> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.battlefield-witness.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A story of the Black Army of Hungary, 1485–1492 - URL: https://www.battlefield-witness.com/a-story-of-the-black-army-of-hungary-1485-1492/ - Published: 2026-10-14T16:46:09.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-14T16:52:27.000Z - Author: Anders Lawerny - Tags: Vienna to Buda, Hungary, historical, research-driven, historical record, John Haugwitz, Wilhelm and Balthasar Tettauer, Jan Filipec, Stephen Zápolya, Pál Kinizsi, King Matthias Corvinus, King Vladislaus II, Black Army # The Wall That Was Owed --- > "...we regard the armoured infantry as a wall, which will never leave its place, even if all of them are slaughtered where they stand." > > — King Matthias Corvinus, in a letter, 1480s --- ## I. Vienna, June 1485 He heard the city before the gate opened. Bells, every bell in Vienna, none of them in time with any other, as if each church had been told to ring and none had been told when to stop. Matěj Brabec stood in the fourth file of the pavisors with the great shield on his back and the strap sitting in the old groove it had worn into his left shoulder, and while the bells went on he did the sum he always did when he had to stand still. Two months owed since Lady Day. Double wage, because he carried the pavise and the pavise carried the rest of them. Less the advance at Korneuburg. Less the boots from the cobbler's widow at Bruck, which had been good boots and had lasted until Laa, where the mud took the left sole off like a hand taking a coat. Less what he had lost at dice to Kuba, which he did not intend to pay. Two months owed. Under this king that was almost the same as paid. "They're opening it," said the boy behind him. "They're not." "They are. Listen." Matěj listened and heard only bells, and then under the bells a groan of timber and iron that he felt more than heard, coming up through the cobbles into his heels. The Kärntnertor. Ahead of them the cavalry began to move, and the smell of the horses moved with them: dung and hot hide and the oiled-leather smell of their harness, so thick in the narrow street that it felt like something you could lean on. "Pick it up," Matěj said, and the boy took the lower strap of the pavise and lifted, the way he had been lifting it since he was twelve, so that the weight came off Matěj's shoulder for a moment and Matěj could roll the joint and feel it crack. Gergő was sixteen now, or thought he was. He had come to the company four years before, in the south, when the captains were paying double bounty for pages because nobody wanted to carry an armoured man's harness and his shield for a page's wage, and his mother had taken the bounty and looked at Matěj for a long time without saying anything, and then she had gone back into her house. Matěj had thought about that look more than he had expected to. The boy had a Hungarian face, wide across the cheekbones, and a habit of asking how many. "How many of us are there?" "They say twenty-eight thousand." "Who counted?" "Someone who's paid to count." They went in under the gate. The city had been starving since winter. Matěj could see it in the faces at the windows, and in the windows themselves, half of them shuttered, and in the dogs, of which there were none. The king had sat outside these walls from January, burning the vineyards and closing the roads, and the Viennese had eaten their horses and then their cats, and now they leaned out of their upper storeys to watch the men who had done it walk past beneath them in good order with the bells ringing. A woman in a white coif was crying. A man beside her had his arms folded so hard that his knuckles showed. Matěj kept his eyes on the back of the man in front, which was the only thing a pavisor was ever supposed to see in a column anyway. The back in front of him belonged to Hynek from Prostějov, and was broad, and had a rip in the jerkin under the left arm that Hynek's wife had sewn with green thread because green was what she had. Beyond Hynek's back Matěj could see the tops of pavises, a whole street of them, and that was the thing he would remember afterwards, more than the king, more than the bells: the colours. Every shield was different. Every man had his own painted, or had paid a painter in some town to do it, and they went up the street like a slow river of saints and beasts and crosses and letters. Saint George on a red ground. A white lion with two tails, Bohemian, which meant its owner was either very loyal or very stupid. A green wildman with a club. The Hungarian double cross. Ravens, many ravens, the king's raven with the gold ring in its beak, because the paymasters liked to see it. Matěj's own was a raven too. Red ground, black bird, a ring the painter had made with real gold leaf and charged him for twice. Under the raven, if you took a knife to it in the right place, there was a white field, and on the white field there was a red chalice. He had carried the chalice at Brno in 1469, on the wall of the Špilberk, when he was not yet twenty and the Hungarians were the enemy. When the castle gave up, the king's captains had walked along the line of prisoners and asked who could hold a pavise and who could hold his tongue, and the men who said yes to both got wages. That was sixteen years ago. The linen over the willow board had been stretched and glued and painted three times since. Under all of it the chalice was still there. He did not think about it often. A man did not think every day about his own bones. "There," said Gergő. "There. That's him." Ahead the street opened into a square and the column slowed and bunched and Matěj, for a moment, could see past Hynek. A knot of riders under banners. One of them bareheaded, stocky, sitting a big grey as if he'd been born on it, turning his face up toward the windows the way a man turns his face to weather. He did not look like the coins. He looked like a man who had not slept, and who was enjoying not having slept. Then the column closed again and there was only Hynek's back and the green thread. "Did you see him?" "I saw him." "What was he like?" Matěj thought about it. "Short," he said. Behind them, somewhere down by the gate, the handgunners were coming in with their matches lit for the show, and the smell reached Matěj before anything else did: that thin, sour, rope-burning smell of slow-match, hundreds of cords smouldering at once, a smell he had come to think of as the smell of the army itself. Sulphur and wet hemp. It got into your hair. It got into the bread. They were quartered that night