellung, 129.
69 PlUB #284.
70 PlUB #292.
71 liwiski locates his time of death between 1276 and 1278 (Poczet, 42).
72 PlUB #272.
 dealing with the past and planning for the future 79

could be gained from granting a convent in the Teutonic Knights lands

permission to found a daughter-house in Pomerania, as this would give
the Knights an added incentive to claim the Pomeranian lands granted to
them by Mciwj and his relatives.
In 1278 Mciwj also reached out to two other religious orders in Pomer-
ania. First, he asked the Dominicans in Gdask to found a new convent
in Supsk.73 As described above, the margraves of Brandenburg had prom-
ised Mciwj that he could hold central Pomerania in fee when this area
was in fact held by Duke Wisaw II of Rgen. Yet, after Wisaw sold it to
the margraves in 1277, they made no attempt to bestow it upon Mciwj.
The foundation of monasteries could be very important for the demarca-
tion of state boundaries in East Central Europe,74 and the foundation of
a convent with Dominicans from Gdask would certainly have strength-
ened Mciwjs claims to this disputed borderland.75 In 1278 Mciwj
also granted the village of Lubieszewo (German: Liebschau), outside of
Tczew, to the Hospitallers. This was undoubtedly done, as he claims, for
the remission of his sins and for his parents souls, but it is also possible
that he was trying to secure allies in his approaching dispute with the
Teutonic Knights.76 The number of grants made in the years following the
Pomeranian civil war to all the monasteries in Pomerania suggests that
the dux tocius Pomoranie, as he now called himself, was attempting to
represent himself as a defender of ecclesiastical interests in order to coun-
terbalance his refusal to fulfill the promises made to the Teutonic Knights.
He also sought allies outside of Pomerania. In 1280 he endowed the
Cistercian monastery of Ld in Great Poland with a number of villages77
and granted the bishop of Pock in Mazovia lands in Pomerania.78 Although
it would be a mistake to judge these grants cynically as solely political

73PlUB #301.
74Karl Borchardt, The Hospitallers in Pomerania: Between the Priories of Bohemia
and Alamania, in The Military Orders. Volume 2: Welfare and Warfare, ed. Helen Nicholson
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 295306; John B. Freed, The Friars and the Delineation of State
Boundaries in the Thirteenth Century, in Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays
in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer, ed. William C. Jordan, et al. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1976), 3140, 425428. Emilia Jamroziak has demonstrated that this also occurred
along the English-Scottish border [Border Communities between Violence and Opportu-
nities: Scotland and Pomerania Compared, in Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and
Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795, ed. Richard W. Unger (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 124].
75In 1280 he also reconfirmed and expanded his fathers grants to the Dominicans in
Gdask (PlUB #315).
76PlUB #300.
77PlUB #314.
78PlUB #319.
80 chapter two

acts, it seems fair to say that by giving away small pieces of his duchy to
a number of different recipients, he was trying to get as many people as
possible interested in the well being of his state in order to prevent having
to give away large pieces of his duchy to the Teutonic Knights.
This assessment is borne out by the fact that Mciwj also met
with Duke Siemomys of Kujawy, Sambors son-in-law, to try to resolve
Sambors daughters inheritance issues.79 In the fall of 1280, these two
dukes met in Rzepka on the Pomeranian-Kujawian borderland. As dis-
cussed above, Siemomys had been Sambors most loyal supporter since
he married Sambors daughter, Salomea, in 1268. This alliance, however,
benefited Sambor little, because during the three years of the most intense
fighting in the Pomeranian civil war, 12691271, the duke of Kujawy was
preoccupied with a revolt of his ecclesiastical and secular magnates
against his rule in favor of accepting Duke Bolesaw of Great Poland.80
When Siemomys returned to power in 1278 he began to stake his claim
not only to the borderland castle of Wyszogrd (which Siemomyss father,
Duke Kazimierz, had taken from Mciwjs father, witopek, in 1243, but
which Siemomys had in turn lost back to Mciwj in 1271), but also to his
father-in-laws former possessions in Pomerania, centered on Tczew.81 As
a result of this meeting Mciwj agreed to provide Sambors daughters
with estates in Pomerania in exchange for being able to retain possession
of Wyszogrd for the rest of his life.82
Having made peace with his former enemy in Kujawy, Mciwj turned
once again to the issue of the disputed land of Mewe, which Sambor had
promised first to Oliwa, then to his new monastery, and then to the Teu-
tonic Knights. In 1281 Mciwj again confirmed Sambors grant of Mewe to
Oliwa, this time providing exact boundaries.83 This was almost certainly
done in preparation for the impending settlement of the Knights claims
to this same land. It would be much easier to deal in specific rather than
abstract space. In addition, Mciwj persuaded the prior of the Gdask
Dominicans and the parish priest of Gdask to witness this document in
order to provide additional sources of authority.

