For at least two years before the Mongol armies crossed the Carpathians, all the European rulers were aware of their intentions. In France, Germany and England the plunderers of Russia became known as the ‘Tartars’ after Friar Julian, inspired by the legend of Gog and Magog and the Russian name ‘Tatar’, had introduced the word in his Latin report, referring to them as ‘Tartari’, the people from hell. But the only ruler who believed that they intended to carry out their threats was King Bela iv of Hungary.
The first western country to be affected by the Russian campaign was England. Every year ships from the countries around the Baltic used to sail to Yarmouth to buy the rich herring catch, but in 1238 the people of Novgorod and its dependencies, who were preparing for the return of the Mongols and repelling the lesser incursions by opportunists in the west, kept their ships at home, while the ships from Sweden, Gotland and the Livonian coast were being used to transport the invading armies of Earl Birger and the Livonian Knights. Consequently no ships came to England that year. There was a glut on the herring market, merchants went bankrupt and even deep inland fifty pickled herrings could be bought for a shilling.
In the same year the source of the first appeals for help was even more surprising. While Batu was conquering Russia, other Mongol armies were extending their empire beyond Khwarizm in the Middle East, and since the conciliatory policies of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick ii had led to an uneasy peace between Christendom and Islam, the Saracen princes, who found themselves facing a far greater threat than the crusades, turned to Europe for support. Not only Frederick, but also King Louis ix of France and King Henry iii of England received Moslem ambassadors, of whom the most notorious were the representatives of the
Sinister ‘Old Man of the Mountains’ who commanded the Ismaili ‘Order of the Assassins’. But the emperor, Frederick ii, and his armies were preparing for the culmination of a violent struggle with the papacy, and the attitude of the rest of Christendom was epitomized in the reaction of Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester: ‘Let us leave these dogs to devour one another that they may all be consumed and perish; and we when we proceed against the enemies of Christ who remain, will slay them and cleanse the face of the earth, so that all the world will be subject to the one Catholic Church and there will be one shepherd and one fold.’
Unfortunately the appeals and the warnings that came out of Hungary fell on equally deaf ears. Friar Julian’s reports and the threats contained in Batu’s letter were passed on to the Holy Roman Emperor and to Salvio Salvi, Bishop of Perugia, who was the papal legate in Hungary. But although the pope, who was delighted by the destruction of the schismatic Russians, was genuinely anxious at the prospect of an invasion in powerful Catholic Hungary, he was in no position to help since he needed every Christian soldier he could muster to defend himself against the Holy Roman Emperor. The emperor for his part, who was equally preoccupied, would have been even less likely to help Hungary than he would have been to help the Saracens since he resented the recent withdrawal of Hungarian support for his cause, after King Bela had discovered that some of his rebellious barons had gone to Vienna to offer the emperor his crown. Besides, Frederick believed that the Mongols were already too fully absorbed by their new conquests and too far from their base to be dangerous. He also had received a letter from Batu demanding the surrender of the empire and offering him a position in the Mongol hierarchy, but he had only joked about it, saying that with his experience he was well qualified for the post of the khan’s falconer.
In a conservative, reactionary and superstitious age, Frederick ii stood out as a progressive and enlightened despot. The grandson of Frederick Barbarossa and King Roger ii of Sicily, he had been brought up in Palermo as a proud Sicilian. He spoke Latin, Greek, Italian, French and Arabic; he had a passion for scientific experiment; he had studied astronomy; and he was also an accomplished falconer and an erudite ornithologist. Since his scholarship had led him to look upon his European contemporaries with arrogant contempt and reject their backward traditions, his reason and his curiosity had led him to reach out towards the superior world of Islam and regard its princes as his only cultural and intellectual equals. His Moslem mercenaries and his harem so scandalized the prudish and newly ascetic Christian clergy, against whose attempts to extend their temporal power he was an implacable enemy, that they gave him the nickname 'Stupor MundV,
The clergy had returned to open demonstrations of poverty and simplicity in an attempt to regain the hearts of the common people and win their support for Pope Innocent ill’s campaign to persuade their princes, who ruled by divine right, to accept God’s representative on earth as at least their nominal overlord. Frederick, however, was determined to recover the Sicilian domains in northern Italy which had been naively ceded to the papacy as a result of this policy. Against Frederick’s efforts Pope Honorius iii, who succeeded Innocent iii, could do little more than protest, since he needed Frederick to take part in a crusade. But although Frederick promised to lead a crusade as early as 1215, every year for the next five years he postponed his departure with a plausible excuse until the pope was prepared to proclaim him Holy Roman Emperor, to which he was entitled as the grandson of Frederick Barbarossa. Eventually the pope gave in and Frederick was crowned, but for the next seven years he still managed to avoid the crusade. In 1227 Honorius was succeeded by Gregory ix, a much stronger man, and when Frederick embarked for the Holy Land and then turned back on the pretext that his crew were sick, Gregory excommunicated him.
