The beginning of the fifth century is marked by the brooding presence of the Huns. Their leader Uldin is really the first historical 'king' of the Huns about whom we know something more substantial than just his name. He was not a king in the sense we would usually use the word; rather he was the military commander of a fairly loose-knit confederacy of tribes. In the year 400 he confronted Gainas, a Germanic leader who had fled with his followers from imperial forces across the Danube into what Uldin saw as his territory. After a number of clashes the Huns were decisively victorious and Gainas was killed on 23 December. Uldin sent his head in a package to Constantinople, the capital of the eastern empire. The head was displayed there on 3 January 401. Along with it was a demand for a 'reward' in the form of gifts, even though no bounty had been put on Gainas's head.
Among Uldin's other exploits was his crossing of the Danube and capture of a fortress in the Roman province of Moesia in 408 (directly to the south of Pannonia). This was achieved not just by sheer force of arms but by guile, as he had collaborators within the stronghold. Inspired by his success, he went on to invade Thrace (roughly equating to present-day Bulgaria and eastern Macedonia). The Romans sought to buy him off but in his arrogance he refused. This haughtiness backfired on him when many of his inner circle succumbed to Roman bribery and turned against him. He was lucky to escape with his life, and his remaining loyal followers, back across the Danube.
In 420 the Huns set up their capital – a sea of tents on the Tisza plains in what is now Hungary. It was to be during this decade that three Hun brothers rose to significance. One of these, Ruga (or Rua), was the military leader of the confederacy of Hunnic tribes along with another brother, Octar. The third brother, Mundiuch, does not seem to have shared power with his two siblings, yet his two sons – his elder Bleda and the younger Attila – were both destined to rule the empire of the Huns.
In 434 or 435 Ruga died and Bleda and Attila shared the reins of power. Not only did they continue the family business, they also expanded it. The eastern empire was forced to pay out even more than to uncle Ruga. The price of peace under the brothers' reign was increased to 700 pounds (about 350 kilograms) of gold per annum. Although company profits were up they still pursued a policy of hostile take-overs, ravaging numerous towns in the eastern provinces in 440. They were hugely successful and managed to triple the Roman tribute to 2,100 pounds (about 1,050 kilograms) of gold a year under the terms of an agreement known as the First Anatolian Peace.
Bleda was of very different character to his younger brother Attila. From the little history left to us, he seems to have been more gregarious and straightforward than Attila. One of the few anecdotes concerning him involved the Hunnic equivalent of a court jester in his retinue, a dwarf Moorish slave named Zerco, who would entertain his audience in a mixture of tongues – Gothic, Latin and the language of the Huns. Not satisfied with Zerco's natural disabilities (a stammer and a strange gait caused by deformity), Bleda felt the need to dress him up in a specially made suit of armour. While Zerco was a favourite of Bleda, Attila was indifferent to the ribald antics of the dwarf.
One day, Zerco and a number of other slaves escaped. On hearing the news, Bleda was completely unconcerned about the others but enraged at the loss of Zerco. Hun horsemen were sent out to track him down and he was brought back dejectedly in chains. Laughing, Bleda asked him why he had run away. Zerco replied that it was because his master had never supplied him with a wife and loneliness had made him reckless enough to risk escape. Bleda gave him a wife but, after the death of his master, Zerco was given away by Attila and as a result lost the wife he had temporarily gained.
After a successful partnership that lasted ten years, there was no brotherly love lost between the co-rulers of the Huns. Bleda died, most likely at the hands (or, at the least, at the instigation) of his brother. The empire that they had carved out of their European interests was now under the sole leadership of Attila, king of the Huns. Yet even the mighty Attila was not overlord of all the Huns; there were numerous independent groups of Huns and many who had long since signed up to auxiliary units in the Roman army. He was, notwithstanding, the most powerful Hun in history.
