Hermann von Salza
Hermann von Salza was the Grand Master who turned the Teutonic Order from a hospital brotherhood of German pilgrims at Acre into a sovereign military state on the Baltic, by being the one man whom both the emperor Frederick II and the popes who excommunicated him trusted; the Golden Bull of Rimini of 1226, by which the emperor gave the Order whatever it could conquer from the pagan Prussians, is the deed of Prussia, and the Order's crossing of the Vistula in 1230 is the beginning of everything that was there until 1945. He was born about 1165 into the ministerial nobility of Thuringia, joined the Order in the Holy Land, and was elected its fourth master about 1210, when it had a few hundred brothers and a hospital. He made it useful. He was with the Fifth Crusade at Damietta in 1219, at Frederick's coronation in Rome in 1220, and at every negotiation between the emperor and Honorius III and Gregory IX over the crusade Frederick kept promising; when Frederick finally sailed in 1228 under excommunication Hermann went with him, negotiated with the sultan al-Kamil the treaty that handed over Jerusalem without a battle, and read the emperor's proclamation in the Holy Sepulchre when no priest would. He then went back and forth until the peace of San Germano in 1230 lifted the ban. The Order's own affairs he ran as an investor. A first venture in Transylvania, where King Andrew II had given it the Burzenland against the Cumans in 1211, ended in expulsion in 1225 when the Order behaved as a sovereign. The Prussian venture, offered by the Polish duke of Masovia in 1226 because the pagans were burning his province, he secured from the emperor by the Golden Bull, from the pope by a bull of 1234 that put the conquests under St Peter, and from the duke by a charter, so that no one could claim what the knights took. In 1237 he absorbed the Livonian Sword-Brothers after their defeat at Saule, which gave the Order the other end of the Baltic. He died at Salerno in March 1239, on his way to reconcile the emperor and the pope again, and the reconciliation did not happen.
- Lived: 1165 CE – 1239 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: grand_master, diplomat
