ANY account of military religious Orders in the Baltic begins, of necessity, in the Levant, and must take into account circumstances in the rest of Christendom. Although Palestine was no tabula rasa, in terms of ancient Christian institutions, the newly conquered ‘Latin east’ required its own structure of archbishoprics, bishoprics, churches and monasteries. The large number of temporary visitors, crusaders, merchants and pilgrims, necessitated a network of hospitals and brotherhoods out of which grew the military religious Orders. Three major military Orders arose in Palestine during the earlier crusades: the Templars, the Order of St John and the German or Teutonic Order. While they owed their ethos to the Church’s wary accommodation with the warrior caste, their power stemmed from their ability to secure exemption from episcopal jurisdictions, and indeed in the case of the Teutonic Order, from the jurisdiction of the Order of St John itself. The Order also profited from the granting by Honorius III of the right to receive donations by way of commutation of crusading vows, which resulted in the steady accretion of a landed power base in northern Europe.

The Order’s extra-Levantine possessions were supposed to provide the wherewithal for the fight against the infidel in the east. Gradually, individual properties, assembled over many years, were grouped under the aegis of bailiwick commanders, who in turn were subordinate to provincial commanders, themselves subject to the German Master, the operational locum of a further hierarchy as yet still based in Palestine.