Empires and Barbarians (37 page)

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?

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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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These suspicions have been confirmed by the comparative evidence about nomadic lifestyles gathered more recently by anthropologists. There are of course almost as many differences between different nomad groups as there are nomad groups in the first place. According to the types of grazing and animals available, practices and organization vary enormously. But there are nonetheless some important features in common, and one of the key ones is that nomads do not usually either move at random, or that far – long-distance treks being punishing for both humans and animals. Eurasian groups observed at first hand in the twentieth century, for instance, tended to move a limited distance twice a year between designated blocks of summer and winter grazing. In the case of the Khazaks, before Stalin sedentarized them, this distance was about seventy-five kilometres. Stock-raising subgroups then slowly cycled their herds around within the pasture blocks, keeping their distance from one another so that the grass had time to grow after each subgroup’s visit. Other parts of the population, in the meantime, occupied fixed camps and some even grew crops.
The purpose of the longer-distance moves in this regime is to connect two blocks of grazing land, neither of which could provide year-round support. Summer pasture, typically, might be up in the hills where it was too cold for grass in winter; winter pasture in reasonably adjacent lowlands where heat and the lack of rainfall limited grazing in the summer months. Essentially, nomadism builds two landscapes into a complete grazing portfolio. In this set-up, movement fulfils a designated function and could never just be random. A nomadic existence is potentially fragile anyway, highly dependent upon rainfall in what are by definition marginal landscapes; but setting off into the wild blue yonder without knowledge of a potential destination’s carrying capacity or, equally important, established rights to graze there, would have been to invite economic disaster.
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What this means, of course, is that the intrusions of Huns into the Alanic-dominated world north-east of the Black Sea, and then subsequently into the heart of Europe, cannot be viewed – as J. B. Bury did, for instance, in a famous set of lectures given in the 1920s – as a natural extension of their nomad economy. The Huns did not just meander around the Great Eurasian Steppe until they happened to come across its western edge north of the Black Sea and take a liking to it. The decisions to switch their centres of operation westwards – in two distinct stages separated by about a generation – must have been taken for specific reasons, and carefully calculated. The potential gains of these moves had always to be balanced against the dangers of failing to find, or – more likely – establish, rights over sufficient grazing for their flocks at the new destinations.
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As to what reason or reasons led the Huns to move westwards, no easy answers are available. Roman sources are of little use. Ammianus’ view that attacking other barbarians was just something that came naturally to Hunnic megabarbarians does not get us very far. The available evidence does suggest three factors, however, two possible and the other more certain, that made it generally likely that Hunnic groups would want to move west. One of the possible factors is climate change. Around the year 400
AD
, western Europe was basking in a climatic optimum, with long hot summers and plenty of sunshine. But what was good for western Europeans was less good for the world beyond the Don, where the same climatic optimum meant that there was less summer rainfall to make the grass grow. Given these conditions, it would be only natural to expect greater competition for
grazing among steppe nomads, and the modern world provides us with a nasty parallel for what can happen. At the heart of the Darfur conflict are Sudanese nomad populations driven out of their old homelands as global warming turns pasture into desert. The trouble with applying this argument to the fourth century, however, is that, for the moment at least, it is impossible to know how severe or, indeed, limited the effects of fourth-century climate change actually were. There are no precise data. And in their absence, the chances are that any effects were fairly marginal. But as we shall see in subsequent chapters, a sequence of nomadic groups exploded out of this same steppe in the mid-to-late first millennium, and more were to follow, which strongly suggests that Eurasian nomadism was not facing any fundamental ecological challenge. And in any case, like the Tervingi and Greuthungi when faced with the Hunnic menace, Huns under ecological pressure could have moved in any of several directions, and adducing climate change would still leave us having to explain why they moved westwards.

The other possible factor is political revolution. At least two of the nomadic groups that followed the Huns out of the steppe into Europe in the later first millennium did so, in part, because they were under political and military pressure from other nomadic groups to their east. The sixth-century Avars were on the run from the Empire of the Western Turks, while the ninth-century Magyars moved from north of the Black Sea to the Great Hungarian Plain because of the attacks of Petchenegs. In the absence of specific information about the western steppe in the fourth century, it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that the Huns too were facing this kind of pressure.
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But even if we allow the Huns a negative element to their motivation deriving from a combination of potential climatic and political factors, there is no doubting that this coexisted, as has proved to be the case in so many flows of migration, with some very positive reasons for moving west. Roman sources describing the Huns’ initial impact on the outer fringes of the Empire offer no substantial explanation of what was going on, but later materials are highly suggestive. From c.390 and particularly the 420s onwards, we find Huns engaged in a variety of activities in relation to the Roman world. Sometimes they raided it. A huge raiding party targeting both the east Roman and Persian Empires passed through the Caucasus in 395, before the Hunnic main body had moved on to central Europe, and there are
indications of other smaller raids in this era besides. Sometimes Huns served the Empire as mercenaries. As early as the 380s, the activities of a body of Huns and Alans led to diplomatic confrontation between the western Emperor Valentinian II and the usurper Maximus. In the 400s, likewise, Uldin provided military support for Stilicho, before his ill-advised incursion into east Roman Dacia. With the arrival of Huns in large numbers in central Europe from c.410 onwards, however, mercenary service reached its apogee. They were possibly already providing major military support to the de facto ruler of the western Empire, Flavius Constantius, in the 410s, but it was in the time of Aetius, from the 420s, that they became a crucial bulwark of the western Empire. Not only did Aetius use their support to keep himself in power against Roman rivals, but they were also deployed to keep in check the aggressive ambitions of the other barbarian groups now well established on western imperial territory: most notably in major campaigns against the Visigoths and the Burgundians in the 430s. Then, finally, as Hunnic power grew in the time of Attila, the Huns turned from raiding and mercenary service to large-scale invasion. Two massive attacks on the east Roman Balkans, in 442 and 447, were followed by invasions of Gaul and Italy in 451 and 452.
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