Teutonic Order: Ship-Sail Hospital at Acre to Baltic State to Vienna Nuns

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Around 1190, during the Third Crusade, merchants from Bremen and Lübeck used the sails of their ships to pitch a field hospital outside Acre for German-speaking crusaders who could not communicate with French and Latin speaking medics. By 1198 the brothers had militarized on the Templar model, and under Grand Master Hermann von Salza they expanded fast. In 1211 King Andrew II of Hungary hired them to guard Transylvania against the Cumans, but after they petitioned the pope in 1224 to place the land under papal authority, he expelled them in 1225. In 1226 Duke Konrad I of Masovia invited them against the pagan Prussians, and the Golden Bull of Rimini made their conquests a sovereign state, won in a brutal 50-year war.

From Marienburg the order controlled the Baltic amber trade, absorbed the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, invaded Gotland to destroy the pirate Victual Brothers and ran seasonal raids into pagan Lithuania that Western nobles joined for prestige. Its aggression pushed Lithuania and Poland into union, and at Grunwald in 1410 the Grand Master and 50 of 60 top dignitaries died. In 1525 Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg met Martin Luther, turned Lutheran and became Duke of Prussia under the Polish king, his uncle. The order survived as Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist branches, lost its lands to Napoleon in 1809 and became a purely religious order in 1929. Today about 100 priests and 200 nuns run clinics and elder care from Vienna.

• Prussian fighters reportedly roasted captured knights alive in their armor as sacrifices.
• The Calvinist Bailiwick of Utrecht still operates separately as a Protestant charity.
• The order's black cross pattée was adapted into the German Iron Cross.
• Heinrich Himmler modeled the SS on a romanticized version of the order, yet the Nazis outlawed the real order in 1938.
• Stalin had Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film Alexander Nevsky shown across the Soviet Union after the 1941 invasion.