The Battle of Mohi, 11 April 1241 (MED0068)

Mohi, 11 April 1241: hand to hand on the Sajó

Two riders locked at arm’s length, close enough that neither can use his best weapon. On the left a Mongol in a fur-trimmed hat and a blue silk coat worked with gold, his quiver and composite bow at his hip; on the right a Hungarian in mail and an iron helm with an aventail, sword already at the end of its swing, a banded shield behind his shoulder and arrows still in the air above them. The battle of Mohi looked like this only at the very end, and only because everything before it had already gone wrong.

The wagon camp that became a cage

King Béla IV brought a large army to the Sajó and made it safe in the way western armies did: wagons chained into a fortified camp, tents inside, ropes between them. Against cavalry that wants to charge, it works. Against an enemy who has siege engines with him and no intention of charging, it is a target that cannot move. The Mongols shot into it, threw incendiaries, and let the crowding do the rest. A hundred and eighty years later the Hussites made a war-winning system out of chained wagons — but they built theirs to shoot from, not to sleep in.

The bridge, and the ford nobody was watching

The armies faced each other across the river with a single bridge between them. The Mongols forced it at night, using engines to clear the defenders off the bridgehead, while a second force under Subutai crossed at a ford downstream and came round behind. It is the same pattern used all over that campaign: what looks like a frontal attack is the fixing element, and the decision arrives from a direction nobody has picketed.

The gap left open on purpose

The encirclement was not closed. A corridor was left, and the trapped army used it, as trapped armies do. Men who break out are men who have stopped fighting: strung out over thirty kilometres of open ground, without formation, they were ridden down at leisure. Leaving a way out is not mercy and it is not an oversight — it is cheaper than storming a camp full of desperate men, and it kills more of them.

What the survivors wrote

We know as much as we do because a churchman lived through it. Master Roger, an Italian cleric in Hungary, was captured and kept as a servant, escaped, and wrote the Carmen miserabile: not a chronicle of manoeuvres but a first-hand account of what happened to a country afterwards, including the false promises of safe conduct used to bring people out of hiding. Thomas of Split adds a second, independent voice. Between them, Mohi is one of the best documented disasters of the thirteenth century — described, unusually, mostly by the losing side.