King Andrew II died on 21 September 1235. Two years earlier he had lost his second wife, Yolande de Courtenay, sister of Robert and Baldwin II, Latin emperors of Constantinople. Although nearing sixty, he contracted a third marriage with Beatrice, the young daughter of the marquis of Este. Upon Andrew’s death, the widow, who was already pregnant, considered it advisable to flee the country, and it was abroad that she gave birth to a son, Stephen, father of Andrew III, the last king of the dynasty.
Béla IV (1235–1270) had already become known for his
conservative views. Between 1228 and 1231, as a younger king, he had taken
serious measures to reverse his father’s ‘useless and superfluous perpetual
grants’; but at that time his father had often prevented his decisions from
being put into effect. Now, as king, he began his reign by expelling or
imprisoning his father’s principal counsellors and confiscating their estates.
Palatine Denis, who was held to be more responsible than anyone else for what
had happened during Andrew II’s reign, was blinded. Béla also made efforts to
restore the kingdom to the state it had been during the time of his revered
grandfather. As a first step he ordered that the barons should henceforth stand
during meetings of the royal council, having their seats burnt as a symbolic
act. He also ordered that all those with grievances should submit these, by
written petition, to the office of the judge royal in order that their cases
might be examined. Only the most important cases would be placed before the
council. However, Béla’s foremost aim was to put an end to the dissolution of
the kingdom’s castle organisation, so he ordered a careful census of what
remained of it and, in order to swell the dangerously diminished stock of royal
estates, he resorted once again to the rescinding of his father’s land grants.
All these measures bore witness to the king’s determination to interpret royal
power as being almost absolute; and, indeed, they seemed to reinforce royal
authority for a short time. The Italian Rogerius, canon of Oradea and later
archbishop of Split, an astute contemporary who described in his Carmen
miserabile the story of the Mongol invasion, was of another opinion. He thought
that Béla’s actions had provoked ‘hatred’ between the king and his subjects,
leading to a level of tension that he saw as the main reason for the
catastrophe that was to follow.
It was at this time that the mysterious ‘eastern’ Hungarians
became involved for a moment in the history of their western relatives. In the
tenth century it was still recalled that the Hungarians had been cut into two
by the attack of the Pechenegs in about 895 and that one part of them had
remained in the East. This episode seems later to have been forgotten, and the
existence of these distant relatives only became known again via the conversion
of Cumania. Prompted by hints provided by a missionary, a Friar Julian and
three other Dominicans left for the East in 1235 in order to find the lost
Hungarians. Following the instruction of the chronicles, the Dominicans looked
for them first in ‘Scythia’, that is, around the sea of Azov, but the eastern
Hungarians were finally found in Bashkiria, along the River Volga, in a land
called Magna Hungaria by Friar Julian. By the time he encountered them, all his
companions had died. It was there that Julian realised the danger posed by the
Mongol expansion, and as soon as he had arrived home he informed his king of
it. In 1237 a new mission was dispatched, this time with the aim of converting
the pagan Hungarians, but it had to stop at Suzdal, for in the meantime Khan
Batu’s troops had begun their westward movement and had swept away the
Hungarians’ eastern relatives for ever.
Mongol pressure led to the first migration of the Cumans
into Hungary. In 1237 Prince Kuthen asked for his people’s admission, promising
that they would become good Hungarian subjects and adopt the Roman Catholic
faith. Regarding the Cumans as potentially useful allies against the Mongols,
as well as against his own subjects, Béla settled them on the Great Plain, but
their arrival only deepened the crisis in Hungary. The king was overwhelmed
with complaints that the Cumans had violated women and disregarded property
rights. There was little he could do to prevent these transgressions, but was
nevertheless accused of bias in favour of ‘his Cumans’.
In the meantime the Mongols arrived on the scene. Kiev fell
in December 1240 and in the spring of 1241 the Mongol armies set out for
Hungary. The right wing crossed Poland and, having defeated Henry, duke of
Silesia at Legnica on 9 April, invaded the kingdom of Hungary from the north.
The left wing pushed through the passes of the Carpathians from the south. The
main army, led by Batu in person, aimed the very heart of the kingdom. On 12
March they broke through the defensive works of the pass of Vorota and defeated
Palatine Denis Tomaj. Five days later Vác was plundered by their vanguard.
