In the troubled times during the reign of King Béla IV, the king’s brother, Duke Coloman was the Lord of Spiš Castle. Then in the year 1241 the Tatar hordes broke through the Carpathian Mountains. With devastating force they stormed into the kingdom, leaving behind them nothing but scorched earth and fields sown with corpses. Coloman set out to help his brother Béla, and entrusted Spiš and its castle to the Castle‘ s Arnold and Arnold’s son Mikuláš.
The day of reckoning arrived. They could see columns of smoke rising above the burnt settlements along the river Hornád from great distance. Just before the Tatars managed to reach the castle, a messenger from the Duke Coloman had galloped up on an exhausted horse. The Duke was fatally injured and the King was fleeing before the Tatars with a group of loyal subjects to the Dalmatian coast. The King’s army was dismembered. The country was abandoned and left to the mercy of the Tatar tribes.‘
One of the Tatar commanders-in-chief, Sheiban Khan camped with his army by the river Hornád, in the country of Spiš. The Khan arrogantly believed that he would surmount the walls of Spiš Castle in a single assault. He sent his entire army to attack, while he and his daughter observed from Dreveník, the hill standing opposite of the Spiš Castle. However it was not to be so easy. The castle garrison put up a strong fight. On the second day of the attack, the garrison forces decided to attack the enemy from behind.
Mikuláš with a small division bolted out of the castle, with a group of Tatars trailing behind, he disappeared into the deep woods of the Branisko Hills.
The conquest was not turning out as the Khan had imagined. As evening drew on, the exasperated Sheiban gave a signal to withdraw, and his troops pitched camp for the night. Only the Khan’s daughter Shad, who outperformed many soldiers at horsemenship and archery alike, ignored her father’s orders and set off into the forest. Just as she was resting in a clearing and watering her horse, riders rushed out of the woods. As soon as Shad saw them, she fainted upon the ground. She later came to her senses in a luxurious chamber within the castle. The steward’s son, Mikuláš, and his diviosion had taken her from the forest and transported her into the castle using a secret entrance.
On the third day, when the Tatar army once again arrived at the gates of the castle , Arnold the steward stood with Shad upon the castle ramparts and held a knife to her throat. As soon as her father, the khan, saw this he instantly knew what it meant, and he sent negotiators to the castle. The terms were clear, the Khan had to withdraw his army from Spiš and leave only a small force beneath the castle. When they would be 10 day ride away, they would release the beautiful Shad, and she, with the small force of men, would return to her father. To guarantee that castle dwellers would hold on to their promise, Mikuláš volunteered to go with Tatars as a hostage. And it happened like so.
But as fate would have it, Mikuláš couldn’t get his mind off the beautiful Tatar princess since the first time they’ve met. Shad wasn’t indifferent towards him either. They had fallen in love with one another, and though they both came from different worlds, their love was stronger…
On the tenth day, Shad was released from the castle and she returned to her father. As promised, The Tatars released Mikuláš as promised as well. The freed young man did not, however, gallop back to the castle that evening, but instead he waited for the beautiful Tatar princess at an agreed spot, and they returned to Spiš together.
Shortly after, all the bells of Spiš were ringing. The great news travelled to the very borders of Hungary. The Lord of Spiš was marrying his son off to the daughter of the Tatar Khan, the beautiful Shad. A long and bedecked procession of coaches full of wedding guests was returning to the castle from the wedding ceremony in the nearby provostship. At the head of the line was a coach drawn by four white horses, in which Arnold, his son and the bride were seated, beautifully arrayed in the finest garments, deeply in love with one another. An arrow whistled through the air and pierced Shad right through the heart. ‚That’s a wedding gift from your father, the mighty Sheiban Khan,‘ yelled a Tatar rider before he disappeared in the thick woods.
Shad groaned and fell dead into the arms of Mikuláš. Crushed with grief, he screamed until his voice echoed far and wide… He buried her in her Tatar clothes at the place where they had first met – at the clearing in the nearby hills of Branisko.