Teutonic order banner of the battle of Tannenberg
The Teutonic Order banners of the Battle of Tannenberg (1410) are those flags of the Teutonic Order that fell into the hands of the Polish-Lithuanian victors after the Battle of Tannenberg (referred to in Poland as the Battle of Grunwald ) and as a sign of triumph in the Kraków Wawel Cathedral as well were hung in Vilnius Cathedral. The trace of the last remaining original flags is lost around 1800. However, a number of replicas were made during the Second and Third Polish Republic, some of which are now exhibited in Krakow and in the museum on the site of the former battlefield.
history
After their victory over the Teutonic Order on July 15, 1410, the Polish King Władysław II. Jagiełło (r. 1386–1434) and the Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas (r. 1392–1430) collected the captured banners from their opponent's military contingents. The greater part of them was brought to Cracow , the rest to Vilnius and hung there in the respective cathedral churches to commemorate the victory and as a token of triumph. Nothing is known about the further whereabouts of the order banners brought to Vilna; the flags that were ceremoniously hung in the Kraków Cathedral on November 25, 1411 on the grave of St. Stanisław († 1079), the patron saint of Poland, were henceforth in the care of the cathedral chapter . Around 1422 there were 39 flags, to which five Livonian flags from the 1431 battle of Nakel (near today's Nakło nad Notecią ) were added.
In 1448 a total of 46 order flags were displayed in color on parchment sheets by the Krakow painter Stanisław Durink at the instigation of the Kraków cathedral chapter and Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki (1389–1455) . The Krakow canon, episcopal secretary and later historian Jan Długosz (1415–1480) had the initially loose pages bound into a code and provided with brief explanations of the individual flags. In this way, the magnificent picture inventory of the flags of the order, known as the Banderia Prutenorum , was created, which was expanded by ten more flag representations after 1455. 51 of the 56 banners shown in this way are said to come from the battle of Tannenberg.
The Banderia Prutenorum , which show the flags - banners and gonfanons - of the Grand Master and the Order , the individual Commanderies as well as the cities and dioceses in Prussia , including the Kulmer Land and Pomerania , still exist today and are a prime source for research into the history of the Order However, the originals of the flags of the order have not been mentioned since 1603. Most of them were probably lost in the following period due to their age and the associated material fatigue. In the course of the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century , the remaining banners, which had remained until then, were brought to Vienna by the Austrian partitioning power, which had fallen to the city of Krakow , and have been lost since then.
When the decision was taken in Poland in 1936 to set up the Senators' Hall of the Kraków Wawel as a hall for the Polish infantry, reproductions of the flags of 1410 were made from the images of the Banderia Prutenorum . 18 of these replicas fell into the hands of the German occupiers after the defeat of Poland in 1939 . Hans Frank (1900–1946), the governor-general of those Polish territories that were not directly incorporated into the empire , decorated the office of his “residence” on the Wawel. The idea of "bringing them home" in a solemn act in the Marienburg , the former headquarters of the Teutonic Order, probably went back to him, who must have thought these flags were originals . Adolf Hitler had already agreed to such a ceremony when the Danzig historian Erich Keyser (1893–1963) pointed out that the order banners were not the originals. Two months before the planned repatriation, this tip came very inconvenient. It was therefore decided in Krakow to get to the bottom of the matter, even brought in Polish scholars to clarify the truth, and found that Keyser's statements corresponded to the facts.
Nevertheless, on May 19, 1940, the transfer of the order banners, including a festive ceremony, took place in the Marienburg. On this occasion there was also a special postmark from the Marienburg post office , which showed a knight with a nasal helmet in front of a round shield and the inscription " Collection of the flags of the Teutonic Knight Order 19. 5. 40 Marienburg (Western Pr.) ". It was not taken into account that the helmet of the knight depicted was of a type that the knights of the order were unlikely to have used, and that the Teutonic Order had never been called the Order of Knights in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, such mistakes did not diminish the pathos of the speeches held. Albert Forster (1902–1952), the Gauleiter of the Reichsgau Gdansk-West Prussia , in which the Marienburg was located, ranked the defeat of 1410 and the victory of 1939 in one - according to the Nazi worldview - “ in the history of the East "Has been a" struggle between Germans and Poles " that has lasted for centuries , whereby he emphasized that this has now" found its final conclusion ". Regarding the fact that only replicas of the flags had actually been “brought home”, Forster remarked that these were not the focus of the whole ceremony. In addition, according to the Gauleiter, these replicas are “ at least as valuable to the Poles as if they were original flags. And that's what ultimately matters ”.
Since the replicas of the order banners brought to Marienburg had been lost in the course of further acts of war, replicas were made again after 1945 in Poland based on the images from 1448, for example the Grand Master's banner in 1962. Just as the history of the order was instrumentalized in the first half of the 20th century for current political purposes - albeit with different objectives - in Poland and the German Reich, so it was not possible in the new Poland that emerged in 1945, this chapter of the German -Let the Polish past rest. The defeat of Hitler's Germany was now being celebrated as a “second Grunwald”, which also meant that the “ Westward displacement of Poland ” seemed to have a meaning reaching far back into the past. The flags of the order functioned as a link between the present and the imagined past. The exponents of this type of historical observation could also refer to Jan Długosz, who reports that after the order banners had been transferred to the Krakow Cathedral, they were ordered to be renewed later if necessary.
Literature and Sources
- 800 years of the German Order. Exhibition of the Germanic National Museum Nuremberg in cooperation with the International Historical Commission for Research on the Teutonic Order , ed. by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum and the International Historical Commission for Research on the Teutonic Order, by Gerhard Bott and Udo Arnold, Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag GmbH, Gütersloh-Munich 1990, ISBN 3-570-07434-X .
Web links
References and comments
- ↑ a b c 800 years of the German Order, p. 125.
- ↑ The information from Alain Demurger, The Knights of the Lord. History of the ecclesiastical order of knights , CH Beck, Munich 2003, p. 284, that the banners have since disappeared is not correct.
- ↑ 800 Years of the German Order, p. 491.
- ↑ 800 years of the German Order , p. 492, where a registered letter with the special cancellation is also shown.
- ↑ a b Quoted after 800 years of the German Order , p. 491.
- ↑ 800 years of the German Order, p. 491f.