Frederick was left with no alternative. The excommunication would be grounds for disobedience among the princes in his German domains to whom he had granted a dangerous amount of autonomy in order to win their support. In June 1228 he set out on a crusade against his friend the Sultan of Egypt, who only the year before had presented him with a giraffe for his menagerie, the first ever to be seen in Europe.
While Frederick was away. Pope Gregory hoped to bring about his downfall by taking over the disputed Italian territories with his own mercenaries and setting up an alternative king in Germany, but the emperor and the sultan conceived a contemptuous ruse by which Frederick would appear to succeed without a drop of Christian or Moslem blood being shed, and within a year Frederick had returned, having acquired Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth on a ten-year lease from the sultan. The pope’s mercenaries were driven out of Lombardy, but the ensuing treaty of San Germano, by which Frederick was accepted back into the Catholic church, did nothing to settle the territorial disputes. After decisively crushing an uprising in Lombardy at the battle of Cortenuova in 1237, Frederick reasserted his suzerainty over Spoleto and Ancona, declared his intention of making Rome his capital and began to canvass support from France and England. Horrified, Pope Gregory riposted by excommunicating him again and summoning a great council of all Christendom to meet in Rome at Easter 1241, to plan a united crusade against the infidel emperor. If this council were to secure enough support, it would be a threat not only to Frederick’s ambitions in Italy, but also to his future as emperor, and so, while King Bela was desperately pleading for help, Frederick was preparing to march on Rome and prevent the council from meeting. Meanwhile the pope was also preparing to defend himself.
It was this struggle between empire and papacy that must bear the greatest responsibility for Europe’s inability to present a united front against the Mongols. The armies in the front lines, the Teutonic Knights, the Poles, the Hungarians and the Bulgars, were isolated and unsupported, and the Mongols knew it.
Founded in 1198, the Order of the Teutonic Knights of Saint Mary’s Hospital in Jerusalem did not remain in the Middle East to compete with the two older orders of knights, the Templars and the Hospitallers. The kingdoms of Islam were not the only areas of the world where the conquest of land and the acquisition of other men’s wealth could be justified as dissemination of the true Christian faith and dignified by the title of a crusade, and soon after their foundation the Teutonic Knights began to concentrate their attentions on northern Europe. For a time they settled in Hungary, where King Bela’s father, Andreas ii, gave them land in return for their military services against the Cumans. But when the Cumans and the Hungarian crown became reconciled after the first Mongol attack in 1222, they were thrown out and moved on to northern Prussia and Lithuania on the Baltic coast. They then absorbed the Sword Brethren who had already settled there, conquered the indigenous pagan tribes and established themselves in large independent estates, which, in recognition of the papal policy, they held in fief from the Holy See. The extent of their estates, and their prospects for increasing them, soon attracted many more of the German nobles to whom the membership of their brotherhood of knights was limited. While the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy were at war, they managed to continue their unrestrained expansion by diplomatically remaining on equally good terms with both the empire, in which their hochmeister was a prince, and the papacy, from which they held their right of tenure. By 1240 they had become a major military power and were preparing to carry the ‘True Cross’ into the lands of the schismatic Russians, and incidentally acquire for themselves the fabled riches of Novgorod. In time, their white cloaks and tunics, decorated with a black cross, were to become as great a symbol of ‘imperialist oppression’ to the people of Russia as the yak-tailed standards of the Mongols.