in a cooper's house near the Hoher Markt. The cooper's wife put a pot on the table and left the room before anyone could thank her. The soup was mostly water and barley and a bone that had been boiled before, possibly many times. Kuba said grace in Czech, very loudly, and then ate like a wolf. Gergő sat on the floor with Matěj's harness across his knees and worked the rust off the rivets of the left vambrace with sand and a rag, which was a page's work, and which he did without being told. "Will we get paid now?" he said. "Now that we've got Vienna?" "Now that we've got Vienna," said Kuba, with his mouth full, "Vienna will get to pay us." --- ## II. Głogów, Autumn 1488 The Oder was the colour of a pewter plate and the mist came off it every morning and lay in the fields until noon, and in the mist the walls of Głogów came and went like something you were remembering rather than seeing. Gergő knelt behind the pavise with his shoulder against its back and his feet braced in a groove he had dug with his heels, and he held it. That was all. You held it. The board was as tall as a man and nearly as wide as two, willow under leather under linen under paint, with a ridge down the middle where the wood had been bent and a spike at the bottom that you drove into the earth so the thing could stand on its own when it had to. It weighed less than it looked. It was meant to. But it did not weigh less when something hit it. Something hit it. A crossbow bolt from the wall, he thought, from the sound: a flat, ugly crack, and a shiver through the board into his collarbone. He looked up and saw a square iron head standing through the linen a hand's width from Matěj's face, three layers of paint peeled back around it like the petals of a flower. Matěj did not move his face. "That one was for you," he said to Gergő. "How do you know?" "Because it missed me." To their left, Kuba laid the barrel of his handgun across the top edge of the pavise beside theirs, where the board had a notch cut for it, and settled the stock against his shoulder and his cheek against the stock. Gergő had watched this a hundred times and it still seemed to him like a man composing himself for prayer. The match hissed in its serpentine. Kuba squinted. The world went white and loud and then grey, a fist of smoke rolling forward off the pavise line and hanging there in the mist, so that for a moment there were two kinds of fog, the river's and theirs, and you could smell which was which. Kuba ducked down. His face was black on one side. "Did you hit anything?" "I hit Głogów." He began to reload, kneeling, with his back to the wall: powder from the flask, a wad, the ball, the ramrod working. He did it slowly. He did it the same way every time, his lips moving. Gergő knew the words. *Ktož jsú boží bojovníci.* Who are the warriors of God. The old Hussite song, the one the priests in the south said was heresy and which half the company still sang under their breath when their hands were busy. Kuba sang it for the rhythm, he said. It was exactly as long as a reload. This was the way it worked, and Gergő had come to understand it as you understand a mill: the shields stood, and the shooters fired over the shields and dropped behind them to reload, and the pikes stood behind the shooters, and if anything came out of the gate the shields closed like a door and the pikes came over the top like the teeth of a harrow. The horsemen stood off on the flanks, and if anything came out of the gate and *broke* on the shields, the horsemen went in. It was a machine made of men. Everybody had a part. The part Gergő had was to kneel in a ditch with a board against his shoulder and not run. Late in the morning two riders came along the line behind them, walking their horses, looking at the walls. Gergő knew them both. The first was the hejtman, the one the men called Černý Hanuš, Black John, Haugwitz. The name was not for his armour, which was plain grey steel like anyone's and spotted with rust at the joins. It was the beard, partly, which was black going badly grey, and partly something else that no one could have said, a way he had of looking at a thing until it gave itself up. He was not tall. He rode with the reins very loose. Beside him was the other one, Tettauer, Wilhelm Tettauer, a German, fair and red in the face, talking with his hands. They stopped behind Matěj's pavise. Tettauer was pointing at something on the wall, a tower where the brickwork had been patched. "If the guns come up by Saint Martin's..." "They won't come up by Saint Martin's," Haugwitz said. "The ground's soft. You'll lose a gun in it." "Then we sit here till Christmas." "Then we sit here till Christmas." He looked down. He looked straight at Matěj, who was looking straight ahead. "Brabec. You're the Brno one." "Yes, hejtman." "You were on the other side of a wall like this once." "Yes, hejtman." "How long did you hold out?" "Till the bread went, hejtman." Haugwitz nodded as if this was the answer to Tettauer's question, and perhaps it was. Then he looked at Gergő, and Gergő felt his face go hot, and the hejtman said nothing to him at all, only looked for a moment longer than he needed to, and rode on. They did sit there. Not till Christmas, but long enough. The guns came up on the dry side and broke a section of the curtain, and the duke inside made his terms, and the gate of Głogów opened not with fighting but with a procession, priests first, then townsmen in black, then the duke's men without their weapons. The Hungarians marched in. Silesia was the king's. That night Gergő found a brown hen in a yard off the market and took it, as you took things in a town that had surrendered, and wrung its neck, and plucked it, and they ate it in the guardroom of the tower that had been patched, and Matěj picked the bolt out of the pavise with his knife and gave the head to Gergő to keep. "For luck," he said. "Whose?" "Yours. It's already used up mine." --- ## III. Silesia, April 1490 – Summer 1491 The news came on a wet day in April and nobody believed it. It came with a rider from the south who had changed horses four times, and who sat on a bench in the gatehouse with his boots full of water and said it to the hejtman and then said it again to the captains, and by evening every man in the garrison had heard it, and by evening every man had decided it was a lie put about by the Poles. The king had died in Vienna on the sixth day of the month, in Holy Week, in the Burg, after eating figs. Or after eating something. He had been sick at the stomach and then sick in the head and then dead. He was forty-seven. "Figs," said Kuba. "I don't