In the Presence of Attila
Our major source for the paltry biographical details we have of Attila is the Byzantine History written in Greek by Priscus of Panium (a town west of Constantinople, now Istanbul, on the coast of the Sea of Marmara). The fragments of this work that have survived down the ages give us an extraordinary if incomplete portrait of the great man. Priscus travelled with a diplomatic mission from the eastern emperor to the court of Attila in the years 448-9. He was probably the only writer from this age to actually have any in-depth experience of life among not just the Huns but any of the barbarian peoples.
The Huns were not by nature town dwellers and traditionally preferred life in tents to life in houses. In a large Hun encampment, Priscus laid eyes on the dwelling of Attila, a timber palace made from smoothly planed boards and encircled by a wooden wall. This wall, he tells us, was built less for defence than its elegant appearance. The Roman envoy gives an account of a banquet he attended in honour of Attila, describing the dramatic and poignant scene that unfurled before his eyes:
When evening began to draw in, torches were lighted, and two barbarians came forward in front of Attila and sang songs which they had composed, hymning his victories and his great deeds in war. And the banqueters gazed at them, and some were rejoiced at the songs, others became excited at heart when they remembered the wars, but others broke into tears – those whose bodies were weakened by time and whose spirit was compelled to be at rest.
Unsurprisingly, Attila was not a man to be easily moved. Neither the gravity of the songs nor the light relief of the next act in the evening's entertainment received a visible reaction from the host. Priscus remarks on his indifference to the pranks of the jester Zerco and on his stony countenance that confronted all who came face to face with him; all, that is, but one. Having seen how coldly dismissive and contemptuous Attila was to even his own sons, Priscus was both surprised and intrigued when he saw his host warm as his youngest, Irnik (Ernac), came into the banqueting hall. Attila tenderly stroked his cheek in a rare moment of public affection. Priscus later found out that Hun 'soothsayers' (nowadays we would probably do better to describe them as Hunnic shamans) had predicted that Irnik would save the empire from ruin. Their prophecies were to come to naught.
On the other hand, Priscus did not find Attila's looks to be handsome, at least by Roman standards. He describes him as short and squat with deep-set eyes, a flat nose and a thin wispy beard. His foreign appearance was compounded by his enigmatic character. He was anything but ostentatious. At the banquet he held for Roman and other foreign delegations, guests would be served food on silver platters and drink from golden goblets, while Attila himself would eat from simple wooden plates and drink from a wooden cup. Both his own barbarian entourage and his 'civilised' guests were served rich dishes while he ate only meat. His men wore scabbards and boot fastenings adorned with precious stones, and their horses' bridles were equally ornate with gold and gems. Neither Attila nor his horse had any of these gaudy trappings – no amount of gold or jewels could outshine the sheer presence of the mighty leader. Priscus tells us that Attila embodied the rarest of attributes, for he 'was a man born to shake the races of the world. The proud man's power was to be seen in the very movements of his body.'
The Fading Power of the Huns
The Huns, like many other barbarian peoples, were more than willing to be mercenaries and trouble-shooters for the empire. Aetius, commander-in-chief of the Roman army in the west, had the unenviable task of keeping the western empire reasonably intact. He called on their aid to repel other barbarians from overrunning Gaul. The eastern part of the region was under threat from a people named the Burgundians, who were effectively suppressed with the timely arrival of the Huns. In 439 the southern part of Gaul was in danger of falling into the hands of t
he Visigoths, and the Huns were once more brought in to prevent that happening.
After years of working together, the mutually beneficial relationship between Aetius and the Huns broke down. In 451, with Attila at their head, the Huns invaded Gaul with the apparent intention of smashing the kingdom that the Visigoths had made for themselves in the environs of Toulouse. Aetius was very worried about the scale of the Hunnic army and joined forces with the Visigoths. A major battle between the two camps took place in the heat of July on the Catalaunian Plains near Troyes, to the east of Paris.
