Empire of Horses

by John Man

  It would take some years for the ‘unknown race’ to appear en masse, under their most effective and devastating leader, Attila, but already their eruption across the steppes of today’s southern Russia and Ukraine had shunted tribe against tribe, the last of which now clamoured on the Danube’s banks.

  Valens’s immediate concern was not the thud of alien hooves but the horde of refugees. They were Visigoths. Valens, approaching fifty and with twelve years of ruling behind him, knew a good deal about the proud and independent Visigoths, and had reason to be wary of them. Having settled in what is now Romania, they had supposedly become allies of the empire, supplying soldiers for the armies of Rome and Constantinople. But they would not stay put and, ten years before, Valens himself had gone to war to pen them into their homeland. Things hadn’t gone to plan. As guerrillas they were unbeatable. Three years into the war, Valens – bow-legged, paunchy, with a lazy eye – had to talk peace on a boat in the middle of the Danube, as if emperor and barbarian leader were equals. They agreed that the Danube was the natural border, and that neither side would cross it. But now here were the Visigoths, about to invade not as warriors but as a whole nation of asylum-seekers: families, children, sick and aged, by the wagonload. Advisers urged Valens to see his former foes not as refugees but as recruits for the emperor’s overstretched army. Officials journeyed north, not to oppose, but to help, with transport, food and allocations of land in the frontier provinces.

  So as the spring of 376 turned to summer, the destitute Visigoths came over the low-lying northern banks, taking to the river in boats and dug-out canoes, hauling rafts bearing their wagons and horses. So many all at once would have overwhelmed the Thracian countryside. They had to be kept where they were. The southern banks of the Danube turned into a vast holding camp for the bedraggled refugees. To the Visigoths, it seemed that they had fled one frying pan only to land in another. They muttered about taking direct action to seize the lands they thought they had been promised. The regional commander, Lupicinus, ordered up more troops from Gaul to quell disorder.

  But time was running out. The Visigoths’ eastern cousins, crowds of Ostrogoths also fleeing the unnamed menace to the east, arrived at the Danube, saw it weakly held, and crossed, without waiting for permission. Pushed and reinforced by the new influx, the Visgothic king Fritigern led his own people 100 kilometres south, to the local provincial capital, Marcianople (the ruins of which lie half-exposed near Devnya, 25 kilometres inland from the Bulgarian Black Sea resort of Varna). The Romans invited the Visigothic leaders to a lavish dinner, ostensibly to discuss an aid package, while outside the walls the mass of their people, kept at bay by several thousand Roman soldiers, seethed with rumour and resentment. Suspecting their chief had been lured to his downfall, the Visigoths attacked a contingent of Romans and seized their weapons. When news of this reached the dinner table, Lupicinus had some of Fritigern’s attendants killed in revenge, and probably had plans to kill them all. But that would have been suicidal. The rioters were now an army. Fritigern had the presence of mind to point out that the only way to restore peace was for him to return to his people, sound, healthy and free. Lupicinus saw his point, and released his guest – who at once, as Ammianus says, ‘took horse and hurried away to kindle the flame of war’. Across Lower Moesia – northern Bulgaria today – outraged Visigoths robbed, burned and looted, seizing yet more weapons. A pitched battle ended with more Romans dead, more arms seized, and Lupicinus cowering in the sacked streets of Marcianople.

  Then, in an act of sheer idiocy, Valens, afraid that Goth would side with Goth, ordered the long-established and peaceful Visigothic colony in Adrianople to leave, at once. He intended to secure the place, and achieved the exact opposite. The colonists lost their tempers, killed a number of their oppressors and, leaving the city, threw themselves into the arms of their fellow Goths, who, in the autumn of 377, broke through the Roman blockade to loot their way south into present-day Turkey.

  The prospect of reinforcement was not good. Though the empire had perhaps 500,000 men under arms, half of these were frontier garrisons watching for trouble in the Barbaricum, leaving only half as mobile field armies. Besides, many of the troops were non-Roman mercenaries, and any order to move inspired desertions. Troops could come only from the Gaulish frontier, under the command of Valens’s young nephew Gratian, who had been co-ruler and Emperor of the West for the last two years. Still only eighteen, he had a growing reputation as a leader, but it was all he could do to keep the peace along the Rhine and the Danube. The plan to shift troops from Gaul to the Balkans leaked across the frontier, inspiring German raids that demanded Gratian’s attention all that winter. It was not until early 378 that he set out to aid his uncle.

