A Tour of Medieval Poland and the Reconciliation of Peoples: Reflecting on Sienkiewicz’s Krzyżacy

My last post focused on the background of the Divine Mercy devotion and St. Faustina’s Diary was actually the first Catholic book I ever read, back in 1995. I went on to read John Paul II’s Crossing the Threshold of Hope and his biography (in the pre-Witness to Hope days), and the letters of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Something was pointing me to Poland and, amazingly enough, I was actually sent there the next year as a Rotary Club exchange student. It was an incredible time to be in Eastern Europe, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, although, more than recent history, I soaked in the great legacy of Christendom that still pervades their culture.

I recently read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Krzyżacy (1900), translated as The Knights of the Cross, the tale of a young knight, Zbyszko of Bogdaniec, who enters into a bitter feud with the Teutonic Knights. The Knights were crusading monks, who, after being expelled from the Holy Land, shifted their sites to Eastern Europe, seeking to force the conversion of the Baltic peoples. The novel is racially charged, accusing the German monk-knights of exploitation, greed, and oversized ambitions to dominate the recently joined nations of Poland-Lithuania. Sienkiewicz was writing when Germans occupied two thirds of Poland, the Prussians in the north and Austrians in the south, and the nation needed to fight for its life once again, as it did on the fields of Grunwald, the culmination of the novel when King Jagiello overthrows the Knights in 1410. For me, however, the book was a welcome pilgrimage, retracing my steps as a young German-American falling in love with the history, culture, and faith of Poland.

The novel begins at the great Tyniec Abbey:

Princess Anna Danuta, Maćko, and Zbyszko, had been in Tyniec before, but in the retinue were courtiers who saw it for the first time, and these, when they raised their eyes, looked with astonishment on the magnificent abbey, on the indented walls running along cliffs above precipices, on edifices standing now on the slopes of the mountain, now within battlements piled up, lofty, and shining in gold from the rising sun. By these noble walls, edifices, houses, and buildings destined for various uses, and the gardens lying at the foot of the mountain, and carefully cultivated fields which the eye took in from above, it was possible at the first glance to recognize ancient inexhaustible wealth, to which people from poor Mazovia were not accustomed, and at which they must unavoidably be astonished. There existed, it is true, old and wealthy Benedictine monasteries in other parts of the kingdom, as, for example, in Lubush on the Odra, in Plotsk, in Great Poland, in Mogilno, and other places, but none could compare with Tyniec, whose possessions exceeded not only dependent principalities, but whose incomes might rouse envy even in kings at that period. Among the courtiers, therefore, astonishment increased, and some of them were almost unwilling to believe their own eyes.

The Knights of the Cross, ch. 3

I visited Tyniec with a Polish scouting group and we climbed up the cliff on which it is built. We prayed with the monks and received their monastic hospitality before heading to Krakow, the same route that Zbyszko took in the story, making his way to Wawel Cathedral where he beheld the great queen St. Jadwiga in awe. It was by her marriage to the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Jagiello, that the two nations joined to form the largest territory in Europe.

Just at that moment the bells sounded, announcing that mass would begin soon, and frightening a flock of daws and doves gathered in the towers. Never in his life had Zbyszko seen anything so imposing as that church and that assembly. . . . But Zbyszko waited with the greatest curiosity for the entrance of the king and queen, and forced his way up as much as possible toward the stalls, beyond which, near the altar, were two velvet cushions,—for the royal couple always heard mass on their knees. . . .

