On 17 February 1370 Algirdas and Kęstutis took an army into Samland and were beaten by the Teutonic Order at Rudau, north of Königsberg. The Order’s marshal Henning Schindekop was killed winning it, and no Lithuanian army seriously threatened Prussia again in that century.
The Battle of Rudau was fought on 17 February 1370 — some Lithuanian accounts give the 18th — near the village of Rudau in Samland, about seventeen kilometres north of Königsberg. A Lithuanian army under the brothers Algirdas and Kęstutis had pushed into the Order’s Prussian heartland and taken the castle there; the grand master Winrich von Kniprode came out to meet it and won. The marshal of the Order, Henning Schindekop, was mortally wounded in the process.
It was the last time in the fourteenth century that a Lithuanian army was a serious danger to Prussia itself, and the Order treated it accordingly — as the vindication of the crusade and the summit of Kniprode’s long mastership. What it did not do was end the war, which ran on for another forty years until the Order took its own catastrophe at Grunwald in 1410.
Rudau came out of a period of unusually hard fighting. The Order had destroyed the brick castle at Kaunas after a siege in 1362 and taken Kęstutis prisoner in 1361, only for him to escape from Marienburg the following year, by one account in a Teutonic mantle. Between 1362 and 1370 the crusaders ran some twenty punitive expeditions into Lithuania. In August 1369 they burned a Lithuanian fort and killed more than a hundred of its people, and during truce talks Kęstutis warned them plainly that this would be answered.
The answer came in February 1370, and it was not a raid in the usual sense. Rather than burning a border district, the brothers took their army deep into Samland, the Order’s own core province, and attacked the castle at Rudau — close enough to Königsberg that the grand master could not ignore it without conceding that he could not defend his own country. They stormed and burned it. That was the point: to make the Order fight in the open.
Kniprode marched out and the armies met near the burned castle. The reconstructed course of the fighting, pieced together from later German accounts, has the Order’s cavalry riding over the Ruthenian foot on the Lithuanian left, the western crusading guests then pinned by Tatar archery on a flank, and a hard struggle in the centre where the Lithuanian horse had the better of it — until the Livonian and Danish-Estonian contingent drove off the Tatars and the guests came round onto the flank of Kęstutis’s cavalry and broke it.
It is worth saying how insecure that narrative is. The contemporary Teutonic sources, which are rarely shy about describing their victories, give almost no detail about how this one was won — an omission historians have found telling. The circumstantial evidence points the same way: the Order’s marshal was killed, and Kniprode founded an Augustinian convent at Heiligenbeil in thanksgiving to the Virgin for the victory. Neither is characteristic of a comfortable afternoon.
Afterwards Algirdas pulled his men into woodland and threw up timber barricades rather than retreat in the open, and Kęstutis withdrew into Lithuania. Casualty figures are as unreliable as everything else: the Order admitted twenty-six brother knights and something between one and three hundred other men, while German tradition counts about two hundred knights and three thousand in all, and the Lithuanian losses of nine thousand or more that the chronicles claim are rejected by modern scholars for the usual reason — Lithuania was campaigning again within the year.
Königsberg remembered Rudau through a story about a shoemaker’s apprentice. When the Order’s banner fell with its bearer, so the tale goes, an apprentice named Hans von Sagan picked it up and held it aloft, rallying the line; for this he was ennobled — by the grand master in some versions, by the Emperor Charles IV in others — and the shoemakers of Königsberg were granted privileges that they were still citing centuries later.
The story is not good evidence for the battle, and its details shift with each telling, which is the signature of civic legend rather than record. It is very good evidence for something else: that Rudau mattered enormously to the city that lay a day’s ride from the field, and that the memory of the battle was cultivated there. It also quietly suggests the fight was closer than the official account allowed — a victory needs no rescued banner.
The strategic result was narrow but real. Lithuanian armies did not again penetrate to the neighbourhood of Königsberg in that century, and the Order kept the initiative in Prussia for the rest of Kniprode’s life. He died in 1382 after thirty years as grand master, remembered in the Order’s own tradition as the ruler under whom the Prussian state reached its height — the builder-administrator of Marienburg and the victor of Rudau.
What the victory did not change was the shape of the war. Samogitia, the land corridor between Prussia and Livonia that the Order had been trying to take since the 1230s, remained unconquered. Algirdas died in 1377 and Kęstutis was killed in 1382 in the succession struggle with his nephew Jogaila; three years later Jogaila’s marriage and the union with Poland removed the crusade’s justification at a stroke, and twenty-five years after that the Order lost its grand master and its field army at Grunwald.