Fields of information, too, played their part. Participating in the two campaigns against western usurpers made possible the Goths’ later intrusions into the western Empire. Hitherto, their understanding of European geography and of the proximity to their Balkan holdings of relatively rich and vulnerable lands in northern Italy would have been minimal. No doubt, too, their three years in Italy around the sack of Rome in 410 also made it possible for them to contemplate moving on to Gaul. The same must have been even more true for the Vandals and Alans. They clearly knew where Rome’s Rhine frontier was located in 406, but can have had only the haziest understanding of where Spain might be found; and perhaps no sense at all, at that point, that from the southern tip of Spain it was a short hop to Morocco. Their extended stay in Spain made it possible not only for them to arrange shipping, no doubt from local Roman traders, but also to gather the basic intelligence, likely from the same quarter, that made the move to North Africa possible. As preparation for that fateful crossing, indeed, they had experimented with a few maritime adventures, not least a sea-borne raid on the Balearic Islands in 425.89
On a broader canvas, likewise, the motivations underlying the Vandals’ and Alans’ repeat migrations make sense from a comparative perspective. The combined group made their way out of Spain and on to North Africa for many of the same of reasons that brought Alaric’s Goths out of the Balkans and into the west. They were certainly interested in the region’s wealth. The central provinces of Roman North Africa – Numidia, Byzacena and Proconsularis – were the bread basket of the city of Rome, and North African traders spread their wares far and wide across the Mediterranean, not least to Spain (as distribution patterns of North African pottery show), where the Vandals’ interest in this prize would have been aroused. At the same time, North Africa offered them the hope of much greater security. Whereas the Goths engaged in repeat migration as part of a strategy to extract diplomatic concessions, before they left Spain the Vandals and Alans had never had a treaty with the central western Roman authorities at all. This did not matter much in 409, since the west was busy dealing with Alaric and a succession of usurpers. By the mid-410s, however, stability had returned to the western Empire; the usurpers had been suppressed and the Goths brought on board via their new treaty. At this point, the Rhine invaders became public enemy number one, and a series of punishing campaigns were launched against them in Spain, mounted by imperial and Gothic forces in combination – this being the particular form of military assistance that the Roman state was looking for from the Goths. Between 416 and 418, the Siling Vandals and Alans were savaged to such an extent that they gave up their independent provinces, the survivors attaching themselves to the leadership of the Hasding Vandals. Central political stability collapsed again in the west in the 420s and the pressure eased once more, but the respite was always likely to be only temporary.
Alongside its wealth, then, North Africa offered hopes of much greater security for surviving Vandals and Alans. Once settled there, any future imperial attacks on them would have to come by sea, which was an exponentially more difficult type of military operation, as subsequent events would show. The Empire mounted three large expeditions against them in North Africa from the early 440s to the late 460s, all of which failed.90 Like the Goths, the Rhine invaders were operating with mixed political and economic motives, and, again like the Goths, used repeat migration to manoeuvre their way to safety and prosperity between the cracks in the Roman Empire’s political and military structures. Repeat large-scale migration was of the essence of continued existence for barbarian groups on Roman territory, and attempts to minimize its importance are thoroughly unconvincing.
For the Rhine invaders, as with Alaric’s Goths, revisionist views on evolving group identities contain much more mileage. The force of Vandals and Alans who captured Carthage in 439 had not made it there from the Rhine without a major renegotiation of their respective identities, as its individual members struggled for survival on Roman soil. In this case, the restructuring went still further. Whereas Alaric’s force was assembled from components that, at elite levels at least, seem to have been mostly Gothic, the Rhine invaders were of a very different composition. The two groups of Vandals, the Hasdings and Silings, may have shared some cultural similarities, but the Sueves were Germanic-speakers from a different region; and the Alans, who had provided the largest block of manpower in 406, were Iranian-speaking nomads with an entirely different economy and social structure from the Germanic agriculturalists with whom they were now allied. In 406, this force had still been held together by only the loosest of alliances, as is shown by the great Spanish share-out of 412, when the groups took separate provinces under their own leaders.
