Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

one another, and then began their advance along the western bank, their heavy mail shirts glinting, their banners fluttering, their warhorses trampling down the dew-wet grass. It was Otto’s intention to take the Hungarians by surprise; and yet, as had happened to him many years previously, in the war against his brother, it was he and his men who were ambushed first. The enemy, as lethally mobile as ever, emerged seemingly from nowhere, and fell upon their rearguard; three of the seven divisions under Otto’s command were routed; only desperate resistance by a fourth, the Franconian, prevented the fighting from being over almost before it had begun. The king, granted a crucial breathing space by the valour of the Franks, frantically marshalled what remained of his host into the semblance of a battle line; and then, above the hissing of arrows, the screaming of the wounded and the keening ‘hiu-hiu’ of the Hungarians, he cried out to his men, calling on them in the name of God to unsheathe their ‘invincible swords’. ‘For who are we, to submit to such an enemy? We, who should blush at the very idea! We, who are the lords of almost all of Europe!’

So it was, at the great tipping point of his reign, that Otto spoke not as a Saxon, not even as King of East Francia, but as the defender of all Christendom; and it was as a Christian that he now urged his followers into battle. Wheeling his horse round to face the enemy, he reached for the Holy Lance; and then, answering the harsh ululations of the Hungarians with a proud war cry of his own, he led the charge. Behind and all around him, the hoofs of their great warhorses making the field of the Lech to shake, there galloped his cavalry, the loricati, the men of iron: a strike force of killers long forged for such a moment. Although their numbers were sorely diminished even from the host that had left camp at dawn, there was to be no withstanding Otto’s warriors that day. With a surging crash, the steel-armoured tide flooded over the hordes of the enemy, hacking and spearing and trampling them down; for against the loricati, trapped at close quarters, the unarmoured Hungarians found themselves defenceless.

The slaughter was prodigious; and of those who attempted to flee, many were drowned in the waters of the Lech, others cornered in villages where they had sought refuge and burned to death, while others still were hunted down like wild beasts. It was this harrying of the defeated, even more than the Battle of the Lech itself, that proved the true calamity for the Hungarians; and Otto, as harsh towards his pagan enemies as he was magnanimous towards Christian rebels, set the seal on his triumph with an act of calculated savagery. Against every usage and custom of war, he chose not to ransom the Hungarian princes who had fallen into his hands. Instead – one last gift to his brother as he lay on his deathbed — Otto ordered them sent to Regensburg. There, strung up from the public gallows, the warlords who had thought to subdue all Bavaria and far beyond were left to twist and rot.

Otto, even as the corpses of his deadliest enemies were being picked clean by carrion birds, was already heading north, to confront Stoinef, the Wendish warlord, and a second great host of pagans. It was late in the campaigning season by the time he arrived back in Saxony, amid ‘wild dancing and celebration’; and not until 16 October did he at last bring Stoinef to battle. No less than it had been at the Lech, however, Otto’s ultimate triumph was as brutal as it was complete. The paganism that for so long had menaced the borders of the Reich suffered a second decapitation. Otto, as if to demonstrate this in the most literal manner possible, ordered the beheading of all his Wendish prisoners of war, while the head of Stoinef himself, who had fallen in the battle, was sawn off and mounted on a pole. Only towards Wichmann and Ekbert, the two Saxon brothers who had so grievously betrayed him, did Otto display his more habitual magnanimity, permitting them to return from the exile into which they had fled after StoinePs defeat, and restoring to them their lands; but they were his countrymen – and Christians.

Mercy, that virtue proper to any lord, was not to be wasted on the barren soil of pagans’ hearts. East Francia had suffered too long and too bloodily at the hands of the Hungarians for her king to countenance any notion of toleration or compromise now. With barbarians so insensate in their savagery that they dared to trample upon the laws of the Almighty, there could be no accommodation: so Otto devoutly believed. Cutting the pagans down, he had done so as God’s champion. That this was no arrogant self-deception on his part appeared, after the annus mirabilis of 955, beyond dispute. For the first time in almost a century, the eastern ramparts of Christendom stood secure. A new march, constituted on Otto’s direct orders, would henceforward serve to keep the Reich from all further Hungarian incursions: ‘the Eastern Command’, as it was known, or ‘Ostarrichi’ — ‘Austria’. Not since the conquest of Saxony had there been such a victory won for Christ. Not since Charlemagne had there been so puissant a Christian king.

No wonder that the men who had followed Otto to the Lech should have hailed him, in the aftermath of the great battle, as ‘imperator’: a Latin title of portentous ambiguity. Once, in the fabulously distant past of Rome, the word had been used to acclaim a victorious general; but it had also, over the centuries, come to possess a far more fateful meaning—’emperor’. In the West, the holders of that title had long been withering away in dignity—until, by 924, there had been no one to lay claim to it at all.