believe in figs." The next rider came a week later and said the same thing. Matěj sat on the wall that night with his back to a merlon and did not do any sums at all. Below in the town someone was playing a pipe, badly, the same five notes, and stopping, and starting again. He found that he was thinking about the man on the grey horse in the square in Vienna, turning his face up to the windows. He had seen him perhaps four times in twenty-one years. He had never spoken to him. He was surprised by the hole the man left. It was not grief exactly. It was more like what you feel when a floor you have been walking on for years turns out to have been a bridge. Under the king the money had come. Late, sometimes; short, sometimes; once, after Laa, so late that the Saxons in the company had marched out of the camp with their banner furled and had to be brought back with promises. But it came. It came because somewhere in the south, in villages Matěj would never see, people paid. He had understood this the way a soldier understands most things, as a fact about the world that was not his business. The peasants paid the king, in war years twice. The king paid the captains. The captains paid the men, and the men stood in the line and did not run. It was another machine. He had never thought much about the first part of it. Now he did, because the money stopped. It did not stop at once. Pay for April came, from what was in the chests at the castles. Pay for May came half. In June the captains were saying that the new king, whoever he was going to be, would make it good. There were three of them that summer who might be king, and the lords of Hungary sat at the Diet and chose the one who seemed least likely to make them do anything, the Bohemian, Vladislaus, a soft-spoken man whom the soldiers came to call *Dobře*, because that was his answer to everything. Good. Very good. *Dobře.* The lords had their price for him. Matěj heard about it in pieces through the winter, from riders and merchants and a friar who stayed three nights. The war tax was cut, a little and then a great deal, until it was a fifth of what it had been, or a quarter, depending who was talking. The king's estates went out to the lords who had voted for him. Whatever had been in the treasury went the way water goes out of a cracked jar, not all at once, but steadily, and there was nothing to put your hand over. In the spring of 1491 the new king made his peace with the Emperor's son at Pressburg, and part of that peace was Silesia. It was to be given back. Its castles, its towns, its garrisons. Black John Haugwitz read the terms in the hall at the castle with the captains standing round him and then folded the paper in four and put it inside his doublet. "Well?" said Tettauer. "Well, I'm owed," said Haugwitz. "I'm owed and my men are owed. When we're paid, they can have Silesia back. They can have it back with a ribbon on." He did not give it back. Through the summer of 1491 the garrisons sat in their towns and their castles and took what they needed from the country around, and the country around learned to hate them in a quiet, Silesian way, with closed doors and shut faces and a fondness for informing. Gergő turned twenty-two, or thought he did. He was taller than Matěj now. He could carry the pavise himself, and sometimes did, and the captains had started to look at him in a way Matěj recognised. A page with shoulders like that was a waste of a page. In the autumn a man came from Buda with an escort and a great deal of baggage. His name was Filipec, Jan Filipec, a Moravian like Matěj, a bishop, a diplomat, with a dry hand and a dry voice, and he sat with Haugwitz for two days behind a shut door. When the door opened there were wagons in the castle yard with iron-bound chests on them, and the men were paid. Not everything. Not everything ever. But a hundred thousand florins, the clerks said, and Matěj stood in the line with the others and held out his hand and felt the coins go into it, heavy and cold and real, golden florins and white silver dinars, a hundred of the little ones to one of the big ones, the old king's good money, and he closed his fingers over them and realised he had been afraid. "Now," said Haugwitz, standing on a wagon in the yard, "we earn it. The Polish prince wants to be king of Hungary. We're going to explain to him that he can't." --- ## IV. Eperjes, December 1491 Cold has a sound. Matěj had not known that before Eperjes. It was the sound of the snow under eighteen thousand men, a squeaking, packed, endless sound like a great many small animals complaining. It was the sound of the wagon chains, which in cold like this did not clank but rang, high and thin, like a bell that had been cracked. It was the silence under that, the valley of the Tarca lying white and humped under a white sky, every sound going a little way out into it and stopping, as if the air were too thick with cold to carry it. They had made the wagon-fort on a rise above the river. The old way. Matěj had learned it at eighteen from men who had learned it from men who had stood with Žižka, and it had not changed, because it did not need to. The wagons drawn up in a ring, nose to tail, the chains run through the wheels and locked, the boards dropped on the outer sides to cover the spokes. The gaps between them closed with pavises. Inside, the guns. Inside the guns, the horses. And outside, out on the snow beyond the reach of the handguns, the Polish army, which was very large, and very bright, and very well mounted, and had spent the morning riding up and down in front of them as if this were a tournament and somebody's sister was watching. "They're pretty," said Kuba. He was crouched behind the wagon next to Matěj's pavise with his match-cord wrapped round his left wrist under his sleeve and the burning end of it cupped in his palm, inside his glove, inside his armpit. In this cold, if the match went out, you did not have a weapon, you had a heavy stick. Every handgunner on the line was crouched the same way, curled around his little coal of fire like a man around a secret. The smell of it, that sour rope smell, sat in the cold air over the whole wagon ring and did not move. "They'll come at the corner," said Matěj. "How do you know?" "Because that's where I would." They came at the corner. Not all of them, and not at first: first a hard, glittering wave of horsemen that came straight across the snow toward the wagons and sheered off at the last moment, as horses will at a solid thing, and rode along the front of the ring, and the men on the wagons shot into them from three paces away. Then the