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A river, a guarded bridge, and a ring of wagons seemed to protect Hungary’s army—until the Mongols found another way across. At the Battle of Mohi in 1241, Batu and Subutai drew King Béla IV’s forces into a defensive position that became increasingly difficult to control.
This military history documentary explores the Sajó River crossings, Mongol night movements, battlefield coordination, and the command pressures that turned Hungarian defenses into a trap. Discover how the defeat broke Hungary’s principal field army and opened the way for further Mongol operations. A detailed history of the Mongol invasion of Hungary, medieval warfare, and the strategy behind one of the defining battles of the 13th century.
This military history documentary explores the Sajó River crossings, Mongol night movements, battlefield coordination, and the command pressures that turned Hungarian defenses into a trap. Discover how the defeat broke Hungary’s principal field army and opened the way for further Mongol operations. A detailed history of the Mongol invasion of Hungary, medieval warfare, and the strategy behind one of the defining battles of the 13th century.
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LearningTranscript
00:00King Bela's army had chosen a position that looked difficult to break.
00:04The Sazhou River stood between the Hungarians and the Mongols.
00:09A guarded bridge controlled the most obvious crossing.
00:13Marshy ground complicated movement along the riverbanks,
00:16while wagons formed a defensive enclosure around much of the Hungarian camp.
00:22From inside that position, the logic seemed clear.
00:26If Batu and Subutai wanted to reach the army,
00:30they would have to force their way across the river,
00:33emerge through a narrow approach,
00:36and face troops already waiting for them.
00:40For a time, the bridge appeared to be exactly where the battle would be decided.
00:45But the Mongols did not see the Sazhou as a wall.
00:49They saw it as a problem.
00:51While Hungarian attention remained fixed on the visible crossing,
00:57Mongol forces were searching for other ways to reach the opposite bank.
01:02Darkness gave them cover.
01:05Distance gave them room.
01:07And the wider the Mongol movement became,
01:10the less important the guarded bridge was going to be.
01:13That changed everything inside Bela's camp.
01:18The wagons that offered protection also limited movement.
01:22The river that seemed to secure one side of the army
01:25could no longer guarantee safety if Mongol troops appeared elsewhere.
01:31And once pressure began to build from more than one direction,
01:35the Hungarian position started to work against the men inside it.
01:39Before the battle was over, Bela would be forced to flee.
01:44His main field army would collapse,
01:47and the road deeper into Hungary would be left dangerously exposed.
01:51So how did one of the strongest armies Hungary could assemble
01:55end up trapped behind the very river that was supposed to protect it?
02:00By 1241, the Mongol advance had already carried deep into eastern and central Europe.
02:07This was no longer a distant threat moving somewhere beyond Hungary's borders.
02:14The danger was approaching the kingdom itself,
02:17and King Bela IV could not treat it as another raid
02:21that might be contained by local troops or frontier defenses.
02:25He needed an army large enough to meet the invasion in the field.
02:30That meant gathering the military strength of the kingdom
02:34and bringing it together before the Mongols could move farther into Hungarian territory.
02:40The men advancing toward Hungary had already shown how dangerous that could be.
02:47Their strength did not depend only on mounted archers or speed.
02:52Mongol armies were effective because movement,
02:55reconnaissance, communication, and command worked together.
02:59They searched for weakness before committing fully.
03:03They shifted direction quickly.
03:06Separate forces could move apart and then cooperate again at the moment that mattered.
03:11At the head of the campaign was Batu, a senior Mongol prince.
03:17Alongside him was Subutai,
03:19one of the most experienced commanders involved in the invasion.
03:23For Bela, their names mattered less than what their army could do.
03:28The Mongols did not need to approach an enemy in the most obvious way.
03:33They could probe one position, threaten another,
03:37and force defenders to make decisions before they understood where the main danger was developing.
03:44That made Hungary's problem larger than simply stopping cavalry at the frontier.
03:50If Bela lost the kingdom's principal field army,
03:54there would be no comparable force immediately ready to replace it.
03:59The roads, settlements, and open country beyond the battlefield would become far harder to defend.
04:06So, men were summoned.
04:09Forces gathered.
04:11The king did succeed in bringing a substantial army together.
04:15That was important, because Hungary had not failed before the battle even began.
04:22It had an army.
04:24It had a king determined to resist.
