Princely judges sat in judgment on the princely captive and condemned
him to death. This sentence caused Lehel no pain; he felt he had
deserved it, not, indeed, for having given battle but for losing it.
Yet it hurt him to the soul to see the rebel Conrad seated amongst his
judges, the traitor who had invited the Hungarians to enter Germany,
and who, by his defection, had caused their defeat. The success of his
dastardly desertion had, however, conciliated the victors and restored
him to their confidence.
Lehel begged but for one favor, and that was to be allowed to wind the
horn, his faithful and inseparable friend, once more, and to sound on
it his funeral dirge. The horn was handed to him. He sounded it for the
last time; and, as he drew from it the sad strains which sounded far
and wide and were mournfully re-echoed by the distant hills, the dying
warrior on the field of Lech lifted up his head, eagerly listening to
the familiar bugle, and the soul which had come back to him, for one
instant, took wings again as soon as the sad strains died away. The
dying music, plaintively quivering, told the tale of an inglorious
death terminating an heroic life. The very henchmen were listening with
rapture.
At that moment Lehel broke away from his place, and, seeing Conrad
before him, felled him to the ground, killing him with a single blow
from the heavy horn. “Thou shalt go before me and be my servant in the
other world,” said Lehel. Thereupon he went to the place of execution.
There is discernible on Lehel’s horn, in our days, a large indentation
which posterity attributes to the event just narrated.
Not only in Germany but also in the southeast of Europe the marauding
Hungarians experienced more than one disaster, and it may be properly
said that in 970, when they attacked the Byzantine empire and were
defeated near Arcadiopolis, their long series of irruptions into
the adjoining countries was brought to a conclusion. They became
convinced that while they themselves were steadily decreasing in
numbers and wasting their strength in continuous wars, the neighboring
nations were becoming every day more formidable by dint of their
unanimity, organization, courage, and skill in warfare, and that, in
consequence, the Hungarian name inspired no more the terror which
the first successes had earned for it. They saw that if they went on
with their inroads, as hitherto, they would thereby but bring about
the dissolution of the empire from within, or that they might provoke
on the part of foreign nations a united attack which they would be
unable to withstand. For this reason they renounced those adventurous
campaigns which began already seriously to menace their existence and
their future in Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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