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.