History and us

Finding information about Teutonic Order wasn’t very difficult. There is plenty web resources considering that theme, yet most of them were modern drawings, which had little in common with real history. Actually this overwhelm of information made it difficult to find something really authentic. We began our study from these three documents: Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, Livonian chronicle by Henry of Livonia (Henry Latvian) and Livonian chronicle by Hermann von Wartberge.

There are elder Livonian Rhymed Chronicle and later version of it. Elder Livonian Rhymed Chronicle consists 12017 verses and exists in two originals: One in Riga, second in Gelderberg. In Riga’s chronicle some pages are destroyed from verses 2561 – 3840, but Gelderbegs chronicle is complete.

These I recommend to study for everyone who is interested in that area. We had translations, so it is possible some information is incorrect and to add is that dates of same events in those chronicles are different from each other. There is another source - Chronicle of Balthasar Russow. It describes late period of Livonian Order.

We managed to find translated Orders charter. It contained a lot of useful information, based on which we created our civil cloth. For example, it was stated that brother can’t use any shoes that have outsets or any accessories. There are also very strict rules about praying and how and when brother can speak with the woman, who were taking care of wounded and maintaining household. After spending some time analyzing organization and structure of the Order (I will come back to it in details later), we created our own hierarchy and ranks, based on our research and available manpower. We decided to make a komturia attached to our city, Riga. I failed to find any information of such kumturia to be existed, within the Order, so in general that fact is a fiction from our side. Yet Livonian order did have named komturia. So here we came to a question which Order we will continue to reenact. This question is still undergoing many discussions and we don’t have clear answer to it yet.