  The empire was already a tattered entity. Though still nominally united by history and family, it had begun to split: Rome and Constantinople, two capitals, two worlds, two languages and two creeds (each fighting its own sub-creeds of paganism and heresy). To the east lay the great imperial rival, Persia; in Africa, Moorish rebels; and right across northern Europe and the frontiers of Inner Asia the Barbaricum, inhabited by those who spoke neither Greek nor Latin. With continual barbarian incursions across the Rhine and the Danube, Rome – the term sometimes included Constantinople and sometimes didn’t, depending on the context – tried to defend itself with a range of strategies from outright force to negotiation, bribery, intermarriage, trade and, finally, controlled immigration. This last was in the end the only possible way to stave off assault, and yet it also led inexorably to further decay.

  Barbarians were good fighters; it made sense to employ them, with confusing consequences for both sides. Enemies became allies, who often ended up fighting their own kin. Peace came always at the price of continued collapse: the army was strengthened by an influx of barbarians, but taxes rose to pay for them; faith in government declined, and corruption spread. By the late fourth century the empire’s borders resembled a weakening immune system, through which barbarians crept, in direct assault or temporary partnership, while the army – the ultimate arbiter of political authority and the guardian of the frontiers – was like the blood platelets of this ageing body, always rushing to clot some new wound, and never in sufficient numbers.

  This, then, was the glorious, vast and diseased structure that Valens was once again preparing to defend as he marched north from Constantinople in the early summer of 378, planning to join up with his co-emperor and rival, his ambitious nephew Gratian.

  Now Valens’s battered ego took the reins. He, who had demanded Gratian’s help, had become jealous of his nephew’s success, and eager for a victory of his own. Marching north to Adrianople in July, he was told by his scouts that a Goth army was approaching, but that it consisted of only 10,000 men, a force rather less than his own of some 15,000. Outside Adrianople, he made his base near the junction of the Maritsa and Tundzha Rivers, around which over the next few days arose a palisade and a ditch. Just then an officer arrived from somewhere up the Danube with a letter from Gratian urging his uncle not to do anything hasty until the reinforcements arrived. Valens called a war council. Some whispered that Gratian just wanted to share in a triumph that should belong to Valens alone. That suited Valens. Preparations continued.

  Fritigern, laagered in his wagons some 13 kilometres away up the Tundzha, was himself wary of giving battle. Around him were not just his warriors, but their entire households as well: perhaps 30,000 people, with an unwieldy corps of wagons, all arranged in family circles, impossible to re-form in less than a day. To fight effectively – away from the encumbering wagons – he would need help; and so he had sent for the heavily armoured Ostrogothic cavalry. Meanwhile he played for time, sending out scouts to set fire to the sun-scorched wheat fields between his encampment and the Romans’ – and a messenger, who arrived in the imperial camp with a letter: yes, ‘barbarian’ leaders were quite capable of using secretaries fluent in Latin to communicate with the Roman world, as the Xiongnu chanyus used secre
taries to write in Chinese. The letter was an official plea to revert to the status quo: peace, in return for land and protection from the whirlwind approaching from the east. Valens would have none of it. He wanted victory: Fritigern captured or dead, the Goths cowed. He refused to reply.

  Next morning, 9 August, the Romans were ready. All non-essential gear – spare tents, treasure chests, imperial robes – was sent back into Adrianople for safety, and the horsemen and infantry set off to cover the 13 kilometres to the Visigothic laagers. It was a short march, but a gruelling one, over burned fields, under a scorching sun, with no streams in sight.

  After a couple of hours the Roman horsemen and infantry approached the Visigothic camp and its huddles of wagons, from which rose wild war-cries and chants in praise of Gothic ancestors. The sweaty approach had caused the Romans to straggle, with one wing of the cavalry out in front and infantry behind blocking the way of the second. Slowly they pulled themselves into line, clattering their weapons and beating their shields to drown out the barbarians’ clamour.