Few realised the seriousness of the danger. While the royal
army was gathering near Pest and the Mongols were advancing with a speed that
only nomadic horsemen could attain, a riot broke out against the Cumans who
were accused of complicity with the enemy. The crowd slaughtered Kuthen and his
retinue, while his enraged people left the royal camp and marched away, doing
as much damage as they could. Nevertheless, even without the Cumans, the
Mongols still thought that the Hungarian army outnumbered them. Béla
confidently marched eastwards and met Batu near Muhi on the River Sajó. It was
there that took place the battle which was to be greatest military catastrophe
experienced by medieval Hungary prior to 1526.
The Hungarian troops took position on the plain, surrounded
by their carts. According to Batu, they ‘closed themselves in a narrow pen in
the manner of sheep’, which made effective defence impossible. By dawn the
Mongols had crossed the river above and below the Hungarian camp, encircled it
and killed by archery all those who could not escape. The very best of the
Hungarian army perished, including the palatine, the judge royal and both
archbishops along with other bishops and barons. Béla’s brother, Coloman, was
severely wounded and died soon after in Slavonia. Although the Mongols did
their best to catch him, Béla managed to escape, and a number of nobles were
later rewarded for helping him with fresh horses. He asked Frederick of Austria
for help, but the duke preferred to take advantage of the situation and forced
Béla to cede three counties. From Austria the king fled to Slavonia, and
continued to send letters to the West asking for help. But all was in vain, for
Gregory IX and Frederick II, whose support he might have hoped for, were
heavily engaged in fighting each other.
In fact the help could not have arrived in time, for the
Mongol storm subsided as quickly as it had arrived. In the beginning of 1242
the invaders crossed the frozen Danube and took Esztergom with the exception of
the castle. They chased Béla as far as Trogir in Dalmatia, but did not have
time to lay siege to the city. The news came that the Great Khan, Ögödey, had
died at the end of 1241, and Batu wanted to be present at the election of his
successor. In March the Mongol army withdrew from the country, killing and
taking thousands of captives en route. ‘In this year’, noted an Austrian annalist
under the year 1241, ‘the kingdom of Hungary, which had existed for 350 years,
was destroyed by the army of the Tatars.’
Internal development and the Mongol invasion brought about
notable changes during second half of the thirteenth century. Some of them
turned out to be decisive. By about 1270 political events had led to a rapid
decline of central power and brought about an anarchy that culminated in 1301
with the dying out of the Árpádian dynasty. But this was also a period of major
social and economic changes, unparalleled since the eleventh and until the
nineteenth centuries. Ancient forms of serfdom began to disappear, and wide
regions of what is today Slovakia, as well as of Transylvania, which had been
almost uninhabited before, began to be settled with increasing density during
these decades. Special attention must be given to the emergence of the diet (or
parliament) and of local autonomies, preparing the way for the growing
influence of the nobility as an ‘estate’ in the following period.
THE EFFECTS OF THE MONGOL INVASION
The destruction caused by the Mongols during the course of a
single year is hardly imaginable. They carried off thousands of captives, and
what they left behind was vividly described by Rogerius, who had been a captive
of theirs but managed to escape with some of his companions. For a week they
wandered in Transylvania from village to village ‘without meeting anyone’,
guided by church towers and living on roots. When they finally arrived in Alba
Iulia ‘they found nothing but the corpses and skulls of those slaughtered by
the invaders’. The spectacle must have been the same wherever the enemy had
passed, and even many decades later villages throughout the kingdom were found
to have been uninhabited ‘since the time of the Mongols’. The fields could not
be tilled while the enemy was there and the unburied corpses caused the spread
of epidemics. Consequently, there followed in 1243 a horrible famine, which
‘took more victims than the pagans before’, according to an Austrian contemporary.
The number of casualties has been disputed, but there is no
doubt that the invasion led to something of a demographic catastrophe. Some
scholars put the loss, probably with exaggeration, at about 50 per cent of the
population (Gy. Györffy), but even the most prudent estimates do not go below
15 or 20 per cent (J. Szücs). The disaster can certainly be compared to the
Black Death, which was to strike the West a century later, and its consequences
were of the same importance. The trauma caused by the Mongol attack itself
prompted a series of comprehensive political reforms, but its indirect social
effects were even more significant. Strange as it may seem, the cataclysm
speeded up the process of transformation that had begun in the reign of Andrew
II. The next few decades saw spectacular changes that transformed the general
outlook and social structure of the kingdom profoundly and enduringly.
