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Hermann was a friend and councilor of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II, for
whom he represented as a mediator in the Papal curia from 1222 onwards. Pope
Honorius III also recognized Hermann's capabilities, and granted the Teutonic
Knights an equal status with the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar,
after it had gone into decline under previous Grand Masters.
Under the leadership of the grand master Hermann von Salza the Teutonic knights
had already begun transferring their main center of activity from the Middle East
to Eastern Europe. The order's first European enterprise started in Hungary in
1211, when King Andrew II invited a group of the Teutonic Knights to protect his
Transylvanian borderland against the Cumans by colonizing it and by converting
its people to Christianity. The order was then granted extensive rights of autonomy;
but the knights' demands became so excessive that they were expelled from
Hungary in 1225. By that time, however, a new opportunity was opening: a Polish
duke, Conrad of Mazovia, with lands on the lower reaches of the Vistula River,
needed help against the pagan Prussians.
Hermann von Salza proceeded carefully, in order to avoid a repetition of what the
order had experienced in Transylvania. He already enjoyed the confidence of the
Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II, whom he had served as a diplomat. So, when
Conrad made his offer, Hermann in 1226 obtained from Frederick the so-called
Golden Bull of Rimini as a legal basis for the settlement. By this charter, Frederick
confirmed to Hermann and to the order not only the lands to be granted by Conrad
but also those that the knights were to conquer from the Prussians. Later (1234),
Hermann also secured privileges from Pope Gregory IX, which can be regarded as
the second foundation charter of the order's Prussian state: the papacy was ready to
accept the order's current and future conquests as the property of the Holy See and
to grant them back to the order in perpetual tenure.
In 1233, led by the Landmeister (provincial leader) Hermann Balk and using an
army of volunteer laymen recruited mainly from central Germany, the Teutonic
Knights began the conquest of Prussia. During the next 50 years, having advanced
from the lower Vistula River to the lower Neman (Niemen, Nemunas) River and
having exterminated most of the native Prussian population (especially during the
major rebellion of 1261-83), the order firmly established its control over Prussia.
Although the order gave one-third of the conquered territory to the church and
granted a large degree of autonomy to the newly developing towns in the area, it
easily became the dominant power in Prussia. It worked to develop the region by
building castles, by importing German peasants to settle in depopulated areas, by
bestowing substantial estates on German and Polish nobles who became vassals of
the order, and by monopolizing the lucrative Prussian grain trade, particularly after
The Hohenstaufen Dynasty - Page 102 of 200