THESES OF THE DOCTORAL (PhD) DISSERTATITON

DEBATED QUESTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF

MEDIEVAL HUNGARIAN LIGHT CAVALRY

János Szabó

Tutor: Dr. Attila Bárány

UNIVERSITY OF DEBRECEN

Doctoral School of Etnography and History

Debrecen, 2016.

CHOICE OF SUBJECT AND OBJECTIVES

For more than a century of Hungarian military historiography, the light cavalry – held up as the

repository of the national ethos and national “mythology” – was the focus point of an academic

discourse which was itself often in thrall to that national ethos. It has taken historians a long

time to identify the complex problems that burden the historiographical tradition of the

medieval Hungarian light cavalry. Against this background, I have gradually recognized how

much there is a need for work towards a new synthesis, reconstructing the historiographical

background to this phenomenon and subjecting it to criticism through studies based on research

in several disciplines.

As long as Hungarian military historiography lacks a clear picture of its core subjects,

the precise meanings of the terms used to describe warfare in medieval Hungary, such as

“Western”, “oriental” or “steppe”, terms which are frequently set against each other, are very

difficult to pin down. In fact, the influence of steppe peoples reached even Western Europe

during the Age of Migrations and left lasting traces which are increasingly being recognized.

Older studies of the relationship between weaponry and tactics placed a rigid boundary at

the end of the tenth century. In the two centuries until then, there seemed to be no doubt that the

Hungarian armies fought with traditional light weaponry. In the subsequent period, however,

there was a consensus among historians that military tactics were dominated by the heavy cavalry.

The light cavalry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries therefore received little attention. Indeed,

since Zoltán Tóth’s highly influential work in the 1930s, almost nobody has approached the

Hungarian medieval light cavalry as an organic whole, and the possibility of doing so was not at

all obvious.

In recent years, however, much work in Hungary and elsewhere has challenged these

conclusions and encouraged studies to broaden their scope in both time and subject matter. The

medieval tactics of Western Europe are now clearly seen to have consisted of more than just

the effective deployment of the heavy cavalry. At least as important was to coordinate the

cavalry with the infantry, which was often numerically stronger by a large factor. Thus the

adoption of Western tactics in Hungary in the early period of the Christian kingdom cannot

purely have been a matter of developing the heavy cavalry. Hungarian commanders must have

been more concerned with coordinating what we may presume to be a small number of heavy

cavalry with the actions of the light cavalry. By contrast, the infantry, owing to the structure of

Hungarian society, did not become a major aspect of military culture until the fifteenth century,

putting a further question mark on the adoption of Western tactics that depended so much on

infantry strength. In the meantime, means of the cooperation between light and heavy cavalry,

owing to the similarity of the formations involved, must have developed in the military culture

of the steppe peoples and the Asian empires long before the Hungarian Conquest. The main

objective of the present work has been to address these considerations so as to contribute to a

new and wider-ranging picture of Hungarian medieval warfare.

SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY

The light cavalry is a category of wide application in almost every place and time, and in order

to make a study of it over a period that spans more than six hundred years, we cannot rely on

any single, narrowly-defined group of sources. Such an investigation is nearly always

multidisciplinary, and this is perceptible even in work with similar aims by military historians

of the past. Narrative historical sources and medieval charters must be supplemented by sources

from archaeology and museology, and even relevant sources of art history and linguistic history.

Considering the scarcity of Hungarian medieval sources even across this broad scope, some of

the problems of the light cavalry required me to step outside the customary framework of

national historiography and make use of parallels from military history elsewhere.

The foundations of Hungarian military historiography were laid by some remarkable

historians in the late nineteenth century. Their findings have in many respects been the reference

points for work in the field ever since, but were naturally confined by the sources available at

the time. These historians concentrated on the European Latin- and Greek-language sources for

which their training had prepared them. The field of oriental studies was in its infancy at the

time and could not contribute sources of comparable volume or value, especially considering

that Hungarian historians could not read oriental languages. The same disproportionateness is

to be found in the influential works of nineteenth-century military history in German, French

and English. Since then, Western historians have radically changed their view of Western

European “chivalrous” warfare, and material concerning Asia has become much more

accessible via translations into world languages. In the last quarter of a century, there has been

an explosion in publications on Asian subjects, and I have attempted to make extensive use of

them as analogues.

