Huns: "Attila's Legacy: The Hunnic Impact on History"

The Huns

    The Huns were a nomadic tribe prominent in the 4th and 5th century CE whose origin is unknown but, most likely, they came from "somewhere between the eastern edge of the Altai Mountains and the Caspian Sea, roughly modern Kazakhstan" (Kelly, 45). They are first mentioned in Roman sources by the historian Tacitus in 91 CE as living in the region around the Caspian Sea and, at this time, are not mentioned as any more of a threat to Rome than any other barbarian tribes.

    In time, this would change as the Huns became one of the primary contributors to the fall of the Roman Empire, as their invasions of the regions around the empire, which were particularly brutal, encouraged what is known as the Great Migration (also known as the "Wandering of the Nations") between roughly 376-476 CE. This migration of peoples, such as the Alans, Goths, and Vandals, disrupted the status quo of Roman society, and their various raids and insurrections weakened the empire.

    To cite only one example, the Visigoths under Fritigern were driven into Roman territory by the Huns in 376 CE and, after suffering abuses by Roman administrators, rose in revolt, initiating the First Gothic War with Rome of 376-382 CE, in which the Romans were defeated, and their emperor Valens killed, at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 CE.

Origins & Link with Xiongnu

    In attempting to locate the origin of the Huns, scholars since the 18th century CE have speculated that they may have been the mysterious Xiongnu people who harassed the borders of northern China, especially during the Han Dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE). Like the Huns, the Xiongnu were nomadic, mounted warriors who were especially adept with the bow and struck without warning. The French orientalist and scholar Joseph de Guignes (1721-1800 CE) first proposed that the Huns were the same people as the Xiongnu, and others have since worked to find support for his claim or argued against it.

    In modern scholarship there is no consensus on the Xiongnu-Hun link but, largely, it has been rejected for lack of evidence. The historian Christopher Kelly interprets the attempt to link the Xiongnu with the Huns as stemming from a desire to not only locate a definitive locale for Hunnic origins but also to define the struggle between the Huns and Rome as a battle between the "noble west" and the "barbaric east". Kelly suggests: "For some writers, connecting the Xiongnu and the Huns was part of a wider project of understanding the history of Europe as a fight to preserve civilization against an ever-present oriental threat. The Huns were a warning from history. With their Chinese credentials established, their attacks on the Roman empire could be presented as part of an inevitable cycle of conflict between East and West."

    Kelly, citing other scholars for support, concludes that there is no reason to link the Xiongnu with the Huns and notes that Guignes was working at a time when archaeological evidence on both the Xiongnu and the Huns was scarce. He writes: "Understanding of the Xiongnu changed significantly in the 1930s with the publication of bronze artifacts from the Ordos Desert, in Inner Mongolia, west of the Great Wall. These demonstrated the striking difference between the art of the Xiongnu and that of the Huns. Not one object found in eastern Europe dating from the fourth and fifth centuries AD is decorated with the beautiful stylized animals and mythical creatures that are characteristic of Xiongnu design."

    He cites the scholar Otto Maenchen-Helfen who observed: "The Ordos bronzes were made by or for the [Xiongnu]. We could check all items in the inventory of the Ordos bronzes, and we would not be able to point out a single object that could be paralleled by one found in the territory once occupied by the Huns...There are the well-known motifs of the animal style...not a single one from that rich repertoire of motifs has ever been found on a Hunnish object."

The Huns & Rome

    The speed with which the Huns moved, and their success in battle, is best illustrated in their conquest of the region that comprises Hungary in the present day. In 370 CE they conquered the Alans and, by 376 CE, had driven the Visigoths under Fritigern into Roman territory and those under the leadership of Athanaric to the Caucalands by c. 379 CE.

    Huns continued their invasion of the region and, as historian Herwig Wolfram writes, citing the ancient source of Ambrose, the chaos this caused was widespread: "The Huns fell upon the Alans, the Alans upon the Goths, and the Goths upon the [tribes of] the Taifali and Sarmatians".  Many of these tribes, besides the Goths, sought refuge in Roman territory and, when it was denied, they took it upon themselves to find a way to escape from the Huns.

    Between 395 and 398 CE, the Huns overran the Roman territories of Thrace and Syria, destroying cities and farmlands in their raids but showing no interest in settling in the regions. At this same time, some Huns were serving in the Roman army, as Foederati and Hun settlements had been approved by Rome in Pannonia. The seeming discrepancy in the Huns being both allies and enemies of Rome is resolved when one understands that, at this time, the Huns were under no central leader. Within the tribe as a whole, it seems, were sub-tribes or factions, which each followed its own chief. For this reason, it is often difficult to determine what the overall Hun objectives were at this time other than, as Jordanes notes, "theft and rapine".

    Their pressure on surrounding tribes, and on Rome, continued as they raided at will and without restraint. Wolfram, citing the Goths under Athanaric as an example, writes: "The Thervingi had no hope of surviving in a ravaged land that a new type of enemy could destroy at will, practically without advance warning. No one knew how to defend against the Huns."