The much tighter unification that followed had the same basic cause as the unification of Alaric’s Goths. Once again, the hostile power of the Roman state made it clear to many of the invaders that their best interests would be served by operating together. And again, they were brought to this realization by force: the brute reality of the joint Gotho-Roman campaigns which destroyed the Siling Vandals (whose king was hauled off to Ravenna in the aftermath of defeat) and smashed the independence of the Alans, who, after the death in battle of their king, threw their remaining strength behind Hasding leadership. Without this application of Roman force, there is no sign that the unification would have occurred at all, and even in the face of Roman pressure not all the invaders signed up to the new confederation. The Sueves resisted subsequent attempts by the Hasding monarchy to bring them under its control by force, and some Alans preferred to stay put and accept Roman domination, being settled eventually in Gaul.91
The hostility of Roman state power, then, forced those who wished to preserve their independence to renegotiate their original group identities so as to create a larger and more cohesive force that stood some chance of survival on Roman soil. Alongside migration, therefore, a particular kind of group-identity evolution played a key role in the ability of immigrant barbarians to survive.
As for many of the protagonists themselves, reconstructing the story of the migrants of 376 and 405–8 involves an extensive journey. Fortunately for us, these migrants, reasonably well documented for parts of their history, provide a key test case, and some fundamental points have already been established that will not require such lengthy exploration again. Their history shows that migrants into the Roman Empire could – and did on occasion – come in large blocks of organized military manpower with their families in tow. If they entertained ambitions that went beyond mere integration into the Roman system as military cannon fodder or agricultural labour, this kind of migratory unit was essential. Only by recruiting well outside military retinues could enough military manpower be put together for expeditions likely to stand any chance of success. Equally important, the better evidence indicates that the immigrants could and did engage in repeat migrations. The vast majority had a well-established tradition of movement even before they crossed into Roman territory, and repeat migration, alongside a renegotiation, under Roman pressure, of group identity which steadily increased overall numbers, provided a two-pronged strategy for long-term survival on Roman soil.
But if organized block migration does need to be retrieved from the revisionist dustbin as a major theme of the thirty years after 376 and placed alongside the population flow of increasing momentum observed in the last chapter as an important migratory phenomenon of the first millennium, it did not take the form traditionally envisaged. The groups who crossed into the Empire derived from a barbarian world that was already politically, economically and culturally complex. They were not ‘peoples’, at least not in the sense of culturally homogeneous, more or less equal population groups whose departure emptied the landscape from which they came. Nonetheless, we are still looking at mass migrations in two senses of the term. Even if they still encompassed only an elite, the inclusion of freemen warriors and their social and familial dependants made for major migrant groups numbering several tens of
thousands of individuals. The migrations were also mass in the qualitative sense used in migration studies, in that the flow administered a distinct political shock at its points of departure or arrival, or indeed both. The migrants who brought down Rome’s east and central European frontiers quickly stacked up between them one emperor dead on a battlefield along with his army, a forced reversal of standard imperial policies towards migrants, and the extraction of some key provinces from full imperial control. The shock in the lands they left behind is equally marked. It is to this subject, the age of the Völkerwanderung beyond the Roman frontier, that we must now turn our attention.
5
HUNS ON THE RUN
IN 453, AFTER A DECADE of mayhem stretching from Constantinople to Paris, Attila the Hun died from the after-effects of one too many wedding nights. Following the odd drink or two, the great conqueror retired to bed, burst a blood vessel and died. In the morning, his terrified bride was found cowering beside the corpse. This sudden demise fired the starting gun on a frenzied race for power among his sons, which quickly degenerated into outright civil war. Events then took a yet more dangerous turn. Attila’s Empire consisted not just of Huns but large numbers of non-Hunnic subjects besides. The civil war was quickly exploited by some of them as an opportunity to throw off Hunnic control. The lead in the revolt was taken by a king of the Gepids called Arderic – the result, a huge battle in 454 on the (unidentified) River Nedao in the old Roman province of Pannonia.
