Hungarian arrows in Europe
A mounted group led by Arpad. The Monument to the Rediscovery of the Homeland in Heroes' Square. The monument commemorates the 1000th anniversary of the rediscovery of the homeland, the crossing of the Carpathian Mountains by Hungarian nomads. Budapest, Hungary. Photo by the author.
In two articles devoted to the Grand Duchy of Moravia, I talked about how nomads, the ancient Hungarians, appeared in Europe and how they captured the Carpathian Valley, part of which belonged to the Moravian Principality, whose territory was mainly inhabited by Slavs.
Even before the defeat of Great Moravia, the conventional date of which is 906, the Hungarians began to be drawn into the war by the East Frankish Empire against their opponents.
The late 14th-century chronicler Akosh provides important information in his "Deeds of the Hungarians" that the Hungarians who arrived in Transylvania initially feared that they would be attacked by neighboring "lords."
But, having become convinced that they were capable of competing with the local peoples, they gave them strength.
For almost fifty years, the Hungarians have been actively conducting campaigns throughout Europe, providing themselves with food during the campaigns through conquest and robbery and enriching themselves with treasures.
Treasures that went straight to the graves of great leaders and heroes.
This is one of the most important factors of the period under consideration. All these shiny trinkets that the Hungarians stole from the Monastery of St. Gallen or the Monastery of Monte Cassino were not objects of accumulation or exchange. Not only among nomads, according to their religious rituals, these were objects for sacred rites.
Therefore, no nomads could have any accumulations; everything obtained in war or during redistribution was either eaten, or what was shiny and could not be eaten was brought as a gift to the gods or buried in graves.
Incidentally, the same thing happened with the notorious Vikings: all the treasures found, except from burials, were found in places from which they could never be extracted, for example, in swamps.
In battles and hikes
During the seventy years of the 10th century, the Hungarians made 47 campaigns, 38 to the west, nine towards Byzantium.
Having just arrived in Pannonia, the Hungarians descended on Bavaria, where Louis IV the Child opposed them. At the Battle of Lech in 900 or 901, the German knights fell into the nomads' traditional trap: they feigned retreat and shot down their pursuing horsemen with bows. After routing their army, they ravaged Swabia, Bavaria, and Lombardy. The chancellor of the empire, Bishop Litward of Vercelli, was captured with treasures "which he possessed beyond measure" and was killed.
In 906, the Hungarians again plundered Saxony and drove the captive women, naked with their hair tied together, as Saxo Annalistus writes, into their nomadic camps.
After the victory in the Battle of Pressburg (modern Bratislava) in 907, the Hungarians, under the leadership of their first single leader, Arpad, defeated the Bavarians of Liutpold.
Soon the elderly chieftain Arpad died, and his youngest son Zsolt became the chieftain.
Arpad helmet with characteristic plant ornamentation. 10th century. Hungarian National Museum, Budapest. Photo by the author.
Gradually, the Slavic lands bordering Hungary, subject to Hungarian tribute, became a springboard for attacks westward. The nomads, instead of having to start a war in the spring and end it by winter, were able to wage war constantly while residing in the tributary lands bordering them, which significantly worsened the situation for their neighbors.
In 910, the Hungarians defeated Emperor Louis IV, and in 913 they were defeated by the Bavarians and Alamanni on the Inn River.
In 915, Saxony was attacked by the Czechs and Danes, the Western Slavs destroyed Hamburg, and the Hungarians destroyed Bremen, as Adam of Bremen wrote:
The Hungarians, burning churches and killing priests at the very altars, exterminated or carried off clergy mixed with common people with impunity. The pagans also damaged and desecrated crosses.
They then marched into Thuringia, reaching the Fulda River.
In 921, two Hungarian leaders, Dursak and Butag, came to the aid of the king and Emperor Berengar against rebellious Italy (as only its northern part, Lambardy or Longobardia, was called). In a battle near Verona, they exploited the element of surprise to completely defeat the rebel army, capturing its leaders.
In 924, Berengar, fighting for Lombardy against King Rudolf, again invited another Hungarian leader, Szilard or Salard. The nomads besieged Pavia, encamped around it, and then burned it with flaming arrows, forcing the inhabitants to pay a huge tribute. From there, they followed King Rudolf across the Saint Bernard Mountains into Provence, where they were destroyed by the forces of Hugh of Arles (c. 880–948), the future king of Italy.
