The Mongols employed one further trick–smoke drifted across the battlefield between the infantry and the knights who had charged ahead, so the foot soldiers and horsemen could not see each other as the Mongols fell upon the knights and virtually annihilated them. Duke Henry tried to gallop off the field, but he was run down by Mongols who killed him, cut off his head and paraded about Liegnitz with it on top of a spear as a trophy.

In accordance with a Mongol custom used to count the dead, an ear was cut from each dead European. The Tartars filled nine sacks with ears. Contemporary records show that 25,000 of Henry’s men were killed. The Grand Master of the Templars wrote to King Louis IX of France, saying of the battle, The Tartars have destroyed and taken the land of Henry Duke of Poland, …with many barons, six of our brothers, three knights, two sergeants and five hundred of our men dead. King Louis, preparing to go to central Europe to fight the Mongols, told his mother, Queen Blanche, that either they would send the Tartars back to hell, or the Tartars would send them to Paradise. His statement was a play on the Latin term for hell, Tartarus, and helped fix the Mongols’ nickname among the Europeans.

The Grand Master’s missive to Louis also stated that no army of any significance stood between the invaders and France. That was no exaggeration. Upon learning of what had transpired at Liegnitz, Wenceslas and the Bohemians halted their approach and retreated to a defensive position. Meanwhile, to the south, Batu and Subotai had forced the passes into Hungary and come down the mountains, covering 40 miles a day in the snow.

On the very day that Henry and so many of his men had fallen, King Béla IV left Pest with an army of some 60,000­70,000 fighting men to confront the larger Mongol force. The Hungarians advanced on the Mongols, who retreated slowly until they reached the plain of Mohi, near the Sajó River. The Mongols then pulled back, past woods beyond the opposite bank, and disappeared. Béla camped on the plain of Mohi and drew his wagons around into a laager for protection.

With the aid of catapults, the Mongols occupied the only bridge over the Sajó. On April 10, however, the Hungarians charged the bridge, and the lightly armored Mongols, having little room to maneuver, took a beating. Again improvising a fortified camp on the west side of the river by lashing wagons together, Béla pushed on and established a strong bridgehead on the east side as well.

Even while the Mongols were being driven from the bridge, however, Subotai had found a fording point to the south. Just before dawn on April 11, he led 30,000 of his horsemen across. Batu then swept to the Hungarians’ left flank, causing them to turn, while Subotai’s men hurried northward to strike at the Hungarian rear. By 7 a.m., the Europeans, completely outmaneuvered, were falling back and took refuge in their camp. For the next several hours, the Mongols assailed Béla’s camp once more with catapults, throwing stones, burning tar, naphtha and even Chinese firecrackers, whose noise and fiery flashes, hitherto unknown to the Europeans, took their toll on morale. Then another strange thing occurred. The Hungarians discovered that the Mongol army that now surrounded the camp had left a conspicuous gap to the west. Cautiously, a few of the Hungarians tried to escape through the gap and passed through without difficulty. Others followed and soon the flight became uncontrollable. As the Hungarians retreated, however, they became strung out–at which point the Mongols reappeared in force, riding along their flanks and showering them with arrows. The Hungarian retreat degenerated into a panicky, disorderly rout–just as Subotai had calculated it would when he deliberately left them that tantalizing but deceptive escape route. Now, moving in for the kill, the Mongols rode the Hungarians down and killed them with lance and saber. Depending on the source, anywhere from 40,000 to 65,000 Hungarians and other European men-at-arms were killed.

Shortly after smashing the Hungarian army, Batu and Subotai were joined by Kadan, who also had not been idle. In the past few weeks, Kadan’s little flanking force had burned and pillaged its way through Moldavia, Bukovina and Transylvania, winning three pitched battles in the process. On the very same day that Subotai annihilated King Béla’s army at Mohi, Kadan had taken the heavily fortified town of Hermannstadt, in spite of the desperate courage of its defenders.

Unlike Duke Henry, King Béla managed to escape unrecognized and fled to Austria–where he was promptly imprisoned by Duke Frederick. After buying his freedom with both a monetary ransom and the cession of three western counties to Frederick, Béla continued his flight into Dalmatia, with Kadan’s Mongols hard on his heels, until he finally found refuge on an island in the Adriatic Sea near Trau (now Trogier), in Croatia.

Europe was shocked at the news of two thorough defeats mere days apart. The Poles and others attributed the Mongols’ success to supernatural agencies or suggested that the Mongols were not entirely human. In fact, there was nothing magical about them; the Mongols had simply exercised discipline, efficiency and order, three qualities generally lacking in European armies of the period.

Almost as astonishing as the Mongols’ invasion of Europe was their sudden disappearance. After its victory at Liegnitz, the northern army left Poland and never returned. Believing that they had inflicted such extensive casualties on the Mongols that they were unable to pursue their invasion, Poles still celebrate April 9 as a day on which they saved their country, and quite possibly Germany and Western Europe as well, from the ravages of the barbarian hordes from the East.

The truth was that Kaidu and Baidar had no intention of venturing deeper into Europe–that had never been their objective. They had, in fact, carried out their assigned task brilliantly. With just two toumans totaling 20,000 horsemen, they had destroyed Boleslav’s and Henry’s armies and forced Wenceslas to withdraw his Bohemian host, thereby completely eliminating the northern threat to Batu and Subotai’s army. Mission accomplished, they turned south to join the main force in Hungary, laying the Moravian countryside to waste in the process.

As it developed, the Mongols did not remain long in Hungary, either. On December 11, 1241, Ogadei died in Asia. Upon learning of the great khan’s death, Subotai reminded the three princes in his army of the law of succession as laid down by Genghis Khan: After the death of the ruler all offspring of the house of Genghis Khan, wherever they might be, must return to Mongolia to take part in the election of the new khakan. Recalling all their forces, the Mongols started back to their Mongolian capital of Karakorum, postponing their invasion of central Europe for another time–a time that would never come.

Terrible as the debacle at Liegnitz was, it had ultimately been pointless–a Mongol effort to support a conquest that was suddenly abandoned, leaving nothing but a wide swath of destruction and death as the Mongol legacy in eastern and central Europe.

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This article was written by Erik Hildinger and originally published in the June 1997 issue of Military History magazine.

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