There an encounter took place between the various nations Attila had held under his sway. Kingdoms with their peoples were divided, and out of one body were made many members not responding to a common impulse. Being deprived of their head, they madly strove against each other . . . And so the bravest nations tore themselves to pieces . . . One might see the Goths fighting with pikes, the Gepids raging with the sword, the Rugi breaking off the spears in their own wounds, the Suevi fighting on foot, the Huns with bows, the Alans drawing up a battle-line of heavy-armed and the Herules of light-armed warriors.1
It’s a famous description, and, even if rhetorical rather than properly descriptive, neatly introduces the issue central to this chapter.
We have already seen that the rise of Hunnic power was responsible for two bouts of mass migration into the Roman Empire. On the face of it, it also prompted major population displacements beyond the frontier. To start with, there are the Huns themselves. In the run-up to the collapse of Rome’s east European frontier in 376, they were operating to the north-east of the Black Sea, somewhere opposite the Caucasus. But Roman Pannonia, where the battle of the Nedao took place, encompassed the south-eastern fringes of the Great Hungarian Plain west of the Carpathians, and the Empire of Attila was centred primarily in the Middle Danubian region, thousands of kilometres from the Caucasus. At the same time, as the battle narrative again underlines, Huns never fought alone. In the 370s, during their first attacks on the Goths north of the Black Sea, Iranian-speaking Alan nomads were also involved, Uldin’s following contained Germanic-speaking Sciri, and after driving other Huns out of Pannonia in 427 east Roman forces were left with large numbers of their Gothic allies to resettle. A generation later, Attila’s Empire incorporated at least three more clusters of Goths, together with Germanic-speaking Gepids, Rugi, Sueves (those left behind, presumably, in 406), Sciri and Heruli, not to mention Iranian-speaking Alans and Sarmatians.2 The vast majority of these non-Huns, like the Huns themselves, were living in and around the Middle Danube c.450 AD. But many of them had not occupied land in the Middle Danube in the fourth century, and neither would they in the sixth. Not only did the Huns themselves move west into the heart of Europe, but they seem to have been responsible in some way for gathering many other groups together on the Great Hungarian Plain, most of whom subsequently left as Attila’s Empire collapsed.
The migration issues raised by even this bare outline of the Hunnic period in central Europe are clear. What, first of all, brought the Huns to the heart of Europe, and what form did their own migratory process take? And how are we to conceive of the demographic displacements involving the other peoples of Attila’s Empire? Was this a case of elite transfer, or something larger-scale?
‘THE ORIGIN AND SEEDBED OF ALL EVILS’
Of all the migrants featured in this book, the Huns are perhaps the most mysterious. They wrote absolutely nothing themselves, but that’s pretty much par for the first-millennium course. More problematic is the fact that very little appears about them even in Roman sources until the time of Attila, or perhaps half a generation before: the later 420s onwards, but above all the 440s. By that date, profound transformations had distanced the Hunnic world from its counterpart of c.370, when the region north of the Black Sea first felt the weight of Hunnic assault. The reason for this dearth of information is not hard to deduce. From a Roman perspective, the crises of 376–80 and 405–8 both saw the Huns push other groups across the imperial frontier. These migrants then proceeded to generate huge disruption on Roman territory. It was only natural for Roman commentators to concentrate on them rather than on the Huns who had caused the initial problem.