79 Jasiski, Porozumienie.
80 Jasiski, Porozumienie, 1718.
81 Jasiski, Porozumienie, 2332.
82 Jasiski, Porozumienie; Labuda, HP I/1, 533; Zieliska, Zjednoczenie, 43; PlUB #317a,
#384, #671, #672.
83 PlUB #326.
 dealing with the past and planning for the future 81

1282The Origin of the Teutonic Knights

and Polish Kings Claims to Pomerania

By 1282 Mciwj had to the best of his ability dealt with the past concern-
ing Sambors grants to his children and the Cistercians. Now he had to
come to terms with the grants made by himself and his relatives to the
Teutonic Knights. There was also the question of who would inherit his
duchy after his death, as all previous candidates had become his enemies
during the 1270sDuke Barnim of west Pomerania, the margraves of
Brandenburg, and Duke Wisaw II of Rgen. In addition, Mciwjs ally
and cousin, Duke Bolesaw of Great Poland, had died without a son in
1279, so that duchy passed to the late duke of Great Polands nephew,
Przemys II.84 Mciwj had apparently quickly developed a close tie with
the new duke of Great Poland, because when Przemys was captured by
Duke Henryk IV of Wrocaw85 in February 1281, Mciwj began organiz-
ing a military expedition to Silesia before Przemys was eventually freed.86
The very next year, when compelled to return to Silesia to stand trial in
front of the papal legate, Bishop Philip of Fermo, in the matter of the
Teutonic Knights claims to significant parts of his duchy, Mciwj passed
through the duchy of Great Poland, where he made an agreement with
Przemys that was to have great implications in the fourteenth century for
both the Teutonic Ordensstaat and the kingdom of Poland.
With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see the year 1282 as a mile-
stone in medieval Polish history. Two events occurred early in that year
which would later be seen as key moments in the Poles changing rela-
tionship with the Teutonic Knights which underlay the restoration of the
kingdom of Poland. The first was the Kpno agreement, in which the heir-
less Duke Mciwj of Pomerania pledged his lands to his cousins son,
Duke Przemys II of Great Poland. The second was the Milicz agreement
between Duke Mciwj and the Teutonic Knights, by which the Knights
gained their first possessions on the left bank of the Vistula River. The
Kpno agreement has been viewed by many Polish historians as the begin-
ning of the restoration of the kingdom of Poland, because one year after

84Bolesaws mother was witopeks sister, Jadwiga (liwiski, Poczet, 7879; Der-
wich, 226227).
85See chapter three for more on Henryk.
86Zieliska, Zjednoczenie, 4546; also see the charters from 1288 in which Mciwj
recalls that his dear son, Przemys (unser lyber son Prsemisl, PlUB #438; unser lieber
sohn Przimisl, PlUB #439) was captured by the duke of Wrocaw.
82 chapter two

Mciwjs death in 1294 the first coronation of a Polish king since 1076
took place. The Milicz agreement, on the other hand, has been viewed as
the first effort by the Teutonic Knights to conquer Pomerania and build
a land-bridge to the Empire, which they subsequently did in 13081309.
Both of these readings, however, lean heavily on the prophetic qualities
of hindsight. Without this, both events emerge as far more complicated
and much less determinative than has occasionally been argued in the
past. Some Polish historians, like Baej liwiski and Janusz Bieniak, have
begun to draw attention to the fact that even the union of the duchies of
Pomerania and Great Poland can hardly have seemed inevitable in the
1280s.87 After all, Mciwj had already promised his duchy twice before.
The fact that the most recent recipient of Mciwjs attentions was Pol-
ish rather than German was not as important then as fourteenth-century
sources and modern historians later argued. Instead, one should perhaps
view this initially as one more attempt at borderland diplomacy, seeking
to preserve the duchy of Pomerania against its predatory neighbors by
allying with one of them.
In fact, the union of the duchies of Pomerania and Great Poland would
have seemed unlikely a decade earlier. Pomerania, which had intermit-
tently been under the suzerainty of Polish dukes, was ruled by a native
aristocracy, not by the Polish Piast dynasty that ruled in the other lands of
the historical kingdom of Poland. In fact, as explained in the first chapter,
twelfth-century Polish chronicles had portrayed the Pomeranians as the
historical enemies of Poland, savage barbarians comparable to the pagan
Prussians. In the same vein, the independent duchy of Pomerania came
into being when Mciwjs father, witopek (who was still remembered
in early fourteenth-century Polish chronicles as an enemy of Poland and
the Christian faith) killed his Polish overlord. Mciwj himself had joined
in the hostilities against the Polish dukes, only becoming their ally during
the 1270s. He had also first turned west to the duke of west Pomerania
and the margraves of Brandenburg for allies when his uncles and brother
turned east to the Teutonic Knights in their internecine fighting. It was
only towards the end of this war that Mciwj began to look south, to the
Polish dukes.
I do not wish to belabor this point, but it is important to keep Pomera-
nias independence in mind in order not to be swept away by the tele-
ologies of the fourteenth-century disputants or their nineteenth- and

