Grunwald: How Poland broke the Teutonic Knights

Gone Medieval

This episode of Gone Medieval explores the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, a pivotal clash between the Polish-Lithuanian alliance and the Teuton

Key takeaways

• The Battle of Grunwald was one of the largest and bloodiest battles in medieval Europe, marking a decisive defeat for the Teutonic Knights.
• Despite its symbolic importance, the immediate military consequences were limited; however, it signaled the beginning of the end for the Teutonic Order as a dominant force.

Main topics

• The Battle of Grunwald (1410)
• The Teutonic Knights' expansion in the Baltic region

Notable quotes

"Delay less, fight more." – The taunting message delivered with two unsheathed swords to King Władysław II.

Conclusion

The Battle of Grunwald, while not a decisive turning point in immediate military terms, became a

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:01) From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarnagher, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week exploring... everything from the ancient world to World War 2. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe Speaker 1 (0:44) Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye. Speaker 4 (1:28) Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Speaker 4 (2:05) It's high summer, July 1410, and in an open meadow deep in the Prussian countryside, thousands of fighting men stand abreast, melting under the heat of the morning sun. Kitted out in plate, cloth and mail, they're ready to indulge in the butchery of war. Hearts throb, heads pound, beads of sweat weave through the folds of weathered faces. They're being made to wait. Speaker 4 (2:37) Across the grassy plain, their opponents are arrayed in martial splendour. Their standards bear the sign of the cross, but coloured charcoal black, the emblem of the Teutonic Knights. For over 200 years, these rapacious crusaders have squeezed northern Europe dry, seizing land and coin to satiate their gluttonous territorial appetites, all supposedly in the name of their benevolent god. And now they face the combined forces of... of another burgeoning Christian power, a union of two proud kingdoms, Poland and Lithuania, bound together in opposition to the cross-clad horsemen from the far west. The uneasy standoff is broken when two riders burst forth from the Teutonic throne. Together, they carry two unsheathed swords. But this is not some lonely charge or the breaking of nerve. Instead, it's a gift, an offering. The two swords are for his majesty, King Władysław II of Poland, sent by Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen. And they're delivered with a sting. Delay less, fight more. The challenge is accepted. Soon the meadow erupts into chaos. Thousands of men collide in one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Middle Ages. By sunset, the Teutonic Order... has been shattered. Its Grand Master lies dead and the two swords, intended as an insult, have become trophies of victory. Speaker 4 (4:20) I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval. Today we're exploring the Battle of Grunwald, one of the medieval world's greatest military clashes, and a battle whose legacy still resonates across Europe more than 600 years later. How did the Polish-Lithuanian alliance defeat one of medieval Europe's most formidable military powers? Why did this battle become such a defining moment in Polish and Lithuanian history? And what happened to those two legendary swords? To help us answer those questions, I'm joined by Dr. Alexander Pluskovsky, Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Reading and author of The Black Cross, A History of the Baltic Crusades. Speaker 4 (5:07) Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Alex. Thanks for having me back. It's great to have you back. We're going to talk today about the Battle of Grunwald, and this is largely the result of a conversation with someone I had at work who wanted to know why we hadn't done one of the most important battles in Polish history. So hopefully you can explain why we should all have heard about the Battle of Grunwald. To kick us off, can you just tell us kind of where and when are we when we talk about the Battle of Grunwald? Speaker 2 (5:33) Okay, so where we're in what at the time would have been southern Prussia, what today is northern Poland, northeastern Poland, not too far from the border between the Kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Order's territory or state of Prussia. And the battle took place on the 15th of July in the year 1410. and lasted all day from morning till the late afternoon. Wow, which is quite a considerable length of time for a battle. Yeah, a long time. And you can imagine that would have been exhausting, massively exhausting. And actually, that's one of the features of the battle. Speaker 4 (6:14) And we're going to get into lots of detail about why it happened, why it happened there, and what happened on the day. But can you just also give us a sense of why this is considered so important, particularly in Poland, but I guess in a wider European context too? Speaker 2 (6:27) Yeah, so... The battle is one of the largest battles of the European Middle Ages, and we can argue one of the most consequential in terms of its symbolism, but also its later ramifications. I guess from a military perspective, it's a devastating defeat for the Teutonic Order and its allies. The Grand Master and most of the Order's brethren who are present at the battle are killed. For Poland, it... represents the defeat of this powerful force and a high point in Polish-Lithuanian power. And I think we'll talk a bit more about that later on. In terms of European history, it really does mark the decline of one of medieval Europe's distinctive institutions, the Teutonic Order. It really is the beginning of the end. And conversely, the rise of Poland-Lithuania as this major European force, what becomes the largest state in Europe. So it is really sort of epoch-making as a symbolic watershed. The battle itself is perhaps less immediately consequential, as we'll discuss, but it's more its symbolism and how it was later imagined and projected. Speaker 4 (7:42) Yeah, yeah. And we're calling it the Battle of Grunewald, but I have seen it given a couple of other names, Tannenberg and things like that. Is there a correct name for it? Is there a reason it has several different names? Speaker 2 (7:54) Yeah, so there's no universally correct name. The preferred name depends on language and national traditions. Grunwald is the Polish name for the battle. And that itself is a German name that just means green forest. Actually, to make it a bit more confusing, it had a different name before