guns. Then the noise, which was worse in the cold, flatter and closer, and the smoke, which did not drift as smoke usually did but lay along the snow in a long grey bank and did not go away. Then out of the smoke, at the corner, the Polish foot, a great many of them, with ladders. Ladders against a wagon. Matěj had never seen that before. He set his feet. He set his shoulder. Gergő was beside him, not behind him now; Gergő had his own pavise, a plain one, white board, unpainted, with a raven chalked on it that the snow had half rubbed off. They stood together and the Poles came onto the shields and the shields held. That was all. That was what it was for. A man reached over the top of Matěj's pavise with a falchion and Matěj saw his face, a boy's face, red with cold, a gap in the teeth, and then a pike came over Matěj's shoulder from behind and the face went away. It went on for some time. Afterwards Matěj could not have said how long. The light did not change. The snow did not change. There was only the weight on the shield, coming and going like a tide, and the noise, and the smell of powder and frozen blood, which is a cleaner smell than blood in summer, almost metallic, like a coin in your mouth. And then there was a moment, the one Matěj had been waiting for since morning without knowing he was waiting for it, when the weight on the shield went away and did not come back. The smoke thinned. Through it, out on the snow, the Polish foot were going backward, not running yet, going backward, the way a crowd goes backward from a fire. And down from the right of the wagon ring, from behind the rise where they had stood all day with their horses blanketed and their breath going up in plumes, the heavy horse came. He had seen this perhaps twenty times. He never got used to it. The ground told you first: a long tremble coming up through the snow, through the wagon wheels, through the soles of your boots. Then the sound, a sound like nothing else, like the sea falling down a flight of stairs. And then the horses, the big Hungarian and Bohemian horses with their heads armoured and their chests armoured and their riders sitting high behind four-metre lances, the points all coming down together as if a single hand had lowered them, and the Polish foot, out in the open on the snow with nothing between them and that. "Mother of God," said Gergő, who had seen it before too. Zápolya's horse went in on the flank. Haugwitz's own went in at the centre. The Polish army broke the way ice breaks, all at once and with a noise. That night they lit fires inside the wagon ring, and the wagons kept off the wind, and someone found a barrel of the Polish prince's wine. Kuba sang the old song all the way through, not under his breath, and some of the Hungarians sang a song of their own over the top of it, and nobody hit anybody. Matěj sat with his back to a wheel and his feet to the fire and felt his toes come back one by one, which hurt more than anything that had happened that day. Gergő came and sat down beside him. He had cut his hand. He held it out to the fire. "We won," he said. "We won." "Will they pay us for it?" Matěj thought of Filipec's chests, which were empty already: gone in debts, in bread, in boots, in dice, in the hundred small holes a soldier's money ran out through. "They paid us before it," he said. "That was the payment." "That's not how it's meant to work." "No." The boy looked at his hand. "When we go south," he said. "If we go south. I could see my mother." --- ## V. The South, Summer 1492 The heat on the southern plain was a thing you could lean against. It came up off the ground in the morning and lay there all day, heavy, white, full of dust and flies, and the sky over it was so wide that Matěj, who had grown up among hills, felt sometimes that he might fall up into it. There was no shade. There were no hills. There was the road, and the dust of eight thousand men on the road, and on either side of the road the flat, bleached, endless land, and here and there a village like a scab on it, and here and there the long silver glint of water, the backwaters and dead arms of the great river, bordered with reed so tall it closed over a horseman's head. They had marched for a month out of the north after the snow went, and then they had marched south again with the summer, because the king, Dobře, had said the Turk was stirring on the border and his good Czechs should go and stand in front of the Turk. They had gone. The pay had not followed them. It was not a thing that happened in a day. Matěj had seen companies go bad before; he had seen the Saxons march out at Laa. It happened the way a wheel comes off, one peg at a time, and each peg seems like nothing. A man trades his spare shirt for bread. A man trades his helmet. A company goes to a village and asks for food, and is given it, because it is a company, and asks again the next week, and is given less. A man goes into a church because it is cool and comes out with a silver cup under his jerkin. The captains hang him. Another man does the same and the captains do not hang him, because they are hungry too, and because they know how many of them there are, and how few the captains are. By July the company was taking, not asking. By August it was taking what it could carry and burning what it could not, because a burnt barn was a barn that would not feed the next company down the road, and they had begun to think about the next company down the road as the enemy. Matěj did it with the others. He did not tell himself any story about it. He was hungry and he was owed and the world owed him, and the world was here, in front of him, in these small villages of mud and reed. He had stood in front of the Turk for this country. He had stood in front of the Poles in the snow. He had a raven on his shield. He also had a boy who walked beside him with his face shut, saying nothing, looking at the villages they passed as if he were counting them. At the end of August, in the evening, in a camp by a dead arm of the river where the reeds rattled all night and the mosquitoes came up out of the water like smoke, Gergő said, "I know where there's food." --- The village was called Halászfalu because it had always been a fishers' village, and nobody there had ever thought the name needed explaining. Erzsébet had lived in it for forty-one years. She had been born in it and married in it and buried a husband in it and two children out of five, and she had paid the king's tax in it every year of her adult life, a florin for the household, sometimes more, in war years twice, counted out at the table in the reeve's