Click on image
The Teutonic Knights, the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar, were the three great orders of warrior monks. With the fall of Acre in 1291, the prestige of the warrior monks suffered and by the early fourteenth century, the Templar order had been abolished by the pope and the Hospitallers were rapidly becoming like other monastic orders, living cloistered lives.
It was different for the Teutonic knights who moved their headquarters from Venice to Marlbork near the Baltic sea in the hope of defeating the heathen tribes of the north. This culmininated in a failed crusade in 1390 against the Poles and Lithuanians, whose own king had already converted to Christianity.
Disillusioned by the order’s mistaken lusts for power and conquest, one knight absconded and eventually travelled to England where he decided to embark upon a new life as a Dominican friar, taking the word of God to the common people, without a sword or a shield. The knight’s name was Heinrich von Beckler.