The methodology of the thesis is based on historiographical reconstruction. It shows

how the picture of the Hungarian “national branch of arms” developed by military

historiography in the narrow sense has been filled out by Hungarian medieval studies, philology

and – increasingly dominantly – archaeology. The first half of the thesis explores the various

premises and arguments that have been put forward in the past, particularly by the seminal

historians in the field. It then addresses certain critical points of the development of ideas, sets

these against the truly relevant sources in the narrow sense and proposes alternative source

interpretations, largely involving military-historical analogues.

The second half, making use of the greater abundance of Hungarian sources from the

fifteenth century onwards, outlines a new tableau, more descriptive than its predecessors, of the

state of the light cavalry in Hungary in the early fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. By

examining these start and end points, we obtain a clearer view of the major internal changes

that occurred during the period. The final section applies traditional “staff” military historical

methods to the symbolic – but still largely neglected – final act of the Hungarian Middle Ages,

the Battle of Mohács, by reconstructing from fragmentary sources the role played there by the

Hungarian light cavalry.

FINDINGS OF THE THESIS

The first task is to determine whether the subject of the thesis – the light cavalry in mediaeval

Hungary – actually fits the definition of “light cavalry”. A view put forward by the Hungarian

historian András Borosy and widely accepted is that saw the vast majority of Hungarian cavalry

between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries occupied some sort of “intermediate” category.

Many novel new definitions have been put forward in the last decade.

Rigidly conformist notions such as the regime of “Eastern” and “Western” systems as

applied to the combat techniques of the variegated cavalry corps have in many respects not

stood up to historical research. In contrast with the combat principles of early modern standing

armies, medieval armies, including the Hungarian army, included lightly armed horsemen

capable of long range combat and deployed either in formations together with heavily armed

cavalry or as combat cavalry or even as infantry. This is consistent with the capability of

Western European cavalry – despite being defined as “heavy” – to carry out the most diverse

duties from raiding behind enemy lines to infantry engagements in castle sieges in the tenth,

eleventh and twelfth centuries. Of course, not every warrior had expensive and heavy weaponry

in Western European armies.

Classification by weaponry does not give a clear picture of differences in tactics. It was

used as a model of dual division for Hungarian cavalry over a period of centuries: heavily

armoured men-at-arms and lightly armed hussars at the end of the fifteenth century (as defined

by Matthias Corvinus: equites levis armaturae, quos husarones apellamus) and men-at-arms

and mounted archers (pharetrarius) in the fourteenth century. Regretfully, we do not have any

sources which describe similar cavalry groupings in earlier times. The laws of Coloman I the

Book-lover mentioned only unarmoured cavalrymen and loricatus or armoured cavalrymen.

Since the definition of saggitarius appeared in addition to those of loricatus and panceratus in

the early sources, the former definition might have been used for armoured cavalrymen in the

Árpád era. Overall, I do not think we yet have a more adequate collective definition of shooters,

mounted archers and hussars than “light cavalry”.

The proportions of the heavy and light cavalry and the ethnic content of both are still

subjects of constant disputes. Zoltán Tóth, who triggered the “hussar dispute” in the 1930s,

proposed that the traditional Hungarian light cavalry of mounted archers ceased to exist as early

as the eleventh century and was subsequently replaced by a sort of Western type heavy cavalry.

From that time onward, although light cavalrymen kept appearing in the army of the Kingdom

of Hungary, they were ancillary units made up of alien peoples: initially Pechenegs, then

Cumans, and eventually Southern Slavs fleeing the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century.

Tóth’s undisputable merit is that he successfully identified the “hussars”, which sources

in the time of Matthias Corvinus began to mention with increasing frequency, with the Serbian

army. András Borosy, however, established that the radical shift which Tóth dated to the

eleventh century did not take place in either the Árpád or Angevin eras. Pál Engel discovered

that the need to raise special contingents of mounted archers during the reign of Sigismund

arose not because the threat of Ottoman invasion increased the need for cavalry but because

social changes had reduced the population subject to state recruitment.