Jadwiga entered by the sacristy door. Knights nearest the stalls, when they saw her, though mass had not begun, knelt at once, yielding involuntary honor to her, as to a saint. Zbyszko did the same, for in all that congregation no one doubted that he had really before him a saint, whose image would in time adorn the altars of churches. More especially during recent years the severe penitential life of Jadwiga had caused this, that besides the honor due a queen, they rendered her honor well-nigh religious. From mouth to mouth among lords and people passed reports of miracles wrought by her. It was said that the touch of her hand cared the sick; that people deprived of strength in their members recovered it by putting on old robes of the queen. Trustworthy witnesses affirmed that with their own ears they had heard Christ speaking to her from the altar. Foreign monarchs gave her honor on their knees; even the insolent Knights of the Cross respected her, and feared to offend her. Pope Boniface IX. called her a saint and the chosen daughter of the Church. The world considered her acts, and remembered that that was a child of the house of Anjou and of the Polish Piasts; that she was a daughter of the powerful Ludvik; that she was reared at the most brilliant of courts; that she was the most beautiful of maidens in the kingdom; that she had renounced happiness, renounced a maiden’s first love, and married as queen the “wild” prince of Lithuania, so as to bend with him to the foot of the Cross the last pagan people in Europe. What the power of all the Germans, the power of the Knights of the Cross, their crusading expeditions, and a sea of blood had not effected, her single word had effected. Never had apostolic labor been joined with such devotion; never had woman’s beauty been illuminated by such angelic goodness and such quiet sorrow.

ch. 4

Zbyszko was right to feel awe before the saint-queen, but he felt a different kind of awe in entering the magnificent fortress of the Teutonic Knights at Marienburg/Malbork, seemingly impenetrable and designed to make the Order’s enemies despair. It is, after all, the largest castle in the world!

Sienkiewicz lays out the castle’s power, while pointing to the religious hypocrisy which undergirded it:

A most terrible nest, which had an expression of immense strength, and in which were joined the two greatest powers known to man in that century,—the power of the church and the power of the sword. Whoso resisted the first, was cut down by the second. Whoso lifted an arm against both, against him rose a shout through all Christendom, that he had raised that arm against the Cross of the Saviour. And straightway knights rushed together from all lands to give aid. That nest, therefore, was swarming at all times with armed men and artisans, and in it, at all times, activity buzzed as in a beehive. Before the great buildings, in the passages, at the gates, in the workshops, there was everywhere movement, as at a fair. Echo bore about the sound of hammers and chisels fashioning stone cannonballs, the roar of wind-mills and tread-mills, the neighing of horses, the rattle of arms and of armor, the sound of trumpets and fifes, calls and commands. On those squares all languages were heard, and one might meet warriors from every nation; hence the unerring English archers, who pierced a pigeon tied to a pole a hundred yards distant, and whose arrows went through breastplates as easily as through woolen stuff, and the terrible Swiss infantry who fought with double-handed swords, and the Danes, valiant, though immoderate in food and drink, and the French knights, inclined equally to laughter and to quarrel, the silent and haughty Spanish nobles, the brilliant knights of Italy, the most skillful swordsmen of all, dressed in silk and satin, and during war in impenetrable armor forged in Venice, Florence, and Milan, the knights of Burgundy, Friesland, and finally Germans from every German country. The “white mantles” circled about among all as superiors and masters. “A tower filled with gold,” or, more accurately, a separate chamber, built in the High Castle next the dwelling of the Grand Master, really filled from top to bottom with coin and bars of precious metal, permitted the Order to entertain “guests” worthily, as well as to assemble mercenaries, who were sent on expeditions and to all castles to be at the disposition of voits, starostas, and comturs. So that to the power of the sword and the power of religion were joined here great wealth, and also iron discipline, which, though relaxed in recent times by excess of confidence, and intoxication over the strength of the Order, was still maintained by the force of ancient custom. Monarchs went there not only to fight against Pagans or to borrow money, but to learn the art of governing; knights went there to learn the art of war, for in all the world of that day no one knew how to govern and wage war as did the Order. When it settled in those regions, it owned not one span of earth save a small district and a few castles bestowed on it by a heedless Polish prince; now it possessed a broad country, larger than many kingdoms, containing fertile lands, strong cities, and impregnable castles. It possessed and watched, as a spider possesses its extended web, every thread of which it holds beneath its body. From out that place, from out that High Castle, from the Grand Master, and from the “white mantles,” went in every direction, by post messengers, commands to feudatory nobles, to city councils, to mayors, to voits and assistant voits, to captains of mercenary troops; and what there in that centre had been originated and determined by mind and will was executed far from there and quickly by hundreds and by thousands of fists in armor. Hither flowed in money from whole regions, wheat, all kinds of provisions, tribute from the secular clergy groaning under a grievous yoke, and also from other cloisters at which the Order looked with unfriendly eye. From out that place, finally, grasping hands were stretched against all surrounding lands and nations.