The Teutonic Knights built ports along the Baltic coast, through which a regular flow of German peasants and craftsmen travelled inland to farm the new estates and build the great castles that would defend them. And as the estates grew and flourished, their southern neighbour Conrad, ruler of the Polish province of Mazovia, looked on with embarrassed apprehension. Constantly threatened by the brutally savage pagan tribes in Prussia, he had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Teutonic Knights and had even given them his province of Chelmno, which he had been unable to defend, but now the emergence of a new German power on his northern border was an even more menacing prospect than the merciless raids of the pagan tribes. Vast numbers of German immigrants from Brandenburg had been allowed to settle in the Polish province of Silesia and in the province of Great Poland, most of which had been taken over by Silesia’s ruler, Henry the Bearded. It was this prince’s ill-concealed ambition to see his son, Henry the Pious, crowned in Cracow as the king of a reunited Poland, and if his grateful new subjects and the sympathyseeking Holy Roman Emperor were to persuade the Teutonic Knights to assist him in this ambition, there would be little that the other Polish dukes could do to stop them.
Since the death of King Boleslaw iii in 1138, Poland, like Russia, had disintegrated into a collection of feuding principalities, Boleslaw having divided the land among his four sons, and their principalities having been further divided by later generations. By the beginning of the thirteenth century the country had collapsed into chaotic civil war, after which various royal dukes had attemped unsuccessfully to have themselves proclaimed king. At the time of the Mongol invasion there were still nine separate principalities, each with its own jealous aristocracy and ecclesiastical hierarchy, which had again been consolidated under the rule of four dukes: Conrad of Mazovia; Miecislaw of Oppeln; Conrad’s nephew Boleslaw the Chaste of Sandomir, who also controlled Cracow and claimed the title of king; and the most powerful, Henry the Pious of Silesia, who had succeeded his father in 1238 and successfully defended his province of Lubsz against an attempted take over by Brandenburg and Magdeburg. Two of these dukes were related to King Bela of Hungary: Henry was his cousin and Boleslaw had married his daughter Kunigunda. But although Bela had warned them of the inevitable consequences of the fall of Russia, he had failed to communicate his dread of the Mongols, and even Conrad had been unmoved by the disasters that had befallen Prince Michael of Chernigov, who had taken refuge with him before moving on to Silesia. In Poland, the sudden appearance of Baidar and Kadan’s army came as a devastating surprise..
In the few years since his accession to the throne of Hungary, Bela iv’s position had been severely weakened by his own determined attempts to restore the dignity and authority of the crown. Throughout the reign of his profligate and capricious father, he had openly condemned him for his irresolute deference to his barons and the extravagance of his injudicious favouritism. Bela was by nature serious and pedantic, but his father’s continued selfdeception and constant contempt for his company had made him cynical and aloof, and for a long time he had been bitter: at the age of seven he had witnessed the murder of his mother by barons who objected to her lavish retinue, and then seen his father marry again without even attempting to bring the culprits to justice. By the time he came to the throne in 1235, at the age of twenty-nine, his resolve to redeem the crown’s prestige and replenish its treasury had hardened into an obsession and the reforms and retributions began at once. He confiscated estates that had been given to worthless favourites; in a symbolic ceremony he burned all the chairs in the council chamber, and did not replace them, so that in future his councillors would have to stand in his presence; and he arrested his father’s corrupt treasurer and put out his eyes. His obviously sincere interest in the prosperity of his kingdom earned him a worthy and reliable body of support, but the majority of his barons, fearing the loss of the freedoms that they had been granted by the Golden Bull in 1222 (an equivalent to the English Magna Carta), opposed him, and without their consent he could not hope to raise anything like the full strength of his celebrated army.
