Contemporary European sources give little detail of the battle, only that it occurred and the Bavarian army was annihilated, but they are silent about the sequence of events, the fights, and the skirmishes that led to the battle's conclusion. The Bavarian
Renaissance humanist, historian, and philologist
Johannes Aventinus (1477–1534), 600 years after the events, in his work
Annals of the Bavarians (Annalium Boiorum, volume VII), basing on documents and chronicles from the 10th century that no longer survive, wrote a fairly detailed description of the battle. Since the Hungarians knew about the attack well before the German army advanced, they probably evacuated all the inhabitants from the
march areas, called
gyepű in Hungarian, between the rivers Enns and Pressburg to the east. As the Hungarians were still nomadic, it was much easier to accomplish this than in a settled society. They took livestock with them and destroyed food they could not take, thus using the
scorched earth tactic, which denied the enemy anything useful. This tactic was used very often by nomadic states and tribes, even in ancient times. For example, the
Scythians against
Darius I and
Alexander the Great, or the
Avars against
Charlemagne, and more than 100 years after the Battle of Pressburg (1030), Hungary's first king,
Stephen I, defeated the invasion of the German Emperor
Conrad II using scorched earth, causing famine among the enemy soldiers. In the same way, King
Andrew I of Hungary defeated another German invasion led by Emperor
Henry III in 1051 using the same scorched earth tactic. Even after the establishment of the Christian and feudal state of Hungary, the principles of nomadic warfare were still used as an effective way to defeat huge imperial armies. , 12. century Aventinus wrote that after the German army crossed the Hungarian border, the Hungarian commanders sent small, lightly armored, mounted archer formations to disrupt the German communications lines, kill their envoys to each other, and harass the army groups. This put the Germans under constant pressure and in a continual state of combat readiness, causing fatigue and demoralization, It is likely that when the Hungarian archers attacked, the Bavarians gave chase, but they rode away unharmed on their horses, since unlike the Bavarians, they were much faster due to having very little or no armor and no weapons other than bows and arrows, no other weapons (although some troops who fought in hand-to-hand combat in the main parts of the battle were much better equipped, so heavier, with curved
sabre,
lance,
battle axe,
mace,
mail,
lamellar armor), The pursuing Bavarian cavalry was heavily armored, and this slowed them significantly. The constant harassment by the Hungarian mounted archers slowed the movement of the Bavarian army even more, forcing them to stop to defend themselves, thus demoralizing them prior to battle. This is why it took the Germans 18 days (between June 17 and July 4) to cover 246 km from
Ennsburg to
Pressburg, an average of 14 km per day. This delaying tactic made it possible for the Hungarians to pick where and when the battle would be fought. They concentrated their troops near Pressburg because of its favorable conditions for a nomadic army. The Hungarians continued to harass the Germans as they marched east, which distracted them from the main attack by the bulk of the Hungarian army. The attack started on July 4, concentrated on the southern shore of the Danube, and attacked the southern army group led by Archbishop Dietmar. : Luitpold's last stand The attack started with the Hungarian archers riding towards the troops led by the archbishop, shooting a "shower of arrows" from their "horn bows" (
corneis arcubus, which refers to the famous
composite bows of the nomadic Hungarians, made of wood, bone, and horn) at the moving German army group. Taken totally by surprise, the Germans retreated. During this battle, the Hungarians applied every specific military maneuver of the nomadic armies, as presented very well by the Byzantine emperor
Leo VI the Wise in his work
Tactica: "[The Hungarians] love mostly to fight from a distance, to lay in ambush, to encircle the enemy, to feign retreat and to turn back, to use dispersing military maneuvers." As Aventinus points out, the Hungarians used many tricks, fast movements, sudden attacks, and disappearances from the battlefield, and these totally confused the enemy commanders, who did not know what to do and did not understand which was a decisive attack or which was just a bluff. As a result, the Germans were demoralized, the unity had been loosened in the army's actions, and their battle order was compromised. In the end, when the decisive moment came, when, thanks to the relentless Hungarian attacks and misleading tactics and
psychological warfare, the battle order and the control of the commanders were totally lost and the soldiers were completely demoralized, tired, and losing any hope, the Hungarians suddenly attacked them from front, back, and sides, encircling and annihilating the southern corps led by Archbishop Dietmar. From this description, one can suppose that the decisive moment of the first day of the battle was when the Hungarians, with the tactic of the feigned retreat, lured the army corps of Dietmar into a trap, which had to be a place that was near a wood, a river bed, or an accidented terrain, where a part of the Hungarian units were hidden, and when the German soldiers arrived there, chasing the feignly fleeing Magyar army, they suddenly came out, attacked from the back and sides the Germans, and together with the main army, which turned back, encircled and annihilated Dietmar's forces. This was preceded by those attacks and retreats of the Hungarian archer troops, about which Aventinus writes, which resulted in loosening the enemies endurance, and fighting spirit and inflicting on them desperation and uncertainty about what to do, which later eased their decision to attack with disintegrated battle order, which brought their destruction. All this time, it seems that Luitpold, whose army was on the northern bank of the Danube, was unable to help Dietmar's forces because he could not pass the river. Although the fleet under the command of Prince Sieghard was still there, it is not known why this did not happen. Perhaps the fleet, for an unknown reason, moved apart from the proximity of the land forces, and this moment was used by the Hungarian army to attack and destroy the southern army corps led by the archbishop. Nevertheless, this first day of the battle brought with it the slaughter of the southern corps of the attacking army, including Archbishop Dietmar, the bishops Utto of Freising and Zachariah of Säben-Brixen, and the abbots Gumpold, Hartwich, and Heimprecht. This is very similar to the Battle of the River Brenta in 899, where the enemy thought he was safe since the river would prevent the Hungarians from crossing, only to find himself terribly mistaken. The Hungarians did cross the River Brenta and took the unsuspecting enemy totally by surprise. The Hungarians used animal skins (goat, sheep, and possibly cattle) tied up to form something like a huge