87See chapter three.

 dealing with the past and planning for the future 83

twentieth-century advocates. What occurred in 1282 did not determine

that the Teutonic Knights would eventually take over Pomerania in
13081309.88 Nor did it forecast that this peripheral duchy would form
part of the nucleus of a restored kingdom of Poland in 1295. Most impor-
tantly, neither the Knights nor the Poles could have predicted that dis-
puted claims to Pomerania would end their century of cooperation and
spawn medieval and modern histories which characterized this remote
region as the central place in an alleged perennial conflict between Poles
and Germans. All of these events were based on contingencies and cir-
cumstances which will require careful scrutiny in the following chapters.
The point here is to examine these agreements within their specific his-
torical contexts in order to better understand how they were used by the
two litigants in the fourteenth century to legitimize their claims to dis-
puted territories.

The Milicz Agreement:

The Teutonic Knights Expand across the Vistula

As already noted in chapter one, Andrzej Wojtkowski attempted to locate

this dispute as well as witopeks dispute against the Knights within the
context of the later trials between the kingdom of Poland and the Teu-
tonic Ordensstaat.89 This methodology, however, is misguided for a num-
ber of reasons. First, neither of these two states existed yet in 1282. Thus,
to argue that what occurred in Pomerania affected any other Polish duchy
besides Great Poland, would be to posit a non-existent feeling of Polish
solidarity among numerous contentious dukes. Second, Wojtkowski fol-
lows the fourteenth-century Polish lawyers attempts to bury the history
of cooperation between the Teutonic Knights and the dukes of Pomerania
and Poland under the later history of conflict between the Ordensstaat
and the kingdom of Poland. It is telling that although all the Pomera-
nian dukes appealed to the Knights for help, the Knights did not become
directly involved in the fighting and did not attempt to take by force the
lands they had been promised. Any simple equation of the Knights claims

88For an example of the common claim that the Knights annexation of parts of Pomer-
ania was nothing more than a prelude to the conquest of the entire duchy, see Labuda: In
this way the Teutonic Knights...pav[ed] the way for further annexations (HP I/1, 534).
89Andrzej Wojtkowski, Procesy polsko-krzyackie przed procesem z lat 13201321
(Olsztyn: Osrodek Badan Naukowych im. W. Ktrzynskiego, 1972).
84 chapter two

to certain Pomeranian lands in 1282 with their claims to the entirety of the
duchy of Pomerania in 1320 and 1339 is counterproductive and distorts the
nature of the relationship between the Teutonic Knights and the Polish
and Pomeranian dukes in the thirteenth century.
This being said, both this trial and the fourteenth-century ones demon-
strate that the Knights were very capable lawyers and diplomats, who knew
how to argue the legality of their claims before the papacy. In March 1276
the Knights had Sambor confirm his grant to them of Mewe and promise
to compensate them for their loss if either the monks of Oliwa or Sambors
daughter and son-in-law deprived them of this grant.90 As noted above,
Jan Powierski has questioned whether Sambor actually made this grant
voluntarily, since he left Prussia immediately afterwards.91 It is certainly
conceivable that Sambor was coerced into turning against his daughter,
although considering his dispute with Oliwa, he seems unlikely to have
needed much encouragement to favor the Knights over his brothers mon-
astery. These charters were witnessed not only by Teutonic Knights, but
also by citizens of Lbeck, the councilors, parish priest, and Dominican
prior of Elblg, the bishop of Chemno, and even the abbot of Sambors
new monastery, who was apparently ensuring that the Knights claims to
these lands would not invalidate his own monasterys rights. At the same
time, the Knights had King Rudolph I Habsburg of Germany confirm the
unspecified grants given to the Knights by Racibor and Mciwj.92
It is not clear when the Knights actively began to pursue their claims to
these lands, but March 1276, when they had the above-mentioned grants
certified, seems a likely date. In any event, in the compromise settlement
reached with the Knights six years later, Mciwj acknowledges that he
had met with the Knights only after many admonitions and summonses
[post plures monitiones et citationes].93 The compromise reached shows
that both sides were beginning to think differently about territoriality.
Although Mciwj and the Knights agreed on Sambors grant of Mewe,
located on the Vistula River, it appears that the Knights did not want and
Mciwj did not want to give them Racibors possessions in Biaogarda,
because they were in the western part of the duchy. Instead, Mciwj
granted the Knights a series of properties along the Vistula River, which as
Gerard Labuda points out was more or less territorially equivalent to the

90 PlUB #278, #279.

91 Powierski, S