materials: the skills and ambitions of mounted pastoral nomads armed with bows. Mounted archery was the military technique that could hold to ransom urbanized cultures across all Eurasia for the best part of 2,000 years, until gunpowder blew the horseback archer from history as utterly as it blew the Japanese samurai and the Swiss pike-man. Within a very short time, the skills that had defined nomadic warriors from Manchuria to the Russian steppes had fallen from use and almost from memory, enduring only in the accounts of those who had been on the receiving end of nomad arrows and in the minds of armchair strategists. The mounted archers themselves left no manuals. No-one after they vanished had a clue about how actually to do mounted archery – how to slide arrows from quivers, load them and fire them, time after time, while sitting on a galloping horse, let alone doing so in formation. No-one tried it.
Until now. Mounted archery is back, bringing a new understanding of how these warriors gained their supremacy – and there is more to it than that skill alone. Almost all Eurasian pastoral nomads were master-horsemen and master-bowmen, and none matched the Huns in their destructive ability. Nor was leadership enough on its own to explain Hun success. Attila had something extra to underpin his victories, something particular to the Huns. Only with the revival of mounted archery has it become possible to say what that magical element was.
* * *
T he revival of the old skill is entirely due to one man: Lajos Kassai, who is, I suspect, the first true mounted archer in Europe since the departure of the Mongols in 1242. The Mongols left from Hungary; it was in Hungary that Attila had his base; so it is fitting that Kassai is a Hungarian – and particularly fitting that he is based a day’s gallop both from the Mongol line of advance and from Attila’s fifth-century headquarters. What follows is the story of his life’s work: as you read, track the tight interlocking of skill, toughness, dedication and self-assurance. This is what mounted archery gives now, and what it once gave the Huns. Kassai jokes about being Attila reincarnate – ‘I feel I was born in the twentieth century by some administrative error’ – but it’s not entirely a joke, if it’s young Attila under consideration, rather than King Attila.
I heard of Kassai because anyone who knows anything about Huns and mounted archery mentions him. If I had been in the world of horses and bows, I would have heard of him in Colorado or Berlin. As it was, I first heard the name from museum people in Vienna and in the northern Hungarian town of Gyr, and again from a lover of Andalusian horses in northern Hungary who knew Kassai was shortly to demonstrate his skills at a sporting festival in Budapest. Kassai Lajos – if you put the given name second, in the Hungarian style – comes out as Cosh-eye Lah-yosh: the rhythm and the soft sh sounds turned the name into poetry. By now he was becoming an obsession with me.
I and my interpreter Andrea Szegedi found him at the fair on Margaret Island in the Danube. He was dressed in a simple wrap-around costume, nomad-style, a Hun reborn, with three assistants selling his own brands of bow. Could we have a word? A nod, that was all, not even a smile. In a refreshment tent, he fixed me with intense, steady blue eyes in a face blank of expression. I was unsure of myself, not knowing anything about mounted archery, or how long we had, or whether I would see him again. He might have tried to put me at my ease with some polite phrases. Not a bit. It was unsettling – and became more so when I tried for some soundbite responses.
Where, for instance, did his interest in mounted archery come from?
‘Something inside me.’ He replied in halting English, nailing me with a fierce gaze. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, just, why the interest?’
He switched his gaze to Andi, and went on in Hungarian, just as abruptly. ‘It was
Until now. Mounted archery is back, bringing a new understanding of how these warriors gained their supremacy – and there is more to it than that skill alone. Almost all Eurasian pastoral nomads were master-horsemen and master-bowmen, and none matched the Huns in their destructive ability. Nor was leadership enough on its own to explain Hun success. Attila had something extra to underpin his victories, something particular to the Huns. Only with the revival of mounted archery has it become possible to say what that magical element was.
* * *
T he revival of the old skill is entirely due to one man: Lajos Kassai, who is, I suspect, the first true mounted archer in Europe since the departure of the Mongols in 1242. The Mongols left from Hungary; it was in Hungary that Attila had his base; so it is fitting that Kassai is a Hungarian – and particularly fitting that he is based a day’s gallop both from the Mongol line of advance and from Attila’s fifth-century headquarters. What follows is the story of his life’s work: as you read, track the tight interlocking of skill, toughness, dedication and self-assurance. This is what mounted archery gives now, and what it once gave the Huns. Kassai jokes about being Attila reincarnate – ‘I feel I was born in the twentieth century by some administrative error’ – but it’s not entirely a joke, if it’s young Attila under consideration, rather than King Attila.
I heard of Kassai because anyone who knows anything about Huns and mounted archery mentions him. If I had been in the world of horses and bows, I would have heard of him in Colorado or Berlin. As it was, I first heard the name from museum people in Vienna and in the northern Hungarian town of Gyr, and again from a lover of Andalusian horses in northern Hungary who knew Kassai was shortly to demonstrate his skills at a sporting festival in Budapest. Kassai Lajos – if you put the given name second, in the Hungarian style – comes out as Cosh-eye Lah-yosh: the rhythm and the soft sh sounds turned the name into poetry. By now he was becoming an obsession with me.
I and my interpreter Andrea Szegedi found him at the fair on Margaret Island in the Danube. He was dressed in a simple wrap-around costume, nomad-style, a Hun reborn, with three assistants selling his own brands of bow. Could we have a word? A nod, that was all, not even a smile. In a refreshment tent, he fixed me with intense, steady blue eyes in a face blank of expression. I was unsure of myself, not knowing anything about mounted archery, or how long we had, or whether I would see him again. He might have tried to put me at my ease with some polite phrases. Not a bit. It was unsettling – and became more so when I tried for some soundbite responses.
Where, for instance, did his interest in mounted archery come from?
‘Something inside me.’ He replied in halting English, nailing me with a fierce gaze. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, just, why the interest?’
He switched his gaze to Andi, and went on in Hungarian, just as abruptly. ‘It was
Similar Books