The Transdanubian region where the invaders spent only a
couple of months was relatively spared, but the Great Plain, which had borne
the Mongol presence for a whole year, was devastated. Archaeological
excavations have shown that in the region of Orosháza, east of Szeged, 31 out
of 43 villages disappeared for ever. In the immediate outskirts of Cegléd,
eight ruined churches were in later centuries to serve as reminders of the
villages that must once have stood around them. In the late Middle Ages many
deserted places still bore the name of a patron saint, showing that they had
been inhabited in earlier times. It has been demonstrated that medieval place
names ending with the word egyház (‘church’, as in the names of the modern
towns Nyíregyháza and Kiskunfélegyháza) also referred to an abandoned church.
Obviously not all the deserted localities should be attributed to the Mongol
destruction. The abandonment of settlements must have been as common in Hungary
as elsewhere in Europe, and the apparent disappearance of many villages that
had been mentioned before 1241 was probably due to a change of name.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the consequences of the Mongol invasion were
grave indeed. It is a significant fact that all of the 40 Hungarian monasteries
that are known to have disappeared at this time lay in the area that was
affected by the invaders, 35 being on the Great Plain and the remainder in the
adjacent part of Fejér county.
The profound transformation in the network of settlements on
the Great Plain should be seen, on the whole, as a consequence of the Mongol
invasion. Even today this part of Hungary is characterised by towns and large
villages, with each having an extensive area belonging to it, while a dense
network of much smaller settlements is more typical elsewhere. The lands
belonging to the abandoned settlements on the Great Plain were taken over by the
survivors and used as pastures. In this way, the general destruction in the
thirteenth century can be seen as a prerequisite for the spectacular boom in
horse and cattle breeding in the following period.
No less fatal for the whole of eastern Hungary was the
simultaneous collapse of eastern European commerce. An initial blow had been
dealt by the sack of Constantinople in 1204, for as a consequence the main
commercial route that led through the Balkans lost its importance. Flourishing
towns like Bač and Kovin, which had hitherto lived off the trade along this
route, soon declined to the status of insignificant villages. However, the
final blow was brought about by the Mongol destruction of Kiev in 1240.
It seems that, until that date, eastern Hungary had been a
flourishing region. It was not, of course, more civilised than the western half
of the kingdom, but it had certainly developed dynamically. Among the evidence
for this are thousands of pennies of Friesach dating from Andrew II’s reign
that have been found along the route leading to Kiev, but not elsewhere. They
were probably buried at the time of the Mongol attack. The earliest known royal
privilege that contained liberties for a community of peasant settlers was
granted in 1201 by King Emeric to Walloons who came to the royal forest of
Sárospatak. The village they founded, later to be called Olaszi (now
Bodrogolaszi), lay along the route towards Kiev. The earliest urban privilege
we know of was accorded by Andrew II in 1230 to the German ‘guests’ (hospites)
of Satu Mare. The fact that Galicia remained a target of Hungarian foreign
policy until about the same time was probably not unrelated to its economic
importance. The route to Galicia led through the passes of the north-eastern
Carpathians, so the king and his court must have been frequent visitors to the
region. After the destruction of Kiev, commerce with the East virtually ceased
to exist and the region quickly became marginalised, from the economic as well
as the political point of view. Užhorod, a ‘great and flourishing town’ in the
time of Idrisi, was not to recover from the blow until modern times. The same
could be said of many other centres in the region, which henceforth would
experience a royal visit no more than once a century.
MILITARY REFORMS
The military defeat brought about a radical change in Béla
IV’s political outlook. In the first place, it clearly indicated the necessity
of constructing strong fortresses. Many of the early earth and timber castles
had probably been abandoned by the time of the invasion, while those still in
use were destroyed by the invaders. Apart from the walled cities of Esztergom
and Székesfehérvár, there were only a few fortified monasteries and stone
castles that were able to resist the Mongols. The most spectacular change of
the years following the invasion was, therefore, the rapid spread of
stone-built castles.
