Teutonic Knights, one of the three military-religious orders of knighthood founded during the period of the Crusades. Certain merchants of Bremen and Lübeck, witnessing the sufferings of the wounded Christians before Acre in 1190, were so moved with compassion that they erected tent-hospitals for them, and provided for surgical and nursing attendance. There had been a German hospital in Jerusalem from 1128 to 1187; and the new arrangement at Acre was in some sort a continuance of this, being called the Hospital St Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem. The new hospital, the attendants and founders of which formed themselves into a monastic order with the same rules as the Knights Hospitallers of St John, found a patron in Duke Frederick of Swabia, and through him secured the countenance of his brother, the Emperor Henry VI., and the confirmation of the pope (1191). Seven years later it was converted into a knightly or military order; and the change was stamped with the papal approval in 1199. The knights, in addition to the usual monastic vows, bound themselves to tend the sick and wounded and wage incessant war upon the heathen. Their distinguishing habiliment was a white mantle with a black cross. The chief officer of the order was the grand-master or 'high-master,' who was assisted by five other dignitaries. The chapter consisted of these six officers in conjunction with the provincial masters. The minor districts and individual castles were governed by commanders, who constituted also the respective provincial councils. There was, moreover, a class of 'serving brothers,' who performed menial offices about the hospitals; and to these were added in certain places a class of inferior female domestics called 'half-sisters.'
About the year 1225 the Duke of Masovia (in Poland) invited the Teutonic Knights to come and help him against the heathen Prussians. The grand-master, Hermann von Salza, sent a body of knights, who experienced little difficulty in establishing themselves in the territories of the heathen. Twelve years later they were strengthened by the absorption into their order of the Brethren of the Sword, a military order which had been formed to convert to Christianity with the sword the Livonians, Estonians, and Courlanders. At length the successive encroachments of the knights roused the Prussians to bitter opposition. A fierce warfare was then carried on for nearly a quarter of a century; but by 1283 the knights were masters of the territory lying between the Vistula and the Memel, and as heirs of the extinct Brethren of the Sword they had also extensive possessions in Livonia and Courland. In 1309 the executive officers of the order established themselves in the great castle of Marienburg, near the Vistula. After subduing the Prussians, the order entered upon a hundred years' contest against the Lithuanians. But a most serious blow was struck at the knights by the conversion of the Lithuanians to Christianity and the accession (1386) of their prince to the throne of Poland. From this time, having lost their main raison d'être—fighting against the heathen—the order began to decline. During the period of its prosperity, however, it had acted as the principal force in the politics of the Baltic countries; and both by its own exertions and by the encouragement it gave to the Hanseatic traders it was the means of spreading German civilisation and manners throughout what are now the Baltic provinces of Russia. The order suffered an incalculable loss of prestige through the terrible defeat inflicted upon them by the Poles and Lithuanians at Tannenberg in 1410. A desperate attempt to recover their power resulted (1466) in the loss of West Prussia and the alienation of the esteem and affection of their subjects in East Prussia, which they could only retain as a fief of Poland. In 1525 the order was secularised; its grand-master, Albert of Brandenburg-Anspach, being created hereditary duke of Prussia under the suzerainty of Poland. The headquarters of the order—for it still possessed several estates scattered throughout the German empire and in one or two other countries—was fixed at Mergentheim in Swabia, and its possessions were reorganised in twelve bailiwicks. Thus it existed until 1801, when the estates west of the Rhine were annexed by France; in 1809 the order was entirely suppressed by Napoleon in all the German states. This left only a couple of bailiwicks in Austria and one at Utrecht; and these still exist, severely aristocratic in both countries. The Austrian branch, reorganised in 1840, justifies its existence by maintaining an organisation for the care of the wounded in war.
See Voigt, Geschichte des deutschen Ritterordens (1859); Lohmeyer, Geschichte von Ost- und West-Preussen (1880); and Perlbach, Statuten des Deutschen Ordens (1890).