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The Teutonic Knights: A Military History. By William Urban. St. Paul, Minn.: MBI Publishing, 2003. ISBN 1-85367-667-5. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii, 290. $19.95.
The Teutonic Knights played an exceptionally important role in the history of the crusading movement and in the political, economic, and cultural development of northeastern Europe. Nevertheless, they have received very little attention in Anglophone scholarship, especially when compared to the Templars and Hospitallers, the contemporaries and rivals of the German Order. William Urban, who has published widely on the Baltic crusades over the past four decades, has essayed to redress this imbalance in the literature with a military history of the Teutonic Knights from their foundation in the late twelfth century until the dissolution of their independent state in the sixteenth. Urban's thorough knowledge of the relevant source materials as well as his familiarity with the scholarship that has been published in a wide range of modern languages, including German, Polish, Russian,...