Another interesting question surrounds the time when the Hungarian cavalry evolved as

a “bipolar” force. Was there a section of Hungarian cavalry in the ninth and tenth centuries with

defensive equipment and hand-to-hand combat weapons that made them “heavier” than the

mounted archers, who are currently understood to have lacked such arms? None of the many

archaeological excavations of recent decades have recovered any armour except for one helmet,

together with a very few hand-to-hand combat weapons. The only two descriptions against

which a comparison can be made contradict the archaeological finds at many points, as do the

other scattered references.

The concept of analogies in written records might bring new results. This is clear from

compilations by Byzantine Emperor Leo VI the Wise and Abbot Regino of Prüm,

contemporaries of the Hungarian conquerors. These authors used old narrative sources of

Eastern peoples, narratives which suited the historic discourse they constructed concerning the

several-century history of peoples of the steppe. The Emperor’s description is nearly an exact

replica of specific parts of the seventh-century Strategikon of Maurice (Murikios), which

originally chronicled the Avars and Turks. Only at a few points in his composition are there

any comments on the Hungarians or the Bulgars.

The fact that the specific pieces of the weaponry listed by the Byzantine emperor have

not been found at burial sites does not necessarily mean that these objects were not used. A

terse account of Turkish weapons cannot automatically be assumed to have had general

applicability to the Avars and Turks of the seventh century, or indeed the Bulgars and

Hungarians of the ninth and tenth centuries. We must keep this in mind when interpreting the

Tactica of Leo VI the Wise. In Leo’s time, armoured horsemen carrying bows and spears –

according to the written sources – represented the elite forces of steppe armies, and were

common among the Central Asian Turks and the Khazars, although they have left few signs in

the archaeological assemblage.

This challenges the long-established view that armour would only been a significant

advantage in hand-to-hand combat and would otherwise – as suggested by contemporary reports

on the Hungarians’ combat methods and and their enemies’ tactics – only have “vexed” the

mobile cavalry of the steppe population. Armour need not have been made of metal. It could

have been made of miscellaneous textiles or even leather, but its main function must have been

to protect the body against arrows, and this need must also have been felt by the mobile

“nomadic mounted archers”.

Another vital contemporary author, Abbot Regino of Prüm, keeps the protective

equipment of the Hungarians “secret”, although he applied to them a passage from an ancient

description of the heavily armoured Parnis. In a description of the Hungarians’ ancestors by

mediaeval Hungarian chronicler Anonymus, who drew on Abbot Regino’s reports, only the

helmets match subsequent descriptions. This permits the conclusion that even if the Hungarian

mounted archers of the tenth century had substantial armour other than helmets, metal may not

have featured strongly among its constituent materials.

Of the terse comments made by Regino, one that is frequently quoted concerns the

importance of the Hungarians’ “corneous” bows. Archaeologists have recovered remains of

these weapons at many excavation sites. Foreign descriptions of the Hungarians’ enemies in

the ninth and tenth centuries, however, give a more complicated picture than Hungarian

scientific deductions from archaeological finds. In many of these armies, poorly-equipped

infantry and light cavalry equipped with spears or – more frequently – bows clearly played a

prominent part. Assessments of the effectiveness of specific ninth- and tenth-century Hungarian

weapons based on the assumption that they were being deployed against enemies equipped

exclusively with heavy arms – as if this was true for the armies of the Carolingian Empire and

its successor states – need to be subjected to a thorough revision.

Although a large part of the armed forces of the Kingdom of Hungary must have been

Western type heavy cavalry even before the twelfth century, the army seems to have preserved

much of its light cavalry character. There is no evidence, either from artefacts or written

sources, of an intermediate type in between heavy and light cavalry. Hungarian commanders

employed various tactics to take advantage of the properties of both corps, against adversaries

who were also heterogeneous in composition. Historians have tended to emphasize one kind of

weaponry or another at different times, probably owing to the above assumption. The argument

that the tactics and weapons of the steppe disappeared during the centuries following the

Hungarian Conquest has no solid foundation, and the sources provide considerable evidence to

the contrary.

The thesis also challenges existing views concerning the traditional light cavalry of

mounted archers (pharetrarius) in late mediaeval times, and proposes that they must have

persisted until the early sixteenth century. In addition, the hussars “inherited” from the

Byzantine military machinery of the tenth century via Balkan intermediaries were very likely

present in the southern border regions of Hungary in the fourteenth century. In other words, the

ancestors of the Hungarian hussars, in addition to Southern Slav warriors fleeing from the

Ottoman Empire, may have included Southern Slavs or Vlachs who served in the royal army of

the Southern Banat regions.

