Teutonic Knights by William Urban

have adopted western weapons even if they had been more easily available.
    Prussian nobles were in many ways like nobles elsewhere. They lived by hunting and warfare and on the labour of their slaves. The women and children they captured on raids served as household help and as concubines, but often they treated them as human merchandise in the regional slave markets. There is some evidence of a trade route south through Poland, and no one would be surprised if many captives were sold down the Rus’ian rivers, the traditional slave route to the Turks and Byzantines. Although this eastern traffic was long past its heyday and was being interrupted by nomad incursions into southern Russia, it was still profitable. Men were of little use as prisoners or slaves unless they could be sold immediately, because they could escape too easily while performing agricultural work in the small forest clearings. Children were even less valuable, because it was expensive to raise a child to adulthood just to work in the fields. Women were more suitable in every sense for the primitive farming in grain crops and for gathering food in the woods.
    Prussian nobles did not work, but lived by their own set of traditions that distinguished them from the commoners. The nobles in Germany and Poland did not work either, but they did not live by the labour of slaves or the income derived from the sale of prisoners taken in warfare. The tradition of slave-catching and the concept of honour that lay behind the successful Prussian social/religious system were cited by Christians in Poland and Pomerellia as the main reasons for their making war on the pagans in Prussia. A cynical modern observer might suggest that Christian rulers’ eagerness to expand their domains was considerably more important. No matter. Either way it appears that religion per se was not the most significant cause of the wars between the Christians and pagans along the Vistula River. Religion became important later, of course, for all parties. The Prussians, certainly, once provoked, were not content to remain at home and practice their rites in peace, but were compelled by their evolving customs to continue their raids on Christian neighbours long after they had taken revenge for the initial outrages. Clearly, it was this increasingly aggressive activity over the years, whether it started as raw war-lust or as a reaction to Polish invasions, that eventually brought not just the Poles and Pomerellians but also Germans from the distant Holy Roman Empire to make war against them.
    Efforts to bring Christianity to Prussia
    The oft-raised issue of Prussian independence and Prussian freedom meant something very different to the warriors of thirteenth-century Prussia than to the nineteenth-century liberals who praised them for their resistance to foreign invaders. The issue is a false one because the Christians had little choice but to defend themselves; there was no living with such a barbarous system. Moreover, the modern concept of nationalism does not track well onto medieval concepts of ethnic identity. Nevertheless, the issue is sometimes still raised, often in the context of imperialism and neo-imperialism, with Western nations almost always in the wrong. 11 There were philosophers in the thirteenth century, too, who must have discussed the same questions that bother us today. There is no doubt that informal debates took place between the elders and priests of the Prussian clans and the trained dialecticians of the Church when the missionaries sought to convert the tribesmen. On the one hand there was praise for the traditional values and free choice, for martial virtue and no taxation; on the other, condemnation of gross superstition, ignorance, and barbaric habits. The churchmen who prized freedom of the mind and spirit did their best to persuade the simple but shrewd rural folk that what they had to offer in the way of civilisation and salvation was worth the sacrifice of ancient,