Battle on the Marchfeld, 1278: how the Habsburgs won Austria

In the mid-thirteenth century Ottokar II of Bohemia was one of the most powerful princes of the Holy Roman Empire. After the last Babenberg duke died, Ottokar took over Austria and Styria, marrying the duke's sister Margaret in 1252, and he later added Carinthia and Carniola. When the princes elected Count Rudolf of Habsburg as German king in 1273, they were choosing, among other things, against a further rise of the Bohemian king, as Stephan Gruber writes for the Habsburg virtual exhibition. Ottokar called Rudolf a count hardly fit to be king.²

Ottokar refused to swear fealty for his imperial fiefs. In 1275 he was placed under the ban of the Empire, and in 1276 Rudolf went to war. In the Peace of Vienna that November Ottokar gave up Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola and kept Bohemia and Moravia as fiefs from Rudolf, and a double marriage between their children was agreed. The settlement did not hold. In 1278 Ottokar tried again, allied with Silesian, Polish, Brandenburg, Meissen and Lower Bavarian princes and with Austrian nobles and the city of Vienna, while Rudolf secured the help of King Ladislaus IV of Hungary.³

The road to the Marchfeld

Ottokar left Prague on 27 June and lost precious time besieging the border towns of Drosendorf and Laa, writes Johann Loserth in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. Alfons Huber, in the same work, judges him a brave soldier but no great general, who gave Rudolf time to gather Austrians, Styrians, Carinthians and heavy cavalry from southwest Germany. When the Hungarian army crossed the Danube near Pressburg, Rudolf left Vienna on 14 August and joined it at Marchegg. Raids by Hungarians and Cumans made Ottokar give up the siege of Laa and move his whole army to the March, where he camped between Drösing and Jedenspeigen.⁴

On 23 August the Hungarians crossed the March and united with Rudolf's troops, and the allies camped between Stillfried and Dürnkrut. Rudolf chose Friday, 26 August, for the battle.⁵

Two kings in the field

How many men fought is disputed. Loserth puts Ottokar's army at about 30,000, stronger than Rudolf's in heavy cavalry, and the Hungarian auxiliaries at no fewer than 30,000 by the lowest estimate. Gruber, writing more than a century later, speaks instead of armies of a few thousand men on each side, each led in person by its king. The Austrian Post, marking the 700th anniversary in 1978, called it a turning point that shifted the weight of central Europe from Bohemia and Prague to Austria and Vienna.⁶

The fighting began at nine in the morning and lasted five to six hours. Rudolf's Germans held the right, the Hungarians under their palatine the left, while the Cumans harried the enemy's flanks. The Bohemian heavy cavalry pushed Rudolf's right wing back from Jedenspeigen to Dürnkrut and across the Weidenbach stream. A Bohemian rider stabbed Rudolf's horse, and the king, then over sixty, went down with it. A knight from Thurgau, Heinrich Walter von Ramswag, pulled him up and got him onto another horse.⁷

The reserve

Rudolf had kept back a body of heavy cavalry under a knight known as the tall Kapeller, with orders to charge at the decisive moment. It now fell on the flank of the Bohemians who had pushed furthest forward and drove them into the March, where most of them drowned. A cry went up that they were fleeing, and the Bohemian flight became general, northward toward Drösing.⁸

Ottokar fought on with a small band. When he saw it was hopeless he tried to cut his way through toward Drösing, was overtaken and killed by personal enemies, among them the steward Berthold von Emerberg. Robert Luft, in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, likewise records that he was murdered by personal enemies after the defeat, in one of the largest knightly battles of medieval Europe. His body was taken to Vienna and later to Znojmo and Prague.⁹

Austria for the Habsburgs

Rudolf's pursuit completed the destruction of the Bohemian army; most were killed or captured, while losses on the German side were light, according to Loserth. Within days he sent the Hungarians home and marched into Moravia, where no one resisted him. Gruber notes that the victory was later stylized by patriotic historians as a national battle of decision. Its practical result was plain enough: in 1282 Rudolf enfeoffed his sons with Austria and Styria, the decisive step in founding Habsburg rule in Austria, which lasted until 1918. Rudolf's daughter Guta married Ottokar's young son Wenceslas II.¹⁰