  To Fritigern, still awaiting help, these were unnerving sights and sounds. Again, he played for time, sending a request for peace. This time Valens was about to agree when a band of Roman outriders, hungry for glory, perhaps, made a quick lunge at the Visigothic flank. At that moment the Ostrogothic cavalry came galloping in along the valley. The Roman cavalry moved forward to confront this new menace. That was what Fritigern had been waiting for. His infantry burst from the wagons, firing arrows, throwing spears, until the two lines clashed and locked in a heaving scrum of shields, broken spears and swords, so tightly packed that soldiers could hardly lift their arms to strike – or, having done so, lower them again. Dust rose, covering the battleground in a choking, blinding fog. Outside the mêlée, there was no need for the Visigothic archers and spearmen to aim: any missile thrown or fired at random dropped through the dust unseen, and had to find a mark.

  Then came the heavy cavalry, with no opposing Roman cavalry to stop them, trampling the dying, their battleaxes splitting the helmets and breastplates of infantrymen weakened by heat, weighed down with armour and slipping on the blood-soaked ground.

  Within the hour, the living began to stumble away from the Roman lines over the corpses of the slain. ‘Some fell without knowing who struck them,’ writes Ammianus. ‘Some were crushed by sheer weight of numbers; some were killed by their own comrades.’

  As the sun set, the noise of battle died away into the silent, moonless night. Two-thirds of the Romans – perhaps 10,000 men – lay dead, jumbled with corpses of horses. Now the dark fields filled with other sounds, as the cries, sobs and groans of the wounded followed the survivors across the burned-out crops and along the road back to Adrianople.

  No one knows what happened to Valens. He had been lost or abandoned by his bodyguard and found his way to the army’s most disciplined and experienced legions, holding out in a last stand. A general rode off to call in some reserves, only to find they had fled. After that, nothing. Some said the emperor died when struck by an arrow soon after night fell. Or perhaps he found refuge in a farmhouse nearby, which was surrounded and burned to the ground, along with all those inside – except one man who escaped from a window to tell what had happened. Thus the story came to Ammianus. True or not, the emperor’s body was never found.

  The violence continued, and the empire had no answer to it. At dawn, the Visigoths advanced beyond the battlefield, to Adrianople, hot on the heels of the survivors seeking refuge. But there was no safety to be had, for the defenders, scrabbling to prepare for a siege, refused to open the gates to their fleeing fellows. By midday the Visigoths had encircled the walls, trapping the terrified survivors against them. Some 300 surrendered, only to be slaughtered on the spot.

  Luckily for the city, a thunderstorm washed out the assault, forcing the Visigoths back to their wagons and allowing the defenders to shore up the gates with rocks and make ready their trebuchets and siege bows. When the Visigoths attacked the next day, they lost hundreds crushed by rocks, impaled by arrows the size of spears and buried under stones tipped from above.

  Giving up the assault, they turned to easier targets, looting their way across 200 kilometres to the very gates of Constantinople. There the rampage died, killed by the sight of the vast walls, and then by a horrifying incident. As the city mounted its defence, a Saracen contingent suddenly erupted from the gates. One of these fearsome warriors, carrying a sword and wearing nothing but a loincloth, hurled himself into the fray, sliced open a Gothic soldier’s throat, seized the corpse and sucked the streaming blood. It was enough to drain what remained of the Goths’ courage and force a retreat northwards.

  The war dragged on for four more years, ending in a treaty that gave the Goths almost exactly what had been agreed in the first place: land just south of the Danube and semiindependence, with their soldiers fighting for Rome under their own leaders. It would not last, for the Goths were a nation on the move, the greatest of the many barbarian migrations that would undermine the empire. A Visigoth who fought at Adrianople could have lived through another revolt, a slow advance deeper into the empire, the brief seizure of Rome itself in 410, a march over the Pyrenees and a final return over the same mountains to find peace at last in south-west France.

  And all this chaos – the refugee crisis, the rebellion, the disaster of Adrianople, the attack on Constantinople, the impossible peace, the slow erosion by barbarians – had been unleashed by the ‘unknown race’ to the east. Still no one in the empire or even the nearer reaches of the Barbaricum knew anything of them.

