Battle of W.l.n.d.r

[2] In an academic work published in 1903, German historian Josef Marquart became the first scholar who considered the narrative from The Meadows of Gold to refer to the same events mentioned in the continuation of George Hamartolos' chronicle (Georgius Monachus Continuatus).

The Hungarian translation of the part of al-Masudi's work which refers to the battle, writes the name correctly, putting points in the place of the vowels (ex.

For example, he writes that W.l.n.d.r was a Greek town between the mountains and the sea,[4] but historians such as György Györffy and Gyula Kristó – accepting the claim of Josef Marquart – believe that it was not a city but a derivation of the old name of the Bulgarians: Onogur/Onogundur (Ten Oghur Tribes), which sounded *wnondur, which in old Hungarian became nándor, from which the old Hungarian name of Belgrade, Nándorfehérvár (White castle of the Bulgarians) originates, and in the works of the Arab geographer Ahmad ibn Rustah and the Persian geographer Abu Saʿīd Gardēzī, appears as W.n.n.d.r.

Hansgerd Göckenjan and István Zimonyi considered Bulgarophygon (Babaeski) as the place of battle, based on the data that the relief army reached the besieged city in eight days from Constantinople.

It is not excluded, that in 934, when the battle took place, the Onogurs in Hungary still had a kind of autonomy, with their own leaders, which may explain the fact that al-Masudi sees them as a separate political entity with its own king.

So as a response, to the question of who and how many were the nations who fought the Byzantines and the Bulgarians, the historians conclude that they were two nomadic political entities: the Principality of Hungary and the Pecheneg Tribal Confederation.

The Byzantines were directly implied in the events, and of course were much closer than al-Masudi who never terveled north to Caucasus, and took his information from others verbal accounts.

[33] But in the last years this question was researched by historians, and the conclusion was that the Byzantine accounts about the crushing defeat and the fear of the Hungarians from Pechenegs are overreacted, and sometimes even false.

[34] Al-Masudi's account too contradicts these claims from De Administrando Imperio: if the Hungarians were so terrorized by the Pechenegs, why would they enter in a war with them because the banal case of a foreign merchant?

[Among them] only the Bulgarians and the Turks [Hungarians] care about the battle order, which is similar by [the both of] them, and because of this, they fight the close combat with greater strength, and [only they] are ruled by a single person".

[35] So, according to this work, which because, unlike the De Administrando Imperio, which is about politics, is a book about war strategy, so is more relevant from the point of view of the question in discussion, the Pechenegs were weak in battle organisation and close combat, in which the Hungarians are presented as good.

Al-Masudi writes that the Hungarian–Pecheneg army was composed of 60,000 warriors, which they gathered with little effort, because if they would do a greater recruiting and concentration of troops, they could have 100,000 soldiers.

The fact that the Arab geographer and historian Ahmad ibn Rustah wrote that the whole force of the Principality of Hungary at the beginning of the 10th century consisted from 20,000 warriors,[38][39] shows very well how exaggerated were the above-mentioned numbers.

[44] The Byzantine chronicler Symeon the Metaphrast writes that the anti-Byzantine campaign of the Hungarians took place in the "seventh year of the indiction in the month of April".

[37] So if we accept April as the date they entered in the territory of the Byzantine Empire, which than, because of the great extent of the First Bulgarian Empire after the death of its emperor Simeon I, was near to Constantinople, and take in consideration that a nomadic army of riders was moving really fast, even if they stopped on the road to plunder, they made the road maximum in a month, so there is an assumption that the Battle of W.l.n.d.r was fought between the end of February and beginning of April.

In 933 a Magyar army was defeated in Battle of Riade by the Kingdom of Germany/Eastern Francia, with this the Principality of Hungary losing a substantial income: the German tribute, received with interruptions from 910.

[48] About the other reason we learn from al-Masudi, who writes in his account about the Battle of W.l.n.d.r, that during a Hungarian-Pecheneg war, which erupted because the people from one of the nomadic states had mistreated a Muslim merchant from the Persian city of Ardabil, who was in very good relations with the other, the people from W.l.n.d.r attacked their nomadic settlements, left without men, taking with them many children to be slaves, and drove away the cattle.

[49] If we accept that W.l.n.d.r designates the town of Belgrade, than part of the Bulgarian Empire, the attack of its soldiers had to be made against the Hungarians, which lands were on the northern side of the Danube, on which southern banks lied the city.

[53] At the dawn of the second day, the Pecheneg king formed many equestrian detachments of 1000 men and positioned them next to the left and the right wing of the nomadic army.

When the Bulgarian-Byzantines arrived near to it, the nomadic army suddenly split, and let the Christians to enter in the middle, then shot a rain of arrows from both sides on them, this causing huge losses and the total falling apart of their organisation, then the Hungarian-Pecheneg army started a general attack, with their ordered battle lines, on the enemy, causing them to start to flee, but the majority of the Christians had no way to run, because they were encircled.

Al-Masudi underlines that until this moment the nomadic army had not used any close range weapons, only their bows which caused the Byzantine-Bulgarians so many losses, but now they pulled out their swords, and started to cut down the enemy.

[28] Al-Masudi writes that they camped in front of the great city for 40 days, they sold the children and women for clothes made from textile, brocade and silk.

[60] According to historians János B. Szabó and Balázs Sudár, there is no evidence that the relevant records from The Meadows of Gold and the Byzantine chronicles – primarily Georgius Monachus Continuatus – refer to the same battle, as there are a number of uncertainties and contradictions between the two types of sources at several points.

According to the two historians, the Battle of W.l.n.d.r, which appears in Al-Masudi's work, is not part of the history of Hungary in the Carpathian Basin nor the Hungarian invasions of Europe.

[61] Instead of the Balkan Peninsula, the two historians place the Battle of W.l.n.d.r to the Caucasus, where Byzantine emperor Romanos I Lekapenos pursued an active foreign policy against the Arabs, as a theater of the longstanding Arab–Byzantine wars.

[62] Analyzing Al-Masudi's geographical names, B. Szabó and Sudár claim, the four Turkic peoples lived in the area west of Alania and Khazaria along the rivers Sal and Manych.

According to the De Administrando Imperio, Pecheneges (identified with "b.dʒ.n.k") of the Pontic–Caspian steppe also lived in that territory surrounding the northwestern part of Caucasus.

[63] B. Szabó and Sudár argues the four Turkic peoples appears additionally in At-Tanbih wa-l-'Ishraf ("Admonition and Revision"), Al-Masudi's other work, under a common summary term, vlndrija, who lived in the area of city W.l.n.d.r at the Byzantium's furthest ends bordering the East.