04:27And it still had the chance to force the Mongols into a fight under conditions that reduced their greatest advantage.
04:35Freedom of movement.
04:37The question was where.
04:40Bela needed ground that could slow the Mongols, restrict their approach, and give his own army time to react.
04:48Ahead lay the Sajo River.
04:51To the Hungarians, it seemed to offer exactly what they needed.
04:55The position near the Sajo River made sense for reasons that were immediately visible.
05:01The river itself formed a natural barrier between the Hungarian army and the Mongols.
05:08Movement along parts of its banks was made more difficult by marshy or broken ground.
05:14Most importantly, the obvious crossing was a bridge that could be watched, defended, and reinforced.
05:21That mattered, because the Mongols were at their most dangerous when they had room.
05:28On open ground, mounted forces could spread out, change direction, threaten the flanks, and force an opponent to react again
05:37and again.
05:38A river reduced those possibilities.
05:41A bridge reduced them even further.
05:45If the Mongols had to cross at one narrow point, they could not simply bring their mobility to bear all
05:53at once.
05:54They would have to approach the bridge, force the crossing, and then deploy on the far bank while Hungarian troops
06:01were already waiting.
06:04Bela's army also had another layer of protection.
06:07Wagons were used to enclose and strengthen the camp, creating a more controlled defensive space around the mass of men,
06:16horses, equipment, and supplies gathered there.
06:20From inside, this could feel reassuring.
06:23The perimeter was defined.
06:26The army was concentrated.
06:28The bridge was visible.
06:30The river seemed to reduce the directions from which a serious attack could come.
06:36Nothing about that logic was absurd.
06:39The danger lay in the assumptions behind it.
06:42A defensive position is strongest when the enemy is forced to use the routes you expect him to use.
06:49If the Mongols could cross somewhere else, the river would stop functioning as a wall.
06:56And once Mongol troops reached the same side as the Hungarian camp, the very concentration that created protection could begin
07:06to create problems.
07:08Wagons that marked a perimeter also limited exits.
07:12Large numbers of men and horses needed room to move, form, turn, reinforce threatened points, and withdraw when necessary.
07:21The tighter the space became, the harder those movements would be.
07:27For now, however, the camp still looked like a strong answer to the Mongol threat.
07:32Across the river, Batu and Subutai had to solve it.
07:36Their problem was not simply how to attack the Hungarians.
07:40It was how to prevent Bela from using the river exactly as he intended.
07:45That meant studying the bridge, the approaches to it, the riverbanks, the surrounding ground, and the way the Hungarians reacted
07:55whenever Mongol forces appeared near the crossing.
07:58The obvious route still mattered.
08:02In fact, it mattered precisely because it was obvious.
08:06If pressure at the bridge could hold Hungarian attention, then any movement elsewhere along the river became more valuable.
08:14The Mongols did not need to destroy Bela's entire position in a single blow.
08:20They only needed to make the Hungarians respond to one danger while another was developing beyond it.
08:27And as both armies settled around the Sazhou, the bridge became the place everyone could see.
08:34The rest of the river was becoming the place the Hungarians could not afford to ignore.
08:41The first serious pressure fell where the Hungarians expected it, at the bridge across the Sazhou.
08:49For Bela's army, this was the obvious place to stop the Mongols.
08:54The bridge narrowed the battlefield to a confined crossing.
08:59Mounted troops that normally depended on space could not simply spread out across the river.
09:05Men approaching the far bank had limited room to deploy, and the defenders knew exactly where they would appear.
09:12That made the crossing dangerous.
09:15A force moving across a bridge could not bring all of its strength forward at once.
09:21Those at the front had to emerge first, while the men behind them were still confined to the narrow route.
09:29If the defenders struck at that moment, the attackers could be forced back
09:34before enough troops reached the far side to form properly.
09:39The Hungarians understood this.
09:42When Mongol forces approached, Hungarian troops responded.
09:46Fighting developed around the crossing, and the defenders showed that the river position could work.
09:53The Mongols could not simply ride forward and overwhelm them.
09:58That mattered psychologically as well as tactically.
10:02Every moment the bridge remained contested seemed to confirm the original logic of Bela's position.
10:09If the Mongols were forced to concentrate there, their mobility counted for much less.
