Jerusalem on the Periphery of the World: Echoes of Crusading Traditions in the Architecture of the Military Orders of the Brandenburg–Pomerania–Greater Poland Borderland

Abstract

In the second half of the twelfth century, the Order of St. John acquired extensive lands in Brandenburg and Pomerania. In the first half of the thirteenth century, further donations anabled the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar, who had not been present here until then, to establish a network of houses in the region. For both orders, this was a peripheral region: their houses were oriented primarily toward pastoral care and economic management, and contact with houses in Western Europe or with the orders’ central authorities remained limited.

It was not until the second half of the fourteenth century that the Knights Hospitaller undertook the construction of brick castles. A Hospitaller castle was essentially the seat of a convent or an order official, and despite the overlap of practical and symbolic functions with secular seats, it arranged these priorities differently. These buildings show the reception of certain models, primarily ideological ones, whose origins lay in the crusader Holy Land. This is a topic that has not been widely discussed so far, mainly due to the significant degree of transformation of the seats of the Templars and the Knights Hospitaller in this interesting area over time.