Francis A. Knight

“On 15 July the Polish, Lithuanian, and crusader armies converged in what is now north-eastern Poland at a place called Grunwald, where Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen mocked King Władysław II Jagiełło and Grand Duke Vytautas, the Lithuanian cousins who ruled Poland and Lithuania, by sending them a pair of swords to encourage them to fight. The fight began soon enough; the Lithuanians were initially forced into retreat. But then, as the Grand Master’s closest knights set to savage hand-to-hand combat with King Władysław’s bodyguard, the Lithuanians returned. Attacking from the rear, they hacked down Von Jungingen and the rest of the Prussian leaders, putting the Teutonic Knights to flight.1 In the long term, Władysław and Vytautas’s victory marked the end of the Northern Crusades and established Poland–Lithuania’s dominance of east-central Europe for nearly two-and-a-half centuries.””