10:17The river was doing what the Hungarians had hoped it would do,
10:21reducing a wide battlefield to one narrow point.
10:25For soldiers near the bridge, the task was straightforward.
10:29The enemy was there.
10:31The crossing was here.
10:33Stopped them before they established themselves on this side.
10:38But commanders had to think beyond what could be seen directly ahead.
10:43The Sajo was not only a bridge.
10:46It was a river extending beyond the immediate battlefield,
10:50bordered by difficult ground and stretches that could not all be defended with equal strength.
10:56That distinction was critical.
10:59If the bridge was the only practical crossing, Bela's position remained strong.
11:06Mongol troops would continue arriving through a narrow route where Hungarian forces could meet them.
11:13If another Mongol force crossed elsewhere, however, the entire defensive calculation changed.
11:21The surviving accounts do not make every movement equally clear,
11:25and historians have reconstructed the precise sequence differently.
11:30But the broader point is firm.
11:33The Mongols did not treat the defended bridge as their only way across.
11:39While Hungarian attention remained naturally fixed on the fighting there,
11:44other Mongol forces were looking for alternatives.
11:47That was the hidden weakness in the Hungarian position.
11:51They could see the danger at the bridge.
11:54They could reinforce it.
11:56They could fight it.
11:58But they could not place the same concentration of troops along every stretch of the Sajo
12:03while keeping the main army together.
12:06The stronger the bridge fight became,
12:09the more valuable a successful crossing somewhere else would be.
12:14For the Hungarians, the bridge looked like the battle.
12:17For the Mongols, it was only one part of it.
12:22As darkness covered the Sajo, the Mongol problem remained the same.
12:27The guarded bridge was difficult of force.
12:30Hungarian troops knew where an attack would emerge.
12:33And any force relying only on that crossing
12:37risked being delayed at the narrowest point on the battlefield.
12:41So the river had to be approached differently.
12:44Surviving accounts differ over parts of the sequence,
12:49and later retellings sometimes present the maneuver more neatly than the evidence allows.
12:55But the larger picture is clear.
12:58Mongol forces were not relying on the main bridge alone.
13:02Forces associated with Subutai's wing sought another way across.
13:07That was easier to describe than to accomplish.
13:12Moving troops at night brought its own dangers.
13:15Men could lose contact with nearby units.
13:18Horses had to be controlled.
13:21Riverbanks had to be approached without turning movement into disorder.
13:25A usable crossing had to be found,
13:28and troops reaching the opposite bank still needed enough cohesion
13:33to continue operating as an organized force.
13:37Darkness concealed movement, but it also concealed the ground.
13:42A river that looked manageable in daylight
13:45could become far more difficult after dark.
13:48Banks could be steep or soft.
13:51Water depth could change.
13:54Men and animals could bunch together at a crossing
13:56and create exactly the confusion commanders were trying to avoid.
14:02The Mongols accepted those risks because the reward was greater.
14:06They did not need another crossing simply to avoid combat.
14:11They needed men on the Hungarian side of the Sazho
14:14without forcing all of them through the position Bela had prepared to defend.
14:19Once that happened, the meaning of the river changed.
14:24Until then, the Sazho had separated the Hungarian army from much of the Mongol force.
14:31The bridge concentrated danger at one visible point.
14:36An alternate crossing destroyed that simplicity.
14:40Now, Mongol troops could begin approaching from directions
14:44that had not been the center of the Hungarian defensive plan.
14:48And while those movements developed, pressure at the main crossing still mattered.
14:54The bridge did not need to fall immediately to serve the Mongols.
14:59It only needed to continue demanding attention.
15:02Every Hungarian commander watching the crossing
15:05had a reason to believe that more troops might soon be needed there.
15:10Every force held nearby was a force that could not instantly respond somewhere else.
15:16That was how separate threats began to reinforce one another.
15:21The Mongols had not yet destroyed Bela's army.
15:25They had not eliminated the bridge defenses.
15:28They had done something more subtle.
15:31They had begun to make part of the Hungarian defensive system irrelevant.
15:41But neither now protected the Hungarian camp in the way Bela had intended.
15:47As the battle developed, the Hungarian commanders faced a problem
15:52very different from the one they had prepared for.
15:55The bridge still mattered.
15:58But it was no longer enough to concentrate on that single approach.
