Who won the Battle of Mohi?
The Mongols won. On 11 April 1241, by the Sajó River near Muhi in northeastern Hungary, an army led by Batu and his general Subutai surrounded and destroyed the royal army of King Béla IV. The king escaped, his brother Coloman died of his wounds, and the Mongols overran the Hungarian plain for a year.1
Two days after one Mongol wing destroyed a Polish and Silesian army at Legnica, the main Mongol army met the Kingdom of Hungary on the banks of the Sajó. Hungary's army was, in Britannica's words, renowned for having the best cavalry in Europe. By the morning of 11 April 1241 it had been broken, two archbishops lay dead among the bishops and barons of the realm, and its king was a fugitive.2
Why did the Mongols invade Hungary?
In 1239 King Béla IV gave asylum to the Cumans, steppe nomads fleeing the Mongols, some 40,000 warriors with their families according to the medieval figure that Peter Jackson and older Hungarian historians repeat, on condition that their khan, Köten, was baptized. The Mongols saw the Cumans as their own runaway subjects. An ultimatum from Batu, carried west by the Dominican friar Julian, charged Béla with keeping “the Cumans, my slaves” under his protection and ordered him to give them up.3
Béla's kingdom was divided. His nobles resented his drive to take back royal lands and his favor to foreigners, and the nomadic Cumans clashed with the settled Hungarian population. As the Mongols poured through the Carpathian passes in March 1241, suspicion that Köten was in league with them boiled over and a mob killed him. His people left the country, plundering as they went, and Béla lost the one force in his army that knew how steppe horsemen fought.4
How were Mohi and Legnica connected?
The Mongol plan was a converging one. Batu and Subutai came through the Verecke pass while other princes broke in from the east and southeast; Subutai's biography in the Chinese Yuan shi and the Persian history of Rashid al-Din both say the Mongols entered the kingdom by five routes. A northern wing under Baidar and Orda swept through Poland to cover the flank and tie down the Polish dukes, destroyed Duke Henry II the Pious at the Battle of Legnica on 9 April, and then turned south to rejoin Batu.5
For the Mongol commanders the campaign was a gamble. With other columns still in Transylvania and Poland, Batu, his brother Shiban and Subutai faced the royal army with only part of their strength. The Persian historian Juvayni says Shiban scouted the Hungarians and reported them twice as numerous as the Mongols, and Thomas of Split, writing in Dalmatia, also heard that Béla's army was the larger.6
The march to the Sajó
Béla mustered his army at Pest while Mongol raiding parties rode around the camp. When he finally marched out, the Mongol vanguard fell back before him, drawing the Hungarians northeast across the plain to the Sajó, where the main Mongol army was already waiting behind the river and its wooded banks. Stephen Pow and József Laszlovszky argue that the battlefield had been chosen well in advance.7
The Hungarians camped on the western bank near the village of Muhi. They ringed the camp with wagons and packed themselves so tightly inside that the tent ropes touched. They left the only bridge standing, because they meant to cross it themselves, and put a guard on it. Thomas of Split says Batu climbed a hill, studied the crowded camp and told his commanders that the Hungarians had shut themselves in like sheep in a fold.8
Not every historian believes in the wagon fort. As András Borosy's survey of Hungarian historiography records, Ladomér Zichy and later Csaba Csorba doubted that a fast-moving army could have brought so many carts, and noted that no source but Thomas mentions it.9
The fight for the bridge
Word reached the camp that the Mongols would attack in the night. Béla sent his brother Coloman, Duke of Slavonia, to the bridge, and Archbishop Ugrin of Kalocsa went with him. They arrived around midnight to find Mongols already crossing and drove them back over the river in hand-to-hand fighting. A stronger guard and the Templars stayed to watch the bridge, and the rest of the army, confident after beating off one attack, went to sleep.10
Before sunrise the Mongols came on again. Their stone-throwing machines drove the guard from the bridge and Batu's men forced their way over. In Bretschneider's summary of the European accounts, one Mongol force waded the river while another forced the bridge with catapults.11
Then the attack stalled. Subutai's biography in the Yuan shi, translated by Emil Bretschneider, says Batu was checked, lost men and proposed to retreat, and that Subutai told him the prince could go back if he wished but that he himself would not turn back before reaching the Danube. The papal envoy John of Plano Carpini heard that the Mongols tried to flee in Hungary and that Batu held them with his drawn sword. Laszlovszky and his co-authors stress that Mongol and Latin sources agree on this point.12
How did Subutai's crossing win the battle?
Subutai had taken his corps to a place where the river was deep, and his men built a bridge of beams fastened together. Once Subutai was over, the Hungarians were caught between two forces, and by about eight in the morning, the Hungarian Catholic Lexicon says, their camp was surrounded.13
Inside the wagons the Hungarian knights could not form up, and Mongol archers and machines poured missiles into the crowded camp. After hours of fighting the army began to break. Jackson writes that the Mongols let groups of fugitives through their ranks and then hunted them down, and that heavy rain had turned the ground into a morass. Britannica describes a column fleeing toward Pest that was ridden down and shot by mounted archers, and Rogerius, a canon of Várad who lived through the invasion as a captive, wrote that the slaughter on the roads to Pest was too great to be believed.14
How many died at the Battle of Mohi?