Meanwhile, Arpad's grandson, Tegel, attacked Saxony.
The king, being in the fortress of Verla, could not rely [in the fight] against such a cruel people on warriors who were still inexperienced and not accustomed to external war.
One noble Hungarian leader was captured, the Hungarians wanted to give him a huge ransom in gold and silver, but Henry I the Fowler (876–936) demanded peace from the Hungarians for nine years in exchange, while the Saxons began to pay them tribute.
Despite the agreements, Hungarian troops continued their raids westward. The chronicler Ekkehard IV (980–1060) described in detail how the Hungarians operated during their 926 campaign through Bavaria westward to the monastery of St. Gallen (modern-day Switzerland): how they hid in forests, sent out scouts everywhere, raided towns, villages, and fortresses, plundered, burned everything they couldn't capture, and then moved on.
This is how he described the feast of the nomads:
The leaders, of course, took a level spot inside the monastery and feasted with all the splendor... When, as was their custom, they stretched out separately and without chairs on the green hay for the feast, he brought himself and the cleric they had captured as booty a small chair each. After the Hungarians, without knives, but with their teeth, tore apart the shoulder blades and other parts of the slain beast and greedily swallowed them half-raw, they began to amuse themselves by tossing the gnawed bones. Wine from full vats placed in the center, each one scooped up as much as they pleased. When they, heated by the undiluted wine, began to invoke their gods in the most horrific manner, they forced the cleric and their fool to do the same. The cleric, knowing their language well, thanks to which his life had been spared, began to shout loudly along with them. And when their language had driven him completely mad, he began, bursting into tears, to sing the antiphon from the service to the Holy Cross (the opening of which was to be celebrated the following day), "Sanctifica nos," and Geribald himself sang with him, albeit in a hoarse voice. Everyone who was there gathered at the unusual singing of the captives and, in unbridled joy, began to dance and compete in wrestling before the leaders. Some even came running here with weaponsto show how skilled they are in the art of war.
The Feast of the Hungarians in St. Gallen. Art by László Gyula.
Of course, like other nomads in the struggle with their neighboring farmers, they understood that war always has costs, first of all for warriors, who were not just anyone, recruited from who knows where and from whom, but their own warrior people, bound together by family ties.
Hungarian territorial-tribal unions were at a stage of development when the alienation of the warrior from the ruler had not yet occurred, which did not abolish the most severe discipline.
In 932, Emperor Henry I refused to pay the nomads. According to Saxo Annalistus, the nine years of truce were spent training cavalry, a crucial stage in the genesis of feudalism in the eastern part of the former Frankish Empire:
Finally, having already acquired a cavalry force, tested in battle, he decided to fight against the Hungarians.
The Hungarians hastily moved to punish the Germans. Two armies, one through Thuringia, the other through the lands of their allies, the Dolenčani Slavs (modern-day Meissen, home to the famous Meissen porcelain), marched into Saxony. The Slavs decided not to tempt fate in this particular case; not only did they not support the Hungarians, but they even mocked them, throwing a fat dog at them as a symbol of insult.
Henry I supported the Thuringians and defeated the army advancing from the south, then turned his attention to the second army. The Hungarians quickly began to gather troops, which dispersed to plunder, while the king set up camp near a certain Riad, possibly the modern city of Kalbsrieth. Here, the battle, also known as the Battle of Merseburg, took place on March 15, 933.
Widukind of Corvey, writing from the immediate aftermath, reported that Henry resorted to a ruse, sending poorly armed Thuringians into battle first; their appearance inspired confidence in the Hungarian horsemen. The king also forbade the newly created knights to fight out of formation, which, in a battle against a nomadic army under unified command, acting as a single organism, was tantamount to death. The Saxons, using a formal attack, were able to neutralize the nomads' advantage and archery, and routed them in hand-to-hand combat, where the knights undoubtedly had the advantage. The Hungarians, as Liutprand of Cremona writes, fled with their decorated weapons and golden phalerae on their harnesses, discarding their ornaments:
The camp [of theirs] was destroyed, and all the prisoners were freed.
But the Hungarians were not disheartened. They turned their sights to the rich lands of the Roman Empire and marched into Thrace, defeating the Byzantine army in Bulgaria along the way.
A large army participated in the march on Constantinople. This occurred after Bulgaria had weakened, through which the nomads had passed without difficulty.