house in dinars and fish and once, the year the pike did not come, in the copper pot her mother had given her at her wedding. She had paid it for the king's soldiers. Everyone knew what the money was for. The reeve said so. The priest said so. The king's soldiers stood on the border so that the Turk did not come up the river and take the children. You paid your dinars and they stood there. That was the bargain. She had a daughter left at home now, Panni, twelve, quick and thin and sullen, and a son somewhere. She did not know where. She had given him to the soldiers eleven years ago, to a big quiet Czech with a painted shield who had paid her the double bounty in silver. The bounty had bought a cow, and the cow had lived nine years, and she had thought of her son every time she milked it. That was all she let herself think. When the cow died she had wept more than seemed sensible. The soldiers came late one afternoon at the end of August, when the men were down at the water with the nets, and she heard them before she saw them, as everyone always did: the dogs first, every dog in the village going off at once, and under the dogs a sound like a herd moving, which was boots, a great many boots, on the dry road from the north. Then the dust. Then the men. They did not look like soldiers. That was the first thing she noticed and the thing she would tell people afterward, for years, until it became part of the way the village told the story: they did not look like soldiers. They looked like beggars who had robbed a church. Half of them had no helmets, and those who had helmets had no shoes. Their clothes were the colour of the road. Their faces were burned black by the sun and their beards were wild and they carried pikes and long knives and, some of them, the long iron tubes she had heard of and never seen. One of them had a woman's red skirt tied round his neck like a scarf. They spread through the village without anyone telling them to, the way water spreads through a house in a flood, into every door, every yard, every shed. They knew exactly where to look. That was the second thing she noticed. They knew exactly where to look. They went straight to the pits behind the houses where the grain was kept under clay against the damp, which no stranger ever found. They went straight to the smoking-sheds by the water where the carp and the pike and the big river sturgeon hung on their racks in the brown reek of the willow fires. They went to the reeve's house and to the church, and to the hollow in the bank under the big willow where the old men hid their good knives. She stood in the door of her house with Panni behind her and a cleaver in her hand that she knew she would not use, and she watched a tall man come up the path toward her with a great painted shield on his back, red, with a black bird on it, and she knew him. She knew him before she knew she knew him. He was older, and greyer, and thinner, but he was the man who had paid her in silver. And behind him, a step behind, with his face shut, came a boy who was not a boy any longer, wide across the cheekbones, with her dead husband's walk. Nobody spoke for a while. The big Czech looked at her, and then he looked at the young man behind him, and then he stepped aside off the path and went and stood in the yard, by the empty place where the cow had been, with his back to them. As if he had decided not to see it. As if he had decided it was none of his business, which perhaps it was not. Gergő stood on the path. "Anyám," he said. Mother. She did not put the cleaver down. She found she could not move her hand to do it. "You told them," she said. "The pits. The sheds. You told them where." He opened his mouth and closed it. "I told them so they'd only take from here," he said. "So they'd take what they needed and not burn anything. I said, it's a good village, I said, they're good people, take what you need and leave the rest. I thought—" He stopped. His Hungarian was strange: slow, with Czech in it, the vowels gone flat. "I thought if I was here they'd be careful." Behind him, down by the water, the first smoking-shed went up. The willow and the fish fat caught together and the flame went straight up into the still air, yellow and loud, and the smell came up the slope to them, burnt fish, burnt fat, the whole winter going up into the sky. Panni began to cry. "Careful," Erzsébet said. --- ## VI. Halászfalu, the Last Days of August 1492 They camped that night outside the village because it was easier than camping in it. There was no wall to the camp. There was no wagon ring. The wagons had been sold or burned or abandoned in the north, along with the chains, and the guns had gone with the wagons. There were fires, many fires, and around the fires men eating smoked carp with their fingers and drinking the village's wine, and some of them singing, and some of them already asleep where they had fallen down, and out at the edge of the firelight, where the sentries ought to have been, the reeds. Matěj did not sleep. He sat with his back to his pavise, which he had planted in the dry earth out of habit, the spike going in as easily as a word. He thought about the woman in the doorway with the cleaver. He thought about the cow. He had seen the bounty go into her hand eleven years ago and had felt nothing about it at all; it was a transaction; he had been buying a page. He had not thought about the cow. He had not known about the cow. It made him angry, somehow, that the cow had existed, that it had lived for nine years in a shed in this village and been milked by her every morning and died and been wept over, and that he had not known. Gergő did not come back to the fire. Matěj did not look for him. Toward the end of the night the reeds went quiet. He noticed it the way you notice a clock stopping. All night they had been rattling and whispering, the dry August reeds, with the frogs going and the mosquitoes whining and the river making its slow small sounds behind everything. Now nothing. Now the frogs had stopped. He sat forward. Away to the east the sky was beginning to go from black to the colour of an old knife, and in that grey light he could see the mist lying in the low ground beyond the camp, flat and white like milk in a pan, and he could see nothing in it at all. He put his hand flat on the ground. There it was. Faint. A long shivering that came up through the earth into his palm, the same tremble he had felt in the snow at Eperjes with his own side's horses coming down the hill behind him, except that now it was coming from in front, from the east, out of the mist, and there were no horses of