One of the most spectacular episodes during the Hussite Wars was the Czech raid through the lands of the Teutonic Order up to the Baltic Sea in 1433. Although historians and then-witnesses focused on the sacked Cistercian Abbey in Oliva and soldiers filling the bottles with seawater, the scale of damages in the main harbour of Prussia and its surroundings has not been the subject of research yet. Furthermore, most scholars treatthe potential attack on Gdansk as a spontaneous or apparent action. The author's most recent monographic studies of the Gdansk agglomeration in the Middle Ages, which consisted of three semi-independent municipalities (Main City, Old City, Young City), includes collecting unknown or never-used-before archival evidence and the results of just-completed archaeological research. These new findings give an opportunity to precisely reconstruct the day-by-day history of assaulton Gdansk, the unsuccessful attempt to capture the city and the plundering ca. 30 villages belonging to the Order, monasteries, burghers and gentry. Moreover, it allows shedding light on the different tactics of the two medieval armies and analysing the role of fear in then-politics and military operations. In the case of Gdansk, the awareness of damages caused by Hussites' attack on the agglomeration, its suburbs and harbour, might have been one of the crucial reasons why the city council, during the civil war in Prussia, decided to demolish one of the three municipalities - the Young City (Jungstadt) in 1455.
Authors
Additional information
- DOI
- Digital Object Identifier link open in new tab 10.4324/9781003323587-5
- Category
- Publikacja monograficzna
- Type
- rozdział, artykuł w książce - dziele zbiorowym /podręczniku w języku o zasięgu międzynarodowym
- Language
- angielski
- Publication year
- 2023