  Perhaps they should have done. For, as Ammianus mentions in passing, among the cavalry that had come to Fritigern’s rescue was a contingent of these lightly armed horse-archers, no more than a few hundred, probably operating as outriders for the main Goth force. It was their arrival the previous year that had forced the Romans to withdraw, allowing the Goths to break through into Thrace. No doubt they had been doing very nicely as freebooters and spies, harassing enemy flanks. If they had been in the battle outside Adrianople, no one would have taken much notice of these few coarse creatures with their minimal armour; but they were seen afterwards, during the looting. Then they vanished, for few cities had fallen and the pickings would have been meagre.

  They left, however, with another sort of treasure: information. They had seen what the West had to offer. They had witnessed Rome’s worst day since the defeat by Hannibal at Cannae 594 years before. They might even have guessed that Rome would in future rely more on heavy cavalry, which, as they knew, was no match for their own type of warfare. They had seen Rome’s wider problems: the difficulty of securing a leaky frontier, the impossibility of gathering and moving large armies to fight fast-moving guerrillas, the arrogance of the ‘civilized’ when confronting the ‘barbarian’. While the whole Balkan sector of the empire collapsed into rioting, these swift mounted archers galloped back northwards and eastwards with their few stolen items, and their vital intelligence: the empire was rich, and vulnerable.

  These lightly armed, fast-moving horsemen were the first Huns to reach central Europe. Shortly, under the most ruthless of their leaders, they too would cross the river, with consequences for the decaying empire far in excess of anything wrought by the Goths.

  In the 380s, some groups of Huns were inside the empire, first as mercenaries-as-peacemakers, then as robber barons leading hit-and-run raids, then as allies bribed with grants of land. Back in Hungary, the Huns took to raiding across Turkey and into Syria, where monasteries provided rich pickings. ‘Dead are the merchants, widowed the women,’ mourned a Christian priest, Cyrillonas, in 395. In 408 they first turned on Western Europe. In about 430, they raided the Rhineland, attacking a small tribe known both as Burgundians and Nibelungs (after a chief, Niflung), thus providing future German-speakers with the roots of an enduring folk tale, epic poem and Wagner’s operatic saga. A new leader, Ruga, came up with a system that bore remarkable similarities to the Xiongnu agenda
: raids, and promises to stop raids in exchange for gifts, in Ruga’s case gold. Ruga died in 435.

  His successor was Attila, who took raiding and blackmail to a whole new level. He was a scary little man, moody and brutal, but also capable of being ‘sympathetic in council’ – in the words of Greek official Priscus, who actually visited Attila in his capital, with its wooden walls, wooden buildings, and Roman-style stone bath-house. Attila hired secretaries. Raids became invasion across the Balkans to the great walls of Constantinople. Ambassadors made demands. There was lavish hospitality, and equally lavish payments (2,000 pounds of gold annually). These funded Attila’s army, which built siege engines. Empire followed, down the Balkans, across to the Caspian, up to the Baltic, an area half the size of the USA.

  And then in 450, ambition got the better of him. He planned to head west, into Gaul, and then to Rome itself. His excuse was that the Emperor’s sister, Honoria, seeking revenge for being deprived of a lover, came up with a daft scheme involving the Hun ruler. In Gibbon’s florid account, she ‘offered to deliver her person into the arms of a barbarian of whose language she was ignorant, whose figure was scarcely human and whose religion and manners she abhorred’.7 She sent her ring as proof of her good faith.

  Attila raised a massive army and crossed France to Orléans. A Christian source claims that on the way he introduced himself to a priest in Latin with the words ‘Ego sum Attila, flagellum Dei’, ‘I am Attila, the scourge of God’, sent to punish a wayward Christendom. In fact, his scourging days were numbered. Turned back by a Roman army, he backtracked to the flat, rolling Catalaunian Plains near Troyes, where, in one of the most famous battles in European history, he was defeated, and returned to Hungary. After another campaign into Italy, stymied by plague and famine, he retreated again and took solace in the arms of a new young wife named Ildico. After a drunken wedding night, he suffered some sort of a seizure – possibly a burst ulcer – and drowned in his own blood. He was found dead the next morning, with poor Ildico (in Priscus’s words) ‘weeping with downcast face beside him’.