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The Magyar Conquest

From the creator of The Last Neanderthal and Tristan & Iseult.

Raid and pillage the Carpathian Basin as you lead the Magyars to a new homeland

What is it?
Was the Honfoglalás (Hungarian Conquest) scenario from Battles of the Forgotten too laggy for you to play? Me, too. Instead, live the Magyar Conquest on an optimal Tiny-sized map!

Story Excerpt
The steppe stood before him: a rolling, endless god of infinity who provided a bounty of grazing lands and riches for those warriors with the daring to conquer it. A god, it was mighty but well-tread: pock marks of horseshoes spread across its wind-swept brownish-green face. A war god, his people were its servants, carrying ruin and despair across it and into the soft settled lands beyond. A fickle god, it too could bring destruction to those nomadic servants, like his people, crossing its gaping maw.

Pursued by the ferocious Pecheneg who had seized their ancestral pastures, Árpád led his people through the Verecke Pass in the Carpathian mountains to the basin known to the Romans as Pannonia. Here, Slavs, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Moravians, and Vlachs conquered, migrated, and settled. Here too had crossed the Goths, Alans, and Avars in their raids into Europe. Here, the grasses still lay folded under the ancient weight of Attila's horses as they marched to conquer the Caesars four centuries before. Here, the Seven Tribes of the Magyars would cross.

The steppe stood before him.

History
A steppe people known for their horsemanship and archery, the Magyars originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, the homelands of many nomadic peoples such as the Cimmerians, Scythians, Huns, Alans, and Avars. Beginning in the 9th century AD, migrations of Turks from Central Asia, likely forced to find new grazing lands due to climate change, pushed the Pechenegs westward into Magyar pastures. Unable to defend against the rival tribe, the Magyars migrated west, beginning with raids against the Eastern Romans and the Franks. By 895 AD, the raids turned into a full-scale migration, as the Magyar gyula (war chief) Árpád led his people through the Carpathian mountains into modern-day Hungary and Romania.

The region they invaded, the Carpathian Basin or, as the Romans called it, Pannonia, had long been the crossroads of nomadic migrations. After the disintegration of Attila's Hunnic empire, the Avars, a Turkic people, migrated into the region in the 6th century. The Avar Khaganate would be destroyed by Charlemagne between 791 and 795. A Slavic kingdom, Moravia, centered in the modern-day Czech Republic and Slovakia, filled the vacuum of power along with the Bulgarian Khanate invading from the south in the early 9th century. By the time of the Magyar migrations, the region was home to a diverse population including Greeks, Romans, Slavs, Germans, Bulgars, Moravians, and Vlach (a Romanian people).

Like other steppe peoples, the Magyars lived and fought in the saddle and specialized in horse archery and hit and run tactics. While they avoided melee confrontation, the Magyar horsemen carried lances and fokos, a one-handed axe. Pagans, they developed a reputation among the Christians as a vicious people prone to pillage and plunder.

The Magyars would continue to raid as far afield as Bavaria and Franconia before gradually becoming settled and converting to Christianity by the 11th century.