The Teutonic Knights
Desmond Seward describes an outstanding colonial achievement of the Middle Ages.
Few medieval phenomena are less understood than the military religious orders of the Crusades. Though historians generally state that they combined chivalry with monasticism, the latter’s role is seldom appreciated. Yet the fact that the order’s members were as much monks as knights, celibate brethren whose lives were spent in barracks which were also monasteries, makes it easier to appreciate why such men rode out to battle to fight with a fanaticism unparalleled in European history.
Seeking armies for its holy wars and anxious to contain the bloodthirsty instincts of a warrior nobility, Catholicism had evolved a formula, by adapting the monastic structure, that produced the first properly staffed and officered troops since the Roman Legions, and at the same time Christianized the old Northern ideal of death in battle. No-one responded to this new spiritual calling with more enthusiasm than the Germans.
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