Árpád the Conqueror's entire army consisted of about 20 thousand horsemen. Since we can assume that there were four or five peasants, as well as artisans, serving as support personnel behind each warrior horseman, the total number of Hungarians at the time of the Conquest can be estimated at 100 thousand families, or about half a million persons.

The movement of the Hungarians inside the Carpathian Basin slackened for a couple of years. First they only reached the Danube; it was only after five years, near the end of the century, that they took possession of the territory west of the Danube.

Although before the Conquest in the middle of the first millennium in Levedia, some distance West of the river Volga along the middle reaches of the river Don they had been introduced to agriculture, at this time, however, their mobility returned. Hardly a year passed without their swift, ransoming armies appearing in ever more distant regions. Their horses waded in the waters of the Baltic Sea in the north and in the Channel in the west; they reached the middle of the Iberian Peninsula in the southwest; they cast a glance at Sicily from the Italian Peninsula in the south; on Greek soil they left only the Peloponnesus untouched; and the Bosporus barred their way in the east. They cut their way through peoples, countries, and borders "like a knife through butter."

What sent this newly arrived people time and time again on fearless attacks from their recently occupied homeland immediately after they settled?

As for their warlike traditions, these incursions are, in part, simply the routines of the eastern nomads. Without them they could not have survived during the long and bloody wanderings of the earlier centuries.

Also, the half-nomadic Hungarians could no longer content themselves with rich meadows, well-stocked streams, and fertile lowlands. Did they, perhaps, have to abandon the nomadic life in their new smaller homeland? No. The sharp division of society had already taken place outside the Carpathians, but this division was more expressed in their new homeland. Their agriculturists, we know, did not participate in raiding parties; most of these campaigns commenced in the spring, the time of the greatest agricultural activity, and rarely ended before the harvest.

In the meantime, economic and social developments achieved a new level in the West; they created new values and a new order. The city and the monastery, the handicraft industry and commerce, increasingly subsisting on money, demanded security and more effective protection of the achievements. The political framework and the power essential to it, however, were missing. This environment created an easy target for the Hungarian armies.

For two generations, hardly a year passed without larger or smaller Hungarian armies being engaged in military ventures, sometimes strictly on their own but mostly on call. And in today's Czech, German, French, and Italian territories or in the Balkans there was scarcely a province, principality, kingdom, or other national structure whose leaders did not call for their occasional military assistance at one time or other and endure their attacks in service to their adversaries at another time. They seemed to appear on schedule on numerous military routes in many distant regions. Their guides came from the party that hired them, and they crossed most rivers peacefully until they reached the lands of the next enemy.

The Hungarians took advantage of the lateness of their arrival. The Hungarians' mode of Asian nomadic warfare - the division of the army into several parts, its lightning fast movement, the deceptive retreat, its very powerful bows, and its far-soaring arrows - surprised foot soldiers accustomed to the more cumbersome, closed battle formations, to moving on large horses, and to heavier weapons, and it muddled the inhabitants of cities and castles who often sought protection singly. On the other hand, their enemies were only slightly able to exploit their weaknesses -the fact that they were less able to wage war in the winter, that rain slackened their bowstrings, that they dispersed to pillage, that they had to lug their booty with them.

From the middle of the tenth century on, the dynamics of the incursions could no longer be supported. The employers - the rulers and aspiring rulers of Europe - gradually realized their own stupidity. Politically, they recognized that by constantly weakening each other's people and economy through destruction by the roaming Hungarians, they were all ruining themselves. Militarily, they recognized that the warfare of Hungarian light cavalrymen was easy to see through and vulnerable, that this voracious people wedged in Central Europe could be tamed by answering trick with trick, by attacking the dispersed forces separately, not isolated in towns but with united forces.

This thinking and thorough preparation eventually resulted in success when German Otto I at Augsburg in 955 staggered the marauding Hungarians. The wiser leaders of the Hungarian tribes and tribal confederations awoke. The restless, full?blooded Hungarians must be settled among the ranks of the more prosperous peoples within the more secure borders of Christian Europe. The choice was clear - they must become a part of a Europe with a strange religion, or the enemy will ultimately destroy them.

By Peter Vali

Source: István Lázár: HUNGARY - A Brief History. Budapest: Corvina, 1993