In traditional accounts of these events, the labels used in our sources – Goths, Rugi, Heruli, Sciri and so forth – were conceived of as belonging to ‘peoples’: as noted earlier, by this was meant compact masses of humanity comprising men, women and children, all of whom shared distinct cultural norms and who were, by and large, closed to outsiders, generally reproducing themselves by marriage within the group. The different phases of migratory activity associated with the rise and fall of Attila’s Hunnic Empire could thus be characterized, literally, as part of the Völkerwanderung: the ‘movement of peoples’. The historical evidence for most of these moves, however, is quite pathetic. Roman historians’ accounts of barbarian migration leave much to be desired, as we have seen, even when those migrations directly affected the Roman world. Most of the population movements associated with the Hunnic Empire unfolded outside Rome’s borders, and detailed evidence is correspondingly sparse. Often we have nothing more than a bare indication that group A moved from point X to point Y, and sometimes even this much is implicit, with no account at all of the composition of the population unit involved.
In the face of so much resounding silence, any estimate of the scale and nature of the action involved in these population moves – or, to be absolutely precise for a minute, recorded shifts in names – is going to depend on your general understanding of the nature of the groups behind the labels. This means in turn that the issue of migration within the Hunnic Empire is intimately linked to the hotly contested issue of barbarian group identity. If you think labels hide population units each with a substantial sense of group identity, then your estimate of the amount of migration flowing on to and out of the Great Hungarian Plain between c.410 and 508 will be correspondingly large. If group identities are perceived, on the contrary, as no more than a set of labels which barbarian populations could adopt or jettison according to short-term convenience, then the movement of these labels around the map of Europe need mean very little in demographic terms. Probably not nothing, since somebody has to move for a label to shift. But there would be no need to envisage large numbers of people on the move. If the label ‘worked’ (that is, performed a function that people found useful), new recruits could quickly be assembled at their point of destination by the few who did move. What, then, does the evidence suggest about the solidity or otherwise of group identities in the age of Attila?
EMPIRE AND IDENTITY
In his eyewitness account of an embassy to the Huns, the historian Priscus tells how, in Attila’s camp, he was suddenly hailed in Greek by someone who looked like a prosperous Hun ‘with good clothing and his hair clipped all around’. On further inquiry, the man told Priscus his life story:
He was a Greek-speaking Roman merchant from Viminacium, a city on the river Danube . . .
When the city was captured by the barbarians, he was deprived of his prosperity and . . . assigned to Onegesius [one of Attila’s leading henchmen], for after Attila the leading men . . . chose their captives from the well-to-do. Having proven his valour in later battles against the Romans and the Akatziri and having, according to [Hunnic] law, given his booty to his master, he had won his freedom. He had married a barbarian wife and had children, and, as a sharer of the table of Onegesius, he now enjoyed a better life than he had before.
This Roman merchant turned Hunnic warrior provides a textbook illustration of a major trend in current thinking about group identities in Attila’s Empire: they were highly malleable. There is another important individual case history suggesting much the same. Odovacar’s father Edeco (if, as seems likely, the two Edecos are the same man) is first met as another of Attila’s chief henchmen, alongside the Onegesius whose patronage was so important to the ex-Greek merchant. What’s so exciting about Edeco is that he became king of the Sciri after Attila’s death, even though he himself was not one. He probably owed his claim to the throne to having married a high-born Scirian lady, since his children, Odovacar and Onoulphous, are said to have had a Scirian mother. But Edeco himself is dubbed variously a Hun or a Thuringian. What these two case histories suggest, of course, is that Attila’s Empire was a melting-pot for pre-existing group identities, and the argument can be bolstered with more general evidence. Many of Attila’s leading henchmen had in fact Germanic not Hunnic names. Onegesius and Edeco certainly did, while two others, Berichus and Scottas, probably did. The recorded names for Attila and his brother Bleda are also Germanic, which, we know, operated as the lingua franca of Attila’s Empire because so many Germani were included within the numbers of its subjects that they massively outnumbered any Hunnic core.30 All the historical evidence thus suggests that the Middle Danubian world of the Huns was deeply multicultural.