his own behind him at all. He stood up. He shouted. He did not afterward remember what. Around him men rolled over, sat up, swore, reached for things that were not there: helmets sold in July, pikes left leaning against a wall in the village, shoes. Somebody laughed. Somebody kicked a fire. Then the mist split open along a line a quarter of a mile long and the horsemen came out of it. Hussars first. Light horse on small fast horses, low in the saddle, curved sabres and the small asymmetrical shields like the wing of a bird, screaming, coming in at the gallop in no order at all and needing none, the way the wind needs no order. They went through the outer fires like a scythe through standing barley. Matěj saw a man stand up from his blanket and fall down again with his head opened. He saw a horse leap a fire, all four feet tucked, beautiful, and come down on the far side on top of a man who had not yet woken. He heard the sabres. A sabre stroke makes a sound you do not forget, a short wet chop, like a cleaver in a butcher's yard. And behind the hussars, coming out of the mist at a trot, a walk almost, in good order, the heavy horse. He knew whose they were before he saw the banners. There was only one man in the south who had heavy horse like that and would bring them out at dawn against eight thousand men and not wait to count first. He had stood in front of those horses' banners at Breadfield as a younger man, on the same side, and seen them turn at a right angle in the middle of a charge, a whole wing of armoured horse, and go in on the Turk's flank as if they had been told the answer to a riddle. Kinizsi. Count of Temes, Captain of the Lower Parts. The miller's son, the men said, who had handed King Matthias a cup of water on a millstone. Who fought with two swords. Who had never lost. "Shields!" Matěj was shouting. "Shields here! On me!" Some of them came. That was the thing he would hold onto afterward, through the march to Buda, through the winter, through all the long walk home: some of them came. Hynek came, in his shirt, with his pavise on his back and his sword in his teeth like a dog with a bone. Kuba came, without a match, carrying his handgun by the barrel like a club. A dozen of the old company came, then twenty, then more, men he had stood beside at Laa and Głogów and in the snow, and they planted their shields edge to edge in a rough ring in the trampled grass with whoever had a pike inside it, and for a moment, a long moment, it held. It was a wall. It was a small wall, and it had no wagons and no guns and no horse on its flank, and it was built of hungry men who had been drunk four hours earlier, but it was the thing they knew how to be, and they were being it. The hussars came at it and sheered off, as horses will at a solid thing. Then the heavy horse came on, not hurrying. Matěj saw him. The man himself. He came up behind his own line on a horse the colour of wet slate, the biggest horse Matěj had ever seen, and the man on it was nearly too big for the horse. Grey-headed, bare-headed in the dawn, the way the old king had been bare-headed in the square in Vienna. He had a sword in his hand, only one, and he was not shouting. He reined in for a moment fifty paces off and looked at the little ring of painted shields in the grass. He looked at it for a long time. Matěj had the strangest feeling that the man recognised it. That he knew exactly what it was, and how it had been made, and who had paid for it, and how much, and for how long. Then he raised the sword and let it fall, and the horse came on. A wall is a promise. Matěj understood that as the lances came down, understood it all at once and completely, the way you understand a thing just before you stop being able to use it. The king's wall was not willow and leather and painted linen. It was not even men. It was the promise that if you stood here, and did not run, and were slaughtered where you stood, somebody would have paid for it. Somebody would have counted out the dinars in a reeve's house on the plain, in fish and copper pots, and that would mean that it meant something. That was what had held the shields up at Głogów and at Eperjes. Not courage. Not the song. The account. And the account was closed. The horses hit the ring. He was knocked down. His pavise went over on top of him, which saved his life, because a horse came over the top of it and the board took the hoof and broke and the hoof did not take his chest. He lay in the grass under a broken shield with the noise going over him and could not breathe and could not move and smelled horse and blood and crushed reeds and the sharp green smell of the grass torn up, and above him, through a gap in the splintered board, he saw the sky, which had gone from the colour of a knife to the colour of a dove, and a single heron going over, very high, unhurried, with its neck folded and its legs trailing, going somewhere else. --- ## VII. The Reeds Erzsébet found her son in the afternoon, after the horsemen had gone. She had not been looking for him. She told herself that. She had gone down to the water with Panni because somebody had to see what was left of the sheds and the boats, and because the horsemen had gone up the road to the north with their prisoners roped in long lines behind them, hundreds of them, and the village had come out of its houses and stood in the road and watched them go, and some of the women had thrown things, and some of the men had gone out across the field to where the dead were lying and begun to take their boots. She did not want to see that. She went down to the water. The sheds were black ribs. The boats had mostly been left alone, because soldiers do not understand boats. And in the reeds beyond the last boat, in the green shade where the water was waist-deep and warm as blood and smelled of rot and mint, there was a man standing very still with only his head out of the water, and the head was her son's. He had been standing there since dawn. He had run, when the ring broke. He had run without deciding to; his legs had decided; he had been standing beside Matěj and then he had been running, through the camp, through the fires, past men dying and men dead, down the slope to the water, and into it, and into the reeds, and he had stood there for nine hours with the leeches on him and the riders going up and down the bank and once, a hussar sitting his horse at the water's edge for a long time looking straight at the reeds, straight at him, and riding away. She stood on the bank. He stood in the water. Neither of them said anything for a while. "Is he dead?" said Gergő at last. "The big