Free Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor Page A

Esztergom had suggested a liquid Champs Elysées, the resemblance on this southward reach is more striking still. A wide ochre flood dwindles across Europe to infinity between symmetrical fringes of willows and poplars with nothing in sight but a heron rising from the flag-leaves or an occasional fisherman’s canoe suspended in the haze like a boat in a Chinese painting. I stayed the night in a bargeman’s tavern at Mohács in order to see the battlefield where Suleiman had overthrown King Lajos: one of history’s most dark and shattering landmarks: a defeat as fatal to Hungary as Kossovo to the Serbs and Constantinople to the Greeks.)
    So much for the Danube way to the South, but it was not the one I had taken. Malek and I had abandoned it for the less trodden route across the Great Plain to Transylvania and were trotting south-east steadily further and further from the great river. Later, searching through travellers’ tales, I could find only a few who passed this way.
    On the fringe of allegory, dimly perceived through legendary mist and the dust of chronicles, these strangers have an outsizequality about them; something of giants and something of ogres, Goyaesque beings towering like a Panic amid the swarms that follow one after the other across this wilderness and vanish. No historical detail can breathe much life into the Gepids, kinsmen of the Goths who had left the Baltic and settled the region in Roman times; and the Lombards only begin to seem real when they move into Italy. Otherwise, all assailants came from the East, with the Huns as their dread vanguard. Radiating from the Great Plain, sacking and enslaving half Europe, they made the whole Roman Empire tremble. Paris was saved by a miracle and they were only halted and headed backwards near the Marne. When Attila died in reckless bridebed after a heavy banquet somewhere close to the Tisza and perhaps not many miles from my present path, the Huns galloped round and round his burial tent in a stampede of lamentation. The state fell to bits, and ploughmen still dream of turning up his hoard of jewels and ingots and gold-plated bows. The shadowy Gepids survived until the Avars scattered them and moved in themselves for nearly three centuries. Like most of these invaders, of Mongol stock and akin to the Turks (they were Turanians all), these hordes of long-plaited savages and their hectoring khans came close to carrying Byzantium by storm. A permanent nuisance to the West, their newly-invented stirrup made them more formidable still: a firm seat in the saddle ousted the bow as the horseman’s chief weapon and replaced it with the spear, and then the lance which in its turn led to the heavily armoured knights of the Middle Ages and, in dim barbaric fashion, foreshadowed the tank. When Charlemagne destroyed their enigmatic sevenfold rings of fortification and put an end to them, all Europe heaved a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, spreading like damp, the Slavs had been quietly expanding eastwards and southwards and into the Balkans, giving birth to the insubstantial Kingdom of Great Moravia on the way. Then the state of the newly-arrived Bulgars stretched a north-western wing into the void the Avars had left. (What figure could seem more remote than Swiatopluk, Kral of the brittle Moravian realm? And who could be further from heart’sdesire than Krum, the early khan of the Bulgars? He and his boyars used to drink out of the skull of the captured Emperor Nicephorus, halved and lined with silver.)
    At last the Magyars came. Fen and tundra people originally, they too were akin to earlier and later invaders, but they had strayed away from their Ugro-Finnic relations centuries earlier; they must have rubbed shoulders with the Persians on their wanderings; almost certainly loitered for a Turkic century or two on the Pontic Steppes to the north of the Caspian and the Black Sea, where lay the vast, mysterious and deeply interesting Empire of the