Its archaeological remains tell a similar story. Nearly two generations of work since 1945 have unearthed a vast mass of material dating to the period of Hunnic domination, largely from cemetery excavations on the Great Hungarian Plain. There are some treasure hoards as well. But in this material, ‘proper’ Huns have proved highly elusive. In total – and this includes the Volga steppe north of the Black Sea – archaeologists have identified no more than two hundred burials as plausibly Hunnic. These are distinguished by some combination of bows, a non-standard European mode of dress, some cranial deformation (some Huns bound the heads of babies, before the skull set into shape, to give a distinctive elongated shape to the head), and the presence of a particular type of cauldron. The number of such burials is tiny. Either the Huns generally disposed of their dead in ways that left no archaeological trace, or some other explanation is required for the profound scarcity of Hunnic material. What these fifth-century Middle Danubian cemeteries have produced in abundance, however, are the remains – or what look like the remains – of the Huns’ Germanic subjects. The reasons for labelling the material Germanic are as follows. Its characteristic features all have close antecedents in norms operating among Gothic- and other Germanic-dominated areas in central and eastern Europe in the late Roman period, before the Huns arrived. These fifth-century finds belong to a sequence of dated chronological horizons, which, between them, mark the emergence of what has been christened the ‘Danubian style’ of Germanic burial.31
The funerary pattern was inhumation rather than cremation,32 its characteristic objects being deposited in large quantities in a relatively restricted number of rich burials. Many other individuals were buried with few or no gravegoods. The range of objects included items of personal adornment: particularly large semicircular brooches, plate buckles, earrings with polyhedric pendants, and gold necklaces. Weapons and military equipment are also quite common: saddles with metal appliqués, long straight swords suitable for cavalry use, and arrows. The remains also show up some odd ritual quirks. It became fairly common, for instance, to bury broken metallic mirrors with the dead. The kinds of items found in the graves, the ways in which people were buried and, perhaps above all, the way in which particularly women wore their clothes (gathered with a safety pin – fibula – on each shoulder, and another closing their outer garment in front), all follow on directly from general patterns observable in Germanic remains of the fourth century. These traits were then pooled and developed further in the fifth among the massed ranks of Attila’s subjects. As a result, it is not possible to tell the Huns’ different Germanic subjects apart on the basis of archaeological remains alone.33 Like the personal histories of the merchant and Edeco, the broadly spread, individually indistinguishable material culture of the Germanic component to Attila’s Empire suggests that we are looking at a cultural melting-pot. The melting may even have gone one stage further. One possible answer to the lack of Hunnic burials in the fifth century is that they had begun to dress like their Germanic subject peoples, just as they obviously learned their language.
There is no doubt, then, that within Attila’s Empire individuals, probably in large numbers, were busy renegotiating their identities as part of their attempt to navigate their way to prosperity, as political conditions and opportunities chan
ged around them. For some scholars, indeed, the historical and archaeological evidence has suggested that group identities within this multicultural Empire were infinitely malleable. Essentially, everyone drawn into the Hunnic orbit in the late fourth and early fifth centuries became fully fledged Huns. The original nomad core and the largely Germanic-speaking contingents who bulked out the manpower of Attila’s Empire all came to share fully in the same Hunnic group identity and then, after Attila’s death, they renegotiated their identities a second time to form the various groups who emerged to independence in the 450s and 460s.34 I have no doubt that this model works in the case of some individuals and groups, but it completely ignores a substantial body of historical evidence showing that the structures of the Hunnic Empire imposed distinct limits on the extent to which individuals could adopt the group identity of their choice, which might have given them the greatest material prosperity available to them.
To start with, it’s worth thinking a bit more about Priscus’ Greek merchant. His route to success came through serving his new master successfully in battle, using the booty he won to buy his freedom. And although plenty of booty was certainly being won during Attila’s successful campaigns of the 440s, you do have to wonder how many Roman prisoners are likely to have done so well. The answer surely has to be not that many. Unless Onegesius kept a truly enormous table, there cannot have been room at it for many favoured ex-prisoners, and how many martially inexperienced Roman prisoners are likely to have been skilful and lucky enough to thrive in battle? Much less quoted is another of Priscus’ anecdotes. This concerns the fate of two other prisoners, likewise drafted into military service under the Huns, who took the opportunity of the chaos of battle to settle some old scores by killing their master. They were gibbeted.35 I suspect this less harmonious state of affairs is more likely to have prevailed among the majority of master–slave relationships than the happy outcome enjoyed by Priscus’ merchant.
All these anecdotes, moreover, concern Romans taken as individual prisoners. Most of Attila’s non-Hunnic contingents were incorporated into the Empire in rather larger population blocks. A large body of historical evidence indicates that, for these, the prevailing pattern of relations was much less conducive to easy, large-scale changes of identity. First, the Hunnic Empire was not something that people joined voluntarily. Evidence for this is plentiful and consistent. Non-Huns became part of the Empire through conquest and intimidation. This was certainly true of the Akatziri, for instance, who became the Huns’ latest victims in the time of Attila. There was some diplomatic manoeuvring, but the bottom line was unequivocal: ‘Attila without delay sent a large force, destroyed some, and forced the rest to submit.’ It was to avoid a similar fate, of course, that the Tervingi and Greuthungi had come to the Danube in the summer of 376. Indeed, all of our evidence indicates that the ranks of Attila’s subjects were filled not with volunteers, but with those who had failed to get out of the way in time.36 This immediately suggests that relations between the Huns and their subjects are unlikely to have been that harmonious. The point is confirmed by the broader run of evidence.
Crucial to any understanding of the Hunnic Empire is the fact that it was inherently unstable. This tends to receive little scholarly attention because most of our descriptive source material is provided by Priscus, writing about its apogee under Attila in the 440s. If you cast your net a little wider, however, the evidence for instability mounts quickly. Because so many of the Huns’ subjects were unwilling participants in the Hunnic Empire, the Romans were able consistently to reduce its power by detaching subject peoples from it, many of whom were more than ready to take the opportunity to escape. By losing some of his subjects, of course, was precisely how Uldin had been defeated in 408/9, but in that case we don’t know whether it was the fault-line between Hunnic masters and non-Hunnic subjects that was being exploited.