16:03Mongol troops had reached the Hungarian side elsewhere,
16:06and the river defense was becoming a battle fought on several axes.
16:11That forced Bela's army to react inside a position designed for a simpler problem.
16:17At first, the wagon enclosure had helped concentrate and protect the army.
16:22It created a defined perimeter and placed men, horses, supplies, and equipment inside a defensible space.
16:31But concentration has a cost.
16:33A field army needs room.
16:36Units need space to form.
16:39Horsemen need room to mount, turn, and move.
16:42Reinforcements need clear routes toward threatened sectors.
16:47Messengers need paths through the mass of troops.
16:50Commanders need to know that an order given at one point can actually reach the men expected to carry it
16:57out.
16:57And if a position becomes impossible to hold,
17:01an army needs exits wide enough to withdraw without dissolving into disorder.
17:09Inside Bela's camp, all of those needs were now competing with one another.
17:14Men were required at different points.
17:17Threats had to be identified before forces could be sent against them.
17:22And every movement took place among wagons, horses, equipment,
17:27camp followers, and other formations trying to do the same thing.
17:32The enclosure could still provide protection.
17:35Hungarian troops could still fight.
17:37This was not yet an army that had simply given up.
17:42The important change was that the Mongols were forcing the Hungarians to use their position in ways it had not
17:50been designed to handle.
17:51Was the main blow still coming at the bridge?
17:55How much Mongol strength had crossed elsewhere?
18:00Which part of the perimeter needed reinforcement first?
18:04Could troops be moved there without weakening another sector?
18:07Every question consumed time, and the Mongols benefited from every delay.
18:15Their success did not depend on instantly overwhelming every Hungarian unit.
18:20It depended on creating more problems than the defenders could solve at the same moment.
18:26A force sent toward one danger was unavailable somewhere else.
18:31A formation delayed inside the camp could not influence fighting beyond it.
18:38An order based on information only minutes old might arrive after the situation had changed again.
18:45The original Hungarian plan had been based on controlling access across the river.
18:52Now the struggle was shifting toward control of the space around the army itself.
18:58That was the deeper Mongol achievement.
19:01They had transformed the battle from a contest over one crossing into a struggle over whether the Hungarian army could
19:09still deploy and react as one force.
19:12The Hungarians had not yet collapsed.
19:15They were still resisting, still moving troops, still attempting to restore control.
19:21But the margin for error was shrinking.
19:24Every new direction of pressure made coordination harder.
19:28Every movement inside the enclosure consumed more space.
19:33And every delay gave the Mongols another opportunity to connect separate threats into one growing crisis.
19:41The next question was whether the wagon camp remained a defense or began to hold Bela's army in place.
19:48The crisis inside the Hungarian position did not begin with a single moment of panic.
19:56It developed as several military problems started feeding into one another.
20:01Mongol pressure was coming from more than one direction,
20:05while Hungarian troops were trying to respond from inside a crowded and increasingly difficult space.
20:13The wagon enclosure still marked a defensive perimeter.
20:18But every movement within it now had consequences.
20:22Men trying to reach one threatened sector had to pass other units.
20:27Mounted troops required room that was becoming harder to find.
20:32Horses, wagons, supplies, equipment, servants, and fighting men all occupied the same restricted area.
20:40A formation that might have maneuvered effectively in open ground could lose precious time simply trying to move through the
20:49camp.
20:50And time was becoming one of the Mongols' most useful weapons.
20:54They did not need every Hungarian soldier to lose discipline at once.
20:59They needed the army to stop functioning as a coordinated whole.
21:04That process could begin gradually.
21:07One group responds late.
21:10Another moves without knowing what is happening elsewhere.
21:14Orders arrive after the situation has already changed.
21:18A route that seemed open becomes crowded.
21:21A unit sent forward discovers that the danger is no longer where commanders expected it.
21:28None of those failures alone destroys an army.
21:31Together, under constant pressure, they can make organized resistance steadily harder.
21:39For an ordinary soldier, the wider battle would have been difficult to understand.
21:45The men inside the enclosure could not see the whole river line or follow every Mongol movement outside the camp.
21:53They experienced the battle at ground level.
21:57Units passing in different directions.
22:00Horses and men competing for space.
22:03Orders struggling to move through noise and confusion.
22:07Enemy pressure appearing at points that had not originally seemed dangerous.
