A Samogitian army destroyed the combined Livonian and Prussian forces of the Teutonic Order near Durbe on 13 July 1260, killing both commanders and about 150 brother knights; the Great Prussian Uprising began ten weeks later and took the Order fourteen years to crush.
The Battle of Durbe was fought on 13 July 1260 on marshy ground in Courland between the Teutonic Order and the Samogitians, and it was the worst day the Order had in the thirteenth century. About 150 brother knights were killed, along with the Livonian master Burchard von Hornhausen, the marshal of Prussia Heinrich Botel and a Swedish duke serving with the crusade. The Order lost more of its professional membership in an afternoon than in any engagement before the Battle of Grunwald a hundred and fifty years later.
What made it a catastrophe rather than a reverse was the timing and the audience. The Order governed a conquered population held down by castles and garrisons, and it had just demonstrated in front of them that its field army could be destroyed. The Prussians rose in September, the Curonians, Semigallians and Oeselians followed, and Mindaugas — baptised in 1251 and crowned a Christian king in 1253 — broke with the Order and went back to war.
By 1260 the Order held two conquered provinces that did not touch each other. Prussia had been subdued between 1230 and the treaty of Christburg in 1249; Livonia had come in with the absorption of the beaten Sword-Brothers in 1237, after the Samogitians destroyed them at Saule in 1236. Between the two lay Samogitia, pagan, unconquered, and exactly the corridor that would have joined the Order's state into one country.
Mindaugas had ceded Samogitia to the Order on parchment as part of the price of his baptism and his crown, which is a different thing from the Samogitians accepting it. They had beaten a Livonian force at Skuodas in 1259, and the Order answered by building castles at Georgenburg and Karšuva to hold the district down. When the Samogitians besieged Georgenburg, the masters of Livonia and Prussia combined to relieve it.
The relief force was a coalition of everything the Order could raise: brother knights from both provinces, Danish troops from Estonia, Swedish crusaders under Duke Karl, and levies of subject Curonians and Estonians who had been conquered themselves within living memory. Its weaknesses were argued over before the fighting started. The Danish cavalry refused to dismount on ground where mounted men could not manoeuvre, and there was a quarrel between the Curonians and the Prussians over precedence.
The decisive grievance was simpler. The Curonians asked that their kinsmen taken prisoner by the Samogitians be included in any settlement, and the brothers refused. The Curonians left the field, and Peter von Dusburg, writing for the Order two generations later, says they turned and attacked it as they went. The Estonians left after them. Whether the Curonians actually struck the Order or merely walked away, the line had a hole in it before the Samogitians closed.
With their auxiliaries gone, the brothers and the remaining crusaders were left in the open on ground of the Samogitians’ choosing, marsh on one side and no room to build momentum for a charge. Samogitian horsemen enveloped them. The fighting was short: encircled heavy cavalry in soft ground could neither ride down its attackers nor get away from them, and the mail-clad brothers were killed where they were held.
Burchard von Hornhausen and Heinrich Botel died with the mass of their knights, and about fifteen more brothers were taken alive — a worse fate, since captured crusaders in the Baltic wars were commonly burned as offerings. The Order had lost, in one engagement, the command of both its provinces and the better part of two years’ recruitment.
The rising that followed began on 20 September 1260 and lasted fourteen years. Five Prussian clans rose with their own leaders — the Natangians under Herkus Monte, who had been raised and educated in Germany, the Sambians under Glande, the Bartians under Diwanus, the Warmians under Glappe and the Pogesanians under Auktume — and the absence of a single commander among them is the main reason the Order survived. Herkus Monte destroyed a relieving force at Pokarwis in January 1261, and at Löbau in 1263 the Prussians killed the Order’s master and marshal in the field for the second time in three years.
The Order was reduced at the worst point to a handful of its strongest castles, and it was rescued by what the Prussians could not match: a steady flow of crusading reinforcements from Germany after 1265, and the papal and imperial machinery that kept sending them. The rebel leaders were captured and killed one by one, and the last strongholds fell in 1274. In Livonia the Semigallians held out even longer, and Courland and Semigallia were not finally subdued until the 1290s.
For Lithuania the battle was the hinge of a reign. Mindaugas had accepted baptism and a crown in order to buy off the Order, and the price had been Samogitia and other western lands. After Durbe he repudiated the settlement, sent armies back against Livonia and, according to the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, returned to the old religion; the Christian kingdom of Lithuania ended with him when he was murdered by rivals in 1263, and the country stayed officially pagan for another century.
For the Order the lesson was about what its state actually rested on. Its power was a network of brick and stone castles garrisoned by a few hundred professional brothers, and the field army it could assemble was small enough that one bad day in a marsh could erase it. It rebuilt, conquered Prussia a second time and went on to two more centuries of annual raiding into Lithuania — but the Samogitian corridor it had gone to Durbe to secure stayed unconquered, and it was still unconquered when the Order marched to Grunwald in 1410.