(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

Vytautas was encouraged by the crushing defeats inflicted by Tamerlane on the Mongols of the Golden Horde to try to wrest from it mastery of the old Rus’ lands. But he overestimated the Horde’s disarray. His grandiose hopes ended in disaster in 1399 with the destruction of his army on the Vorskla river. In the previous year, he had had to recognize the consequences of his own folly in dallying with the Ordensstaat when, by the peace of Salin, he had been obliged to confirm its possession of Žemaitija. The Teutonic Knights and their associated Order, the Knights of the Sword in Livonia, now had a perfect springboard against Vilnius. Vytautas began to scheme for Žemaitija’s recovery almost as soon as he had surrendered it. He could count on Jagiello’s support. Officially, neither the king nor his Polish subjects were involved in Vytautas' wars. Yet many Poles served him in their private capacities: on the Vorskla in 1399, in the uprisings which he fomented in Žemaitija between 1401 and 1404 and again in 1409. They helped garrison Lithuanian strongholds. The Order’s purchase from Sigismund of Luxemburg in 1402 of the Neumark, flanking Wielkopolska’s north-west border, alarmed its nobility. But it was only in July 1409 that Jagiello was able to persuade his Polish subjects openly to oppose any attack by the Knights on Lithuania. In August, Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen responded with an attack on northern Poland.

So began a long conflict which Poland eventually ‘won’ but never truly resolved. Not until 1466 were the territories the Order had seized during Lokietek’s reign recovered. The stunning victory which the forces of the Polish-Lithuanian lands won over the Knights on 15 July J410, near the villages of Grunwald and Tannenberg, failed to deliver the capital, Marienburg. Behind their fortifications, the Knights were impregnable, for their enemies lacked the resources for sustained siege warfare. A series of debilitating wars (1409-11, 1414, 1422, [431-5) gave the Crown

almost nothing in territorial terms. Lithuania at least secured the unconditional restoration of Žemaitija at the peace of Melno in September 1422. Vytautas and his successors concentrated their attention on Rus’. Their co-operation with Poland against the Knights largely ceased.

The inconclusive, periodic fighting caused immense devastation in and around the Teutonic Knights’ Prussian lands. Germany’s parallel political and demographic crisis led to severe recruitment shortages for the Order, which tried to compensate by increasingly brutal fiscal policies. When, on 6 March 1454, the Crown chancellery issued an act of incorporation of Prussia, it did so in response to growing agitation and rebellion among the Order’s own subjects, with the nobility and the great towns of Danzig, Thorn and Elbing in the van. Such was the massive scale of initial defections that it might have seemed the Order would be swept away almost without a fight. Its nerve held. The Polish treasury was empty. To begin with, Casimir IV was barely able to afford the services of 2,000 mercenaries. The Polish levėe en masse, the pospolite ruszenie, was routed at Chojnice on 18 September 1454. The war dragged on for thirteen years. Though Poland taxed itself heavily (Piotr Swidwa, castellan of Poznan, complained that ‘the war cost the king more than all of Prussia is worth’), the chief burden was borne by the Prussian lands themselves. But the Knights had their own financial problems. Marienburg castle was delivered into Polish hands in June 1457 by the Knights’ Czech mercenaries in return for payment of their wage arrears. The peace of Thorn of 19 October 1466 showed just how badly hit the Order was. Its rich, western territories along the lower Vistula passed under Polish suzerainty as ‘Royal Prussia’. The rich see of Warmia (Ermeland) was detached from the Order as a separate dominium under the Polish Crown. The Order retained the hinterland of the port of Konigs-berg, poorer lands for which its Grand Masters now had to perform homage to the kings of Poland.

The success came at a price. Despite the incorporation of 1454, Royal Prussia received, in law, enough autonomy for its elites to regard it as a distinct political unit. Successive Grand Masters did their utmost to ditch their vassal status or even to reverse the peace of Thorn altogether. Frederick of Saxony, Grand Master from 1497

5 The town hall of Danzig/Gdansk, т ^79-80. Note the sixteenth-century Flemish-style buildings, much influenced by Danzig's commercial contacts. Extensive post-т945 restorations.