22:12And exits becoming more important with every passing stage of the fight.
22:17Hungarian forces continued to resist.
22:21But separate groups fighting effectively were not the same as an army maneuvering under one coherent plan.
22:29The more fragmented the response became, the more dangerous Mongol mobility became outside the enclosure.
22:36A compact formation could protect itself.
22:40Scattered groups trying to leave the position were far more exposed.
22:45That made the exits increasingly important.
22:48Staying inside meant remaining under growing pressure.
22:53Leaving meant giving up some of the protection the camp provided.
22:56And beyond the wagons lay open ground where Mongol-mounted troops could regain the freedom of movement the river position
23:04had originally been chosen to restrict.
23:07The battlefield was creating a brutal contradiction.
23:12Inside the camp, space was becoming more restricted.
23:16Outside it, space favored the enemy.
23:19Not every direction around the Hungarian position had to be sealed equally for this to become dangerous.
23:27Any apparent route away from the camp offered hope of escape.
23:31But moving through it risked breaking formations apart.
23:35Once men began leaving in separate groups, the Mongols no longer had to fight the entire Hungarian army as one
23:43body.
23:44They could confront pieces of it.
23:46That was the danger Bela's commanders now faced.
23:51The river no longer kept the Mongols away.
23:55The bridge no longer contained the battle.
23:57And the enclosure could no longer give the Hungarian army the freedom of movement it increasingly needed.
24:05Bela's force was still on the battlefield.
24:09Men were still fighting.
24:11But the army was losing the thing that mattered most.
24:15The ability to act as one force.
24:19By this stage, the Hungarian army was no longer simply defending a position.
24:24It was trying to keep that position from collapsing faster than it could respond.
24:29Resistance had not vanished.
24:31But the structure that held the army together was weakening.
24:35Units were under pressure from different directions.
24:38Movement inside the enclosure was becoming harder.
24:42Orders took longer to matter.
24:44And once men began looking for ways out, the problem changed again.
24:50A defended camp can protect an army while its formations remain organized.
24:55It becomes far more dangerous when those formations begin to fragment.
25:00Men trying to escape had to pass through limited exits and difficult ground.
25:07Horses, wagons, equipment, and other troops competed for the same routes.
25:13Groups that reached open ground no longer had the protection of the enclosure around them.
25:18And outside the camp, Mongol mobility became increasingly decisive.
25:24This was not one great cavalry charge suddenly destroying the Hungarian army.
25:31The collapse was the accumulated result of everything that had come before.
25:36The pressure at the bridge.
25:38The crossings elsewhere.
25:40The appearance of Mongol forces on the Hungarian side of the Sazhou.
25:46The difficulty of moving troops inside the wagon camp.
25:49The growing uncertainty over where the main danger was coming from.
25:54And finally, the loss of cohesion that turned an army into smaller groups trying to survive separately.
26:03Once formations broke apart, mounted troops had more freedom to pursue them.
26:09A body of soldiers moving together could still defend itself.
26:13Men scattered across open ground were much easier to isolate.
26:18The position that had once seemed to reduce Mongol mobility was now producing the opposite result.
26:26The river had failed to keep the enemy on the far bank.
26:29The bridge had failed to contain the battle.
26:33And the wagons that had helped create a protected camp now complicated movement at the moment when movement mattered most.
26:42This was the final contradiction of Mohi.
26:46The Hungarian army had chosen terrain intended to limit the Mongols.
26:51But once the Mongols crossed the river in more than one place,
26:56it was the Hungarians who found themselves increasingly restricted.
27:01King Bela IV survived the battle and escaped.
27:06That mattered.
27:07The kingdom had lost the field army gathered to stop the invasion,
27:11but it had not lost its king.
27:14The exact number of men killed at Mohi remains disputed,
27:19and the surviving sources do not support one universally accepted total.
27:24What is not disputed is the scale of the military defeat.
27:30Hungary's principal field force had been broken as an effective barrier to the invasion.
27:36Bela had escaped.
27:37But the army he had assembled to stop the Mongols had not.
27:42And beyond the battlefield, the kingdom now faced a much larger disaster.
27:47The defeat at Mohi did not mean that Hungary simply ceased to exist,
27:53but it changed the military situation across the kingdom.
27:58Bela's main field army had been shattered,
28:01and there was no comparable force immediately ready to replace it.
