Battle of Legnica, 1241: when the Mongols reached Europe

As the duke rode out of Legnica that spring morning, a stone fell from the tower of the Church of the Virgin Mary and nearly struck him. People took it as an omen. Henry II the Pious, the most powerful of the Polish dukes, was leading the last army in Poland still able to face the invaders, and he could not wait any longer for his Bohemian allies. By evening his army had been destroyed on the plain outside the town, and his head was on a Mongol lance.³

Background: the storm from the east

By 1241 the Mongols, united by Genghis Khan, had built an empire that stretched from China to Rus'. Their great western campaign under Batu, a grandson of Genghis, had already crushed the principalities of Rus'. Its main target in 1241 was the kingdom of Hungary, which had given refuge to the Cumans, steppe nomads who had fled the Mongols. To keep the Poles and their neighbors from coming to Hungary's aid, a smaller force was sent north into Poland.⁴ › Batu Khan

The northern force struck hard and fast. In March it defeated the knights of Lesser Poland at Chmielnik, and on Palm Sunday, 24 March, the Mongols burned Kraków. Then they turned west into Silesia. At Wrocław the town burned while the castle held out, and the Mongols, unwilling to waste time on sieges, passed on in search of the duke and his army.⁵

Poland was badly placed to resist. The country was split among rival branches of the Piast dynasty, which proved unable to give a united answer to the invasion. Henry of Silesia was the strongest of them, and it fell to him to stop the raiders.⁶

Armies and commanders

The sources do not agree on who led the Mongols. Britannica names the princes Kadan and Baidar, HistoryNet Baidar and Kaidu, and the Polish History Museum Baidar and Orda, Batu's brother. Their numbers are just as uncertain. Britannica gives 12,000 to 20,000 Mongols and HistoryNet about 20,000, while the account of the friar C. de Bridia, who drew on Mongol participants, says that Batu sent 10,000 warriors into Poland with his brother.⁷

The two armies could hardly have been more different. The Mongols were organized in units of ten, a hundred and a thousand, grouped into divisions, or tumens, of nominally 10,000 men, and commanded by men promoted for proven ability. Every warrior was a horseman and an archer, signals passed by flag rather than trumpet, and their favorite trick was the feigned flight that drew an enemy out of formation. A European army of the time was a looser gathering of knights grouped by region and lordship, led by men chosen by birth, and built around the charge of heavily armored horsemen with lance and sword.⁸

Henry gathered what he could. His army included the knights of Silesia and Greater Poland, survivors from Lesser Poland, Duke Mieszko of Opole with his men, foreign volunteers and miners from the gold mines of the Sudetes around Goldberg (Złotoryja). A small contingent of the military orders came too: the Templars and the Hospitallers were certainly there. Britannica and HistoryNet count the Teutonic Knights as well, but Polish historians still debate whether they fought. Britannica puts Henry's army at 25,000 to 30,000 and HistoryNet at about 30,000, but the Polish History Museum's account rejects such figures: it suggests a Mongol army of perhaps 8,000, including Rus' and Cuman auxiliaries, and a Christian army somewhere between 1,500 and 10,000, probably somewhat smaller than the Mongol force.⁹

Help was close. King Wenceslas I of Bohemia, Henry's brother-in-law, was marching to join him and was perhaps a day or two away; the Polish History Museum places his camp a little more than 50 kilometers from Legnica. The Mongol commanders knew it, and they meant to fight Henry before the two armies could unite. Henry chose not to wait, and marched out from behind Legnica's walls.¹⁰

The battle in phases

Four divisions

The armies met on 9 April on a plain southeast of the town, the place the Germans later called Wahlstatt. Henry drew up his army in four divisions, which, as was the custom of the time, went into the fight one after another.¹¹

The feigned flight

Then the Mongols used the trick that had served them across Asia. Their line broke into what looked like a disorderly retreat, and the knights rode after it, away from their own foot soldiers. Once the European cavalry was strung out, the Mongols closed in from the flanks with arrows, and their heavier cavalry finished the work. The Opole division of Mieszko was the first to give way and leave the field.¹²

The smoke

The most famous detail of the battle comes from the fifteenth-century chronicler Jan Długosz, writing some two centuries later. He describes a huge Mongol banner topped by a bearded head which, when the Mongols pretended to flee, was shaken by its bearer and gave off a foul-smelling smoke that left the Polish knights faint and unable to fight. Britannica and HistoryNet retell it as a smokescreen that cut the knights off from their infantry. The historian Tomasz Borowski of the Polish History Museum considers a chemical weapon unlikely, since a new weapon would have been used and described again, and reads the passage as symbolic: a literary sign of the dark powers that medieval writers attached to the Mongols.¹³ › Mongol vs Knight

Turning point

The battle turned when Henry's own division went in. Seeing the Opole men leave the field, the duke led the last division into the Mongol lines himself. When the line collapsed, Henry tried to escape, but he was caught by the Mongols, killed and beheaded.¹⁴

Aftermath

The Mongols carried Henry's head on a lance around the walls of Legnica. To count their kill they cut an ear from each of the dead, and by Długosz's account filled nine sacks. King Wenceslas, hearing of the disaster, turned back toward Bohemia.¹⁵

The northern Mongol force did not press on to the west. It laid waste to Moravia and turned south to join Batu's main army in Hungary, which had destroyed King Béla IV's army at Mohi, on the Sajó River, two days after Legnica. Then, within a year, the threat vanished. The Great Khan Ögedei had died in December 1241, and Batu turned back east to take part in the struggle for the succession.¹⁶ › Subutai

Tradition says that Henry's mother, Saint Hedwig, and his wife, Anna, searched the battlefield for his headless body and found it at the spot where a chapel of the Holy Trinity was later built. In the judgment of Wiesław Chełminiak, writing for the Polish History Museum, the chance of reuniting Poland under the Silesian Piasts died with Henry.¹⁷

Legacy and memory

Legnica has two memories. Poles have long remembered 9 April as the day an Asian invasion was turned back from Europe, and the parish at Legnickie Pole still holds an annual commemoration of the battle. HistoryNet points out that for the Mongols it was simply their third victory over a European army in a few weeks, won by a diversionary force that had done exactly what it was sent to do and then moved on.¹⁸

The place itself became a shrine. A stone church of the Holy Trinity rose where, by tradition, the body had been found, and Benedictine monks came to care for it. In the eighteenth century the Benedictines built a great Baroque church and monastery beside it to plans by Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer, completed in the 1730s.¹⁹

Visiting the battlefield today

The battlefield lies at the village of Legnickie Pole, on the outskirts of Legnica near the A4 motorway. The old Holy Trinity church now houses the Museum of the Battle of Legnica, and the Baroque Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and Saint Hedwig stands across the road. In 2004 the President of Poland declared the former Benedictine abbey complex a Historic Monument, to protect a place that commemorates, in the decree's words, a breakthrough event in the history of Europe, the battle of 1241.²⁰ › 9 April in military history