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The River and the Hammer: Otto the Great and the Battle That Ended the Magyar Terror
Paperback
Series: Forgotten Battles
Medieval & Renaissance HistoryGeneral Military History
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 9 2026
Pages: 148
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.34 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
For fifty years, they had come out of the east without warning.
The Magyars - ferocious nomadic horsemen who had swept into the heart of Europe at the end of the ninth century - terrorised the kingdoms of Christendom with a campaign of raiding that no ruler seemed capable of stopping. Monasteries burned. Harvests were destroyed. Populations fled behind city walls. Chroniclers compared them to the horsemen of the Apocalypse.
In August 955 AD, King Otto I of Germany rode out to meet them on a river plain in Bavaria with an army of heavy cavalry and a battle plan that nobody had tried before.
What followed ended fifty years of terror in a single afternoon.
The Battle of Lechfeld is the most important military engagement of the early medieval period. It stopped the Magyar invasions permanently, transformed a German king into the most powerful ruler in western Europe, and shaped the political map of a continent for centuries. Almost no one has heard of it.
The River and the Hammer is the gripping narrative account of the forgotten battle that ended the Magyar terror - told through the lives of the commanders who fought it, the bishop who held a besieged city through sheer force of will, and the disgraced duke who rode into battle without his helmet and did not ride out again. This is history as it should be told: urgent, human, and impossible to put down.
Book Two in the Forgotten Battles series.
Perfect for fans of Tom Holland, Adrian Goldsworthy, and Bernard Cornwell.
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