that. Briefly, it was referred to as Grunfeld Greenfield. But someone in the Royal Chancellery in Kraków, the capital of Poland, either made a mistake or made a deliberate change, and it became quickly known as Grunwald. And then the first sources that really write about this, that we'll talk about in a bit, start using the word Grunwald. So then this becomes popular, and then it gets adopted by 19th century Polish painters and writers. But it really does depend on what... you're reading. And so the historians, the international historians reading Polish literature would start using this name. Whereas the other name you refer to, Tannenberg, which is the German name, which basically means fir tree hill, which is a name that's given to a nearby village that the name itself is later changed into Polish, into something else. But this then becomes part of the German tradition. So those reading the German histories would then start using this name. And then we got a third name, Zalgiris, which is the Lithuanian name. And that is just the Lithuanian version of Polish Grunwald. So it really depends what you read. But I would say Grunwald probably is the most popular, just because the Poles have written the most about it. And we've got the big film from the 1960s that popularized the battle on the big screen. I think the only one to do so, actually. So that's why Grunwald probably is the one that we all use. Although in Germany, Tannenberg is still used. Speaker 4 (9:50) Yeah. And what kind of sources do we have for reconstructing the events leading up to the battle and the battle itself? Are we relying on chronicles? Do we have kind of letters? Do we have some archaeology from the battlefield, maybe? Speaker 2 (10:03) Yep. So we've got all of those things. The two main sources are Polish. We've got this so-called Chronicle of the Conflict. which is written by an eyewitness not long after the battle. We don't really know who he is, but someone high up in the Polish state. But only an abridged version of that survives in a 16th century copy. The most famous account was written by this person called Jan Długosz as part of his Annals of the Kingdom of Poland. Now, he was actually born five years after the battle. But his father had fought at the battle. He was a minor nobleman who served in the Krakow Regiment. And so Jan would have grown up in a household where the battle would have been treated as part of family memory. By the time he was writing, he was an important member of the royal court. He was a tutor to the Polish king's son. He was involved in diplomatic negotiations between the Teutonic Order. and the Polish crown. So he was writing many decades after the events, maybe speaking to very elderly eyewitnesses, and obviously writing from a biased political viewpoint. He also produced this really colourful manuscript called the Banderia Prutonorum, which just basically translates to Prussian banners. He wrote that in 1448. And it's this beautifully illustrated inventory of a captured banners of a Teutonic Order's army. that were taken as trophies back to Krakow and stored in the castle. So that gives us a nice detailed commentary on the organisation of the Order's army. And then we've got a few German sources, a few chronicles, as you said, which are less detailed. There's something called the Older Grandmasters Chronicle, which is basically a history of the Teutonic Order's grandmasters, written again from the Order's viewpoint. Speaker 2 (11:56) The writers there really had to explain how such a disaster could have befallen in the institution that had this divine mandate. So they emphasized all sorts of things that you don't see in the Polish chronicles. You're right in saying that there's a lot of correspondence. There are letters within the Teutonic Order's archives, but also letters to the papacy, letters between different rulers discussing or referring to the battle. And then we've got the archaeology. which really kicks off in the late 1950s as the museum on the supposed battlefield sites being built. The museum was opened in 1960 on the 550th anniversary of a battle. And the excavations focus on an area that later we know is the Teutonic Order's camp, where they find mass graves, where we have... A few hundred individuals excavated with signs of battle trauma, as well as pits of charred and burnt remains. There are disagreements about the exact location of a battlefield that's defined the archaeology. And these are disagreements between Polish scholars and German scholars about where exactly the battlefield was. It was probably spread out over several places for reasons that will become clear a bit later on. And then we've got the first big metal detector ring survey taking place in 2014. So the archaeology of battlefields, it's quite a late development. Initially, they don't find much because they're looking in the wrong place. Later on in subsequent years, they find fragments of weapons, axes, armor, crossbow bolts. And that sort of shifts where... people think the battle took place. And these have been happening sort of year in, year out. They've been finding more arrowheads, more crossbow bolts, coins, bits of dress accessories worn by the Teutonic Order, for example, have inscriptions Ave Maria and things like this. But actually, most of the armour and the weapons probably would have been collected at the time. And anything that was buried would have been dug up by farmers and recycled in subsequent centuries. So there's relatively little in terms of the archaeology. Speaker 4 (14:08) Yeah, it sounds like a battle that's fairly well served by the evidence that we've got a fairly strong range of sources that we can draw on. So we've talked a little bit about one side in this battle is the Teutonic Knights. I wonder if you can give us a kind of a potted history of why the Teutonic Knights have ended up here. What is the crusading order doing in the northeast of Europe? Speaker 2 (14:27) Okay, so as you said, the Teutonic Order are a crusading order. They're a German-speaking Catholic military institution, and they built their territorial state on the southern and eastern Baltic coast. And this took place over much of the 13th century. They were actually invited to the region by the Polish Duke of Mazovia, Konrad, in 1230, and joined or started to lead the Crusades against his neighbours, the pagan Prussians. They conquered the region. They then joined the Crusades in what became Livonia, so modern Estonia and Latvia, from 1237. And so this is where they carved out their core Baltic territories. And once they'd conquered these, they focused their attention on a region that is part of western Lithuania today called Samogitia, and then... the region of Lithuania itself that became a Grand Duchy in the mid