On 22 September 1236 Samogitian warriors caught a crusader army returning from a raid through the land of Saulė, around today's Šiauliai in northern Lithuania, and destroyed it. The master of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, Volkwin, died with 48 of his knights, and the order never recovered: within a year its survivors were merged into the Teutonic Order. Lithuania and Latvia now mark the date as Baltic Unity Day.
The first crusade against Lithuania
Since 1208 the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, a crusading order of knights, had been conquering the pagan Baltic peoples along the Daugava, and Estonians, Livonians and Latgalians already owed it military service. On 19 February 1236 Pope Gregory IX proclaimed a crusade against the pagan Lithuanians.1
The Lithuanian encyclopedia VLE describes the army that answered the call: 55 knights of the order with their men, about 600 in all, under Master Volkwin; some 500 crusaders, mostly from northern Germany and Gotland, under Count Heinrich von Dannenberg; about 1,500 Estonian, Livonian and Latgalian troops owing service to the order; and 200 men sent by the prince of Pskov. VLE and the historian Artūras Dubonis both put the whole force at about 3,000. VLE records that Volkwin was reluctant to march and was pushed into it by the crusaders and the papal legate.2
Ambush in the marshes
In mid-September the army struck into northern Samogitia from the castle of Mežotne in Semigallia, set up a camp and split into raiding parties that plundered the country for several days. On the way back, on 21 September, Samogitian warriors of the Saulė land blocked the road at a stream, and the heavily armored knights from Germany refused to fight on the marshy ground. On the morning of 22 September, as the crusaders decided to withdraw, the main Samogitian force arrived and attacked; VLE names its leader as Vykintas, then the most powerful Samogitian duke, and Dubonis considers that he most likely played a leading part.3
The death of an order
The crusaders were slaughtered. Volkwin and 48 knights of the order were killed, and Semigallians cut down many of the men who fled toward Riga. Dubonis cites losses of about 2,000 crusaders and 180 men from Pskov, and VLE says only one Pskovian in ten came home. Almost everything about the battle comes from a single source, the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, and the exact battlefield is still disputed: Dubonis notes that the widely repeated site at Jauniūnai, north of Šiauliai, rests on little evidence, while Edvardas Gudavičius placed it southwest of the town.4
The defeat set off revolts among the Curonians, Semigallians and Selonians, and the order lost the Baltic lands south of the Daugava it had conquered since 1208. In 1237 the surviving Brothers of the Sword were incorporated into the Teutonic Order as its autonomous Livonian branch. According to VLE the German orders did not attack Lithuania for more than a decade afterward, while the Lithuanian state continued to grow. Two centuries later the Teutonic Order would suffer its own great defeat at the hands of Poland and Lithuania at Grunwald.5
Baltic Unity Day
In 2000 the Latvian Saeima and the Lithuanian Seimas made 22 September Baltic Unity Day in memory of the battle, when Samogitians and Semigallians defeated the Brothers of the Sword. The day is marked each year in a town in Latvia or Lithuania. The date of 1236 is given in the Julian calendar, which was then in use.6
Also on this day
- 1789: Battle of Rymnik. On the Rymnik river in Wallachia, Suvorov's Russians and the Austrians of Prince Josias of Coburg attacked a far larger Ottoman army under the Grand Vizier.
