Charles R. Bowlus - The Battle of Lechfeld and its Aftermath, August 955: The End of the Age of Migrations in the Latin West

The Battle of Lechfeld and Its Aftermath, August 955

To Barbara
Cordelia and Jazz
Christopher and Carrie

3 The Reforms of Henry I in Saxony

Conclusion:Hungarian Defeat Ottonian Victory

Frontispiece Heavy cavalry attacking mounted archers

This book has had a long period of gestation. In 1968 A. R. Lewis first raised the question in my mind: why was the Latin West virtually free from the incursions of Inner Asian nomads during the High Middle Ages, an era when other advanced Afro-Eurasian societies were struggling to keep raiders from the steppes and deserts at bay? Although this volume does not answer this broader question, it does attempt to explain why predatory nomadic societies were relatively unsuccessful on the eastern frontier of the Latin West by taking a close look at the Hungarians, who, discounting brief incursions by the Mongols, were the last interlopers from the steppes into medieval Europe. These mounted archers followed in the hoofprints of Huns and Avars to settle in about 900 in the Carpathian Basin, which, I thought at that time, should have been an ideal ecology for a confederation of warriors who had already honed their predatory skills on the steppe lands adjacent to the Black Sea. Yet the Hungarian incursions into the Latin West ended abruptly on 10 August 955. I asked myself why.

At the time when I began thinking about this problem, some scholars were already challenging conventional notions concerning the impact of the Hungarians on the West. Foremost among these were Szabolcs de Vajay, Thomas von Bogyay and Gina Fasoli, who demonstrated convincingly that incursions into Europe on the part of predatory nomads were not as serious as had been believed and that their activities must be understood in the context of the military and political situation in Europe at the end of the ninth and beginning of the tenth centuries. Meanwhile Denis Sinor and, slightly later, Rudi Paul Lindner were developing the thesis that the ecosystem of the Carpathian Basin was really too small to support a nomadic superpower such as the Mongols put together on the much larger steppes of Inner Asia. Moreover, they maintained that Hungarians, like Huns and Avars before them, had to change their style of warfare almost immediately after settling on the fringes of the Latin West. At about the same time, from the European vantage point, Karl Leyser published two path-breaking articles in which he argued the heavily armed and armored warriors of the West were not really inferior to the mounted archers who seemed so formidable in the narratives of the tenth century.

By the mid-1970s at the latest I had come to the conclusion that one of the questions that Lewis had raised could be easily answered: the Latin West did not live under the permanent threat of incursions of predatory nomads during the High Middle Ages because the Carpathian Basin was an inadequate base from which to operate. Moreover, to compete successfully with western armies the Magyars had to change their style of warfare completely, and in the process their entire way of life was ineluctably transformed from one of nomadic predators to a society that practiced a mix of agriculture and husbandry.

While I continued to think about questions involving the settlement of nomads on the fringes of Latin Christendom and tried to keep abreast of the scholarly literature on this topic, this theme did not develop into a major interest of mine until 1993 when I began to focus on the so-called battle of Lechfeld in 955 as a means of illustrating why I thought that Hungarian mounted archers were ill equipped to deal with the army that King Otto I had hastily cobbled together against them. The occasion was a GermanAmerican historical symposium at Notre Dame University. I was asked to comment on a paper presented by Johannes Fried, who argued that Otto was an incompetent commander. The king only managed to win this encounter because the fortunes of the battlefield (Schlachtenglck) were with him on that day. Fried asserted that Otto committed a potentially fatal error when he allowed a Magyar contingent to slip behind his marching column, to encirle it and to attack his forces from the rear. I disagreed, pointing out that some recent scholars had made the case that it was Magyar commanders (not Otto) who were incompetent in their conduct of this expedition. I cited contemporary evidence (noted by Bogyay) that the Magyar attempt to envelop the German army failed because the attackers stopped to pillage the baggage train rather than rolling up the column as their ancestors (according to the Byzantine emperor Leo VI) would have done. Furthermore I referred to Leysers argument that it was the Hungarians who made the fatal command decision that determined the outcome of the contest when they elected to stand their ground and fight in close quarters against Ottonian heavy cavalry rather than feigning retreat and drawing their less agile opponents into traps and ambushes. Finally I insisted that if there was luck involved in Ottos triumph, it came in the form of heavy, late summer rains which caused massive flooding, cutting the Magyars off from the safety of the Carpathian Basin and making them vulnerable to assaults by armed men operating from numerous fortresses in their rear. Of course I also pointed out that while the heavy rains may have been a lucky coincidence, the positioning of armed men in forts guarding river crossings was not the work of the goddess Fortuna. I argued that a defense-in-depth military organization had been developed in Germany by Ottonian rulers and that this system demonstrated the basic competence of the Ottonians in dealing with steppe warriors.