bota bag, filled it with air, and tied on their horses sides, which helped the warrior and his horse to float in order to cross rivers or even the seas like the
Adriatic Sea, as they did in 900, to attack
Venice. This Western army group, because of its false sense of security, seems not to have paid very little attention to guarding the camp. It had no chance; almost all the soldiers, together with Luitpold, the Master of the Stewards, Isangrim, and the other 15 commanders, were massacred. The fact that the Hungarians could take the sleeping East Francian army by surprise and that this attack was so successful shows that maybe Luitpold had no knowledge of the defeat of Archbishop Dietmar's forces, and this shows that his army was pretty far from the first battlefield (according to the newest opinions, when the battle from the first day occurred, the two Bavarian army corps were one day distance from each other, due to the fact that the main engagements of the battle occurred on consecutive days), because if he had known what happened to the southern army, he would have paid more attention to the guard, preventing such a surprise. Probably the light Hungarian cavalries lured the southern and
northern Bavarian forces so away from each other that from there it was impossible for one group to learn what happened to the other (the same thing happened also on the First Battle of Augsburg, when the Hungarians lured the German cavalry away from the infantry and annihilated it without the infantry having any knowledge). The next day, the Hungarians attacked the German fleet under Prince Sieghard. Aventinus writes nothing about how they managed to attack the fleet, and he points only to the ease of the Hungarian victory and the paralyzing terror of the Germans, who could do nothing to defend themselves. Although there is nothing known about how the Hungarians accomplished this difficult task - destroying the Bavarian fleet - easy, it can be outlined that they did it in the following way: the Magyar army, aligning on both the shores of the Danube, shot burning arrows on the ships, setting them on fire, like they did so many times during the period of the Hungarian invasions of Europe, when the Magyars set many cities on fire by shooting, from great distance, burning arrows on the roofs of the houses behind the city walls, like they did with the towns of
Bremen (915),
Basel (917),
Verdun (921), and
Cambrai (954). Setting wooden ships on fire was no harder than burning down towns using flaming arrows. The distance of the ships floating on the
Danube was also not an impediment to them. The width of the Danube at Pressburg is between 180 and 300 meters, but the range of the arrows shot from the nomadic
composite bows could reach the extraordinary distance of 500 meters, so there is no doubt that the Hungarian arrows could reach the ships, which, if they were in the middle of the river, would have been only 90 to 150 meters from the shore. Maybe the fire started on the ships by the arrows caused the terror and panic among the Bavarians, about which Aventinus writes, who initially thought that they were safe. We can presume that those Bavarians who wanted to escape from the burning ships jumped in the water, and a part of them drowned, and those who arrived at the shore were killed by the Hungarians. As a result, the majority of the Bavarians from the ships, together with their commanders, Prince Sieghard, counts Meginward, Hatto, Ratold, and Isangrim, died on the last day of the battle. The three days of the battle brought an almost incredible number of casualties among the German army, including the majority of the soldiers together with their commanders: Prince Luitpold, Archbishop Dietmar, Prince Sieghard, Bishop Utto of Freising, Bishop Zachariah of Säben-Brixen, 19 counts, and three abbots. Among many other contemporary documents,
Annales Alamannici (Swabian Annals) writes: "Unexpected war of the Bavarians with the Hungarians, duke Luitpold and their [his peoples] superstitious haughtiness was crushed, [just] a few Christians escaped, the majority of the bishops and counts were killed." There are no accounts of the Hungarian casualties of the battle because the German chronicles, annals, and necrologues, which are the only sources, say nothing about this. Despite this, some modern Hungarian authors think Árpád and his sons died in this battle, but this is only an attempt to romanticize and mythicize historical events by presenting the hero of the Hungarian Conquest as somebody who also sacrificed his life for his country. After the news of the defeat came to the king, who stood during the period of the campaign near the Hungarian border, he was brought in haste to the city of
Passau, which had huge walls, to escape from the rage of the Hungarian warriors, who immediately after the battle started to chase the fliers and kill everyone in their reach. The Bavarian population rushed to big cities like Passau,
Regensburg,
Salzburg, or in the
Alps mountains in woods and marshes to escape the punitive Hungarian campaign, which devastated Bavaria and occupied new territories in the eastern parts of the duchy, pushing Hungary's borders deep in Bavarian territory over areas west of the Enns river, the former border. Luitpold's forces, consisting of three battle groups, succumbed to the
Eurasian nomad tactics employed by the mounted Hungarian soldiers. In a storm of arrows, a large part of the German army was bottled in, crushed, and destroyed. In this battle, the Hungarians overcame unexpected military challenges for a nomadic army, like fighting against a fleet, and won a great victory. This is why the commander of the Hungarians had to be a military genius who also led them to great victories in the battles of Brenta, Eisenach, Rednitz, and Augsburg. ==Location==