July 15, 1410 - The Two Swords of Grunwald

Six hundred and sixteen years ago today, a Polish-Lithuanian army broke the back of the Teutonic Knights on a field in what's now northern Poland. It was one of the largest battles fought in medieval Europe. It also turned into one of history's better examples of a symbol outliving the event it commemorates — by about five centuries.

The Teutonic Knights’ Order — successors to the Germanic branch of the Knights Templar — had been running its own crusader state along the Baltic since the 1200s, converting — by force if necessary — the locals as it went. Poland and Lithuania, once rivals, had been united by marriage in 1386 when the pagan Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila took the Polish crown and, not incidentally, Christianity. That deal removed the Order's last good excuse for its eastern and southern expansion.

They didn't take the hint. War came in 1409.

Both sides spent months building the largest armies either had ever fielded. Estimates run 30,000 to 50,000 men total. On July 15, they met near the villages of Grunwald and Tannenberg. Polish King Jagiełło, in no hurry, kept his army resting in the shade of a nearby forest while the Teutonic Knights stood formed up in the open under a blazing July sun. Plate armor and July heat really don't mix well, and their Grand Master, Ulrich von Jungingen, got impatient waiting for someone to attack.

So, he sent heralds. Two of them, carrying two bare, unsheathed swords, with an implied message for Jagiełło and his brother – Vytautas, the new Grand Duke of Lithuania: “Maybe you won’t fight because you don’t have weapons? Here are a couple of nice swords to help you find your courage.” It’s the Dauphin's tennis balls sent to England's Henry V, five years before Agincourt made that joke famous — a taunt meant to needle the enemy into a rash, ill-considered attack. Jagiełło didn't take the bait. Chroniclers have him accepting the swords with something close to grace, saying (allowing for translation and a court chronicler's flair for making his king sound good) that he didn't need the enemy's swords, but he'd take them anyway and trust the outcome to God. Then he went ahead and fought the battle on his own terms, at the time and pace he'd already chosen.

After more than an hour of hard fighting, the Lithuanian light cavalry broke and ran, with the Knights in pursuit, looting the field as they went. That’s the narrative according to the main Polish chronicler, who wrote the whole thing up as a rout and that the Poles then won it on their own. That was “the Narrative” for five centuries.

Then, in 1909, a historian noticed the Lithuanians had pulled this exact move once before … at the Battle of the Vorskla River in 1399 … where it hadn't worked out, and they got crushed. Anyway, the historian argued the Lithuanian retreat wasn’t panic. It was a trick borrowed from the Golden Horde: Feigned retreat. Let the enemy chase you until they are a disorganized mess. Then turn around and hit them once they've lost formation. The theory got real backing in 1963, when a Swedish historian dug up a letter written a few years after Grunwald, warning the next Teutonic Grand Master to watch out for exactly this — a feigned withdrawal the Lithuanians had used before. Whether genuine terror or calculated Tatar-style bait, it worked: While the Knights were tangled up chasing Lithuanians and looting, the Polish heavy cavalry hit their flank, the Lithuanians came back and hit them from the rear, and the Teutonic Grand Master — leading one last charge at the Polish king — took a lance through the throat. The Knight’s command structure died with the Grand Master, and the whole Teutonic line came apart. Historians still argue today about the Lithuanian retreat and re-engagement. Stratagem or happy coincidence? Nobody's yet settled the question.

Those two taunting swords, meanwhile, ended up as war trophies. Jagiełło hauled them back to Kraków, and over the following two centuries they turned into actual crown jewels, used at Polish-Lithuanian coronations from the 1500s well into the 1700s, one sword symbolizing each nation of the union. They were lost to history for good in 1853, but the image stuck hard enough that Poland's communist resistance revived it in 1943 as the design for a military decoration, the Cross of Grunwald … and in 1938, a Polish postage stamp depicting the swords drew a formal diplomatic protest from Nazi Germany, which Poland's foreign ministry actually caved to. An insult meant to provoke a reckless enemy became, five centuries later, still potent enough to get a government worked up over a piece of mail.

Grunwald was tactically decisive but strategically underwhelming. The allies dawdled on the march to the Order's capital at Marienburg, giving the Knights time to organize a defense. The eventual peace treaty cost the Order some territory and a lot of money, but not its existence. That's often how these things go: win the battle, fumble the follow-through.

But that wasn’t the end. Grunwald still echoes. In August 1914, German forces annihilated a Russian army in roughly the same part of East Prussia. The Germans could have called it whatever the nearest town was. They didn't. They called it the Battle of Tannenberg — deliberately reaching back 500 years to claim they'd avenged the 1410 defeat. Hindenburg became a national hero on the strength of it, and a massive memorial went up in the 1920s — later expanded by the Nazis — who buried Hindenburg there and drew up plans (never finished) to add a statue of Hitler.

Then came 1945. With the Red Army closing in, German troops blew up their own memorial rather than let the Soviets have it, and hauled Hindenburg's coffin west to a salt mine in Thuringia. He eventually got reburied in Marburg. The Poles, for their part, spent the next three decades quietly finishing the demolition job the Germans started, erasing what was left.

So, a taunt meant to provoke backfires into a legendary victory, gets turned into crown jewels, gets appropriated by Germans in 1914 as revenge, gets built into a shrine, gets blown up by its own builders in 1945, and gets erased by the descendants of the people it was originally fought against. All from one field in Prussia.

Grunwald remains a genuine touchstone of Polish and Lithuanian national identity. There's a mass reenactment there every July, thousands of people in armor, horses, banners ... the whole production. Given the current political and military situation, "Slavic peoples uniting against foreign invaders" isn't exactly ancient history to the people who live there. Interestingly, there has been a Grunwald reenactment in Belarus as well. It was cancelled this year. I guess "Slavic peoples uniting against foreign invaders" isn’t something to celebrate if your besties are playing the role of the foreign invader.

Addendum: a note on “The Two Swords”

• After the Partitions of Poland (1790s), the swords ended up with historian Tadeusz Czacki, who rescued them from a wrecked treasury and handed them to Princess Izabela Czartoryska — a collector obsessed with Polish national relics. She put them in her private museum, the Temple of the Sibyl, on her estate at Puławy.
• In 1830, Poland rose up against Russia (the November Uprising). Russian troops seized Czartoryska's palace. Most of her collection had already been smuggled out to France — but the swords, for whatever reason, weren't part of that shipment. Instead, it seems, they got stashed in a parish priest's house in a nearby village.
• There they sat until 1853, when the priest died. Russian gendarmes searched the house … apparently that was routine after a death … found the swords, and confiscated them as illegal weapons. That's the last confirmed sighting. After that ... nothing. No auction record, no museum accession, no mention in any later inventory. They just vanish from the paper trail.

So "lost to history for good" is literally accurate — nobody knows if they were melted down, tossed in a river, or stuck in some Russian officer's attic. Maybe they are propping open the windows in some old babushka’s house, or are still sitting unidentified in a storeroom somewhere next to the Ark of the Covenant. It’s a mystery. Given they were originally described as plain, unadorned battle swords with no obvious markings, they could easily have ended up misfiled as generic 15th-century ironwork and never connected to Grunwald at all.