Hunger war
| date | July 1414 to October 7, 1414 jul. |
|---|---|
| place | Teutonic Order State (especially Warmia ), Poland ( Kujawia ) |
| Casus Belli | Unresolved border dispute, the Teutonic Order's desire to negotiate |
| output | Armistice without conflict resolution |
| Territorial changes | no |
| consequences | Famine in the Teutonic Order |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
The Hunger War ( Polish Wojna głodowa ) was a military conflict that took place in 1414 between the Teutonic Order and the Kingdom of Poland and its ally Lithuania . The war was characterized by the fact that the two sides avoided each other and instead attacked supply routes and destroyed the harvest, which led to famine and epidemics.
background
The hunger war is part of the history of the Lithuanian Wars of the Teutonic Order , which since 1303 led a crusade against the then pagan Lithuanians. After the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila converted to Christianity around 1384 and now also ruled the Polish kingdom in personal union, the still unsecured acquisitions of the order in Samogitia and the Pomerelles were endangered. The Samogite revolt of 1409 was the occasion for another war, which was decided by the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410 in favor of the Lithuanians and Poles. In the First Peace of Thorn in 1411, high reparations payments to Lithuania were set, which the order was only able to raise partially with difficulty, but the order has not yet been assigned any territory.
The grand master of the order, Heinrich von Plauen , opposed the arbitration ruling of the imperial ambassador Benedikt Makrai , who had awarded the right bank of the Memel ( Memelland including Memel ) to the Lithuanian Grand Duchy in 1413 . Plauen sent armed forces to Poland under the command of Order Marshal Michael Küchmeister to emphasize his refusal. However, Küchmeister quickly interrupted his campaign and returned to Marienburg to explain that the order was not yet ready for another war. In January 1414, Küchmeister deposed von Plauen and became Grand Master himself. His efforts in May 1414 to start completely new negotiations with Poland, however, met with rejection on the part of the Polish king Jagiełło, who insisted on the reinstatement of Plauen and the arbitration award of Benedikt Makrais.
Course of war
Jagiełło and Grand Duke Vytautas and their Silesian allies invaded the religious state in the summer of that year and devastated the Warmia . Even a group of Bohemian mercenaries could not stop them. The main armed forces of the knights of the order entrenched themselves mainly on their castles. They left the cities and villages to the enemy and avoided the open battle in which the Polish-Lithuanians would have been superior. These in turn were unwilling to start long sieges of castles of the order, which had already been unsuccessful in the last war of 1410 (see Siege of Marienburg (1410) ) . Some castles surrendered to the Poles after brief sieges, which is why Küchmeister held out the Poles to cut off the supply routes behind them and to recapture castles. Danzig auxiliary troops also advanced into (Polish) Kujawy to plunder there. Effective to starve the invaders out, Küchmeister followed a scorched earth strategy until the enemy troops eventually withdrew, weakened. On October 7, 1414, William, the papal envoy and bishop of Lausanne , negotiated a two-year armistice.
The villages devastated during this war include Bischofsburg , Christburg , Passenheim , Rosenberg and Saalfeld . While most of the destruction was attributed to the Poles and especially the Tatars ( Landsberg , Mehlsack , Mühlhausen , Wartenburg , Zinten were pillaged, Wormditt was looted ), at least the destruction of Hohenstein was the work of the knights themselves.
The immediate result of the war was a famine in the religious state after which the war was named. The Polish army also suffered from dysentery and hunger during the campaign . According to Johann von Posilge's chronicle , 86 German knights also died of epidemics during and after the campaigns.
consequences
The conflict between the Order and the Poles and Lithuanians was prolonged by the armed conflict with no tangible results. There followed several extended armistices by various conflict mediators, which were extremely costly for the Order, as they were weakened by the past wars, had to conduct expensive negotiations at the Council of Constance and later elsewhere and to raise troops for the annually possible breakdown of the negotiations had to equip. Only after Küchmeister's resignation in 1422 was the peace of Lake Melno achieved that same year .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Wiesław Sieradzan: Benedek Makrai as a Subarbiter in the Conflict between the Teutonic Order and Its Neighbor Countries in 1412-1413 . In: Arguments and Counter-Arguments: The Political Thought of the 14th and 15th Centuries during the Polish-Teutonic Order Trials and Disputes . Pp. 157-168. Digitized
- ^ Albert Werminghoff: The German order and the estates in Prussia. In: Pfingstblätter des Hansischen Geschichtsverein Blatt VIII. 1912. P. 42.
- ↑ a b Marian Biskup: The problem of mercenaries in the armed forces of the Teutonic Order of Prussia from the end of the 14th century to 1525 . In: Zenon Hubert Nowak (ed.): The warfare of the knight orders in the Middle Ages. Toruń, 1991. pp. 55 f.
- ^ Preussische Allgemeine Zeitung , May 6, 1989: Castles in East and West Prussia: Wartenburg. Page 12.
- ^ William Urban: Tannenberg and After . Chicago 2003, p. 204. ISBN 0-929700-25-2 .
- ^ Robert Krumbholtz: The finances of the Teutonic Order under the influence of the Polish politics of the Grand Master Michael Küchmeister (1414-1422) , German journal for historical science vol. 8 (1892), 226-272.