Ch. 62

The power was not to last, however, as the intertwined might of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire was roused against the Knights:

The Order gained confidence and felt itself almighty. Marienburg, with its two tremendous castles and its First Castle, dazzled men through its strength more than ever. They were dazzled by its wealth and its seeming discipline; and the whole Order appeared more commanding, more inexhaustible for coming ages, than it had been at any time; and no man among princes, no man among knightly guests, no man even among Knights of the Order, save the Grand Master Conrad, understood that from the hour when Lithuania had become Christian, something of such character had happened as if those currents of the Nogat, which defended on one side the formidable fortress, had begun to undermine its walls in silence and irresistibly. No man understood that, though power remained yet in that enormous body, the soul had flown from it; whoso came freshly and looked at that Marienburg reared ex luto, at those walls, bastions, black crosses on gates, mantlerooms, and storehouses, thought, first of all, that even the gates of hell would not prevail against the Cross there, in its northern capital.

Ch. 62.

Although Jagiello crippled the knights, it was left to his son Casimir IV to capture Marienburg/Malbork itself, making it into a residence for the Polish kings. It was assumed back into German territory when Prussia, along with Russia and Austria, partitioned Poland in the 18th century.

Writing at a time when Poland did not exist on the map, Sienkiewicz sought to arose the consciousness of his nation by recalling its great victory of the Knights of the Cross at Grunwald in 1410. People have accused him of stirring up anti-German sentiment and using the knights as a caricature of the entire German peoples. There is some truth to that insofar as the Germans had engaged in centuries of attempted conquest–stalled by the Emperor Otto III’s recognition of Poland as a Christian nation–followed by waves of merchants, as the novel even mentions that a third of the residents of Krakow were Germans at that time. If the Teutonic Knights had gone unchecked, they would have opened the way for more German military and economic activity in Eastern Europe.

What struck me, especially with my own Germanic descent, was that Sienkiewicz actually went out of his way to show that many Germans did not support the Knights and even welcomed the Poles back into Prussia. Early in the story, when Zbyszko was burning to fight Germans, he actually made a deep friendship with a Germanic knight from Lorraine, de Lorche, who ends up fighting against the Knights at Grunwald. It’s certainly not that Sienkiewicz was letting the Germans off easy: “all the German might, which up to that battle [Grunwald] had been flooding unfortunate Slav lands like a sea, had broken itself against Polish breasts on that great day, that day of purification and redemption” (ch. 80). Although the Knights do provide a stand-in for German aggression in general, Sienkiewicz does make it clear that the conflict was not simply about ethnicity or culture. Germans themselves could recognize the horror and hypocrisy committed by the Knights: “And not only are they hated by the people who use our speech, or the Prussian, but even by the Germans” (ch. 63). Sienkiewicz certainly wrote as a patriot but not as one trying to stir up indiscriminate hatred of Germans qua Germans, even as he hoped for a new expulsion of their occupation of his homeland.

It shouldn’t be surprising that St. John Paul II deeply appreciated the writing of his compatriot. I couldn’t help, while reading the novel, but think of the Pope’s own efforts, along with the Bishops of Poland, for reconciliation with Germany during the Cold War in 1965. The Polish Bishops wrote to their fellow Bishops of Germany at a sensitive time, since the borders between the countries had been adjusted after the Second World War, displacing many people. In fact, the very land conquered by the Teutonic Knights had formed the basis of German Prussia (from which modern Germany was formed) and had remained in German hands until the end of World War II. When Time Magazine covered the land transfer, they showed a large picture of Marienburg with the caption: “German seat of war becomes a part of Poland” (Nov 19, 1945, page 116, although it should have said “again”). Although the Poles suffered atrociously at the hands of the Nazis (the worst incident in more than a thousand years of conflict), they took the initiative of reconciliation, with the simple message: “We forgive and ask forgiveness.” Perhaps the great partnership of Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger flowed from the grace of this reconciliation.

The Polish Bishops wrote again this year to their German confreres, this time to correct them, although that is a different kind of battle. May the Polish prevail again!