Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights.. The Teutonic Knights were a medieval military order modelled on the Hospitallers of St. John. They had a nomadic history: from Acre, their cradle in Palestine (1190~1309); Marienburg, Prussia, the center of their temporal domination as a military principality (1309~1525); their decline in Mergentheim in Franconia (1524~1805); and finally, Vienna, Austria, where they survive as a purely hospital order. Handcolored copperplate engraving from Robert von Spalart's "Historical Picture of the Costumes of the Principal People of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the New Ages" (1800).