Béla completely abandoned the old principle according to
which the erection and administration of fortresses was a royal prerogative.
Immediately after the Mongols had left the country he initiated a large-scale
programme with the aim of adopting the type of stone castle that had already
become common in the West. The policy of lavish land-grants was renewed. Béla,
as he himself put it, was prompted by his royal office ‘not to reduce but to
enlarge’ his grants.4 Both the castle-building programme and the creation of a
knightly army were dependent on the lords receiving huge parcels of land, from
the revenues of which they could construct and maintain castles. The king
himself began such construction on the royal demesne, and simultaneously
permitted others to do the same on their own estates. The first known
authorisation for a private person to build a castle was issued in 1247, and by
the time of Béla’s death about a hundred new fortifications stood throughout
the kingdom, ready to face a new invasion. They were held by bishops, lay
lords, as well as the king and the queen.
The most important new castles lay mainly in the royal
forests and were erected by the king himself. Good examples are Spišský hrad
and Šarišský hrad. The castle of Visegrád, perched on a hill above the great
bend of the Danube north of Budapest, was built by Queen Mary to be the centre
of the forest of Pilis. The fortifications erected by nobles, often called
‘towers’, were more modest constructions. They normally consisted of a massive
tower, sometimes supplemented by a palace and a chapel, and surrounded by a
stone wall, the whole site occupying no more than an acre. During the first
decades they were usually built on inaccessible peaks, often in a remote
mountain region, clearly indicating that they were intended to serve not as
residences but as refuges for the owner and his family in case of danger. The
outcome of the programme set in motion by Béla and continued by his immediate
successors can still be seen. All over the Carpathian basin there are hundreds
of castles great and small, often rebuilt or enlarged later and now lying
mostly in ruins, that have nuclei dating back to the second half of the
thirteenth century.
Another military implication of the invasion was that there
was a pressing need to modernise the army. The bulk of the king’s army
continued to consist of the castle warriors serving as light cavalry. Although
they were unable to afford more than the traditional leather armour, the king
tried to increase their number and modernise their equipment. From the 1240s
onwards he began to grant small parcels of land in the uninhabited royal
forests upon the condition that the grantees equipped a certain number of
heavily armoured cavalrymen for the royal army. It was the descendants of these
settlers who, by the end of the Middle Ages, had come to form the lesser
nobility of the basin of Turc and of the district of the ‘ten-lanced’
(decemlanceatus) nobles of Spis. The king also wanted to increase the number of
heavily armoured Western-style knights, and proved to be as generous as his
father had been in distributing enormous landed estates among his barons and
followers.
In view of the Mongol menace, mounted archers skilled in
nomadic warfare were also needed. This military element had hitherto been
furnished by the Székely and the Pechenegs, but after the invasion the role of
the latter was taken over by the Cumans, whom Béla managed to lure back into
his kingdom in 1246. In order to bind them closely to his dynasty, he made his
eldest son marry Elisabeth, the daughter of the Cuman prince. He assigned them
a territory of their own in those regions of the Great Plain that had recently
become uninhabited. One of their groups, later called ‘Major Cumans’, settled
east of Szolnok, while the ‘Minor Cumans’ occupied the sandy area between the
Danube and the Tisza. It might have been about the same time that a group of
nomadic Alans, called jász in Hungarian and, for an unknown reason, Philistines
in some Latin sources, also appeared in Hungary. In the early fourteenth
century they were allotted a district of their own in Heves county, in the
region now called Jászság.
The extensive pastures that the Cumans and Alans found on
the Great Plain enabled them to pursue their traditional nomadic life for some
time, but within two or three centuries they had become assimilated into the
surrounding population. By then their temporary nomadic ‘dwellings’ (descensus)
had been transformed into villages, and they had also abandoned their original
languages. That of the Cumans, a Turkic language, left no written traces, while
that of the Alans is represented by a list of 38 Iranian words scrawled on the
back of a legal document from 1422. Both the Cumans and the Alans were directly
subjected to the king and, like the Székely or the castle warriors, were
expected to perform unlimited military service. Their constant presence in the
Hungarian army in all of its wars gave it a peculiarly exotic flavour.
