Who won the Battle of Lechfeld?
Otto I won. On 10 August 955 the East Frankish king, later the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, routed a large Magyar army that had been besieging Augsburg, near the river Lech in southern Germany. The Magyar leaders were captured and hanged, and the great Magyar raids into the German lands came to an end.1
For more than half a century, mounted raiders from the plains of the Carpathian Basin had struck deep into Europe, from Saxony to Burgundy and Italy. In the summer of 955 a large Magyar army stood before the walls of Augsburg. The battle that followed on 10 August, the feast of St Lawrence, raised King Otto I so high that it opened his road to the imperial crown, and it is remembered in Germany as the end of the Magyar raids. In Hungary it goes by another name and carries another meaning.2
Who were the Magyar raiders?
The Magyars, the ancestors of today's Hungarians, had settled in the Carpathian Basin at the end of the ninth century and raided central and western Europe from there for about half a century. Hungarian historians call this period the age of the expeditions. For the wider story of Hungary at war, see the guide to the military history of Hungary; for the German side, the military history of Germany.3
Their strength was the mounted archer. The Magyars fought at a distance, with arrows, and avoided close combat with heavily armored horsemen, which was exactly where the Frankish armies were strongest. The Deutschlandmuseum in Berlin sums up the encounter of 955 as a clash of two ways of fighting.4
The raiders were not mindless plunderers. Négyesi describes the expeditions as something like business ventures aimed at booty, planned on the basis of intelligence about the target and led by experienced professional commanders, rather than the whole armed force of the tribes. He also shows how they used rivers as shields: in 955 the Danube, the Iller and the Lech framed the area they stripped, so any relieving army would have to cross water while the raiding parties gathered. What they were not good at was taking walled towns. The Hungarian defense ministry's account of the battle notes that they were unpracticed in siege warfare and tended to try to starve a town out.5
Why did the Magyars invade Germany in 955?
The year before, Otto I had been fighting a civil war against his own son Liudolf and his son-in-law Duke Conrad the Red of Lotharingia. In 954 the Magyars rode through southern Germany and across the Rhine with guides supplied by Liudolf, plundered as far as the Low Countries and northern France, and went home by way of Burgundy and Italy. Widukind of Corvey, the Saxon monk who wrote the history of Otto's reign, says they were openly paid and feasted at Worms.6
That alliance backfired on the rebels. By the spring of 955 Liudolf and Conrad had submitted, and Otto's brother Henry had retaken Bavaria and its capital Regensburg. The Magyars, Appelt argues, knew this from their scouts: a new campaign in a Germany united again under its king would need a larger army than ever.7
Around the beginning of July 955 a Magyar embassy came to Otto in Saxony, claiming old friendship. Widukind thought many saw them as spies come to find out how the civil war had ended. Otto sent them home with small gifts. Soon afterwards messengers came from Henry of Bavaria, who lay ill: the Magyars were pouring over the border and meant to give battle.8
How did Bishop Ulrich hold Augsburg?
The Magyar leaders were Bulcsú, Lél (remembered in Hungary as Lehel) and Súr. Their army spread across Bavaria between the Danube and the Alps, crossed the Lech and raided Swabia far to the west, while its main body turned on Augsburg, the seat of Bishop Ulrich.9
Augsburg had only low walls without towers. Ulrich, one of Otto's most loyal supporters in the south, had gathered his best knights inside, and the garrison beat off a bloody attack on the east gate. The next day the Magyars launched a general assault, and the bishop's biographer Gerhard, an eyewitness, describes men being driven forward with whips. Both entries on Ulrich in the German national biography credit him with holding the city until the king came.10
In the middle of the assault Berthold, an outlawed son of the Bavarian count palatine Arnulf, rode into the Magyar camp with news that the king was approaching. The Magyar leaders broke off the siege at once to face him. That night Ulrich's brother, Count Dietpald, led the garrison's horsemen out of the city to join Otto's camp.11
What army did Otto I bring?
Because of a dangerous war with the Slavs beyond the Elbe, Otto came south with only a few Saxons. Near Augsburg he was joined by Franks and Bavarians, and Conrad the Red, reconciled with the king, arrived with a strong force of cavalry; Widukind says his coming lifted the soldiers' spirits. The Lotharingians, alone among the great peoples of the kingdom, sent no troops.12
After a fast in the camp, the army swore oaths of loyalty and marched out at dawn in eight divisions, which Widukind calls legions. The first three were Bavarians under Duke Henry's officers, the fourth the Franks under Conrad, the fifth and largest the king's own picked men around the banner of the archangel, the sixth and seventh Swabians under Duke Burchard, and the eighth a thousand Bohemians, guarding the baggage at the rear as the safest place.13
Otto led his columns through rough, broken country with trees and scrub, Widukind explains, so that the Magyar archers could not get at the ranks with their arrows. Appelt doubts that the king had any brilliant plan beyond a strong frontal attack; Négyesi suggests he had learned the lesson of 910, when a Magyar army had destroyed the army of King Louis the Child near Augsburg by a feigned retreat.14
The Magyar attack on the rear
The Magyars struck first. Part of their army crossed the Lech, rode around Otto's columns and fell on the rearguard with arrows and loud war cries. The Bohemians were scattered, the baggage was taken, and the two Swabian divisions were routed in turn, with many killed or captured.15
Otto sent Conrad back with the Franks. Conrad freed the prisoners, recovered the booty and drove off the raiders, then rejoined the king in triumph. Many historians, Hungarian and German, see this as the turning point: the Magyar force that had broken into the rear and fallen to plundering was not supported in time by the main body facing Otto.16
Négyesi reads it differently. In his view the force that hit the baggage was not a pincer meant to surround the Germans, but a decoy meant to lure them into an ambush, the tactic that had worked in 910. Because Otto did not take the bait, the plan fell apart.17
Otto's charge and the rout
Widukind gives Otto a speech before the decisive attack: the Germans were outnumbered, but not in courage or arms, and it was better to die gloriously than to live as the enemy's slaves. Then the king took up his shield and the Holy Lance and was the first to ride at the enemy.18
The bolder Magyars resisted at first, then broke when they saw others fleeing. Some rode into nearby villages and were burned there; others drowned trying to swim the river. The Magyar camp was stormed and its captives freed. On the second and third days, Widukind writes, the garrisons of the neighboring towns hunted down the rest.19
From the walls of Augsburg the defenders saw a great mass of horsemen coming back in good order and thought at first that no battle had been fought; only when it hurried past the city to the far bank of the Lech did they realize it was a beaten army in flight. That evening Otto entered Augsburg and spent the night with Ulrich.20
How many fought and died at Lechfeld?