They reached the city and carried off all the inhabitants of Thrace, reports Theophanes' successor. And so the protovestiarius, the patrician Theophanes, who oversaw all affairs, set out to arrange an exchange of prisoners... Emperor Romanus, however, showed magnanimity and humanity and spared no expense to free the captives.
Byzantium began to pay tribute to the Hungarians.
After the death of Henry I in 936, the Hungarians decided to test the new emperor, Otto I (917–973). In 937, he repulsed them from Franconia, and they retreated to Italy, where they plundered all the lands around Capua, Benevento, and Liburi. Their captives were ransomed with the treasures of the Monte Cassino monastery.
In 943, the Hungarians again attacked the Romans, after which a five-year peace was concluded. Meanwhile, the Dukes of Bavaria were already raiding Hungarian territory beyond the Tisza River.
And in 945 the Hungarians again found themselves on campaign in Italy, where King Hugo, having paid them 10 modii of silver, provided guides and sent them to Cordoba, in Spain.
In 950, during the reign of Arpad's grandson, Fais (Felici), the Bavarian Duke Henry I, son of Henry the Fowler, invaded the Hungarian lands.
"The Hungarian Invasion." Illustrated Chronicle of Lajos Martin Kalthy, 14th Century.
Before the Battle of Lech
Many historians, starting in the 19th century, believed that the invasion of the Normans and Hungarians, and the Arabs in Spain, gave impetus to the emergence of feudalism in Europe, when, in order to ensure security, society was divided into those fighting and those working... for them.
This process occurred at different times in different parts of Europe; in some places it followed a natural course, while in others it became an "export" option. For the East Frankish part of the empire, which became the German Empire under Otto I, it spanned the period roughly from the reign of Henry the Fowler (919–936) to Henry II (1002–1024).
And the battle at Lech or Lechfeld demonstrated the success of an army organized according to the new principle of the feudal militia.
In July 955, Hungarian ambassadors arrived to King Otto, who was waging war against his vassals. They ostensibly wanted to confirm peace with the king, but in reality, they were conducting reconnaissance on the political situation in Saxony. The Hungarians were being drawn into the struggle against Otto by his opponents, and they received gifts from the king.
But with or without them, the nomads decided, despite the confirmed peace with Otto, to begin a plundering campaign. The king's brother reported that the Hungarians had begun an invasion, briefly laying siege to Augsburg.
The Battle of Lech or the Battle of Augsburg
Thietmar of Mersenburg wrote that Otto called for a levy of knightly militia, promising high wages, but, as he continues with regret, only managed to muster eight units. At the same time, war with the Slavs was raging.
As our main “informant” of these events, Widukind of Corvey, reports, Otto marched with his army from Neuburg (from the Danube) to the south along the right bank of the Lech.
Before the battle, a fast was declared in the camp, given the fact that many of the participants in the campaign had recently fought against the king, and oaths of allegiance were taken.
This was especially true of Duke Conrad (910–955), a formidable, courageous and tireless warrior, yet extremely prudent, former Duke of Lorraine, who took part in the rebellion against Otto I and lost Lorraine.
At dawn, the king set out on his campaign. It was already intensely hot, and the army marched through deserted territory, aiming to counter the Hungarian tactic of firing from the cover of trees and bushes.
Enemy scouts constantly monitor each other's movements.
The army consisted of eight detachments: three detachments of Bavarians under Duke Henry I, who was unable to participate in the campaign due to illness; the fourth was Franconian; the fifth and largest was the king's; the sixth and seventh were Swabian; and the eighth was Czech. These were elite Czech warriors, but they were in the rearguard, protecting the army's baggage train.
And the Hungarians quickly crossed from the high left bank of the Lech and surrounded the Germans, so it is strange to hear from some military historians that the German army outnumbered the Hungarians.
The Hungarians, like all nomads, begin pelting the enemy with arrows from afar and, as is their custom, attack the baggage train, overwhelming the Czechs. And then they attack the Swabians:
...for the Hungarians, without any delay, crossed the Lech River, surrounded the army and began to pelt the last detachment with arrows, and then with a terrible cry they attacked [it], killed some, took others prisoner and, having seized all the baggage, put the rest of the warriors of this detachment to flight.
But the Franconians, young knights of Duke Conrad, repelled their attack and drove them away from the convoy.
