as liutprand of cremona mentions, hearing about the apparition of the hungarians in his kingdom, berengar i. was very surprised how this army from a nation, about which he never heard of, appeared so suddenly. then he sent envoys and letters in every corners of his country demanding to everybody to send their troops to him to fight the hungarians. after all his troops gathered his army became three times bigger than the magyar army. according to "chronicon sagornini" of john the deacon, the italian army was 15,000, so we can conclude, that the hungarians were 5,000. this number could be exaggerated, like the medieval chroniclers often did with the numbers of the armies, but the affirmation that the italians were three times more than the hungarians, has no reason not to be accepted, because usually the chroniclers exaggerate the number of the enemy armies and diminish the number of the troops of their own, so we can accept that the italians heavily outnumbered the hungarians. noticing his superiority, berengar started to think too much of himself, and instead of attacking the hungarian army immediately, he spent his time in a town carousing with his men. this gave time to the hungarian troops, scattered to plunder in every corner of the italian kingdom, to retreat towards the gathering place, one precisely not specified place on the bank of the river brenta, which, as shown before, probably was chosen from the beginning to be the place of the battle. seeing this, king berengar thought that they were frightened from the number of his troops, and started to chase them, thinking that he already won. his mounted troops even managed to surprise a hungarian troop and force it to cross in haste the river adda causing the drowning of many of them. but generally the retreat was a success, because the hungarians light armors and weapons (the commoners, who usually made the pillaging raids, wear no or just leather armours, only the leaders had lamellar armours, their weapons were always composite bows, the hand-to-hand weapons were sabres, and rarely battle axes or maces) enabled their horses to be more rapid than the heavy armored and weaponed carolingian type italian cavalry. the hungarians retreated on the old roman road via postumia towards the future battlefield.