Battle of Rednitz

After the battle, the German king Louis the Child, together with the Swabian, Frankish, Bavarian, and Saxonian dukes, accepted to pay tribute to the Hungarian state.

[4] During this war, after the Battle of Pressburg, the Hungarians continued their campaigns against East Francia, in order to subdue completely the Germans, beaten in 907.

[5] We know about two armies which gathered: one, consisting of Swabian and other forces from southern Germany, led nominally by the king Louis the Child (but because of his young age, in reality the leader of this army were Gozbert count of Alemannia and Managolt the count of Ladengau in Franconia), and the other, consisting from troops gathered from Franconia, Lotharingia (presuming that if the duke of Lotharingia led the army, he had to bring with him also an important troop from his country), Bavaria[6] and maybe Saxony (however we do not know anything about the Saxons taking part of this battle, but we presume that they also heard the call and the threat of king Louis, and that maybe they want to put an end of the Hungarian attacks, because they suffered in 906 and 908 two devastating attacks from the Hungarian armies[7]), led by Gebhard, Duke of Lorraine and Liudger, the count of Ladengau.

After these two battles the Hungarian army plundered and burned the German territories, and nobody tried to fight them again, retreating to the walled towns and castles, and waiting them to turn back in Hungary.

[20] This battle concluded and demonstrated once and for all the military superiority of the light armored, quick moving nomadic warfare over what represented the peak of the Central and Western European style of warfare of those times: the post-Carolingian Germanic armies, represented by heavy armored, slow moving cavalry and pedestrians, the nomadic Hungarians heavily defeating them several times in the most categorical way.

After 4 years (907-910) of heavy defeats (Pressburg, Eisenach, Augsburg, Rednitz) from the hands of the Hungarian mounted archers, every of which resulting with the annihilation of the armies (this causing a "shortage" in soldiers to the Germans), and the deaths of the German commanders (among them princes, dukes, counts, margraves, bishops, archbishops), the German kings (Conrad I of Germany, Henry the Fowler) and other political leaders, decided not to fight again in an open field with the obviously tactically superior Magyars, fearing to have the same fate of their predecessors, but they retreated in their castles and walled towns (knowing that the Hungarians are not very skilled in sieges, because they have no siege equipments), waiting until they left their countries filled with spoils.

[21] It is interesting to know that not only the Germans who shared borders with the Hungarians chose not to fight with them (for example in 924 the German king Henry the Fowler retreated in his castle of Werla, instead of defending his duchy with fight, when hearing that the Hungarians crossed Saxony's borders, and started to plunder his realm[22]), but also the French too, for example in 919, when the Hungarians invaded Lotharingia and France, the king Charles the Simple wanted to gather the forces of his kingdom against them, only the archbishop of Reims appeared from the nobles of the whole kingdom, who obviously hearing about the risks of a battle with the archers from the Carpathian Basin from the news which came from Germany, decided not to participate in a war against them, so the king withdrawed together with his 1500 soldiers, letting the Magyars to pillage his country.

[21] This inefficience and fear of the European armies to fight against the Hungarians made it possible for the latter to extend their raids into Western Europe: France, Burgundy and even northern Spain, and in the Balkans to Constantinople and Greek peninsula!