No reliable count survives. Britannica gives the Hungarian army as 100,000 men, of whom 60,000 were lost, against 80,000 Mongols. Hungarian historians have never agreed either. Borosy's survey of their work records estimates running from Ladomér Zichy's 15,000 on each side and Gyula Erdélyi's 20,000 to 25,000 Hungarians against up to 60,000 Mongols to Ödön Olchváry's 65,000 Hungarians against more than 100,000 Mongols. The most recent Hungarian estimates sit at the low end: the Hungarian Catholic Lexicon gives the royal army as 15,000 to 20,000 men.15
The roll of the dead shows the scale of the disaster. Among them were Archbishop Matthias of Esztergom and Archbishop Ugrin of Kalocsa and the bishops of Győr, Nitra and Transylvania, together with a long list of the kingdom's leading churchmen and barons.16
The Mongols paid too. The Hungarian Catholic Lexicon notes heavy Mongol losses, and Carpini, travelling to the Mongol court a few years later, strayed by mistake into a guarded cemetery kept for the men killed in Hungary, and its keepers nearly shot at his party. Historians such as Stephen Pow now see Mohi as a much closer fight than the old picture of an easy Mongol triumph.17
Why did the Hungarians lose at Mohi?
The Hungarians lost because they were outgeneraled. They guarded one bridge and ignored the rest of the river, let a beaten-off night attack lull the camp to sleep, and crowded the army into a camp it could not fight from, while the Mongols struck from two directions and kept their nerve when the battle hung in the balance.18
Hungarian historians add deeper causes. The army was smaller than the kingdom could raise, because the counties nearest the invasion routes and the troops of several barons and prelates never reached the royal camp; Erdélyi judged that only 20,000 to 25,000 men fought at Mohi. Thomas of Split and Rogerius both blamed complacency after years of rumors that came to nothing, and the quarrels between Béla and his nobles.19
What happened to Coloman and King Béla?
Coloman was badly wounded but broke out with his armored horsemen. He stopped at Pest to warn the townspeople to look to their own safety and rode on to Croatia, where he died of his wounds soon after. Béla got away only because his followers sacrificed themselves again and again to cover him, the historian Attila Zsoldos writes.20
The king fled first to the Austrian border, where Duke Frederick II of Austria received him and then seized western lands of the kingdom as the price of help he never gave. Béla moved on to Slavonia and the Zagreb region and, once the Mongols were across the Danube, to the Dalmatian coast. Prince Qadan chased him to the island town of Trogir but could not take it, and toward the end of March 1242 he rode away to rejoin Batu.21
What did the Mongols do after Mohi?
The victors took and burned Pest and spent the spring and summer plundering the country east of the Danube, with the worst destruction on the Great Hungarian Plain. The river held them for months, because Hungarian troops guarded the fords and broke the ice. When the Danube froze in the hard winter of 1241, the Mongols crossed and attacked Esztergom, but its stone citadel, defended by crossbowmen, held out.22
Why did the Mongols leave Hungary in 1242?
In the spring of 1242 the Mongols abandoned Hungary as suddenly as they had come. The traditional answer goes back to Carpini: the Great Khan Ögedei had died in December 1241, and the princes turned back to settle the succession. Britannica still gives this reason.23
Historians have never agreed. Greg Rogers sorted their explanations into four groups, as Laszlovszky and his co-authors summarize: the khan's death; Denis Sinor's argument that the Hungarian plain could not feed the Mongols' herds; the theory that resistance had worn the invaders down; and the idea that the campaign was only ever meant as a raid. Peter Jackson, as Pow notes, reads the invasion as punishment of Béla for sheltering the Cumans.24
In 2016 Ulf Büntgen and Nicola Di Cosmo added tree rings and documents: warm, dry summers from 1238 to 1241 were followed by cold, wet conditions early in 1242 that turned the plain to marsh, cutting pasture and the cavalry's mobility while famine spread. Laszlovszky, Pow and their colleagues reply that the famine was largely man-made and that no single cause will do. They point to stiffer resistance than once believed, a king the Mongols never caught, and the agreement of Mongol and Latin sources that the Mongol leaders had been ready to give up even at Mohi.25
Why was the Battle of Mohi important?
Mohi was the decisive battle of the invasion that Hungarians call the tatárjárás, in András Borosy's words the heaviest blow to Hungary before 1526. It also changed how the kingdom defended itself. Béla returned and spent the rest of his reign rebuilding, encouraging a network of strong castles, and when the Mongols invaded again in 1285, Laszlovszky and his co-authors argue, the kingdom showed how much it had learned.26
Where was the Battle of Mohi fought?
The battle was fought on the plain by the Sajó River near the village of Muhi, close to where the Sajó meets the Hernád, in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county in northeastern Hungary. Hungarian writers use the spelling Muhi; Britannica and most English books keep Mohi.27
Exactly where the camp and the bridge stood is still being worked out. Pow and Laszlovszky place the bridge between old channels of the Sajó and the Hernád and the battlefield within a zone of 25 to 30 square kilometers, and recent finds there include the remains of men killed in the battle and, from metal-detector surveys, weapons and jewelry.28
A memorial park to the battle stands at Muhi, and it was restored in 2018.29
For the northern half of the same campaign, read the Battle of Legnica; for the men who led it, see Batu Khan, Subutai and the greatest commanders of the Mongol Empire, and for Hungary's long story, the military history of Hungary. Test what you remember in the medieval battles quiz.
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