There follows an attempt to reconstruct the specifics of hussar weaponry at the turn of

the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries using the sparse available documentation and the

interpretation of analogues in a new context. This reveals that “hussars” at that time meant light

cavalry carrying spears and shields, mostly without any protective equipment, and not light or

semi-heavy armoured light cavalry as Tóth imagined on the basis of incorrectly perceived

analogies with later Polish hussars and Osmanli spahis.

The history of arms outlined by Zoltán Tóth requires correction in many aspects,

because he, like many previous historians, reckoned that the light cavalry of the Balkan people,

and thus the Hungarian hussars, used the same kind of weaponry and equipment as the

Osmanlis. The rapid advance of the Ottoman conquest did not leave much time for such

acculturation in the Balkans, and the Osmanlis, who came from Asia Minor, are known to have

been light cavalrymen akin to Hungarians. Numerous objects and habits of the later hussars had

already appeared in early times, and so the early hussars, given the ethnic associations of their

weaponry, must be regarded as of a Balkan type rather than cavalry with “Turkish features”.

What may lie at the root of these misinterpretations is the assimilation into the Ottoman

military machinery, in an almost unaltered form, of the vast majority of the armed men of the

Balkans. This meant that the “Turkish” and “Hungarian” forces facing each other at the

southern Hungarian border mostly spoke the same language and used identical military tactics

and equipment. (The customs and weaponry of these “European Turkish” forces distinguished

them from the Asian military peoples of the Empire.)

The military machinery of the Balkan peoples of the fifteenth century evolved out of the

traditions of the Byzantine Empire. This fact inspired linguist László Gáldi, when he entered

the “hussars debate” in 1939, to propose a link to a category of lightly armed troops in the tenth-

century Byzantine army called khosari or khonsari. Their primary duties encompassed

reconnaissance, ambush and pillaging, as in the case of their eventual Hungarian successors.

The Hungarian career of the hussars took on momentum at the end of the fifteenth

century. Armed with cheap weapons, composed of alien ethnicities, and employing efficient

combat methods, these ancillary units outperformed the traditional Hungarian light cavalry of

mounted archers. The Western type heavy cavalry was condemned to decline. Hussars matured

into a dominating force within the Hungarian light cavalry during Jagellonian reign, a

peculiarity which must have been due to their effectiveness in the “minor war” against the

Ottoman Empire at the southern border. Dynastic relations at that time caused the first Southern

Slav hussars to be sent to Poland, where they rendered excellent military service in the battles

against the Tatars of Crimea.

At the decisive military encounter with the Ottoman Empire, the Battle of Mohács in

1526, the Hungarian light cavalry is thought to have been competent in combat. Since two

opposing armies were equipped with almost identical weaponry, knowledge of tactics based on

the combination of a lightly armed assault cavalry and a defensive infantry of archers and

arquebusiers cannot be attributed to the Osmanli alone. These parallels imply the crucial

importance of one side’s capability to impose its will upon the other by taking advantage of

these tactics.

UNIVERSITY OF DEBRECEN

UNIVERSITY AND NATIONAL LIBRARY

Address: 1 Egyetem tér, Debrecen 4032, Hungary Postal address: Pf. 39. Debrecen 4010, Hungary

Tel.: +36 52 410 443 Fax: +36 52 512 900/63847 E-mail: publikaciok@lib.unideb.hu, ¤ Web: www.lib.unideb.hu

Candidate: János B. Szabó Neptun ID: MUA1KO Doctoral School: Doctoral School of History and Ethnology MTMT ID: 10039730

List of publications related to the dissertation

Hungarian book(s) (6) 1. B. Szabó J., Boldog Z. .(tan., rajz.): Háborúban Bizánccal: Magyarország és a Balkán a 11-12.

században. Corvina K., Budapest, 245 p., 2013. ISBN: 9789631361506 2. B. Szabó J.: A mohácsi csata. 3. jav. kiad. Corvina K., Budapest, 179 p., 2013. ISBN:

9789631361568 3. B. Szabó J.: A tatárjárás : a mongol hódítás és Magyarország. Corvina K., Budapest, 191 p.,

2010. ISBN: 9789631359244 4. B. Szabó J.: A honfoglalóktól a huszárokig: A középkori magyar könnyűlovasságról. Argumentum

