Empire of Horses

by John Man

  His history was never translated into English. But one aspect of his theory took root, and flourished. Attila’s Huns, he said, were descendants of the ‘Hiong-nou’. He does not argue his case, simply stating as a fact that the ‘Hiong-nou’ were the Huns, period. ‘First Book,’ he starts, ‘History of the Ancient Huns’. A warlike nomadic tribe had vanished from Central Asia in the mid-second century. Two hundred years later, the Huns emerged at the other end of Central Asia, similar in lifestyle and name. That was enough for de Guignes, and for his successors, the weightiest of whom was Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In Gibbon, de Guignes found magisterial backing. The Huns who threatened Rome were descendants of the Xiongnu made …

  … formidable by the matchless dexterity with which they managed their bows and their horses; by their hardy patience in supporting the inclemency of the weather; and by the incredible speed of their march, which was seldom checked by torrents or precipices, by the deepest rivers, or by the most lofty mountains.

  Gibbon used words as artillery, blasting doubt before it had a chance to grow. For the next two centuries, it was taken as a fact that the Huns were the Xiongnu, reborn in poverty. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica relies on the misspelled ‘de Guiques’. René Grousset, the great French expert in Central Asia, writing in the 1930s in L’Empire des Steppes (and in the English edition of 1970, see Bibliography), refers to the ‘Hsiung-nu of the west’ – that is, the remnants of those under Zhizhi who were defeated in 36 BC – ‘who under the name of Huns were to be the adversaries of the Roman world’. In his Historical Atlas of China of 1935, the German orientalist Albert Herrmann has a spread on the ‘Hsiung-Nu or Huns’.

  About the same time, it occurred to some sceptical scholars that there was absolutely no evidence to bridge the gap between the two. Indeed, the difference between the sophisticated nobility buried in Gol Mod and Attila’s impoverished hordes is striking. The theory fell into limbo. As Edward Thompson, one-time Professor of Classics at Nottingham University, baldly wrote in his 1948 book on the Huns,1 ‘This view has now been exploded and abandoned.’

  In fact it was never exploded, just never established, and it has recently regained lost ground. The two tribes were briefly so close in time and place that it is hard to believe they were separate. The remnants of the Xiongnu, fleeing from central Mongolia int the 90s along trade routes that led through the Ili Valley in southern Kazakhstan, would have reached the Syrdarya River by about 120. In round figures, that’s 2,800 kilometres in thirty years, or a mere 90 kilometres a year. In 160, the Greek polymath Ptolemy mentions the ‘Khoinoi’, commonly equated with the Chuni, the initial ch sounded as in the Scottish loch, which makes them sound pretty much like ‘Huns’. These people he placed between two other tribes, the most distant of which, the Roxelani, probably lived on the Don, thus putting the Huns just north of the Sea of Azov – the ‘Maeotic marshes’ mentioned later by Roman authors. The gap has narrowed to 2,000 kilometres and forty years – a gap easily crossed at the slow pace of 50 kilometres a year.

  The Huns moved a lot further and faster than that. They were wanderers, in need of a base and pastures. But with every kilometre westward, they would find pasturage increasingly reduced by other nomads and by settled communities. With little to offer other than wool, felt and domestic animals, their only remaining option would have been theft. They turned from pastoral nomads into a robber band, for whom violence would be as much a way of life as it became for wandering Vikings.

  Conquest demanded unity and direction, and for that we come at last to the final element in their rise to fame and fortune: leadership. Some time in the fourth century the Huns acquired their first named leader, the first to bring himself and his people to the attention of the outside world. He was called something like Balamber or Balamur, and hardly anything at all is known about him except his name. It was he who inspired his people and focused their fighting potential to attack tribe after tribe, establishing a tradition of leadership that would, in the end, produce Attila. In AD 350 the Huns crossed the Volga and approached the outer fringes of the Roman world, dislodging a host of other tribes as they went.

  In the mid-fourth century, this grassland was dominated by the Sarmatians, a loose confederation of Iranian people who had taken over from the Scythians more than 500 years before. The Sarmatians specialized in fighting with lances, their warriors protected by conical caps and mailed coats, but no match for the Hun tornado.