A whole host of other barbarian peoples were involved in the battle. Accompanying Aetius's own troops and the Visigoths were many who had made their home in Gaul – Franks, Bretons, Saxons, Sarmatians, Burgundians and Alans. On the side of the Huns were the Gepids and the Ostrogoths. Attila had sought the predictions of his shamans in order to know what the outcome might be. Through divining from the marks and lines on bones and the entrails of animals, they told him that the Hun forces would face major setbacks, even defeat. That was the bad news. The good news from their point of view was that an enemy general would fall in battle. Attila hoped this was a prediction that Aetius would be killed.
The night before the battle saw the first clash, between the Franks and the Gepids. Even if we allow for a great deal of exaggeration in the reports of the battle, this was no mere skirmish: 15,000 are said to have died before the battle had really begun. Around three in the afternoon the following day the fighting began on the 300 acres of flat, even battlefield.
According to one version of events, the Visigothic king Theoderic (not to be confused with the later Ostrogoth king of the same name), commander of the right wing of the Roman forces, was killed by a spear thrown by the Ostrogoth Andagis. The later Theoderic would look back on this battle and rue the conflict of Goth against Goth, describing it as fratricide. Another account says that he fell from his horse and was accidentally trampled to death by his own cavalry. Either way, the Hun shamans' prediction had come true even though the victim was not Aetius.
The battle was hard fought and exceedingly bloody: an estimated 165,000 died in addition to those who had died the night before the main conflict. The Huns were the losers and Attila, who up until this time had seemed invincible, suffered the humiliation of his first defeat. In the aftermath Aetius could have let the Visigoths pursue the Huns and effectively finish them off. He deliberately did not allow this to happen. Exactly what his motives were we cannot be sure, but it seems likely that he wanted to keep his options open. The Huns had been useful in the past and could well be useful to him in the future. The Visigoths, despite his temporary alliance with them, were a force that could easily get beyond his control – especially without the Huns to keep them in order.
In the fifth century the empire of the Huns encompassed a land mass reaching from the Rhone to the Urals. Despite his remarkable achievements Attila ruled his empire for only eight years. Legend envelops the death in the spring of 453 of the greatest leader the Huns had ever known. It is said that having gone to bed with a new concubine named Ildico he had died in the height of passion from a burst artery. Others claim that he was poisoned by this seductive and efficient assassin. Whether killed by a new concubine, or dying peacefully among friends as his funeral elegy claimed, Attila died in bed and not on the battlefield. His burial place has never been located; his grave remains one of the great unknowns of archaeology.
After his death his sons simply did not have the charisma and the power to hold the empire together as their father had done. Within a year Ellac, his eldest son, had died in combat with the forces of Ardaric, a barbarian leader of the Gepid people who had been living under the rule of the Huns. His second eldest son, Dengitzik, lasted far longer but died while fighting the armies of the eastern empire in 469. Attila's death was proving to be the beginning of the end, heralding the rapid disappearance of the Huns. They left the stage of history as abruptly and dramatically as they entered it. They would soon return again but their name would not. When the Huns came back they were to be known as the Bulrgar tribes.
Many of the barbarian peoples tried to emulate the Romans – the Goths, as we have already seen in earlier chapters, were enamoured of the empire and all its material and cultural trappings. The Huns were different. They spurned the chance to integrate, preferring to keep their own culture as distant as possible from Roman influence. Unlike the Germanic and Celtic barbarians, the Huns came from another cultural sphere altogether and left as quickly as they had arrived. They chose to live their own lives and returned to the steppe lands that placed them back outside the remit of written history. They were not an ignorant and backward people but had their own culture, alien to their European neighbours, but one with which they were as much at home as they were at home in the saddle.
Chapter Seven
ON THE CENTAUR'S TRAIL
The nation of the Huns, scarcely known to ancient documents, dwelt beyond the Maeotic marshes beside the frozen ocean, and surpassed every extreme of ferocity.
