HUNGARY

Following his accession to the throne. King Charles Robert d’Anjou (1308-42) created a new aristocracy to replace the so-called ‘little kings’ of the late Arpad-dynasty era. They were required to provide feudal military service, and in addition each had to establish and maintain a personal company of armoured horsemen called a banderium, usually recruited mostly from the lesser nobility of their own estates and partly from foreign mercenaries. These banderia varied greatly in size (some vassals even having more than one) but could be of substantial dimensions, often comprising 500 men and sometimes over 1,000, but also sometimes numbering as few as 25 men. Strictly speaking the size of each banderium depended on the extent of the vassal’s estates, and inevitably those of the king, queen, and high-ranking court and church officials were the biggest — the king’s banderium was about 7,000-strong, for instance, and in the 15th century the despot of Serbia’s (on account of his lands within Hungary) numbered 8,000. They were organised on a decimal basis, with units of 10, 100, and 1,000 men, the last being called a dandar, and were maintained at the vassal’s expense, though, since they came to be looked upon as private armies at a very early stage, the king often found it necessary to recompense them when he required their support, which could usually only be invoked in wartime.

The other principal means of raising an army in the earlier part of this period was by calling upon the generalis exercitus, a sort of arriere-ban involving the obligatory service (theoretically as cavalry) of the entire lesser nobility, which in Hungary was considerable (numbering between 20-40,000 families by the 15th century). However, by a law of 1222 these could only be called upon to serve within the boundaries of Hungary and only for 15 days, not being obliged to serve beyond the frontier at all. The constrictions this imposed upon a military expedition are well-evinced by an episode of 1439, where the lesser nobility abandoned King Albrecht I’s army during a campaign against the Ottomans because their 15 days were up, obliging Albrecht, left with insufficient troops, to abandon his undertaking. In addition the generalis exercitus lacked organisation and leadership, and by the early-15th century at the very latest the lesser nobility of which it was comprised had largely deteriorated into an ill-armed, upper-class peasantry serving chiefly on foot (horses, where owned, being used only for transport).

The largest armies raised during the 14th century were seemingly those which marched to Zara in 1345 (80,000 Hungarians, Bosnians, Austrians, Croats, Bohemians and Styrians), and fought against Sultan Bayezid I at Nicopolis in 1396. The latter army is variously stated by contemporaries to have numbered from

16.000  (Schiltberger) and 60,000 (Froissart) to 150,000 men (Philippe de Mezieres), A. S. Atiya and other modern authorities tending to favour figures of 80-100,000; Froissart in fact has it that Bayezid estimated the strength of the whole Christian army at 100,000, a figure repeated by Boucicault’s biographer. Atiya (‘relying almost entirely on the chroniclers’, as he puts it) agrees that the entire army, including crusaders, totalled 100,000 men, of which the ‘Hungarian’ elements comprised 60,000 Hungarians, 10,000 Wallachians and 13,000 Styrian, Bohemian, Polish and Italian mercenaries and crusaders mixed. Another authority calculated that the Hungarian army was made up of 36,000 Hungarians, 26,000 Hungarian mercenaries,

16.000  Transylvanian infantry, 10,000 Wallachians and 12,000 German and Bohemian mercenaries — i. e.,

100.000  men in all. The individual figures cited for the non-mercenary elements in this list are certainly not beyond the realms of possibility; the proposed quantity of mercenaries, however, does stretch credibility a little too far.