“Having crossed the Danube, they encamped beside the Danube as far as Budafelhévíz. Hearing this, all the Romans living throughout the land of Pannonia, saved their lives by flight. Next day, Prince Árpád and all his leading men with all the warriors of Hungary entered the city of King Attila, and they saw all the royal palaces, some ruined to the foundations, others not, and they admired beyond measure the stone buildings and were happier than can be told that they had deserved to take without fighting the city of King Attila, of whose line Prince Árpád descended. They feasted every day with great joy in the palace of King Attila, sitting alongside one another, and all the melodies and sweet sounds of zithers and pipes along with all the songs of minstrels were presented to them...." (An excerpt from Gesta Hungarorum)

Of all the steppe peoples in the medieval period, perhaps none were more important to European history than the Magyars. Like the Huns and Avars before them and the Cumans and Mongols after them, the Magyars burst into Europe as a destructive, unstoppable horde, taking whatever they wanted and leaving a steady stream of misery in their wake. They used many of the same tactics as the other steppe peoples and lived a similar, nomadic lifestyle. The Magyars also had many early cultural affinities with other steppe peoples, following a similar religion and ideas of kingship and nobility, among other things.

That said, as similar as the Magyars may have been to other steppe nomads before and after them, they were noticeably different in one way: The Magyars settled down and became a part of Europe and Western civilization in the Middle Ages. The Magyars exploded onto the European cultural scene in the late ninth century as foreign marauders, but they made alliances with many important kingdoms in less than a century and established their own dynasty in the area, roughly equivalent to the modern nation-state of Hungary. After establishing themselves as a legitimate dynasty among their European peers, the Magyars formed a sort of cultural bridge between the Roman Catholic kingdoms of Western Europe and the Orthodox Christian kingdoms of Eastern Europe. Ultimately, the Magyars chose the Roman Catholic Church, thereby becoming a part of the West and tying their fate to it for the remainder of the Middle Ages.

To be fair, the Magyars didn’t simply settle down out of sheer convenience. The Magyar raids into Eastern and Western Europe began around AD 900 and spanned several decades, coming at a time when Western Europe had just begun to bear some slight resemblance to the map as it is known today. The Western Roman Empire had disappeared in the fifth century, but the Germanic kingdoms of the West clung to Roman institutions and religion in an attempt to maintain a sense of European unity.

Meanwhile, Charlemagne had received the crown of a revived empire at the hands of the pope in AD 800, and this gave the West a renewed sense of identity. However, after Charlemagne’s death 14 years later, the kingdom split. The title of emperor was shared by rulers of the various Frankish successor states, but when Emperor Berengar of Italy died in AD 924, the imperial crown was not passed to a successor, and the empire would not be revived until later in the 10th century. When it was, it would be claimed not by a Frank, but by a Saxon, Otto I the Great, who was instrumental in pushing the Magyar raids out of Western Europe.

The Battle of Lechfeld: The History and Legacy of the Conflicts Between the Germans and Magyars in Western Europe chronicles the origins of the crucial battles and how the results affected Europe.