Ammianus Marcellinus, fourth-century historian
In western Europe the memory of Attila lived on, albeit in a distorted and limited form. He has gone down in history as an arch-enemy of civilisation, a tyrant and a plunderer of the coffers of Rome. Along with Genghis Khan and Hitler, he has been one of the prime candidates for the role of Antichrist. The legend of Attila also fuelled the western imagination through the media of music and film. Among the high points are his starring role in the Verdi opera Attila, Liszt's The Battle of the Huns and his appearances in Fritz Lang's 1920s films based on the Nibelungenlied. Perhaps rather less memorable is Jack Palance's Attila in the 1950s Hollywood movie The Sign of the Pagan.
I came to Hungary to see what I could find out about the eastern European view of the Huns, to try for a more complete picture of Attila and his people. (Despite the prominent position of the Huns in the cultural background of the Hungarian people, the name of the country itself owes nothing to the Huns. It was the Onungun tribes who entered what is now Hungary long after the Huns had disappeared who gave their name to the country.) On my first night in Budapest, the bridges that cross the Danube were floodlit to an unparalleled degree of brightness thanks to its use as a set for the latest Eddie Murphy movie. I checked into the Gellert Hotel, a gargantuan veteran that has seen the Communist era come and go.
I was aided in my quest to find out more about the enigmatic Huns by the Hungarian anthropologist and film-maker Janos Tari. He introduced me to Professor Peter Tomka, an archaeologist and specialist in Mongolian and other Central Asian tongues. Professor Tomka has spent his professional life tracking down the elusive Huns through their archaeological remains. It is difficult enough for archaeologists to assign the artefacts they find to a particular ethnic group, but it is doubly difficult when those people are nomads like the Huns.
In Hungary, the name of the most famous Hun leader lives on in road signs. Fittingly, I first met Professor Tomka one autumn morning in a cafe in Attila Street, Budapest. For the Hungarian citizen, this is taken for granted in the same way that the New Yorker would not think twice about the name Kennedy Airport or the Londoner Sloane Street. In Hungary and throughout eastern Europe the mighty Hun leader is not seen as a prime candidate for the job of Antichrist, but is honoured as a national hero in the same way as Genghis Khan is in present-day Mongolia. Attila is venerated as a hard ruler who sought to rid the Hun territories of Roman influence and to repossess the gold and other treasures plundered by the Romans. In this version of events, the reason he stopped short of ransacking Rome was that he had no desire to destroy the empire; his aim was simply to restore what he saw as Hun land and Hun property. Having achieved this, he left Rome to its own devices.
The Hidden History of the Asian Huns
Through Janos Tari's able translation, Tomka began to communicate what he had learnt of the Huns. With the Huns, one has to start with the simplest questions to which there are no simple ans
wers. I asked Tomka where they came from. As a wandering people, there was no one place that they could be pinned down to but somewhere in or around Mongolia was their homeland. Looking at a map gives one some idea about the size of this country – this can hardly be called pinning them down!
The writers of the ancient world who concerned themselves at all with the 'barbarian' peoples naturally did not have the same interests as those of the modern historian or anthropologist. In many instances their information is accurate and detailed and we can hardly criticise them for not writing to suit the requirements of our own era. While they do give us tantalising details of the customs and habits of these peoples, there are inevitably large gaps in our knowledge of Hunnic life.
The Huns seem to have given the Roman writers little in the way of information about themselves. This has been put down to their ignorance of their own origin and history – perhaps as a result of their migration over vast distances of the monotonous steppe from their unknown homeland. Yet it is hard to believe that any people could be so uninterested in preserving knowledge of their background. Furthermore, it is well known that even societies that have no recourse to the written word (and the Huns were such a people) have the means to preserve their heritage in great detail through the oral transmission of myths, legends and epic tales. We cannot reject the possibility of a certain reticence on the part of the Huns in telling the Romans the whole story.
The quote from Ammianus Marcellinus at the beginning of the chapter refers to the Huns' origin 'beyond the Maeotic marshes'. The Maeotic Lake was the ancient name of the Sea of Azov, a body of water north of the Black Sea to which it is attached by the Straits of Kerech. It was in this part of the world that the Huns first appeared on the horizon of Roman understanding.
Barbarians- Secrets of the Dark Ages Page 8