one. With the raven." "I don't know. I didn't look." "He stood," Gergő said. "When they came. He stood and he called us to him and some of them went. I didn't go. I was right there and I didn't go." She looked at him. His face, above the black water, with the reed shadows moving on it. She could see the bones of it under the skin. He had not been eating, not for weeks; the soldiers had not been eating either, she understood suddenly; they had come into her village starving, not only greedy, starving, and that did not make any difference to anything, and she was surprised that she had noticed it at all. "The count's men are taking all the Czechs to Buda," she said. "The reeve says they'll be hanged, or sent out of the kingdom. Either way they don't come back. The reeve says anyone in the village who hides one hangs with him." "Yes." "There are men in this village whose sheds you burned." "Yes." "Old Gáspár says he'd know you anywhere. He says you've got your father's walk." Her son said nothing. There was a sound from up the slope: Panni, coming down the path, calling for her, the girl's voice high and cross and frightened, the way it always was now. Erzsébet turned her head toward it and then back toward the reeds. "Stay there," she said. "Stay there till it's dark." She went up the path and took her daughter's hand and walked her back to the house, and when it was dark she came down again with a pair of her husband's old trousers and a shirt, and a knife, and a bowl of the burned fish that was all anyone in Halászfalu was going to eat for a while. She sat on the bank while he ate it. She cut his hair, in the dark, by feel, close to the skull, the way the fishermen wore theirs, and threw the hair in the river. She took the soldier's jerkin and the soldier's belt, with the little purse on it that had nothing in it except a square iron crossbow head, and she weighted them with a stone and threw them into the deep water past the last boat. The crossbow head she kept back. She did not know why. She turned it over in her fingers, in the dark, and it was cold and heavy and blunt at the tip as if it had already hit something. She put it in her apron. "You'll be my sister's son," she said, "from Szeged. You came down for the harvest. You don't talk much. You don't know anything about anything." "Yes." "You'll mend the boats. You'll go out with the nets. You'll learn it all again." "I knew it once." "Then you'll know it again." He was sitting on the bank now, in her husband's shirt, with his knees drawn up. He looked at his hands. She looked at them too. They were not a fisher's hands. They were broad and scarred across the knuckles, and there was a ridge of callus along the outside of the left palm that she did not know the reason for, and would not ask, and he would never tell her. It was the place where, for eleven years, the strap of a pavise had pulled. --- ## VIII. Buda, Autumn 1492 They took the pavises first. They stood in the yard below the castle at Buda in the rain, a long grey field of men, what was left of eight thousand, and the count's officers walked down the lines and took the shields from their backs and threw them on a pile. Matěj's went on the pile with the rest. Red ground. Black raven. The broken corner where the hoof had come through. He watched it go and was surprised to find he felt nothing much, or nothing he had a name for. It was a board. Then the helmets, those that had them. Then the swords. Then the knives, even the eating knives, which seemed petty, and a man three down from Matěj said so, and was hit in the mouth for it. Then a clerk stood on a cart and read from a paper in Latin, and then in Hungarian, and then, badly, in German, and then somebody who had been a captain once and was not now read it again in Czech. They were dismissed from the service of the king. They were to leave the kingdom of Hungary within the term appointed and not return. They were to make no claim upon the treasury for wages owed, now or in time to come, by themselves or by any person in their name. That was all. "Owed," said Kuba, beside him. Kuba had lost two teeth at Halászfalu and his voice whistled now. "He said *owed*. You hear that? It's written down. They wrote it down that they owe us." "They wrote it down that we can't ask." "Same thing. You don't write down that a man can't ask for a thing unless there's a thing." Matěj looked at him, and despite everything he laughed, and the guard nearest them looked round sharply, and he stopped. Haugwitz was not among them. He had got out of the field at Halászfalu with a couple of thousand of the best of them, the horse and the men who were near the horse, and gone west, people said, up the river into Austria. People said he was living off the country there. People said a great many things. Tettauer's brother Balthasar was not among them either; he was at Belgrade, they said, with what was left of the frontier garrison, and the frontier garrison had not been paid either, and Matěj thought about that for a while and then stopped thinking about it, because there was nothing in it but more of the same. They let them out of the gate in the afternoon in batches of fifty. Matěj's batch went down the hill toward the river in the rain. There were people in the street, Buda people, merchants and women and boys, standing under the eaves, watching them go, the way the Viennese had watched them come in seven years ago. Nobody threw anything. A woman in a doorway said something to the man beside her, and Matěj, who had learned a soldier's Hungarian in twenty-three years and not much more, caught one word of it, and then caught it again from a boy farther down, said with a kind of satisfaction. *Fekete.* Black. "What are they saying?" said Kuba. Matěj listened. It was being said all along the street now, under the eaves, low, the way people say a thing they have just found the word for. *A fekete sereg.