https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2234-5419
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Mark Whelan, Verlust und Dauer. Weshalb sie nicht mehr fuhren und was an die Stelle trat: die Preußenreisen des europäischen Adels, German History, Volume 42, Issue 4, December 2024, Pages 599–600, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghae025
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Extract
This is the fourth volume in Werner Paravicini’s magisterial study of the so-called Preußenreisen, the military expeditions launched by the Teutonic Order and their array of international volunteers into Russia and Lithuania from their base in Prussia in the later medieval period. While the first two volumes examined what the crusaders and their allies did while on campaign and the third assessed the varied motivations encouraging the participants to support the military endeavours of the monastic order, the fourth takes the reader into the fifteenth century to examine why the European nobility chose eventually to display their martial energies elsewhere in the defence of Christendom, leaving the Teutonic Order politically isolated and militarily exposed. As Paravicini highlights, the decline in volunteers travelling to the Baltic to fight for the Teutonic Order spelled disaster for its leadership, with the Kingdom of Poland partitioning the monastic state by force in the 1460s and taking for itself the richer, western half of Prussia. A much-reduced Order then eked out a precarious existence until its grandmaster submitted to the Polish crown in 1526, ending the Teutonic Order’s status as an independent power.
