Battle of Mohi - Aftermath

Aftermath

After their victory, the Mongols regrouped and began a systematic assault on the Hungarian nation. The Hungarians' losses were such that they were unable to mount an effective defence.

An attempt was made to hold off the main Mongol army at the Danube, which was mostly successful, from April 1241 until January 1242. In an unusually cold winter, the river froze over, and after a number of close battles, the Mongols managed to cross. The royal family escaped to Austria to seek help from their ally Duke Frederick, but instead he arrested them and extorted an enormous ransom in gold and forced the king to cede three western counties to Austria. It was at this point that King Béla and some of his retinue fled south-west, through Hungarian-controlled territory, to the Adriatic coast and the castle of Trogir, where they stayed until the Mongols retreated.

While the king kept himself apprised of the situation in the rest of the country, he made numerous attempts to contact other rulers of Europe, including the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the King of France, but none seemed interested, and all seemed to have the same profound misunderstanding of the threat posed by the Mongol armies, which were by this time within a week's ride of the borders of France. The Mongols appointed a darughachi in Hungary and minted coins in the name of Khagan. According to Michael Prawdin, the lands of Béla were assigned to Orda by Batu as an appanage.

Meanwhile, in the main territory of Hungary, surviving members of the royal retinue, being for the large part those that did not get to the battle of Mohi in time to participate, along with a number of unorganised irregulars consisting mostly of armed peasants, employed guerrilla tactics to harass the Mongol troops, occasionally engaging them in open battle. Much of the civilian population fled to areas of refuge inaccessible to the Mongol cavalry: high mountains in the north and east, swamps (especially on the Puszta, around Székesfehérvár and in the west ), and older earthwork fortresses (most of which were in a motte-and-bailey form or consisted of a mud-banked enclosure on the top of a mountain, steep natural hill or man-made hill). Rogerius recounts his experience in one such refuge called Fátra in his Carmen Miserable. (Such places are often referred to by the German term Fluchtburg.)

At dawn on December 11, 1241, Great Khan Ögedei died, causing the Mongols to retreat to Mongolia so that the princes of the blood could be present for the election of a new great khan. Prior to their departure, the Mongols were having difficulty pacifying the country, though they had planned to attack Austria and eventually Germany and Italy. While the defeat of the Hungarian army at the River Sajó is most often described in a couple of sentences as an effortless rout of the Hungarian army by the Mongols, this is an oversimplification. The Hungarian army as well as irregulars from the countryside proved dangerous foes and Mongol losses were significant. Subutai's engineers faced greater difficulties in constructing a bridge in the deeper-than-expected waters, and managed to attack the Hungarian rear just in time, as Batu's forces were being stretched and taxed by the numerically superior Hungarian forces.

By the mid-13th century, the Hungarian army is thought to have abandoned the tactics of the steppe nomads that made them such effective fighters against the German states, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Balkans and the Low Countries in the ninth and tenth centuries. But some historians have expressed doubts about this, and have suggested that the Hungarian military became more Westernised after the Mongol invasion and because of it; further that using steppe tactics, early Hungary rebuffed German offensives many times (in the wars of 1030, 1031, 1051, 1053 and 1074) in the western borders of Hungary. Light horse archers had a less important military role after the Hungarians adopted Christianity. The majority of the horse archers were conscripted from various ethnic groups, such as Székelys, Kipchaks, Jassic people and (after Mohi) Cumans from the poorest peripheric regions of the kingdom (southern parts, the middle of the Great Hungarian Plain and eastern parts of Transylvania). Nonetheless, during the battle, Batu Khan's personal guards were attacked and his life placed in peril. At another point, the Mongol troops were being routed by the Hungarian archers followed up by the heavy mounted knights, and only the personal rallying of Batu Khan prevented his army retreating.

In spite of this, by Candlemas (February) 1242, more than a year after the initial invasion and a few months before the Mongols' withdrawal, a significant number of important castles and towns had resisted the formidable and infamous Mongol siege tactics. Among the nearly eighty sites that remained unconquered, only three were of the most formidable type: the then-new stone castle on an elevation: Fülek, Léka (near the western border) and Németújvár. The rest were either fortified towns (e.g., Székesfehérvár), old committal centre castles (e.g., Esztergom citadel), fortified monasteries (e.g. Tihany and Pannonhalma) or military fortresses (e.g. Vécs guarding a main trade route in the mountains of Transylvania. Ultimately, the country was not subdued, and though much of the population was slaughtered, the king and higher nobility avoided capture. As a tardy revenge, the Hungarians and Croats ambushed and destroyed the rearguard division of the retreating Mongol army in the Carpathians.

After the withdrawal of the Mongol troops, they were never again to return to Hungary with a force capable of laying siege to fortified cities, as the Chinese bombardiers and engineers under general Subutai were no longer deployed in the European theater of operations. Subutai was reassigned by Guyuk to engage the Southern Song, and died of old age in 1248. Hungary lay in ruins. Nearly half of the inhabited places had been destroyed by the invading armies. Around 15 to 25 percent of the population was lost, mostly in lowland areas, especially in the Alföld (where there were hardly any survivors), in the southern reaches of the Hungarian plain in the area now called the Banat, and in southern Transylvania.

However, the power of the kingdom was not broken. Within a year of the withdrawal of the Mongols, the three westernmost counties (Moson, Sopron, and Vas) that were extorted as ransom by Duke Frederick of Austria were recaptured, and a local uprising in Slavonia was quashed. The threat of another Mongol invasion, this time taken seriously, was the source of exceptional national unity and provided the impetus for Béla IV's extensive expansion of Hungarian defences, especially the building of new stone castles (forty-four in the first ten years) and the revitalization of the army, including expanding the number of heavily armoured cavalry in the royal army. Béla IV is seen now as a second founder of the nation, partly in recognition of all that was done during his reign to reconstruct and fortify the country against foreign invasion from the east. These improvements were to pay off, in 1284, when Nogai Khan attempted an invasion of the country. In that event, the invasion was defeated easily, as were a number of other minor attacks before and after.

In the coming centuries, as the power of the Mongols of the Russian steppe waned and western defences became more capable, the attention of countries of central Europe would increasingly be directed to the south-east, and the growing power of the Ottoman Empire.