28:06That gave Mongol armies much greater freedom to continue operations across Hungarian territory.
28:13The invasion that followed brought extensive destruction during 1241 and 1242.
28:22Settlements were attacked, large areas of the kingdom were exposed,
28:27and the consequences of Mohi reached far beyond the ground beside the Sazhou.
28:33King Bela continued to flee while trying to preserve royal authority.
28:39His survival mattered because Hungary still had a ruler around whom resistance and recovery
28:44could eventually be organized.
28:47That distinction is important.
28:51Mohi was a devastating battlefield defeat,
28:55but a battlefield victory did not automatically give the Mongols complete political control of the kingdom.
29:02What it did was remove the strongest immediate military obstacle standing in front of them.
29:10The battle also revealed why Mongol armies could be so difficult to stop.
29:16Their advantage was not simply that they moved quickly.
29:19Speed worked together with reconnaissance.
29:23Reconnaissance worked together with coordination.
29:26Separate forces could pressure different points.
29:29Geographic obstacles could be studied rather than accepted.
29:34And when an enemy formation began to break,
29:37mounted troops could exploit the disorder faster than many opponents could recover from it.
29:43But Mohi should not be reduced to the idea that the Mongols were somehow unbeatable.
29:49The lesson is more specific.
29:52At the Sazhou, they identified what the Hungarian defense depended on.
29:57The river was supposed to restrict movement.
30:00The bridge was supposed to concentrate the attack.
30:03The wagon camp was supposed to provide security.
30:07The Mongols did not need to destroy those advantages directly.
30:11They needed to change the conditions that made them advantages in the first place.
30:17Once forces crossed elsewhere,
30:20the river no longer protected the camp as intended.
30:23Once threats appeared from different directions,
30:27the bridge no longer defined the battle.
30:30And once the Hungarian army had to move rapidly inside a confined position,
30:35the wagon enclosure became less useful than it had been at the beginning.
30:41That was what Mohi opened.
30:43Not only a route deeper into Hungary,
30:46but a demonstration of how a mobile army could turn an opponent's assumptions against him.
30:53The Hungarians had chosen the Sazhou
30:56because they hoped the terrain would restrict Mongol movement.
31:00The Mongols won in part because they refused to let the Hungarians decide where movement was possible.
31:07In the end, Mohi was not decided by one dramatic charge or one isolated mistake.
31:15It was decided by the way several reasonable defensive choices were turned against the army that trusted them.
31:22The river had seemed to offer protection.
31:25The bridge had seemed to concentrate the danger.
31:28The wagon camp had seemed to give the Hungarian army order, security, and a defensible perimeter.
31:36Each of those ideas made sense on its own.
31:40Together, they created confidence in a system that depended on one crucial assumption,
31:46that the Mongols would be forced to attack where the Hungarians were strongest.
31:51They were not.
31:54Once Mongol forces found other ways across the Sazhou,
31:58the battlefield changed faster than Bela's army could comfortably adapt.
32:03The river no longer separated the two armies in the way the Hungarians expected.
32:09The bridge no longer defined the main threat,
32:12and the camp that had protected the army also made movement harder as pressure increased.
32:18That is why Mohi became one of the defining battles of the Mongol invasion of Hungary.
32:25Its importance was not only that the Mongols won.
32:29It showed how geography can create confidence without guaranteeing safety.
32:35How a defensive position can become less useful when the enemy refuses to attack it on the terms expected.
32:42How reconnaissance, timing, coordination, and movement can matter as much as raw strength.
32:50And how a battle can begin to slip away before the final collapse is visible.
32:56For the men inside the Hungarian camp, those lessons were not abstract.
33:01The exits became harder to use.
33:05Formations began to separate.
33:07The enemy was no longer only across the river.
33:11And once the army lost the ability to move and respond as one force,
33:16the defenses around it could no longer save it.
33:20The Hungarians had chosen the Sazhou because they believed the river would limit the Mongols.
33:26At Mohi, the Mongols showed that terrain only protects an army
33:31as long as the enemy accepts the limits it appears to impose.
33:35If you found this story worth remembering, share your thoughts.
33:40Do you think the Hungarian position at the Sazhou was fundamentally flawed?
33:46Or did the Mongols simply adapt faster once the battle began?