On 22 September 1236 the Samogitians and Semigallians trapped a crusading army in a swamp and destroyed the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, killing their master Volkwin and about fifty brother knights. The order could not recover, and in May 1237 what was left of it was absorbed into the Teutonic Order.
The Battle of Saule was fought on 22 September 1236, the feast of Saint Maurice, when a returning crusader army was caught in marshy ground at a river crossing by the Samogitians and destroyed. The master of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, Volkwin, was killed with about fifty of his brother knights — the professional core of an order that had perhaps a hundred and twenty in total. The Semigallians fell on the survivors as they fled.
No other defeat in the Baltic crusades did so much damage so quickly. Within months the Curonians, Semigallians, Selonians and Oeselians, all conquered within living memory, were in revolt, and roughly thirty years of conquest on the left bank of the Daugava were undone. The order itself simply ceased to exist: in May 1237 Pope Gregory IX folded its remnant into the Teutonic Order, and Livonia became the northern half of a two-province crusading state.
By the 1230s the Sword-Brothers were in trouble. Founded at Riga in 1202 to give the bishopric a standing army, they had conquered the Livs, the Latgallians and much of Estonia, and had then fallen out with nearly everyone — with the bishops over the division of the conquered land, of which they kept the larger share, and with the papacy and the emperor over Estonia. Their finances were strained and their recruitment was thin.
On 19 February 1236 Gregory IX proclaimed a crusade against Lithuania. Volkwin’s reply was that his order was not strong enough and was at odds with the bishopric of Riga, which is a remarkable thing for a military order’s master to put in writing to a pope. He was overruled by circumstances rather than by argument: crusading pilgrims from Holstein arrived at Riga expecting the campaign they had taken the cross for, and would not be sent home without one.
The strategic aim was the one that governed the whole northern crusade for the next two centuries: to take the Samogitian coast and join Livonia to the Teutonic lands in Prussia. Saule was the first serious attempt on that corridor, and it failed so badly that the corridor was still open a hundred and seventy-four years later.
The army rode south into Samogitia and did what such armies did — burned settlements, took what could be carried, and turned for home before the weather closed in. The Samogitians gathered behind it and caught it at a river crossing on swampy ground on 22 September.
What happened next was argued over before it began. The Holstein crusaders refused to fight on foot in the marsh as evening came, on the grounds that they would lose their horses — the exact instinct that had killed heavy cavalry on soft ground from Courland to the Nile. The army halted for the night with the enemy in front of it and the bog around it. By morning the Samogitians had been reinforced and the position was hopeless.
The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, written for the order two generations later, describes a one-sided killing. Lithuanian light cavalry threw javelins at short range into men who could not close with them or ride away, and the mail-clad knights, whose whole value lay in a charge they could not deliver, were shot and speared where they stood. In the swamp, the chronicler says, they could offer only weak resistance and were cut down like women.
The same source, hostile to the pilgrims and loyal to the brothers, keeps its respect for how the master died: Volkwin and his brothers fought until their horses were killed under them and then went on fighting on foot. The native auxiliaries broke and ran early, which the chronicler blames them for without noticing that they had less reason than anyone to die for the order.
The retreat was worse than the battle. The Semigallians, subjects of the order who were about to stop being subjects, waited on the road back and killed the fugitives as they came. Of the whole army, by the chronicle’s account, only one man in ten reached Riga. Casualty figures for the brothers themselves range from forty-eight to sixty, with a hundred and eighty men lost from the Pskov contingent alone.
An order that had lost its master and half its knights in one afternoon could not hold a conquered province against a general rising, and the rising came at once. The survivors sent to Rome to ask for the merger they had resisted for years, and in May 1237 Gregory IX announced the incorporation in four letters — to the Teutonic Order, to its grand master Hermann von Salza, to the papal legate William of Modena, and to the bishops of Riga, Dorpat and Ösel. That summer Hermann Balk, the master of Prussia, rode into Riga to install his own men as commanders and administrators.
The Sword-Brothers thus became the Livonian Order, a largely self-governing branch of the Teutonic Order with its own master, and the Baltic crusade acquired the shape it kept until 1561: one institution holding two separated provinces, Prussia and Livonia, with pagan Samogitia between them. Every later campaign in this war, including the one that ended at Durbe in 1260, was in some sense an attempt to close that gap.
Almost everything above rests on one text: the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, composed for the order in the 1290s, sixty years after the event. Hermann de Wartberge later located the battle in the terram Sauleorum, the land of the Saules, which is where the name comes from. There is no Lithuanian account at all, because thirteenth-century Lithuania did not write.
That has two consequences worth stating plainly. The first is that the winners are anonymous. The Samogitian duke Vykintas is regularly named as the victorious commander, and the attribution dates from the second half of the nineteenth century, resting on a remark in the Halych-Volhynian Chronicle that he had killed many brothers. No source of the battle names any commander on the pagan side, and it is likely the districts fought under their own elders rather than a single leader.
The second is that nobody is sure where it happened. Saule was long identified with Šiauliai, and a rival tradition placed it at Vecsaule near Bauska in Latvia. In 1965 Friedrich Benninghoven argued for Jauniūnai in the Joniškis district, at the confluence of the Mūša and the Tautinis, and that identification now has most support and a state-backed memorial; Edvardas Gudavičius argued instead for a site much further southwest, near Laukuva and Tverai, and the village of Pamūšis has its own claim. A battle whose location is disputed by a hundred kilometres is a reminder of how thin the evidence for the northern crusade’s early decades is.
What is not in doubt is the result, because the institutional consequence is documented in the papal chancery. An order that existed in September 1236 did not exist by the following summer.