  One group of Sarmatians were the Alans, a wide-ranging sub-federation known as As to the Persians. (It is from their name, by the way, that ‘Aryan’ is derived, l shifting to r in some Iranian languages; thus the tribe so admired by Hitler turns out not to be Germanic at all.) Now we are getting into a region and a tribe that became known to the Romans. Ammianus Marcellinus, the fourth-century Roman historian, says they were cattle-herding nomads who lived in wagons roofed with bark and worshipped a sword stuck in the ground, a belief that Attila himself would adopt. They were terrific riders on their tough little horses. The Alans, more European than Asian, with full beards and blue eyes, were lovers of war, experts with the sword and the lasso, issuing terrifying yells in battle, reviling old men because they had not died fighting. They were said to flay their slain enemies and turn their skins into horse-trappings. Theirs was an extensive culture – their tombs have been found by the hundred in southern Russia – and a flexible one, happy to assimilate captives and to be assimilated. The Huns blew them apart, clan by clan. The Alans then formed fragments of the explosion of tribes that tore the Roman empire to pieces. They also had a talent for retaining their own identity. In the slurry of wandering peoples, the Alans were like grit, widely mixed but always abrasive. Within a couple of generations, different clans would in some cases become useful recruits for the Huns, in others allies of Rome. Their remnants in the Caucasus would transmute into the Ossetians of southern Russia and Georgia: the first two syllables of this name recall their Persian appellation, As, with a Mongol-style plural -ut (so the current name of the little Russian enclave known as North Ossetia-Alania doubly emphasizes its roots). At the other end of the empire, they would join both the Goths on their march into Spain – some derive the name Catalonia from a combination of Goth and Alan – and the Vandals, who swept them up on their flight to North Africa in about 420.

  Across the Dnieper lived the Ostrogoths – ‘Eastern’ Goths – members of a huge Germanic tribe that had wandered into eastern Europe and southern Russia two centuries before, and had now divided into two branches, the others being the Visi- (‘Western’) Goths. The Ostrogoths were settled farming folk, but their venerable chief, Ermanaric,2 would have been something of a role model for an aspiring Hun leader. He was the central figure of an estate that straggled from the Black Sea to the Baltic, from its core, which Ermanaric ruled directly, out to an ever looser network of vassals, allies, tribute-payers and trade partners. Balamber, with his Hun and Alan cavalry, smashed Ermanaric’s army just north of the Black Sea in about 376. The loose federation of tribes collapsed like a burst balloon; the old Ostrogoth committed suicide; and Balamber took a Gothic princess in marriage to seal the takeover.

  At the Dniester, the Visigoths of today’s Romania were next in line. These had become a proud and sophisticated people, now settled in towns, with a respect for law and order administered by their ruler. Rome, having given up thoughts of direct rule, treated the Visigoths as trade partners, valuing the supply of slaves, grain, cloth, wine and coins. After the Roman Emperor Valens acknowledged Visigothic independence in 369, it seemed both would benefit: their agreement established a mutual trade link, mutual respect, a buffer state for Rome against the barbarian hordes of Inner Asia.

  Rome could be resisted, but not the advancing Huns. A line of defences along the Dniester was easily bypassed when the Huns ignored the Gothic army, crossed the river by night and made a surprise assault on the Goths from the rear. After a hasty retreat across present-day
Moldova, Gothic morale collapsed, driving them across the Danube into Thrace. Behind them, advancing from the Ukrainian lowlands, came Attila’s immediate forebears, on a 75-kilometre march over the Carpathians, winding uphill along the road that now leads from Kolomyya through the Carpathian National Nature Park, spreading wagon-trains and herds over the Hungarian grasslands, which became their base.

  Hungary is a long way from where the Xiongnu vanished, and links are hard to find. There are arguments both for and against.

