Page:Bohemia An Historical Sketch.djvu/70

 enormous army, which is said to have consisted of 140,000 men. Daniel Romanovic, King of Russia and Prince of Kiew, the Prince of Cracow, and many of the tribes of Eastern Europe, Servians, Bulgarians, and Wallachians, joined the Hungarian standard. In the meantime Ottokar had also assembled an army of 100,000 men, and—a mountainous country like Styria not being adapted to the movements of enormous armies, which largely consisted of cavalry—the plains on the frontier of Hungary and the duchy of Austria, through which the river March flows, became the seat of war. On the banks of this river, near the village of Kressenbrunn, a great battle took place (1260), in which the Hungarians were defeated with great slaughter; we read that they lost 18,000 men in battle, and that 14,000 more were driven into the river March while flying from the field. King Bela now renounced all rights on Styria; and Ottokar, to strengthen his hold on that country, induced the German King Richard of Cornwall to invest him with it as a fief. After their great defeat at Kressenbrunn the Hungarians, though they were in 1270 already again in arms against Ottokar, avoided meeting the Bohemian army in the open field till they obtained a powerful ally in Rudolph of Habsburg.

In 1268 King Přemysl Ottokar concluded a treaty with his nephew Duke Henry of Carinthia, by which that prince recognized him as his heir in case of his dying without male descendants. On Duke Henry's death in the following year Ottokar was able to add Carinthia, with the dependent lands of Carniola and Istria, part of Friulia, and the town of Pordenone, to his already vast dominions; several towns of Northern Italy, Treviso, Feltre, Verona, and others, also recognized him as their "over-lord"

Ottokar's power had now attained its summit (1269); but dangers arising from the election of a German king already began to menace it. Ottokar was probably not anxious to obtain the German crown, which indeed he had declined before, as long as that crown remained in the hands of King Richard, who had no power of his own in Germany, and was entirely in accord with the Bohemian king.

The death of Richard of Cornwall (1272) caused a complete change in the prospects of Ottokar; his great conquests had aroused the animosity of the German princes, specially of Louis, Count Palatine of Bavaria; and the