Abstract
The Kronike von Pruzinlant, a verse chronicle in the German vernacular, was written by a priest of the German military order of Teutonic Knights between 1331 and 1341. It chiefly comprises a translation, with additions, paraphrases, and emendations, of the Latin Chronicon Terrae Prussiae of another priest of the order, Peter von Dusburg, composed between 1326 and 1331. In this welcome addition to Ashgate’s Crusade Texts in Translation series, Mary Fischer, whose translation is both fluent and clear, emphasizes that, almost more than the largely derivative content, Nicolaus’ work is significant for two reasons. First, it reveals how the German Order wished to present itself in the difficult days of the early fourteenth century when its function and operations were challenged from within Christendom as well as by its enemies. Second, in its use of the vernacular and the evidence of its wide late-medieval dissemination across German-speaking lands, the poem exposes aspects of the order’s distinctive culture, a product both of its chiefly military purposes and its consequent domination by laymen, the knights.
This secular quality of activity and membership marks the order, like its companion military orders the Templars and Hospitallers, from both of whom the German Order derived structures and ideology, as very different in internal dynamics and aesthetics when compared with other contemporary religious orders. However, it is clear that the German Order was far from the coven of greedy, brutish, imperialist racist thugs of popular repute (although Nicolaus provides plenty of instances of venality, brutality, imperialism, and racism). The milieu is also one of libraries for laymen and extensive liturgical and devotional literature, much of it in the vernacular. One of Nicolaus’ patrons, the princely Grand Master Luder von Braunschweig (1331–5), proved himself a builder of palaces and a patron of the arts, as well as being the author of a life of St Barbara, one of Prussia’s patron saints. More widely, Nicolaus’ project, in retelling the order’s history from its foundation in the 1190s to the 1330s, was to educate fellow members but also to justify and legitimize the order’s continued rule in Prussia and Livonia (modern Latvia and Estonia) using arguments and scriptural analogies long familiar to any student of crusading, medieval or modern. In this way, for all its domestic, local focus of subject matter and language, Nicolaus’ poem establishes the umbilical association tying the German Order to the wider context of Western religion, holy war, and the expansion of Latin Christendom.