The battle of Southern Syria, 1226 AD
Henry let the scroll fall to the floor. “We assassinated a Princess?” he asked Horst incredulously.
The young Teuton could not meet the Kaiser’s eye. “A French Princess by the name of Agnesot.” he mumbled.
Henry shook his head. “May God have mercy on her soul, and ours. How many more assassinations have we been behind?”
Horst shrugged: “I do not know, Sire, it seems there are several mentioned each Diet report. You now have a reputation for being fine with political murders.”
Henry’s face darkened: “Not once in my time in office as Chancellor did I authorise an assassin to so much as get out of bed, let alone kill a young woman! I promised Hans my support on condition that he would follow the path of light and this is road he follows. I told him we were cursed: that if he was Kaiser, every blow from our assassins would scar his immortal soul. And now the father must pay for the sins of the son.”
Horst tried to placate him: “Sire, this is beyond your control. And it could have been worse - Prinz Hummel could been elected.”
Henry spat out contemptuously: “At least with that snake you knew where you stood.”
Then, as rapidly as it had arrived, the fire seemed to leave Henry and he slumped back in his seat.
“The Reich seems set on a path of remorseless expansion. Rheims sacked, Paris sacked, Durazzo sacked, Sofia … no doubt due to be sacked. We are marauding across Europe. We are no different from the horse lords. At least they have the decency not to worship a loving god or spout balderdash about chivalry…”
Horst looked alarmed: “My lord, you are beginning to sound like Kolar again!”
Henry looked at Horst pityingly: “Kolar taught me many things. His words taught me that just because the church says one thing does not make it right. And his actions taught me that just because an act is expedient for your kingdom does not make it right either.”
It was not clear to Henry whether Horst understood his meaning or not, but it did not matter. Looking at the Teuton’s mutilated hands, the Kaiser had no inclination to debate the merits and failings of the monster who inflicted that torture.
“I am too old for this. Too old to be a puppet, a figurehead, for the new generation.” Henry paused, watching the figure of Kurt Altman come into his tent. “I am weary. And I am losing my touch. I thought I could just march out and attack the horse lords. It took my son to remind me that, by the Charter, I required Diet approval first.”
Kurt saluted the Kaiser and said almost under his breath: “Well, that at least is one thing you won’t have to worry about, Sire.”
*****
Kurt heard the Kaiser give the opening speech - the veteran warrior thought he could detect in it something of young Elberhard, especially the Kaiser’s quip that his men should feel pity for the Mongols and ”especially their horses to support such boney arses.”. However, there was something more authentic in Henry’s closing call to his men to ”pray, you brave fools.”.
Seeking to replay the victory at Antioch, Henry deployed on the highest piece of ground he could find. However, it was but a gentle slope. The Imperial left was anchored by some heights, but the right was wide open and this was where Henry placed most of his cavalry, including his own escort.
It seemed only moments before Mongol heavy archers were moving fast towards the pavise crossbows stationed on the right of the Imperial line. Damnation, cursed Kurt and he urged the supporting heavy infantry forward to protect his missile troops. They caught the first Mongol regiment just in time.
While the heavy archers seemed to stumble into their charge, the Mongol attack on the German centre right was more deliberate. First, light lancers struck, followed by heavy lancers and soon even the Mongol general, Bayan the Wrathful, joined the assault.
For a moment, Kurt imagined that the centre would hold. Stout German spearmen could perhaps hold off the finest Mongol cavalry. But then he realised that what was missing was heart - as a regiment of sergeant spearmen started to break and run to the rear, it looked as if the whole Imperial position would collapse. Kurt heard the Kaiser cry:
“Send in the cavalry! Orders to the regiments on the right: forward charge! Bodyguard, ride with me!”
The fighting was hectic and brutal - Henry hand no time to carefully manoeuvre his army; his aides had only one instruction - to ride along the line and make sure that every regiment was in action.
Eventually, the sheer weight of the Imperial forces committed - eight regiments of foot and five of horse - prevailed over the seven regiments of Mongol horse in the melee. But it would not be fair to say the Mongols broke. They merely died. If the odd regiment did rout, it was only to rally seconds later and return to the fray. Soon all that was left of entire Mongol regiments was a single horseman or two, still wandering the battlefield looking for a fight.
Once through the Mongol cavalry, Kurt saw Henry rejoice to see below clumps of Mongol infantry and archers. The Kaiser had been studiously ignoring the throngs of light Mongol horse archers still unengaged. He knew from bitter experience with the Mameluks that sending German cavalry in pursuit of such foes was a fool’s errand - the cavalry would be whittled down and never catch their enemy, or even bitterly regret it when they did finally come to blows. No, the Kaiser was too savy to chase horse archers, but Mongol infantry could not flee.
