Von Arnstein against the Lithuanians at Voplaukis, 1311 (MED0108)

Voplaukis, 1311: two armies, two registers

The plate is built as a comparison. Above, the Order: white mantles with the black cross, a brother on horseback, mail and iron hats, a crossbow. Below, the Lithuanians: lamellar and mail, round and kite shields, bows already drawn, a leader on a white horse raising his spear under a chequered banner. Both groups are fighting in the same scrub and neither is on open ground.

A frontier kept deliberately empty

Between Prussia and Lithuania lay a belt of forest and marsh that both sides preferred to leave uninhabited: the Wildnis. It was not neutral ground so much as a buffer with no witnesses, crossed by known trails, and it made the war on this frontier a matter of raids rather than campaigns. The objective was rarely territory. It was people, cattle and stores — captives above all, because a frontier economy is built on labour it does not have.

Two ways of paying for an army

The difference in the picture is a difference in supply. The Order had houses, workshops, imported iron and a permanent income from estates across Europe, and it could give a brother the same equipment year after year. Lithuanian forces were raised by lords from their own men and fitted from what the household could provide or capture — hence a mix of lamellar, mail and hide-covered shields alongside first-rate weapons. Neither side is poorly armed; one is standardised and the other is not.

Why the fight is in the trees

Nobody chose to meet here. Forest and bog make a charge impossible, break formations into parties of a few men, and turn the bow and the short spear into the useful weapons. The engagement of 1311 was an interception — a returning raid caught before it could get clear — and that is the shape of almost every action on this frontier for a century.