Peace of Thorn

1411

The defeated Teutonic Order paid a crushing indemnity to Poland-Lithuania and retreated behind its remaining castles. Though the Knights would linger another century, their independence was finished. Prussia began its slow drift toward becoming something Polish, then German, then Polish again, a borderland cursed by its own strategic usefulness. The treaty began Poland-Lithuania's emergence as northeastern Europe's dominant power, a position held until the seventeenth century.