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

Khazars... Leaving the Ural river behind them, and then the Volga and the Don and the Dnieper, they reached the delta of the Danube and halted just north of it in Bessarabia. The Byzantine Emperor, fiercely harassed by the Bulgars, persuaded the godsent Magyars to cross to the south of the Danube and attack them. To counter this, Simeon, the Bulgars’ leader (soon to be Tzar) called into play the terrible race of the Pechenegs. These, the fiercest, the cruellest and the most perfidious of all the steppe nomads, were already chafing in the halted queue of Asiatic invaders directly behind the Magyars. While the Magyars were busy assaulting the Bulgars, they moved forward and ravaged and then occupied the Magyars’ temporarily evacuated Bessarabian stamping ground.
    A fateful chain of events was set in motion. Deprived of Bessarabia, the Magyars struck out towards the sunset; some of them went south-west along the Danube, through the Iron Gates, and then sharp right; but the main body headed north-west through the Carpathian passes, and then sharp left until all the tribes were congregated on the Great Plain, which became Hungary at last. They were already organised in a war-like hierarchy; Arpád had been hoisted on a shield by the other chieftains; and his subjects, expert horsemen, javelin-throwers and archers to a man, had saddles and stirrups that enabled them to twist like corkscrews and loose off in all directions at full gallop. The campaign gathered momentum. All rivals were subjugated or swept from the Plain; the whole of Slovakia was taken; Transylvania was occupied;the Great Moravian Kingdom was trampled in pieces and the Slavs of the North and the South were sundered for ever.
    No wonder old chroniclers mixed up the Magyars and the Huns! Their origins and conquests and their behaviour in earlier decades were on exactly the same lines. Like them, they became the terror of Europe; they bargained with the Roman Emperor under the walls of Constantinople, rode roughshod through Italy as far as Otranto, crossed the Rhine and ravaged Lorraine and Burgundy until at last, near Augsburg, the Emperor Otto almost annihilated them; they straggled home chastened to their huge captured territory by the Danube. Then everything began to change. In a few more decades, as we have seen, Arpád’s descendant, Stephen, was king of a great Christian state; he died a saint; and the frontiers of Hungary, except for expanding later on to take in the kingdom of Croatia and then being fragmented for a century or two by the invading Turks, remained unchanged for nine hundred years. St. Stephen’s momentous coronation at Esztergom in AD 1000—like Charlemagne’s coronation in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day 800—is one of those lucky key-dates which help to give us our bearings in this chaos.
    But the Nomad procession had still not dried up. We have seen what happened with the Mongols in 1241, and how King Béla’s kingdom was laid in ashes. To re-people the desert, he summoned yet another horde from the steppes, the Cumans, [5] and the Cumans were even worse than the Pechenegs. Vast numbers settled on the Plain; hoping to tame them, Béla married his son to a Cuman princess but the barbarians’ power increased until the country was on the point of relapsing into heathen barbarism; finally the brave and clever dynasty of the Arpáds began to fail. When the last one died in 1301, the Anjous of Naples, their legal heirs, succeeded, and an able line of Angevin kings, culminating in Louis, or Lajos, the Great, resurrected the country; rebuilding began, and for awhile generations of house-martins could return to the same eaves each year, and storks to their chimneys, without finding everything in ruins. But offstage, the Turks were already fidgeting in the wings.
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    When I had unfolded my map under the carob tree, the Tisza river, flowing south-east to join the Danube, uncoiled straight ahead of my