As a result, our ignorance of the Huns is astounding. It is not even clear what language they spoke. Most of the linguistic evidence we have comes in the form of personal names – Hunnic rulers and their henchmen – from the time of Attila. But by then (for reasons that will become apparent later in the chapter), Germanic had become the lingua franca of the Hunnic Empire and many of the recorded names are either certainly or probably Germanic – so no help there. Iranian, Turkish and Finno-Ugrian (like the later Magyars) have all had their proponents, but the truth is that we do not know what language the Huns spoke, and probably never will.3 The direct evidence we have for the motivations and forms of Hunnic migration is equally limited. According to Ammianus, there was nothing to explain: ‘The origin and seedbed of all evils . . . I find to be this. The people of the Huns . . . who dwell beyond the Sea of Azov near the frozen ocean, are quite abnormally savage.’ They were just so fierce that it was natural for them to go around hitting people. Similar images of Hunnic ferocity are found in other sources. Zosimus, drawing on the contemporary historian Eunapius, records the panic generated by the Huns’ first attacks on the Goths, while the sixth-century Jordanes portrays them as the offspring of expelled Gothic witches and evil spirits.4 Tempting as it is to leave the issue there, we do need to be just a touch more analytical if we’re going to find a convincing explanation of the migratory processes at work among the Huns in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.
What we can say is that, originally, the Huns were nomadic pastoralists from the Great Eurasian Steppe. This vast landscape runs for thousands of kilometres from the fringes of Europe to the western borders of China. Summer rainfall is sparse and the characteristic vegetation is grass, so that its populations tended to depend more on herding than their neighbours; but, contrary to received images, they did do some arable agriculture and depended on economic exchanges with more settled populations to make up for any shortfalls in grain, which still provided much of their staple diet. That the Huns were nomads is suggested both by their geographical location when they are first encountered – east of the River Don, which marks the boundary where average rainfall drops below the levels that make widespread arable agriculture possible without irrigation – and by the famous description that Ammianus provides of them. Gibbon loved it, and the words are hugely evocative:5
Their way of life is so rough that they have no use for fire or seasoned food, but live on the roots of wild plants and the half-raw flesh of any sort of animal, which they warm a little by placing it between their thighs and the backs of their horses. They have no buildings to shelter them . . . not so much as a hut thatched with reeds is to be found among them. They roam at large over mountains and forests and are inured from the cradle to cold, hunger and thirst . . . .Once they have put their necks into some dingy shirt they never take it off or change it till it rots and falls to pieces
from incessant wear . . . None of them ploughs or ever touches a plough-handle. They have no fixed abode, no home or law or settled manner of life, but wander like refugees with the wagons in which they live. In these their wives weave their filthy clothing, mate with their husbands, give birth to their children, and rear them to the age of puberty. No one if asked can tell where he comes from, having been conceived in one place, born somewhere else, and reared even further off.
Sadly – because the image has a certain romance – its basic implication that the Huns were constantly and randomly on the move is deeply mistaken.
You could work out that there is some kind of problem, in fact, just from the description itself. It was Ammianus’ standard practice, and one generally required of those working in the classical historical genre, to introduce interesting new protagonists with some kind of digression, and by the fourth century AD such moments were loaded with high expectation. The audience was looking for highly coloured descriptive rhetoric and extensive reference to well-known classical authors. Ammianus’ Hunnic digression did not disappoint. But not only is it full of rhetoric and quotation, there is another still more obvious problem. In the surviving books of his History, Ammianus had cause to introduce to his readers three sets of nomads – Alans and Saracen Arabs, alongside the Huns – and in each case the digression is more or less identical, with just a few details altered. Essentially, Ammianus had at his disposal nomad digression 101, and just hit the recall button whenever he needed to employ it. This raises the issue of what status to accord the details that are specific to each version. In the case of the Huns, Ammianus has some interesting things to say about their political leadership, which we will return to shortly, and records that they kept meat under their saddles as part of a curing process. This used to be discounted as a misunderstood treatment for saddle sores until a modern anthropologist-cum-historian found Mongols doing the same in the 1920s, so perhaps we do need to take seriously at least something of what Ammianus says. On the other hand, one of the few details he recorded of the Saracens is that both men and women enjoyed sex enormously, and you can’t help wondering how he knew. But in general, the fact that desert Arabs from the fringes of the Fertile Crescent as well as Iranian-speaking Alans and Turkic or Finno-Ugrian Huns from the Great Eurasian Steppe are described in extremely similar terms should have been enough to set the alarm bells ringing, and for some it did.6
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