  In 1986 a joint Russian–Mongolian expedition excavated a grave-site in the far west of Mongolia, in the Altai Mountains. Their report refers to the find as a ‘Hun’ site, reflecting the Mongolian eagerness to equate Xiongnu and Hun, but it is clearly Xiongnu. The five graves were remarkable because they had not been thoroughly vandalized. All contained wooden coffins, and four of the five held the remains of bows: bits of bone or horn, used as ‘ears’ at the end of the limbs and to reinforce the central section. Oddly, the graves contained no actual bows or the remains of any, only ears. The four graves had in turn three ears, three ears, two ears and four ears, and each grave also contained a varying number of the horn strips used to reinforce a bow’s wooden body. Many bits of different bows, but no complete bows. There can be only one conclusion: the bits were never part of a bow, or bows. Speaking of one of the graves, one of the greatest of experts on the Huns, Otto Maenchen-Helfen, concluded: ‘The people buried the dead warrior with a sham bow.’3 A ghost bow, more like. Once suggested, the idea is obvious. Bows took years to make. And these were not the graves of wealthy chieftains. It was natural that grieving families would not waste such precious, life-and-death objects by burying them. For our purposes, though, the finds had particular significance. The ears were of different lengths, from which the authors concluded that the bows were asymmetrical, the upper limb being longer than the lower limb. Both Xiongnu bows and Hun bows were asymmetrical – for reasons that remain obscure – which suggests a link between Hun and Xiongnu.

  There’s more indirect evidence in cauldrons. You cannot discuss Huns and avoid cauldrons. There are some 150 examples of these heavy, metre-high, round-bodied, cylindrical objects, found all across Eurasia, from Ordos and northern Mongolia and Siberia to Hungary (with one bit from France, where Attila campaigned in his later years). About twenty of them are considered Hunnish. It sounds like evidence to link east and west, Xiongnu and Hun. One problem is that they are very varied in design – no two are exactly alike; some have legs, some a small stand, some no support at all, and they have many different types of handle and decoration Another problem is that many groups made them. They seem to have been used for boiling up vast clan meals and/or for funeral ceremonies. They are solid, practical objects, with none of the sophistication of Chinese bronzes. There are some individual features – Hun cauldrons are thinner, with rectangular handles, some with mushroom-shaped additions; Sarmatian ones are wider-bellied with semi-circular handles. Some scholars see a progression from Xiongnu to Hun based on handle-decorations, but it is impossible to date cauldrons unless they are found in a dateable tomb. As Otto Maenchen-Helfen puts it, ‘The crude, often barbaric copper cauldrons link the Huns with the area of the Xiongnu confederacy,’ which is almost, but not quite good enough to equate the two.

  Similar arguments are made about other objects – bronze mirrors, which are mostly Chinese, but were also made by nomads; gold plaques; glass beads used in embroidery, along with coral, mother-of-pearl, lapis lazuli – all were used by all Eurasian cultures, including Xiongnu and Hun, though none can be used to prove a link between the two.

  If Hun and Xiongnu are not quite joined by archaeology, what about folklore? If there was a link, isn’t it odd that the Huns did not seem to have a folk memory of it? The Xiongnu’s Turkish successors in Mongolia were happy to claim them as ancestors until they, too, were driven westwards in the eighth century; but Attila, much closer to the Xiongnu in time, apparently never did. He had his bards, but no eyewitness recorded them singing of all-conquering forebears. Again, the argument can be made to run both ways. Sometimes folkloric information is astonishingly enduring – the Trojan War remained alive in oral accounts for centuries before Homer wrote it down. Sometimes it fades fast, especially during a long migration. The Mongols, too, forgot their origins: their great foundation epic, The Secret History of the Mongols, says only that they sprang from a wolf and a doe, and had crossed an ocean or lake to arrive in Mongolia perhaps around 500 years before the Secret History was written, probably in 1229. The Huns seem to have forgotten much faster – in 250 years – recalling nothing of their forebears; nothing, at least, that anyone recorded.