The Co-Reign of Attila & Bleda

    By 430 CE, a Hun chief named Rugila was known to the Romans as King of the Huns. Whether he actually ruled over all the Huns or simply the largest faction is not known. Some scholars, such as Mladjov, claim a Hunnic king named Balamber initiated a dynasty and was Rugila's grandfather while others, such as Sinor, claim that Balamber was only the leader of one sub-set, or faction, of the Huns or may never have existed at all. If Mladjov's claims are accepted, then Rugila was king of all the Huns but this seems unlikely as there is no evidence of unity at the time he was leading his raids.

    Rugila had two nephews, Attila and Bleda (also known as Buda) and, when he died on campaign in 433 CE, the two brothers succeeded him and ruled jointly. Attila and Bleda together brokered the Treaty of Margus with Rome in 439 CE. This treaty continued the precedent of Rome paying off the Huns in return for peace, which would be a more or less constant stipulation in Roman-Hun relations until Attila's death. Once the treaty was concluded, the Romans were able to withdraw their troops from the Danube region and send them against the Vandals who were threatening Rome's provinces in Sicily and North Africa. The Huns turned their attention east after the Margus Treaty and warred against the Sassanid Empire but were repelled and driven back toward the Great Hungarian Plain, which was their home base.

    With the Roman troops who once guarded the border now deployed to Sicily, the Huns saw an opportunity for easy plunder. Kelly writes, "As soon as Attila and Bleda received reliable intelligence that the fleet had left for Sicily, they opened their Danube offensive". In the summer of 441 CE, Attila and Bleda drove their armies through the border regions and sacked the cities of the province of Illyricum, which were very profitable Roman trade centers. They then further violated the Treaty of Margus by riding onto that city and destroying it. The Roman emperor Theodosius II (401-450 CE) then declared the treaty broken and recalled his armies from the provinces to stop the Hun rampage.

    Attila and Bleda responded with a full-scale invasion, sacking and destroying Roman cities all the way to within 20 miles of the Roman capital of Constantinople. The city of Naissus, the birthplace of the emperor Constantine the Great, was razed and would not be rebuilt for a century afterward. The Huns had learned a great deal about siege warfare from their time serving in the Roman army and expertly put this knowledge to use, literally wiping whole cities, such as Naissus, off the map. Their offensive was all the more successful because it was completely unexpected. Theodosius II had been so confident that the Huns would keep the treaty that he refused to listen to any council that suggested otherwise. Lanning comments on this, writing: "Attila and his brother valued agreements little and peace even less. Immediately upon assuming the throne, they resumed the Hun offensive against Rome and anyone else who stood in their way. Over the next ten years, the Huns invaded territory which today encompasses Hungary, Greece, Spain, and Italy. Attila sent captured riches back to his homeland and drafted soldiers into his own army while often burning the overrun towns and killing their civilian occupants. Warfare proved lucrative for the Huns but wealth apparently was not their only objective. Attila and his army seemed genuinely to enjoy warfare, the rigors and rewards of military life were more appealing to them than farming or attending livestock."

Attila's Death and Dissolution of the Hun Empire

    By 452 CE, Attila's empire stretched from the regions of present-day Russia down through Hungary and across Germany to France. He received regular tribute from Rome and, in fact, was paid a salary as a Roman general even as he was raiding Roman territories and destroying Roman cities. In 453 CE Attila married a young woman named Ildico and celebrated his wedding night, according to Priscus, with too much wine. Jordanes, following Priscus' report, describes Attila's death: "He had given himself up to excessive joy at his wedding, and as he lay on his back, heavy with wine and sleep, a rush of superfluous blood, which would ordinarily have flowed from his nose, streamed in deadly course down his throat and killed him, since it was hindered in the usual passages. Thus did drunkenness put a disgraceful end to a king renowned in war."

    The entire army fell into intense grief over the loss of their leader. Attila's horsemen smeared their faces with blood and rode slowly, in a steady circle, around the tent that held his body. Kelly describes the aftermath of Attila's death: "According to the Roman historian Priscus of Panium, they [the men of the army] had cut their long hair and slashed their cheeks "so that the greatest of all warriors should be mourned not with tears or the wailing of women but with the blood of men." Then followed a day of grief, feasting, and funeral games; a combination of celebration and lamentation that had a long history in the ancient world. That night, far beyond the frontiers of the Roman empire, Attila was buried. His body was encased in three coffins; the innermost was covered in gold, a second in silver, and a third in iron. The gold and silver symbolized the plunder that Attila had seized while the harsh gray iron recalled his victories in war."

    According to legend, a river was then diverted, Attila was buried in the river's bed, and the waters then released to flow over it covering the spot. Those who had taken part in the funeral were killed so that the burial place might never be revealed. According to Kelly, "these, too, were honorable deaths", in that they were part of the funeral honors for the great warrior who had brought his followers so far and accomplished so much for them.

    Once his funeral services were concluded, his empire was divided among his three sons Ellac, Dengizich, and Ernakh. Attila's commanding presence and fearsome reputation had kept the empire together and, without him, it began to break apart. The three brothers fought each other for their own best interests instead of placing the interests of the empire first. Each brother claimed a region, and the people in it, as their own and, as Jordanes writes, "When Ardaric, king of the Gepidae, learned this, he became enraged because so many nations were being treated like slaves of the basest condition, and was the first to rise against the sons of Attila". Ardaric defeated the Huns at the Battle of Nedao in 454 CE in which Ellac was killed.

Publisher: M. Celio Durrani

Source: World History Encyclopedia