
HUNGARY
A steppe people who spoke an Ugrian or central Asiatic language, the Magyars had definitively abandoned their nomadic ways after Otto the Great’s effective defeat of their forces in 955 at the battle of the Lechfeld, a site on the River Lech, a tributary of the Danube, in the very shadow of the ancient city of Augsburg (a Roman foundation). Unlike the small and rather more typical raiding parties, the army that the soon-to-be Roman emperor Otto I crushed was huge and assembled from the full array of Magyar tribes. The clan chiefs had concluded, no doubt from the predictions of their shamans, that fortune would bless their enterprise.