  Perhaps there was something more active than mere forgetfulness at work, if Xiongnu turned to Hun. Once reduced from imperial grandeur to impoverished bands, perhaps the Huns became ashamed of their decline, and simply refused to mention their former greatness to their children. I have never heard of such a process being recorded; but then, it wouldn’t be, would it? One generation of taboo – ‘Don’t mention China!’ – would be enough. That is the way some languages are lost, obliterated by the higher status of a dominant culture.4

  There’s very little help from language. Though Attila employed interpreters and secretaries, no one wrote Hunnish, only Latin or Greek, the languages of the dominant culture, with its inbuilt prejudice against barbarian tongues. The Mongolians look on the Xiongnu as ancestors, and recent DNA analysis of Xiongnu bones reveals a genetic link between the two. There must have been an overlap between incoming Mongols and some remaining Xiongnu. But very few words that are absolutely, undoubtedly Hunnish or Xiongnu have survived. Some names, yes – but they are Sinified or Latinized.

  To tally the possible, the probable and the certain: the Huns were probably of Turkic stock, probably spoke a Turkic language (which shared distant roots with Mongolian), were possibly a remnant of migrating Xiongnu, and were certainly nothing whatever to do with the Slavic and Germanic tribes into whom they so rudely barged. It will take DNA analysis, I think, to tell whether Attila’s genes owed anything to Modun’s 500 years earlier.

  Let’s assume that the Huns were descendants of the Xiongnu, much changed by their epic journey across Eurasia. Even if they weren’t, they were a part of the multiple migrations caused in part by the Xiongnu’s rise, fall and flight. The Huns were something new in history: a juggernaut that could live by pillage. Like sharks, they had become expert predators, honed to fitness by constant movement, adapted to roam the inland sea of grass, blotting up lesser tribes, until they emerged from the unknown and forced themselves on to the consciousness of the sophisticated, urbanized Europeans. Their impact was catastrophic, at first indirectly and then extremely directly. Lacking anything from Hun sources, this part of the story can only be told from the Roman point of view.

  In 376, disturbing news reached the Emperor Valens in Constantinople. Valens, co-ruler with his brother of the Roman empire, was familiar enough with troubles on his frontiers, but there had never been anything like this. Far to the north, beyond the Balkans, on the marshy northern banks of the Danube, refugees were gathering by the thousand, destitute and starving, fleeing their farms and villages in terror. In the words of the historian Ammianus, ‘a hitherto unknown race of men had appeared from some remote corner of the earth, uprooting and destroying everything in its path like a whirlwind descending from high mountains’.5 These aliens were mounted archers, horsemen such as no one in the Empire had ever seen before, riding as if forged into their saddles, so that man and mount seemed one, like the centaurs of old.

  In Roman eyes, these were the vilest creatures imaginable. Their opinions, all wrong, were even more prejudiced than Chinese ones of their barbarians. The Huns came from the north, and everyone knew that the colder the climate was, the more barbaric the people were. To paraphrase Ammianus, who never saw a Hun himself, they were squat, with thick necks, so prodigiously ugly and bent that they might be two-legged animals, or the figures crude
ly carved from stumps which are seen on the parapets of bridges. There was nothing like them for cruelty and ugliness, the one accentuating the other, because they cut their baby boys’ cheeks so that, when they became men, their beards grew in patches, if they grew at all. They knew nothing of metal, had no religion and lived like savages, without fire, eating their food raw, living off roots and meat tenderized by placing it under their horses’ saddles. No buildings, of course, not so much as a reed hut; indeed, they feared the very idea of venturing under a roof. Once they had put their necks into some dingy shirt, they never took it off or changed it until it rotted. Granted, they were wonderful horsemen; but even this was an expression of barbarism, for they practically lived on horseback, eating, drinking, sleeping, even defecating in the saddle. Their shoes were so shapeless, their legs so bowed that they could hardly walk. Jordanes, the Gothic historian, was no less insulting. These stunted, foul and puny tribesmen, offspring of witches and unclean spirits, ‘had, if I may say so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes’.6 It was amazing they could see at all, given that ‘the light that enters the dome of the skull can hardly reach the receding eyeballs … Though they live in the form of men, they have the cruelty of wild beasts.’ These are judgements that have echoed down the ages. Practically everyone is happy to quote everyone else, including Gibbon, in condemning the Huns as smelly, bandy-legged, nasty, brutish and short.