Kiadó, Budapest, 244 p., 2010. ISBN: 9789634465072 5. B. Szabó J. (szerk.), Sebők L. (térképeket kész.), Boronkainé Bellus I.(ford.): Mohács. Osiris K.,

Budapest, 637. p., 2006. ISBN: 9633898382 6. B. Szabó J., Somogyi G.: Elfeledett háborúk:Magyar-bizánci harcok a X-XIII. században. Zrínyi K.,

Budapest, 115. p., 1999. ISBN: 9633273358

Foreign language international book(s) (1) 7. Szabó, J.B., Tóth, F.: Mohács 1526: Soliman le Magnifique prend pied en Europe centrale.

Economica, Paris, 170 p., 2009. ISBN: 9782717857405

Registry number: DEENK/69/2016.PL Subject: Ph.D. List of Publications

UNIVERSITY OF DEBRECEN

UNIVERSITY AND NATIONAL LIBRARY

Address: 1 Egyetem tér, Debrecen 4032, Hungary Postal address: Pf. 39. Debrecen 4010, Hungary

Tel.: +36 52 410 443 Fax: +36 52 512 900/63847 E-mail: publikaciok@lib.unideb.hu, ¤ Web: www.lib.unideb.hu

Hungarian book chapter(s) (4) 8. B. Szabó J.: A magyarok hadszervezete és haditaktikája. In: Magyarok fegyverben. Szerk.: Petkes Zsolt, Sudár Balázs, Helikon K., Budapest, 16-37,

48-67, 2015. ISBN: 9789632276946 9. B. Szabó J.: A huszita hadviselés hatása és adaptációja Kelet-Közép-Európában. In: "causa unionis, causa fidei, causa reformationis in capite et membris" : Tanulmányok a

konstanzi zsinat 600. évfordulója alkalmából. Szerk.: Bárány Attila, Pósán László, Printart-Press Kft., Debrecen, 432-441, 2014. ISBN: 9789638996336

10. B. Szabó J.: A huszárság megjelenése Magyarországon. In: Rex invictissimus : Hadsereg és hadszervezet a Mátyás kori Magyarországon. Szerk.:

Veszprémy László, Zrínyi K., Budapest, 121-152, 2008. ISBN: 9789633274576 11. B. Szabó J.: Gondolatok a 9-10. századi magyar hadviselésről: A Krími Kánság vizsgálatának

bevonása a "kalandozó" hadjáratok kutatásába. In: Fegyveres nomádok, nomád fegyverek: III. Szegedi Steppetörténeti Konferencia. Szerk.:

Balogh László, Keller László, Balassi Kiadó, Budapest, 124-138, 2004. ISBN: 963506554X

Hungarian scientific article(s) in Hungarian journal(s) (4) 12. B. Szabó J.: Lehet-e helye rablóknak a nemzeti mitológiában? : Megjegyzések az egykori

huszár-vita margójára. Hadtört. Közl. 121 (2), 455-461, 2008. ISSN: 0017-6540. 13. B. Szabó J.: Az Árpád-kor csatái a steppei népek hadviselésének tükrében. Hadtört. Közl. 120 (2), 501-526, 2007. ISSN: 0017-6540. 14. B. Szabó J.: Gondolatok a XI-XIV. századi magyar hadviselésről: A fegyverzet, a harcmód és a

taktika összefüggéseinek kérdései. Hadtört. Közl. 114. (1), 75-102, 2001. ISSN: 0017-6540.

UNIVERSITY OF DEBRECEN

UNIVERSITY AND NATIONAL LIBRARY

Address: 1 Egyetem tér, Debrecen 4032, Hungary Postal address: Pf. 39. Debrecen 4010, Hungary

Tel.: +36 52 410 443 Fax: +36 52 512 900/63847 E-mail: publikaciok@lib.unideb.hu, ¤ Web: www.lib.unideb.hu

15. B. Szabó J.: A Bizánci Birodalom hadserege a X-XI. század fordulóján. Társad. Honv. 4 (2), 97-105, 2000. ISSN: 1417-7293.

The Candidate's publication data submitted to the iDEa Tudóstér have been validated by DEENK on the basis of Web of Science, Scopus and Journal Citation Report (Impact Factor) databases. 21 March, 2016