It is not surprising, therefore, that he welcomed the Cumans with such enthusiasm, but the Cuman settlement was a failure. The Hungarians regarded the sudden and enormous increase in the immigrant population with suspicion. Most of the Hungarian steppe had become farmland and was no longer suitable for nomad herdsmen, and when the crops between the Danube and the Tisza, where the Cumans had settled, were trampled by their horses, it was seen as justification for a nationwide protest, expressing all the usual prejudices: the Cuman camps were filthy; their cooking was foul-smelling; and their idle and barbarous menfolk were a threat to the honour of Hungarian women.
Eager for popular support, the barons took up the cause and pressed for the Cumans’ expulsion, but Bela was adamant. He was building forts and barricades with the pine trees in the Carpathian passes, and he intended to garrison them with his own standing army. If these fell, the Cuman cavalry would be his only line of defence against the Mongols until self-preservation forced the barons to rally. His neighbours had not offered him an alliance. The Holy Roman Emperor had ignored him, and so desperate was the pope that while Bela was trying to recruit his subjects to fight in their own defence, the pope’s representatives were recruiting them for a crusade, not against the Mongols or the Saracens, but against the Holy Roman Emperor.
Soon after Christmas 1240 Bela’s scouts began to come in with regular reports that the Mongols were advancing. Early in the new year he rode up to the Carpathians to inspect the fortifications and placed their garrisons under the command of Nador Denes, the leader of his council. When he returned, he ordered a general mobilization and summoned all the barons and bishops, who had their own military retainers, to attend a council of war at Buda on 17 February 1241. The barons may not have been quite as oblivious to the danger as they pretended, on the appointed day the majority of the army was assembled, including Kotian and his Cumans. But although the barons were willing to muster their soldiers, they were not prepared to lead them into battle without reward. They argued that Bela had brought the invasion on himself by declaring his support for the Russian princes who had once been his enemies, and they were convinced that the Cumans were a Mongol fifth column who would turn against them as soon as the invasion began. Bela compromised and placed Kotian and the other Cuman leaders under house arrest as hostages for the Cumans’ loyalty, but still the barons refused to fight without more privileges and greater autonomy, and Bela was not prepared to give in to the sort of blackmail that had eroded the royal power during the reign of his father. The stalemate continued even after lo March, when a messenger arrived with the news that the Mongols were attacking the Carpathian passes, and while Bela pleaded and the barons resisted, the Hungarian army stood by, ready, waiting and idle.
Bela dispatched yet another letter begging for assistance from the Duke of Austria, Frederick ii, but although this time the duke set out at once with a small army, his motive was selfish curiosity rather than any desire to help his neighbour. Like his namesake the Holy Roman Emperor, the Duke of Austria (who was to be known by several nicknames including Frederick the Valiant, Frederick the Warlike and, most appropriately, Frederick the Quarrelsome) had also been offered the Hungarian crown by rebellious barons in the last year of the reign of Bela’s feeble father, and to prevent him taking it by force Andreas and Bela had made a pre-emptive strike with an enormous army which reached the gates of Vienna and only withdrew after Frederick had bought them off with a crippling payment of gold/ His consequent fear of the Hungarian army and his war with King Wenceslas of Bohemia, which had recently been ended by the threat of a Mongol invasion in Poland, had prevented him from taking his revenge and annexing the coveted Hungarian departments on the west of the Danube, but the possibility of Bela’s defeat at the hands of what he believed to be no more than a horde of nomad raiders presented a welcome opportunity for the achievement of his ambition.
On 14 March a grimy and battered Nador Denes arrived in Buda. The Carpathian passes had fallen, his garrisons had been annihilated and the Mongols were advancing into Hungary.
Bela sent his wife to safety in Austria, charging Bishop Stephen of Vac to escort her as far as the border, and persuaded the barons to move the army across the Danube from the fortress of Buda on the high west bank to the German settlement of Pest on the lower east bank, but only the Cumans rode forward to stand in the way of the Mongol advance.
