Any account of military religious Orders in the Baltic begins, of necessity, in the Levant, and must take into account circumstances in the rest of Christendom. Three major military Orders arose in Palestine during the earlier crusades: the Templars, the Order of St John and the German or Teutonic Order. The social origins of the brethren provide clues concerning where the Order was territorially most potent. Expansion beyond the Reich and Palestine came in the early thirteenth century. In 1211 King Andrew II of Hungary, the father of St Elisabeth, invited the Order to Transylvania notionally in order to fight the heathen Cumans. The Order's attempts to have the territory they were defending taken under papal protection resulted in their expulsion by the king in 1225. From 1231 onwards knights of the Order issued forth from their initial base at Thorn, establishing a line of timber fortresses along the Vistula until they reached the coast at Elbing six years later.