Adlig leben im 14. Jahrhundert. Weshalb sie fuhren

This book represents the third volume of Werner Paravicini’s monumental study of the ‘Preußenreisen’, the military expeditions launched by the Teutonic Order and their array of international volunteers into Russia and Lithuania from their base in Prussia. The first two volumes, as Paravicini states, focused on ‘what the European nobility did’ while on these campaigns, and he now turns to the issue of ‘why they went’ (p. 15). Assessing what attracted aristocrats from a geographical and cultural expanse stretching from Silesia to Scotland, from Sweden to Sicily, to crusade in the Baltic is a complex task. One poet from the early fourteenth century, for example, listed no less than nine reasons why a Christian knight might want to crusade (pp. 25–6). For Paravicini, the principal reason driving European nobles to fight under the aegis of the Teutonic Order along the Baltic littoral was the longing to engage with and live...

Ancient history · Knight · Nobility · Political science · History · Law · Medieval European History and Architecture