“Hah!” shouted Henry. “There they are, boys! At ‘em!”
After the battle, Kurt wondered if Henry had failed as a commander that day - if his tactics of headlong charges into the enemy were crude and inefficient. But at the time, there was no time. Everything happened so quickly - the chaos of battle was so great, any careful manoeuvring seemed impossible. And when a regiment was out of combat, the relentless archery from the Mongol horse was withering. A regiment of halberd militia was reduced from 80 to 20 merely marching from its victorious melee against the Mongol heavy cavalry down to meet the Mongol infantry. The Kaiser reasoned that the safest place for any German to be was at the throat of a Mongol and even with the wisdom of hindsight, Kurt could not quarrel with that.
The only Germans who were not in melee or racing towards it that day were the pavise crossbowmen in the rear. If Henry did make one mistake that battle, it was in taking his eye of the enemy general, Bayan the Wrathful, who we last left locked in the opening central melee. Bayan was a mighty warlord, cruel and cunning, driven by rage. Somehow while his heavy cavalry were dying all around him in the central melee, he broke through to the rear.
There, he lay about the pavise crossbowmen, charging into regiment after regiment with only a handful of fellow riders to guard him. Slowly, the German command realised what was happening behind its lines, but it lacked any reserves to counter the marauding warlord. Eventually almost all the regiments of crossbows in the army were tasked with shooting down the Mongol general.
“Stand and fight! He is only one man! Shoot him! Shoot him!”
Bayan was soon stripped of his escort, but his own fine armour seemed impervious to even the steel stringed arbalests of the Germans. Volley after volley of the crossbowmen succeeded only in killing their own kind, the unfortunate ones that Bayan visited on his own indomitable solo charges.
Eventually, the inevitable happened.
It will never be known with certainty, but from discussions after the battle, Kurt came to the conclusion that Bayan alone probably claimed more crossbowmen’s lives than all seven regiments of Mongol horse archers.
Shortly after Bayan’s death - and even perhaps as a consequence of it - Henry finally broke through the Mongol infantry. Unlike their mounted counterparts, significant numbers of the Mongol foot did turn and run. Whether they could possibly have known of their leader’s death, far to the German rear, Kurt was never sure. But Mongol communications and battlefield coordination were exemplary, so it could not be ruled out.
Kurt looked at Henry - he seemed almost maddened and cried out, fierce in battle:
“There’s still more of them lads! Look, down there! The foot archers! Charge!”
While the German centre was charging forward, smashing into regiment after regiment of Mongol foot, the flanks were suffering grievously from the Mongol horse archers. On the German right, when the horse archers had sufficiently weakened a regiment of mailed knights and one of sergeant spearmen, the Mongols closed in for the kill and routed them. It was now a bloody war of attrition - a race to see who could kill the most, the fastest: the Germans on the centre or the Mongols on the flanks.
Such was the ferocity of the fighting that it seemed to die out suddenly, but with almost every Mongol on the field dead or, in the case of some foot, captured. Only one enemy regiment of any significance remained at the end: a unit of Mongol infantry that had rallied and returned to the fight.
After the battle, Henry wandered the battlefield whispering:
“My knights, my poor knights, where are they all gone?”
His cavalry had been almost annihilated, along with most of his spearmen and a good proportion of the rest of his troops.
“I must contact Otto and Leopold immediately.” breathed Henry to Kurt Altman. “It is most urgent.”
If one Mongol stack could do this while attacking, how would Leopold’s crusade fare against three Mongol stacks each with the advantage of defence?
*****
After the battle, Kurt Altman presented Henry with 240 Mongol prisoners and asked about their fate. Henry looked conflicted, the bitterness of his losses and his newfound ferocity in battle darkening his countenance. But then he seemed to soften, as if his true nature reasserted himself.
“Those men do not have riding boots. They are almost all infantry. And infantry we can deal with. I have heard the Mongols have a considerable war chest from all their depravations. Let them spend some of it to get those fellows back. Besides - the Mongols want to come to Christian civilisation. Let us show them how civilised men wage war.”
Kurt nodded, unsurprised to see his master’s chivalry emerge even under this most extraordinary of trials. But the veteran warrior was equally unsurprised when the heartless horse lord Khan refused the ransom and invited the Germans to put to the sword those Mongols unworthy enough to surrender rather than die fighting.
Re: Battle reports thread - King of the Romans PBM
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