Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

in 1211 and had just been expelled from that kingdom in 1225 for creating
a state within a state. The dispossessed knights began almost immediately
to take possession of their newly granted lands, and in 1235 and 1237
they respectively absorbed the weaker Order of Dobrzyn and amalgamated
with the more powerful Order of the Swordbrethren.
In 1240 the Teutonic Order moved its seat from Acre to Prussia, most
of which it conquered by 1283. The knights quickly made themselves the
collective lords of this peculiar order-state, which by 1309—when they established
their headquarters in the great Castle of Marienburg—was
slightly larger than England and included all of the lands now incorporated
in northern Poland (centered on Danzig, Polish Gdansk), Russian Kaliningrad
(the Königsberg of the knights), Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The
high master, under the purely theoretical suzerainty of the pope, ruled all
of these lands (divided between Prussia and Livonia). Although its reason
for existence ceased to be in 1386, when the last pagan grand prince of
Lithuania, Jogaila, married the heiress to the crown of Poland and converted
to Catholic Christianity, the order-state survived intact into the
1460s, when the ruler of Poland-Lithuania seized control of both eastern
and western Prussia and divided the domain into two parts. What remained
of Prussia became a fief of the Polish crown, and it passed out of
the order’s control in 1525, when the reigning high master, Albrecht von
Hohenzollern, decided to become a Protestant and rule it as a duke. Livonia
continued under the control of the (newly independent) Brethren of the
Sword until 1561, when their high master decided to do the same and became
a Polish vassal as duke of Courland.
Long before these developments in the far north, the original crusade
against the Muslims in the Holy Land had suffered a series of setbacks. It
finally failed entirely in 1291, when the remaining Christian strongholds,
centered on the cities of Acre and Tripoli, were retaken by the Mamluk sultan
of Egypt, the successor of Saladin. This forced the military orders that
had remained there to fall back to Cyprus, regroup, and decide what to do
next—under considerable pressure from such men as the indefatigable
preacher Ramon Llull and a whole succession of popes to amalgamate in a
single great order. This idea was fiercely resisted, however, and all but the
Templars withdrew from Cyprus as soon as they could find somewhere else
to settle. The Knights of St. Thomas moved their headquarters to England,
and the Lazarites to France, while the Hospitallers of St. John merely
moved slightly westward in 1310 to the island of Rhodes. There they soon
established an order-state, comparable in nature (if not in extent) to that of
the Teutonic Knights, and continued an active war against the Muslims by
sea. They were commonly called the Knights of Rhodes from 1310 to
1527, when they finally lost that island and its dependencies to the Otto-
Orders of Knighthood, Religious 375