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which they might lose their lands to the Welfs or win their lands. Only a few great
nobles and prelates honored their vows by continuing their journey on to Acre,
then besieged by crusader armies from France and England which were suffering
terrible agonies from heat and disease.
For the newly arrived Germans the psychological torment may have been worse
than the physical. Richard the Lionheart, the English king who was winning
immortal fame at Acre, hated those Hohenstaufen vassals who had driven his Welf
brother-in-law, Heinrich the Lion, into exile a few years before, and he missed few
opportunities to insult or humiliate them. Richard recovered Acre but little more.
The French king, Phillip Augustus, went home, angry at his repeated insults, and
most Germans left, too, determined to get revenge on him at the first opportunity.
The German nobles and prelates, both those who had served at Acre and those who
had run home, were bitterly disappointed with the outcome of their great
expedition. Reflecting back on the high hopes with which they had set out, they felt
they had been betrayed by everyone--by the English, by the Byzantines, by the
Welfs, and by one another. They had but one worthwhile accomplishment to show
for all their suffering, so they thought later: the foundation of the Teutonic Order
The Foundation Era 1190-1198
The establishment of the Teutonic Order was an act of desperation, desperation
based not on a lack of knights, but on a lack of medical care. The crusading army
besieging Acre in 1190 had been more than decimated by illness. The soldiers from
northern Europe were not accustomed to the heat, the water, or the food and their
sanitary conditions were completely unsatisfactory. Unable to bury the dead
properly, they threw the bodies into the moat opposite the Accursed Tower with the
rubble they were using to fill it, and the stink hung over the camp like a fog. Once
The Hohenstaufen Dynasty - Page 98 of 200