Who won the Battle of Grunwald?
The Polish-Lithuanian army of King Władysław II Jagiełło and Grand Duke Vytautas won the Battle of Grunwald on 15 July 1410. In about six hours of fighting it destroyed the field army of the Teutonic Order and killed its Grand Master, Ulrich von Jungingen. Germans call the battle Tannenberg, and Lithuanians call it Žalgiris.2
On 15 July 1410, on rolling fields between the villages of Grunwald and Tannenberg, one of the largest battles of medieval Europe destroyed the military power of the Teutonic Order in an afternoon. Known in Poland as Grunwald, in Lithuania as Žalgiris and in German as Tannenberg, it is the same day remembered under three names, and it still runs deep in the national memory of all three.3
The battle from both sides
Two perspectivesThe allied army of King Władysław Jagiełło and Grand Duke Vytautas came to Grunwald to break the Teutonic Order's grip on the Baltic. It was one of the largest forces in medieval Europe: Polish knights, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Tatars and others. When the Lithuanian wing gave way, whether broken or in a feigned retreat, the Order committed its reserves and lost its cohesion, and the Polish line held and then rolled forward. The Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen and much of the Order's leadership were killed. The victory shattered the Order's military power and made the Polish-Lithuanian union the dominant power in the region, a triumph still central to Polish national memory.
The Teutonic Knights met the allied army confident in the heavy cavalry and discipline that had made them the Baltic's foremost military power. Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen sought a decisive field battle and, by tradition, sent two bare swords to King Władysław Jagiełło and Grand Duke Vytautas as a taunt to fight. The Order's charge drove back the Lithuanian wing and seemed to be winning, but when its knights pursued and then committed the last reserves, the Polish line enveloped them. The Grand Master and most of the senior brethren fell on the field. Though the Order's capital at Marienburg withstood the siege that followed, Grunwald began a decline it never reversed.
The Order and the alliance
For a century the Teutonic Knights, a crusading monastic order turned Baltic state, had expanded at the expense of their neighbors. Against them stood the union of the Crown of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, sealed by the marriage that made the Lithuanian ruler Jogaila into King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland. He and his cousin, Grand Duke Vytautas (Witold) of Lithuania, brought together a remarkable army: Polish knights, Lithuanian and Ruthenian riders, Tatar horse-archers and Czech mercenaries among them.4 › Battle of Płowce, 1331
The road to Grunwald, 1409 to 1410
The war began over Samogitia, the Lithuanian borderland the Order claimed. When the Samogitians rose against the knights in 1409 with Vytautas' backing, Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen declared war on Jagiełło on 6 August 1409 and invaded the Dobrzyń Land. A truce held through the winter, and the allies used it to plan a single thrust at the heart of the Order's state, its capital at Marienburg.5
To get there they needed to cross the Vistula. A pontoon bridge was built in secret during the winter and brought to Czerwińsk, where the Polish army crossed on 30 June 1410; in the first days of July it joined Vytautas' Lithuanians, the Mazovians and a Tatar contingent. The combined army then marched north into the Order's lands.6
Two bare swords
The Grand Master, Ulrich von Jungingen, drew up his heavily armored knights and waited. As the morning wore on and the allies did not attack, he sent Jagiełło a taunt, two naked swords, an invitation to fight if he dared. He would not live out the day.7
The retreat that turned the field
The battle opened on the allied right, where Vytautas' lighter Lithuanian and Tatar cavalry engaged, then fell back. Whether a genuine rout or a deliberate feigned retreat in the steppe manner is still argued, but the effect was the same: it drew ranks of Teutonic knights out of formation in pursuit. On the left the Polish heavy cavalry ground forward in a long, brutal mêlée. When the Order committed its last reserves, in a charge that seemed aimed at Jagiełło himself, the allied line held, enveloped them, and the Teutonic army came apart.8
Lithuanian historians read the withdrawal as a plan, not a flight. The Lithuanian national encyclopedia describes it as a maneuver borrowed from the Tatars that drew the knights out of formation, after which the Lithuanians came back to strike the disordered enemy in the flank. The battlefield museum notes that Długosz calls it a flight, while modern historians suggest a feigned retreat.9
Długosz records two moments of crisis. The great royal banner, carried by Marcin of Wrocimowice, went down under the enemy's pressure and was raised again at once. Then a German knight, Diepold von Köckritz, rode out of the Teutonic ranks at the king himself, until Zbigniew Oleśnicki knocked him from his horse with a broken lance and he was killed.10
How many died at Grunwald?
The Order's leadership was destroyed. Ulrich von Jungingen died with the reserves he had led into the last charge, and with him fell the Grand Marshal, the Grand Commander and nearly every senior officer of the Order on the field. The Battle of Grunwald Museum counts 203 of the 250 brothers of the Order who fought there among the dead, and the Lithuanian encyclopedia puts them at about 200. The allies took 51 Teutonic banners, the figure Długosz reports.11
The total of the dead is far less certain. The museum cites Andrzej Nadolski's estimate of about 8,000 for the Order's army and treats Heinrich von Plauen's claim of 18,000 dead as exaggerated, while Jerzy Rajman thinks even 8,000 too high for the Order alone. The losses of Jagiełło's whole army, in the museum's view, probably did not exceed about 1,000. The Grand Master's body was found the next day and sent with honor to Marienburg for burial, along with the bodies of other dignitaries of the Order.12
Where was the Battle of Grunwald fought?
The armies met on the fields between three villages in what is now northern Poland: Grunwald, Stębark, which the Germans called Tannenberg, and Łodwigowo. Vytautas' Lithuanians stood on the right wing, near Stębark, and it was near Stębark too that the Grand Master fell. Today the Museum of the Battle of Grunwald stands on the battlefield at Stębark, beside the ruins of a chapel raised after the battle, and every year a reenactment of the battle draws thousands of knights and tens of thousands of spectators.13
What the day decided
The Grand Master and much of the Order's leadership were killed on the field. The follow-up failed, the allies could not take the great fortress of Marienburg (Malbork), and the Peace of Thorn in 1411 was territorially modest. But the aura was gone. Grunwald broke the Teutonic Order's reputation and its offensive strength for good, and shifted the balance of power in the region toward Poland-Lithuania for generations. Few battles have meant so much to so many nations at once.14
A symbol that outlived the Order
The defeat did not destroy the Teutonic Order at a stroke, but it began a decline it never reversed. Though the Order's capital at Marienburg held out against the siege that followed, the loss of so many knights and so much prestige broke its grip on the region. Over the next decades a deep political and economic crisis hollowed it out: fewer knights and less money came from the West, and the higher taxes it raised to stave off financial collapse turned its own Prussian estates against it, until by the Peace of Thorn in 1466 it ceded vast territory and became a vassal of the Polish crown. For Poland and Lithuania the battle became something larger still, a lasting emblem of their union and of victory over a mighty enemy, invoked for centuries afterward in art, literature and national memory. The Order's push east had been checked before, notably in 1242, when Alexander Nevsky's Russians defeated an army of Teutonic knights at Lake Peipus.15
Tannenberg 1410 and Tannenberg 1914
The German name gave the battle a second life. In August 1914 the German Eighth Army destroyed a Russian army in East Prussia, and Paul von Hindenburg, who knew the history of 1410, asked for the victory to be named after Tannenberg. German propaganda presented the Battle of Tannenberg of 1914 as revenge for the Teutonic Order's defeat, a second Tannenberg in an age-old struggle between Germans and Slavs, as both the German military historian Heiner Bröckermann and the Polish history portal dzieje.pl describe.16