Other evidence is much clearer. In the 420s, for instance, the east Romans stripped away a large body of Goths from Hunnic control when they expelled the Huns from parts of Pannonia. The Goths were transferred to Thrace and seem to have served loyally thereafter in the east Roman military.37 On other occasions, the subjects took the initiative themselves:
When Rua was king of the Huns, the Amilzuri, Itimari, Tounsoures, Boisci and other tribes who were living near to the Danube were fleeing to fight on the side of the Romans.38
These events date to the later 430s, after Rua, Attila’s uncle, had already achieved considerable success, but even that success and their shares in all the booty that followed in its wake were insufficient inducement to guarantee the subjects’ quiescence. As might anyway be expected, the beginning of a new reign was a moment of particular stress:
When [at the start of their reign c.440] they had made peace with the Romans, Attila, Bleda and their forces marched through Scythia subduing the tribes there and also made war on the Sorogsi.39
Reasserting your overlordship over subject groups, once you had established yourself as number one Hun, was probably a basic necessity for any new ruler. So much so, in fact, that, when they could, Hunnic leaders tried to ensure that no Romans would be able to stir up trouble for them. In the first treaty they made with Constantinople, Attila and Bleda forced the east Romans to agree that ‘[they] should make no alliance with a barbarian people against the Huns when the latter were preparing for war against them’.40
The massive internal conflicts let loose after Attila’s death between the Huns and their subject peoples were not a one-off exception, therefore, but illustrative of a much deeper structural problem within the Hunnic Empire. The picture of internal peace and quiet you get from Priscus’ embassy to Attila is deeply misleading. The Empire was created by conquest, maintained by intimidation, and the only way to leave it, as the narrative of events after Attila’s death makes clear, was to fight your way out.
Much of the explanation of why there should have been this enduring hostility between rulers and ruled emerges from a further fragment of Priscus’ History dealing with Dengizich’s last attack on the east Roman Empire in 467/8, almost twenty years after the historian visited the court of Attila. This records how the separate contingents in a mixed force of Goths and Huns was brought to blows by a Roman agent provocateur. He did so by reminding the Gothic contingent of exactly how the Huns generally behaved towards them:
These men have no concern for agriculture, but, like wolves, attack and steal the Goths’ food supplies, with the result that the latter remain in the position of slaves and themselves suffer food shortages.41
Taking their food supplies was, of course, only part of the story. The subject peoples were also used to fight the Huns’ wars. While Priscus’ merchant-turned-Hun certainly prospered, his is likely to have been a minority story. As noted already, few civilian Roman prisoners are likely to have been much use when it came to fighting, and their casualties when they were used for Hunnic campaigns are likely to have been frightful. For most people, the reality of becoming part of the Hunnic Empire was a nasty experience of military conquest followed by economic exploitation, spiced up from time to time by being marched out to fight Attila’s wars.
Equally to the point – and this is where it differed so markedly from the Roman Empire – the Hunnic Empire lacked the governmental capacity to run the affairs of its subject peoples at all closely. Famously, the Hunnic bureaucracy consisted of one Roman secretary supplied by Aetius, the de facto ruler of the western Empire, and a Roman prisoner who could write letters in Latin and Greek. What this meant in practice is that, once conquered, subject groups still had to be left largely to run their own day-to-day affairs themselves. This does not mean that everything carried on absolutely as before. For instance, after conquering the Akatziri, Attila appointed one of his own sons to oversee their surviving chiefs, having eliminated several who resisted him. Likewise, while the Goths who provided part of Dengizich’s invasion force in 467/8 – referred to in the fragment quoted above – still had their own chiefs; th
ey possessed no overall ruler. Given that all the independent Gothic groups we know of between the third and the fifth centuries had a pre-eminent ruler, even where power was shared between, for instance, brothers (as with, initially, the Amal-led Goths), this strongly suggests that Hunnic supervision often involved preventing the emergence of overall rulers among the larger concentrations of their defeated subjects.42 The point of such a stratagem would have been exactly the same for the Huns as it had earlier been for the Romans, when they operated it against the Alamanni outside the Empire, or in the 382 treaty against the Goths within. If you suppress an overall leader, you stimulate political competition within a group, and lessen the possibility of it mounting effective resistance.
Similar conclusions are also suggested by the political history of the Amal-led Goths. Stories preserved by Jordanes suggest that Valamer did not inherit his pre-eminence over them, but had positively to create it by suppressing rival warband leaders, and attaching, where possible, the followings of those whom he had defeated to his own power base. The stories are undated, but it seems more likely that this happened after Attila’s death than before it, since it created precisely the problem that Hunnic management strategies seem designed to avoid: a Gothic group powerful enough to act with independence. It was only after such a unification that these Goths had sufficient power either to invade the Middle Danube region or ask Constantinople to recognize their independence.43 And if what was true of the Goths was the case more generally among the Huns’ subjects, this would also explain why the Sciri had to find themselves a king from among Attila’s leading henchmen as Hunnic power collapsed.
Empires and Barbarians Page 31