Some military historians suggest that Otto achieved victory because he deployed his knightly army in three lines, and when the Hungarians defeated the first line, which included the Czechs and Swabians, the Franconians, supported by the Bavarians from the second line, were able to repel them. However, contemporaries of these events write nothing of the sort: we know nothing from them about any system of troop formation.
A 10th-century Scandinavian sword found in Germany. It's quite possible the knights used the weapons of their enemies. Museum Island, Berlin, Germany. Photo by the author.
After Conrad repelled the attack on the baggage train and returned to the king, it must be assumed, as Widukind reports, that there was some confusion about what to do next. Perhaps there was even the option of reaching an agreement with the Hungarians, but Otto, whose unit had not participated in the first battle, had fresh horses, and he personally led the attack, shield and sacred spear in hand.
Holy Spear. 8th century. Length 50,7 cm. Inscription: Spear and Nail of Christ. The victory at Lech is attributed to the power of this spear. Treasury of the Hofburg Palace. Vienna, Austria. Photo by the author.
The Hungarians, using a "wave" tactic, sometimes attacking to shoot at the knights, sometimes retreating, exhausted their horses in the heat.
That was the deciding factor. The knights' cavalry charged at them, and hand-to-hand combat ensued. Duke Conrad died in the fighting, an arrow piercing his throat, but the knights broke the nomads' resistance.
In literature, one can find the term "heavy cavalry" for knights of this period. Certainly, knightly armament differed from that of the Hungarians, and nomads often lacked protective armament altogether. However, in the 10th century, there was no such fundamental difference in "heavy" armament; horses were certainly virtually unprotected. The heavy cavalry was represented by the cataphracts, or cataphracts, of the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas.
Cataphract from the reign of Nicephorus Phokas (916–968). Illustration by I. V. Kirsanova.
A general flight ensued, the exhausted horses unable to save the riders, and attempts to hide in buildings ended disastrously: they were burned along with their houses, while some attempted to swim to the neighboring, high bank of the Lech, where they perished, unable to scale it. Meanwhile, the local population massacred the hated robbers. Three Hungarian leaders were captured and sentenced to a shameful execution: they were hanged in Regensburg.
Otto the Great was proclaimed "emperor" in the Roman sense of the term.
В stories It is customary to define this or that event as a borderline event, and the Battle of Lech is defined in the same way.
Although there is both a skeptical and a more reserved view of these events.
So, it is probably entirely fair that for the Hungarian tribal union this defeat was not so crushing, but...
Still, this battle was significant. Firstly, it demonstrated the capabilities of feudal knightly cavalry, its advantages in terms of military structure and battlefield operations.
The victory put an end to the periodic Hungarian raids not only on the borderlands, but also further into the territory of modern France and Italy.
The attempt to compensate for the opportunity to plunder in the west with campaigns against Byzantium, as discussed below, was unsuccessful. This forced the nomads to transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a semi-sedentary one, and then to a sedentary one, adopting economic skills from the Slavs, as evidenced by philological data.
Settling on the land allowed the Hungarian kings to consolidate their power, differentiate themselves from the hereditary nobility, and rise above it. This was partly due to the adoption of a Western system of government, a monarchy. The path to feudalism began, simultaneously with the adoption of Christianity, without which the former was impossible.
It all started after the Battle of Lech.
Hungarians and Byzantium
The Byzantines, upon learning of Otto's victory, refused to pay tribute to the Hungarians, and in 958 they marched on Constantinople under the command of Apor. According to Hungarian legend, their army stood for 40 days outside Constantinople, and the duelist Botond smashed a hole in the city's iron gates with a club and defeated the Byzantine champion.
But in fact, apart from what they got from plundering, they did not succeed in anything, moreover, on the way back they were defeated.
Attempts to change the situation in 961 and 968 changed nothing.
At the same time, individual Hungarian leaders accepted Christianity from Byzantium, and in 962, the Hungarian leader Taksony, the son of Zsolt who survived the Battle of Lech, turned to the Pope in Rome for baptism.
The marriage of the emperor's heir, the future Otto II (955–983), to the Byzantine "princess" Theophana brought not only a high level of ceremony at court, but also a close alliance between the two empires, which threatened, among other things, the Hungarians.
Under these circumstances, the Hungarian high leaders began to cooperate with the Saxon dynasty. The new Hungarian prince, Géza (970–997), sent an embassy to Otto I in 973, asking for peace and expressing a desire to be baptized.
To be continued ...
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