Battle of Mohi

In the early hours of 11 April 1241, Mongol forces under Batu Khan and the general Subutai attacked the army of King Béla IV of Hungary by the Sajó river, near the village of Mohi (today Muhi) in north-eastern Hungary. The Hungarian royal army was almost entirely destroyed, and the kingdom lay open to a year of devastation. Mohi was the decisive battle of the Mongol invasion of Europe and one of the great disasters of Hungarian history.

The Mongol Empire had been pushing west for two decades. Hungary had taken in tens of thousands of Cumans, steppe nomads fleeing the Mongols, and the Mongols treated this as a reason for war. At home, Béla was quarrelling with his nobles, having tried to take back royal lands his father had given away, and many resented his protection of the Cumans. When the army gathered at Pest in early 1241, riots broke out and the Cuman leader was murdered. The Cumans left the country, plundering as they went, and Hungary lost the one force with real experience of fighting the Mongols.

The Mongols attacked central Europe with several armies. Two struck through Poland, one of them defeating the Silesian duke Henry II at the Battle of Legnica on 9 April. Another entered Transylvania, while the main army under Batu and Subutai forced the Verecke Pass in the Carpathians and destroyed a force under the palatine Denis Tomaj on 12 March. Mongol raiders reached Pest by mid-March. Béla at first refused to fight, and when he finally marched out, the Mongols drew back before him for about a week.

The Hungarians camped beside the flooded Sajó behind a ring of wagons. Their numbers are unknown; one contemporary German account says they lost 10,000 men, which suggests an army of about that size. Mongol sources put the whole invasion force at 40,000 horsemen, only part of which fought at Mohi.

Warned of a night attack, Béla's brother Coloman and Archbishop Ugrin Csák surprised a Mongol vanguard crossing the bridge over the Sajó at midnight and drove it back with heavy losses. At dawn, Batu cleared the bridge with stone-throwing engines while another column forded the river upstream, and Subutai built a crossing further south to strike the Hungarian rear. Hard fighting cost Batu dozens of his bodyguards and an officer, Bakatu, and he considered withdrawing, but Subutai insisted on pressing on.

The Hungarians fell back into their camp, which the Mongols bombarded and set alight. When the army finally broke, the soldiers fled through a gap the Mongols had left open on purpose and were cut down along the road. Ugrin, another archbishop and three bishops died. Béla escaped, but Coloman died of his wounds soon afterwards.

With the royal army gone, the Mongols took and burned Pest and hunted Béla as far as the Adriatic coast, where he sheltered at Trogir. Duke Frederick II of Austria, from whom he had first sought help, held him for ransom and took three western counties. Across the Hungarian plain and Transylvania, perhaps 15 to 25 per cent of the population was lost, and famine followed.

The Mongols began to leave Hungary in late March 1242 and had pulled out of central Europe by mid-1242. The reason is debated: one contemporary traveller linked it to the death of the Great Khan Ögedei in December 1241, while a later Persian historian claimed Batu did not yet know of it. The invasion pushed Béla to rebuild his kingdom's defences, including dozens of new stone castles, and he is remembered as a second founder of Hungary.

Our 1200 map shows Hungary a generation before the invasion, and our 1279 map shows the Golden Horde, whose khans later demanded Hungary's submission, to the east.