On 15 July 1410, on the fields between the villages of Grunwald and Tannenberg in Prussia, the army of King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland and Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania met the army of the Teutonic Order. By evening Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen was dead and the Order's army destroyed. It was one of the largest battles of medieval Europe, and the Order never regained its dominance. This page is a short dated summary; the full story is in our article on the Battle of Grunwald.
The day of the two swords
The two armies drew up early in the morning, and until about noon neither moved. Jan Długosz, writing some sixty years later, tells how two heralds then rode over from the Order's lines carrying bare swords, sent by the grand master to the king and to Vytautas so that they would stop hiding in the woods and come out to fight. Britannica tells the same story of the taunt.1
The Lithuanian cavalry on the allied right went in first and was driven from the field. The Order's knights then turned on the Poles, and in the hardest fighting King Jagiełło himself was in danger. Britannica writes that the Lithuanian cavalry came back and struck the knights from the rear; whether its first withdrawal was a rout or a deliberate feint is still argued, as our full article explains. Ulrich von Jungingen was killed with his marshals and commanders, and the rest of the Order's army was cut down, captured or scattered in flight.2
How many fell
Długosz claims that fifty thousand of the enemy died and forty thousand were taken prisoner, and that 51 banners were captured, but he admits that the dead were hard to count. Modern estimates are far smaller. Britannica gives about 8,000 dead and 14,000 captured out of some 27,000 on the Order's side, and about 5,000 dead on the Polish-Lithuanian side.3
What it decided
The victors could not take the Order's capital at Marienburg (Malbork), and the peace signed the next year was mild, Britannica notes, but the Teutonic Knights never regained their dominance and Poland-Lithuania became the leading power of eastern Europe. The date, like all dates of the time, is in the Julian calendar.4
Britannica also traces the battle's afterlife: when the Germans defeated the Russians in East Prussia in 1914, they named that victory Tannenberg to claim revenge for 1410. That story is in our article on Tannenberg 1914. The 1410 battle itself, with the armies, the fighting and its place in national memory, is told in our article on the Battle of Grunwald.5