Nobody knows. Widukind gives Otto eight divisions and the Bohemians a thousand men, but no total, and the contemporaries who spoke of 100,000 Magyars were guessing wildly. The Hungarian historian Henrik Marczali already doubted the figure in 1894.21
Modern estimates are far apart. In the survey of the literature that Négyesi published in 2003, the German army ranges from 3,000 to 4,000 men (Karl Leyser, László Veszprémy) through 7,000 to 8,000 (Hans Delbrück) and 10,000 to 20,000 (György Györffy) to 25,000 (József Breit), and the Magyar army from 5,000 to 10,000 (Györffy) through 20,000 to 25,000 (Gyula Pauler) to 35,000 to 40,000 (Breit). Négyesi's own estimate is about 4,000 Germans against 6,000 to 8,000 Magyars, and Appelt also judged Otto's army considerable but smaller than the enemy's.22
The losses on Otto's side were heavy. Duke Conrad the Red, fighting hard, loosened the laces of his armor in the fierce heat of the day and was killed by an arrow in the throat. Ulrich's brother Dietpald also fell. Of the Magyar army, Widukind claims that hardly anyone escaped.23
Who won, and why did the Magyars lose?
Otto won a crushing victory. Widukind wrote that no king had enjoyed such a victory in two hundred years; Appelt thought the monk was comparing it with Charles Martel's victory over the Arabs at Tours.24
Historians on both sides point to the same causes. Otto had a kingdom united again behind him, and in the close fight his armored horsemen had the advantage. On the Magyar side the attack on the rear and the main body did not work together, and once the army broke up in flight, the rivers and the hostile country around it turned defeat into disaster.25
How do Hungarians see the battle?
In Hungary it is the battle of Augsburg (augsburgi csata), not of the Lechfeld, and Hungarian scholars read it differently. The Polish historian Adam Lubocki, reviewing the German-centered literature, notes that Hungarian researchers reject the old idea that one defeat turned the Magyars overnight from nomads into settled farmers; at most, following Györffy, it pushed their rulers toward changes already under way.26
The Hungarian defense ministry's account stresses that the leaders who died led the tribes of western Hungary, which bore the brunt of the defeat, while the rest of the Hungarian forces in the Carpathian Basin were hardly touched. The raids did not stop at once: they turned south, toward the Balkans and Byzantium, which Appelt says ended only around 970. Nor did Otto follow up his victory with an attack on Hungary, as both Appelt and Négyesi point out.27
Hungarian tradition turned the defeat into a legend. In it the captured Lehel asks to blow his horn one last time and strikes the German ruler dead with it, so that his enemy will serve him in the next world. A carved medieval horn kept at Jászberény is still shown as Lehel's horn.28
What happened after the Battle of Lechfeld?
The three Magyar leaders were captured and handed over to Duke Henry of Bavaria, who had them hanged, at Regensburg according to Hungarian and German accounts. Henry himself died of his illness on 1 November 955.29
Hanging them was a message. Rich leaders taken in battle could normally expect to be ransomed or exchanged, and the Hungarian defense ministry's account reads Otto's refusal to bargain as a sign that he meant to end the raids for good; Négyesi stresses that it broke the unwritten rules of these wars and made raiding the West a deadly risk. Négyesi thinks the executions shocked the class of leaders who organized the expeditions more than the defeat itself.30
Otto ordered thanksgiving services in every church of the realm. Widukind says the victorious army hailed him as father of the fatherland and emperor; Appelt reads this as a learned flourish borrowed from Roman writers. Otto was actually crowned emperor by Pope John XII in Rome on 2 February 962, and his biographer in the Neue Deutsche Biographie notes that voices calling his rule imperial grow louder after 955.31
The year was not over. In October 955 Otto marched against the Slavs who had risen east of the Elbe and defeated them on the Recknitz in Mecklenburg. Harry Bresslau called the two victories of 955 the greatest battles of Otto's reign, and both were won by the king in person.32
Simon of Kéza, writing in Hungary in the thirteenth century, recorded that after the deaths of Lél and Bulcsú the Hungarian army no longer entered Germany. Less than three centuries later Hungary itself would be invaded from the east, as told in the story of the Battle of Mohi in 1241.33
Where was the Battle of Lechfeld fought?
The Lechfeld is the plain between the Lech and the Wertach that stretches south of Augsburg, and Gerhard's Life of Ulrich names it as the place where victory had been foretold. But the sources never fix the battlefield, and historians have placed it south, east, west and north of the city. Négyesi, who walked the ground, puts Otto's camp near Gablingen north of the city, the decisive fight in the marshy Schmutter valley to the northwest, and only the last clashes south of Augsburg, around the Magyar camp.34
The name therefore varies. German and English writers speak of the Lechfeld, Hungarians of Augsburg, and Polish writers of the battle on the Lechowe Pole, the Lech field, or by the river Lech near Augsburg.35
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