His scouts had been so inefficient that he still did not realize the full extent of the danger. All he knew was that an army had entered northern Hungary, but in January and February the southern wing of the Mongol army under Subedei and Kuyuk had ravaged Moldavia and Wallachia and while Kuyuk had forced the Oitosch pass into the mountains of Transylvania, Subedei had entered by the Mehedia pass in the far south and stormed Orsova. Transylvania and south-eastern Hungary had already suffered the same terror as eastern Russia. Towns had been burned, citizens slaughtered, churches pillaged and women raped. The king’s silver mines at Rodna had been destroyed and at one town, Varadin, the Mongols had been forced to abandon their camp because of the stench from rotting corpses. There had not been time for most of the Transylvanian barons and bishops to bring their armies to Buda and it was Kuyuk’s job to keep them occupied while Subedei advanced north behind them. By mounting dummies on his spare horses he had convinced them that his strength was far greater than it actually was, and they were now assembling to defend themselves at Hermannstadt while Subedei was racing up the Tisza to join Batu. Meanwhile, Batu’s main army, which had taken the Verecke pass where Nador Denes had been in command, was advancing on Pest at such a speed that his vanguard is said to have come down from the mountains through the snow at the rate of sixty miles per day, and on 17 March the right wing under Siban attacked Vac, only twenty miles north of Pest. The whole of Hungary east of the Danube was in the grip of a Mongol pincer.
Bela’s relations with his army continued to deteriorate. When Vac fell and its population was slaughtered, the impatient Archbishop Hugolin of Calocsa rode out to challenge Siban and returned with only his personal retinue, after his entire command had been lured into a marsh and slaughtered. The loyal barons and the contingent of Templars who had been posted to Hungary joined the archbishop in blaming Bela for not supporting him. When the Duke of Austria arrived discord developed into catastrophe.
Frederick took up the cause of the barons who were refusing to fight without reward, and made similar demands for himself, saying that he had brought with him evidence to support their prejudice against the Cumans. His Austrian army had captured one of Siban’s patrols; the officers were Mongols, but some of the men were Cumans who had been conscripted in Russia. This, he maintained, was proof that the Cumans were untrustworthy, although he knew the truth. Having gained the support of the dissident barons, he set about winning the hearts of their soldiers by challenging two of the Mongols to single combat, running one through with his spear and slicing off the other’s arm with a single blow from his sword.
When Bela still refused to expel the only soldiers who were standing in the way of the advancing enemy, some of the barons crossed the Danube by night and broke into the house in Buda where Kotian and the other Cuman princes were being held. Realizing what was about to happen, Kotian killed his wives and then committed suicide while the other princes were defending themselves; and to please the jeering crowd that had gathered outside, the barons cut off all their heads and threw them into the street. When the news reached their camp the Cumans went wild with fury. They attacked and slaughtered the soldiers of the Bishop of Czanad who were marching to join Bela at Pest and the bishop himself only escaped because he was so sick that he had to be carried in a litter and had been taken to safety as soon as the fighting began. The Cumans rode towards Austria devastating the countryside and sacking several cities including Szombateley and then turned south and disappeared into Bulgaria carrying all their plunder with them.
Through their own treachery the Hungarians had lost their most valuable allies and, satisfied that he had done as much damage as he could, Frederick collected his soldiers and marched back to Austria on the pretext that Bela was being unreasonable.
By the end of March Subedei and Siban had joined forces with Batu and the Mongol army was drawn up in front of Pest, but Bela kept his nerve and still steadfastly refused to make any concessions to his barons. If they remained they would have no choice but to defend themselves in the inevitable attack, and many were preparing to abandon Bela when suddenly the Mongol army turned round and rode away. The invaders had obviously decided that the army assembled in Pest was too strong for them, and since victory
Now seemed possible, the dissidents at last agreed to join the loyal barons and the Templars who were already clamouring for pursuit. If it looked as though Bela was going to be defeated they could still abandon him, and if he was going to be victorious, it would be best for them to have shared in the glory.
On 7 April 1241 King Bela of Hungary ordered his army of a hundred thousand men to advance in pursuit of the retreating Mongols.
World History
