What happened at the Battle on the Marchfeld?
On 26 August 1278, between Dürnkrut and Jedenspeigen near the March river in Lower Austria, the German king Rudolf of Habsburg and his Hungarian allies defeated King Ottokar II of Bohemia. Ottokar's army was driven into flight and the king himself was killed. The victory let Rudolf hand Austria to his sons and laid the foundation of Habsburg rule there for centuries to come.1
The Marchfeld was a battle between two kings for the inheritance of a third dynasty. When the Babenberg dukes of Austria died out, Ottokar of Bohemia took their lands; when Rudolf of Habsburg was elected German king in 1273, he claimed them back for the empire. On a late summer day in 1278 the quarrel was settled with lances on the plain by the March.2
Background: the Babenberg inheritance
Ottokar II, king of Bohemia from 1253, was the most powerful prince of the empire. He took over Austria and Styria after the last Babenberg duke, Frederick II, died, and in 1252 married Frederick's sister and heiress Margaret to strengthen his claim. He later added Carinthia and Carniola, so that, in Britannica's words, his domains stretched from Silesia to the Adriatic.3
He was also a crusader and a soldier. In 1254 he led a crusade against the pagan Prussians, and the Teutonic Knights named their new castle of Königsberg after him. In 1260 he beat the Hungarians and forced King Béla IV to give up Styria. Soon afterward he put aside the childless Margaret and married Kunigunde, a granddaughter of Béla.4
Count Rudolf of Habsburg was elected German king in 1273. Britannica and the Habsburg historian Stephan Gruber both see the election as aimed in part at the overmighty Bohemian, whom the electors feared. Ottokar refused to recognize Rudolf or to receive Austria and Styria from his hands as imperial fiefs; the princes stripped him of his rights and Rudolf put him under the ban of the empire.5
War came in 1276. Rudolf's first plan was to strike at Bohemia itself, but when Duke Henry of Bavaria abandoned Ottokar, Rudolf turned his main army down the Danube into Austria, while his ally Count Meinhard of Tyrol overran Styria and Carinthia. The Austrian and Styrian nobles flocked to Rudolf; Vienna, loyal to Ottokar, held out for some weeks. Ottokar, whose army was thinning by desertion and whose own Bohemian nobles were turning against him, gave way. By the Peace of Vienna, concluded on 21 November 1276 in Loserth's account and on the 22nd in Coxe's, he renounced Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola and kept only Bohemia and Moravia, and a double marriage between the two families was agreed. On 25 November he did homage to Rudolf in the royal camp. The peace did not last: disputes over its terms dragged on, and Ottokar prepared to win back what he had lost.6
Armies and commanders
Ottokar spent the uneasy peace building a coalition. He gathered allies among the princes of Silesia and Poland and in Germany, where he brought Duke Henry of Bavaria back to his side, and his supporters in Austria plotted a rising that was discovered before it broke out. In the summer of 1278 he set out from Prague. Rudolf found little help in the empire; Johann Loserth's old biography in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie and the historian William Coxe, writing in 1807, both note how few German princes came to his aid. What he did have was an alliance with King Ladislas IV of Hungary, who had his own quarrels with Ottokar.7
The size of the armies is uncertain. Loserth estimates Ottokar's army at 30,000 men, stronger than Rudolf's in heavy cavalry, and puts the Hungarian contingent at no fewer than 30,000; Britannica gives 56,000 Hungarians and Cumans, a Turkic people settled in Hungary. Gruber, more cautiously, writes that each king led an army of a few thousand men.8
The battle in phases
Laa and the march to the March. Ottokar wasted time besieging Drosendorf and Laa on the Austrian border. Rudolf, waiting in Vienna for reinforcements, confirmed the city's privileges to keep its citizens loyal. When he learned that the Hungarians were coming, he left Vienna in mid-August, crossed the Danube at Hainburg and joined them at Marchegg. Hungarian and Cuman raiders harried Ottokar until he lifted the siege of Laa and moved his whole army south to the March, where he camped near Jedenspeigen.9
The battle line. On 26 August 1278 Rudolf's army advanced on Ottokar's camp. Coxe has it moving off at dawn, while Loserth puts the start of the fighting at nine in the morning and gives it five to six hours.10
The king unhorsed. The fighting was fierce, and in the melee Rudolf himself was brought down when an enemy knight stabbed his horse. The sources disagree about who saved him: Loserth names Heinrich Walter von Ramswag, a knight from the Thurgau, who helped him onto another horse, while Coxe has him rescued by the commander of the reserve. Both agree that the sixty-year-old king was in mortal danger.11
Turning point: the reserve
The day was decided by a body of horse that Rudolf had held back. Led by a knight of the Kapeller family, the long Kapeller in Loserth's account and Berchtold Capillar in Coxe's, the reserve struck the flank of the Bohemians who had pushed farthest forward and drove them toward the March, where many drowned. Coxe too credits the reserve with completing the victory.12
The Bohemian army broke and fled. Ottokar fought on with a few men, tried to cut his way out, and was overtaken. Taken prisoner, he was killed by Austrian and Styrian nobles who had personal scores to settle with him; Gruber calls it probably an act of revenge by a group of nobles.13
Aftermath
Ottokar's body was taken to Vienna and later to Prague: by the Neue Deutsche Biographie's account it lay first at Znojmo in Moravia and was moved to St Vitus's Cathedral in 1297, while Coxe has it carried to Prague seven months after the battle. The plunder of the camp was immense, and within a few days Rudolf sent his Hungarian allies home; Coxe suggests he feared quarrels over the booty, and Loserth that the auxiliaries had become an embarrassment.14
Rudolf then marched into Moravia, which submitted without resistance. In Bohemia, where Ottokar's son Wenceslas II was still a child, Margrave Otto of Brandenburg took charge of the kingdom.15
The great prize was Austria. In December 1282 Rudolf granted Austria and Styria as imperial fiefs to his sons Albert and Rudolf, raising his family to the rank of imperial princes. The Neue Deutsche Biographie calls this the decisive step in founding Habsburg rule in Austria.16› Battle of Grunwald, 1410
Legacy and memory
For Austria the Marchfeld was a founding battle. When the Austrian post issued a stamp for its 700th anniversary in 1978, it described the battle as the day that decided Austria's destiny for centuries and shifted the weight of central Europe from Prague to Vienna.17
The battle also lived on in literature. Franz Grillparzer's tragedy King Ottocar, His Rise and Fall, written in 1823 and first staged in 1825 after trouble with the censors, set the rise of Rudolf against the fall of Ottokar. Both Britannica and Gruber single out the play.18
The battle goes by several names: after the villages of Dürnkrut and Jedenspeigen, or after the Marchfeld, the plain by the March east of Vienna, which Coxe calls the March Field.19
