The German Knights: The Making of a Modern Myth
The medieval order of Teutonic Knights held powerful sway over the historical imagination of Germany until the Second World War. Why and how did this nationalist myth flourish?
The German or Teutonic order was a military religious order like the Knights Templar or Hospitallers. Founded in Palestine in the 1190s, it survived the loss of the crusader states by shifting the centre of its operations to the Baltic. From the early thirteenth century the Order built a powerful state in Prussia in which it ruled a mixed society of incoming German colonials and what was left of the native (Slav) Prussian population. Its raison d'etre was the war against the heathens.
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