The Knights Of The Cross

A historical novel by the eminent Polish Positivist writer and the 1905 Nobel laureate, Henryk Sienkiewicz. Its first English translation was published in the same year as the original. Before its first complete printed edition appeared in 1900. The book was first translated into English by Jeremiah Curtin, a contemporary of Sienkiewicz.

The Teutonic Knights has since been translated into 25 languages. It was the first book to be printed in Poland at the end of the Second World War in 1945, due to its relevance in the context of Nazi German destruction of Poland followed by mass population transfers. Written in 1900 when the Polish state--after being partitioned between Russian, Austrian and German empires at the end of the 18th century--did not exist and the majority of Poles were living in the Russian occupation zone named Vistula Land, formerly Congress Poland.

One of Sienkiewicz's goals in writing The Knights of the Cross was to encourage and strengthen Polish national confidence against the occupying powers. In order to circumvent the Russian censorship, he placed the plot in the Middle ages, around Prussia (region) and the State of the Teutonic Order. The story exhibits with splendid force the collision of race passions and fierce, violent individualities which accompanied that struggle.

Those who read it will, in addition to their thrilling interest in the tragical and varied incidents, gain no little insight into the origin and working of the inextinguishable race hatred between Teuton and Slav. It was an unfortunate thing surely, that the conversion of the heathen Lithuanians and Zmudzians was committed so largely to that curious variety of the missionary, the armed knight, banded in brotherhood, sacred and military.

To say the least, his sword was a weapon dangerous to his evangelizing purpose. He was always in doubt whether to present to the heathen the one end of it, as a cross for adoration, or the other, as a point to kill with. And so, if Poland was made a Catholic nation, she was also made an undying and unalterable hater of the German, the Teutonic name and person.