On 13 July 1260 (Julian calendar), in Courland in what is now western Latvia, an army of Samogitians defeated the combined forces of the Livonian Order and the Teutonic Order. When the fighting began, the Curonians serving with the knights left them and some turned on them. The Livonian master, Burchard von Hornhausen, fell with about 150 knights. The defeat set off revolts among the conquered Baltic peoples, including the Great Prussian Uprising, and held up the Orders' advance for years.
A crusade against Samogitia
In the mid-13th century the Livonian Order in the north and the Teutonic Order in Prussia were pushing into the lands of the Baltic peoples, and the Samogitians, in the west of today's Lithuania, stood in their way. In 1259 the Livonian master Burchard von Hornhausen built a castle called Georgenburg on the edge of Samogitia, according to the historian Tomas Baranauskas, who discusses the long debate over where it stood.1
The Universal Lithuanian Encyclopedia describes the army the Orders gathered in 1260. For the first time the Teutonic Order joined the Livonian knights in war against the Lithuanians; with them came Danish and Swedish troops under a prince named Karl, crusaders recruited at the pope's call, and levies from the conquered lands, among them Prussians, Curonians and Estonians. It estimates the Orders' army at several thousand men and the Samogitians at about 4,000.2
The battle
The Samogitians did not wait to be attacked. They invaded Courland, and the Orders' army turned away from its march toward Georgenburg to follow them. The armies met on 13 July 1260 by the Durbe, in Courland.3
The Universal Lithuanian Encyclopedia gives the course of the battle. When the fighting began, the Curonians left the Livonian army and some of them attacked the Germans from behind; the Estonians began to fall back; the Orders' contingents had no single commander and quarrelled; and panic spread among the Germans. The Samogitians surrounded the knights, killed many of them and hunted down those who fled.4
About 150 knights of the Orders were killed, with many other soldiers. The dead included the Livonian master Burchard von Hornhausen, the Teutonic marshal Heinrich Botel and the Danish and Swedish commander Karl with his men. Baranauskas calls the result a Samogitian victory over the Teutonic Order.5
Where exactly?
The battle has traditionally been placed by Lake Durbe, near the modern town of Durbe in western Latvia. Baranauskas, writing in 2025, finds that location poorly supported. The two main medieval sources, the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle and the chronicle of Peter of Dusburg, put the fight in a field by the Durbe river and mention no lake or castle, and he places it along the river, north of the lake.6
The Baltic in revolt
The defeat shook the Orders' rule over the peoples they had conquered. The Curonians, Semigallians and Estonians rose against the Order, and the Great Prussian Uprising began; in 1261 the Lithuanian king Mindaugas broke his peace with the Livonian Order and went to war with it again. The encyclopedia concludes that Durbe halted the Orders' eastward expansion until the 1270s and gave the Lithuanian state time to grow stronger. A local history report by Radio Svoboda, written in Durbe itself, makes the same point: the Teutonic knights had to stop their advance to the east.7
The long struggle between the Teutonic Order and its neighbors ended a century and a half later at Grunwald in 1410. An earlier defeat of the crusading knights in the east is told in our article on the Battle on the Ice.