* The black army. He had never heard it before. In twenty-three years under the raven, nobody had ever called them that. They had been the king's men, the paid men, the Czechs, the *zsoldosok*, the hired soldiers, the standing army, a dozen names, none of them that one. He did not know why it was black. It was not their armour, which had been every colour and was now gone. It was not their banners, which had been white once, or silver, and had only gone dark from being carried. It was black the way a mood is black, he supposed. The way a deed is. A name for a thing that had gone bad. He understood, walking down the hill in the rain with no shield on his back for the first time since he was nineteen, that this was the name the thing would keep. Not the king's men. Not the wall. The name the villages had given it, the last summer, on the plain. They were given it on the day they stopped existing. At the bottom of the hill, by the river, he stopped and put his hand inside his shirt. He had a thing there that the count's officers had not taken, because it was nothing, because it was a rag: a square of painted linen the size of his palm, cut from the corner of the pavise where the hoof had broken it, in the first hour after the battle, while he lay under it in the grass and could not yet move. He had cut it with a sliver of the broken board. He had not known why. He looked at it now in the rain. On the top was the red ground and a little of the raven's wing. Where the linen had torn at the edge he could see the white under it. And on the white, a small curve of red, faded, cracked, but there. The lip of the chalice. Brno. The wall of the Špilberk. Nineteen years old, on the other side. He put it back in his shirt. "Where will you go?" said Kuba. "Home." "Where's that?" Matěj thought about it. "North," he said. They went north. --- > In the spring of 1493, on the seventh day of May, the remnant of the Black Army that had followed John Haugwitz west was cornered by imperial troops under Georg Eynczinger near the River Thaya, in Lower Austria. It was destroyed. Haugwitz, according to most accounts, died with it. > > A year later, at Belgrade, the unpaid frontier garrison under Balthasar Tettauer agreed to sell the fortress to the Ottomans. Pál Kinizsi discovered the plot, arrested the conspirators and had them starved to death in the fortress cellars. Kinizsi himself died that same year, after a stroke. He was buried at Nagyvázsony, in the Pauline monastery he had founded. > > The name stuck. --- ## Historical Note This is a work of fiction built on a historical frame. Matěj Brabec, Gergő, Erzsébet, Panni, Kuba and Hynek are invented. John Haugwitz (Hanuš Haugvic z Biskupic), Wilhelm and Balthasar Tettauer, Jan Filipec, Stephen Zápolya, Pál Kinizsi, King Matthias Corvinus and King Vladislaus II are real, and the events they move through are drawn from the record. **What the story takes from the sources** - **The name.** "Black Army" (*fekete sereg*, *Legio Nigra*) was never used during Matthias's lifetime; it appears only after his death in 1490, as the army fragmented. The two leading explanations are Haugwitz's own epithet, "Black John," and the period use of "black" for soldiers who were ruthless or out of control. The story lets both stand, and has Matěj hear the name for the first time on the day the army is disbanded. - **Not black at all.** The pavises were not painted black. They were willow boards covered in leather and painted linen, brightly decorated with heraldry and personal devices, and the soldiers' armour was individual and mixed. The army's banner in the Philostratus Chronicle looks dark today because its silver pigment has oxidised. - **Pay and the pages.** Pavisors earned double the ordinary infantry wage, and a 1481 letter records that armoured infantry needed a page for each harness and shield, with pages paid a double bounty. The army was funded largely by a direct household tax on the peasantry, levied up to twice a year in wartime, and backed by the stable 1467 coinage of 100 silver dinars to the gold florin. - **Tactics.** The pavise wall and the chained wagon fort (*tabor*) came from Hussite practice. Handgunners rested their barrels on the shield edge, and up to a quarter of the infantry carried firearms. The epigraph is Matthias's own description of the armoured infantry as a "wall." - **The arc.** The 1485 entry into starving Vienna. The siege of Głogów in 1488 under Haugwitz and Wilhelm Tettauer. Matthias's death in Vienna in April 1490\. The 70–80% tax cut under Vladislaus II and the end of regular pay. The Peace of Pressburg in 1491, Haugwitz's refusal to give up Silesia, and Filipec's 100,000-florin settlement. The victory over John Albert of Poland at Eperjes (Prešov) in December 1491 with about 18,000 men. The unpaid army of about 8,000 sent south, the plundering, and Kinizsi's dawn attack at Halászfalu in late August 1492\. The prisoners marched to Buda, disarmed, and banished without their pay. The Thaya in May 1493, and Belgrade in 1494. - **Kinizsi.** The millstone legend, the two swords, and the 90-degree wheel of his heavy cavalry into the Ottoman flank at Breadfield (Kenyérmező) in 1479 all come from the sources, though the millstone is folklore. **Where the story fills gaps** - **Halászfalu's location.** The sources name the battle Szegednic–Halászfalu but do not agree on, or clearly give, its exact site. The village here is an imagined fishing village on a backwater of the southern plain, which fits the name (*halász*, fisherman) and the army's southward deployment, but it should not be taken as a located place. - **Haugwitz's fate.** The supplied sources and most English-language summaries say he was killed at the Thaya in 1493\. Some Czech material is less certain. The closing note hedges with "according to most accounts." - **The battles' small details.** No surviving account describes the fighting at Eperjes or Halászfalu closely. The wagon fort in the snow, the Polish ladders, the burning match kept under the arm, and the hussars out of the dawn mist are reconstructions consistent with the army's known methods and the season, not recorded facts. - **Matthias's death.** Contemporary rumour blamed poisoned figs. Modern opinion favours a stroke. Kuba's "I don't believe in figs" is the soldiers' version of that debate. **Sources used** - *The Black Army of Hungary and Captain "Black" John Haugwitz: Origins, Campaigns, and Fall* (supplied PDF). - *Svarta legionen: Vapenarsenal, organisatorisk struktur och taktiska innovationer under kung Mattias Corvinus* (supplied PDF). - *Chronological History of the Black Army of Hungary and the Reign of King Matthias Corvinus (1458–1494)* (supplied PDF). - [Black Army of Hungary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%5FArmy%5Fof%5FHungary?ref=battlefield-witness.com), Wikipedia, consulted for the dissolution sequence (1490–1494). - [Pál Kinizsi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A1l%5FKinizsi?ref=battlefield-witness.com), Wikipedia, consulted for Kinizsi's background, the millstone legend, Bonfini's "two swords," and his death and burial. --- The word hussar has its roots in Hungary and the Hungarian language: - Linguistic origin ( húsz = twenty): The name *huszár* derives directly from the Hungarian word húsz, which means twenty**.** ---