here - Nobility Associations

Also called Teutonic Knights, formally House
of the Hospitalers of Saint Mary of the
Teutons in Jerusalem, German Deutscher
Orden, or Deutscher Ritter-Orden or Haus
der Ritter des Hospitals Sankt Marien der
Deutschen zu Jerusalem, Latin Domus
Sanctae Mariae Theutonicorum in
Jerusalem, religious order that played a major
role in eastern Europe in the late Middle Ages
and that underwent various changes in
organization and residence from its founding
in 1189/90 to the present. Its major
residences, marking its major states of
development, were: (1) Acre, Palestine
(modern 'Akko, Israel), its original home beginning with the Third Crusade
(1189/90-c. 1291); (2) Marienburg, Prussia (modern Malbork, Pol.), the centre of
its role as a military principality (1309-1525); (3) Mergentheim, Württemberg,
Ger., to which it moved after its loss of Prussia (1525-1809); and (4) Vienna, where
the order gathered the remains of its revenues and survives as a purely hospital
order (from 1834).
The feeling for spiritual knighthood was almost extinct in the East, when at the
turn of the twelfth-thirteenth century in Acre the nursing community of the
German Knights of St. Mary bound themselves into a third spiritual Order beside
the Templars. The Templars were mainly French, and the Knights of St. John were
largely English and Italian. Pope Innocent III gave to the Teutonic Knights the Rule
of the Templars, whom they were to emulate in everything spiritual and knightly as
they were to emulate the Knights of St. John in care for the poor and the sick. The
Order was to be strictly national; only knights of German birth were to enter it.
The story of the new Order is much tamer than that of the Templars. Its origin,
lacking the blessing of St. Bernard, lacks fire and inevitability ; its battles lack the
glamour of the distant East ; its end the mystery of early death which always over
takes the heroes of myth. The German Knights never enjoyed such lavish wealth,
their temptations were not so great, they never sank into the same corruption, but
never did they inspire tale or legend with the glory and mystery that surround the
heroes of the Temple, the secret guardians of the Grail. The history of the Teutonic
Order, however, is all the more real because it was neither born in myth nor buried
in mystery, and because its battles were fought on familiar fields near home. When
Frederick II came to Germany the Teutonic Order was still an insignificant body.
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