Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  Looking past the image of Attila in all his pomp, then, we can begin to understand the inherent instability of his Empire. Unlike that of Rome, which spent centuries turning subjects – or at least their landowning elites – into fully fledged Roman citizens, dissipating thereby the original tensions of conquest, the Huns lacked the bureaucratic capacity to run their subjects directly. I suspect, in fact, that the actual extent of Hunnic dominion and interference varied substantially between groups. The Gepids seem already to have had an overall leader at the time of Attila’s death, for instance, which probably explains why they were the first to assert independence. Other groups, like the Amal-led Goths, had to throw up an overall leader in the mid-to late 450s before they could begin to challenge Hunnic hegemony; and still others, like the Goths still dominated by Dengizich in 468, never managed to do so.44

  If the sources were better, the narrative progression would probably show the Hunnic Empire peeling apart like an onion after 453, with different layers of subject groups asserting their independence at different moments, in an inverse relationship to the level of domination the Huns had previously been exercising over their lives. Two key variables – and they may well have been related – were probably, first, the extent to which the subjects’ political structure had been left intact, and, second, the distance separating them from the heartland of the Empire, where Attila maintained the camps at which he was visited by Priscus’ embassy. Some groups, settled in close proximity to the camps, were kept under tight rein, with any propensity to unified leadership among them strongly suppressed. Others, settled at a greater distance, preserved more of their own political structures and were much less closely controlled. By the time of Attila, Franks and Akatziri defined the geographical extremes. We hear of Attila attempting to interfere in one Frankish succession dispute, so that even the northern Rhine was not completely beyond his compass, and the Akatziri were established somewhere north of the Black Sea. In between, various groups of Thuringians, Goths, Gepids, Suevi, Sciri, Heruli, Sarmatians and Alans were all, if to differing degrees, dancing to Attila’s tune.45

  One other possible complicating factor is worth raising. We have no detailed information for the Empire of Attila, but a trustworthy Byzantine source gives us interesting information about some of the gradations of status that operated in the analogous Empire of the nomadic Avars, two centuries later. This tells the story of a group of east Roman prisoners who were originally dragged north from their homes and resettled as Avar slaves around the old Roman city of Sirmium. Over time, they were raised to free, but still subordinate, status within the Empire and granted their own political leadership.46 It is important not to narrow unduly the range of allowed possibility just because we lack sources of similar quality. Attila’s Empire may have been articulated in a similar way, with intermediate statuses between fully fledged Hun and Hunnic slave. It should be emphasized, however, that even their subsequent promotion did not give the captives and their descendants enough of a stake in the Avar enterprise to want to remain part of it unconditionally. When the opportunity to break away from Avar control arose, they took it.

  All of this has strong implications for the operation of group identities within the Hunnic Empire. They were not unchanging. Priscus’ former Greek merchant shows that it was possible for particularly successful individual slaves to rise to full free status among the Huns – that is, to pass across pre-existing divides in status and identity. But the original Hunnic core was itself at this time experiencing substantial changes in group identity. I mentioned earlier that as far as we can tell, its original identity was based on immediate loyalty to a series of ranked kings, whose association created the larger group, but these lower-level identities were swept away by the political restructuring that came with the rise of the dynasty of Rua and Attila. This kind of process affected other, better-documented nomad groups as they too worked their way to the western edge of the Eurasian steppe and beyond. The so-called Seljuk Turks of the eleventh century, for instance, were not a long-standing political entity, but a large body of nomadic Turkic-speakers united – temporarily – behind the astonishingly successful Seljuk leadership clan, who eclipsed potential rivals while conquering much of the Near East.47 But while dramatic, such a political process has a strong tendency to generate winners and losers even within its core supporters, which perhaps explains why we have indications that some Hunnic groups preferred, as the Empire began to collapse, to throw in their lot with leaders other than the sons of Attila.

  Even more dramatic was the restructuring experienced by at least some of the Huns’ subjects. Their new overlords interfered pretty consistently at the top end of the political spectrum, suppressing the overall leadership structures of some of their more tightly governed subjects. Attila seems to have recruited aides from a variety of backgrounds, part of whose job may well have been to supervise the subject groups – whose status, as we have seen, is likely to have varied, although we lack detailed evidence from the time of the Huns themselves. This sort of approach was only sensible. Running an empire composed largely of more or less autonomous subjects, Attila needed loyal subordinates to run their affairs or to supervise those doing the running. The same kind of strategy is suggested by finds of gold in the archaeological horizons associated with the Empire at its height. Gold has been found in relatively vast quantities, but even this probably represents only a fraction of what was originally deposited. How much has been found and recycled over the centuries by intervening occupants of the Hungarian Plain is impossible to know. Gold, it should be stressed, is a rare find in Germanic archaeological remains before the Hunnic period, so the amount of new wealth that became available as Attila ransacked the Roman world can hardly be overstressed. Alongside military domination, then, he clearly also used the distribution of booty captured in his campaigns against the Romans to give subject leaders a further incentive to consent to his rule, just as the Romans granted annual gifts even to barbarian leaders they had just defeated or otherwise subdued.48

  But while the dense concentrations of military manpower gathered there from all corners of the barbarian, especially the Germanic-speaking, world turned the Great Hungarian Plain into a cultural crucible, it also put barriers in the way of a total dissolution of larger-scale group identities. The whole point for the Huns in conquering Goths, Gepids, Heruli and others was to turn them into subjects whose military and economic potential could be harnessed and exploited. If they were all allowed to become fully fledged free Huns like the former Roman merchant, then the treatment meted out to them, as they acquired such privileges, would have had to change for the better, just as his did. And as it did so, the overall benefit to the Huns from their initial conquests would have been lost. The Hunnic Empire was certainly multicultural, but, as is often the case in multicultural societies, this did not mean that group identities within it were either infinitely malleable or easily eroded. Because being a Hun meant higher status, the Empire’s multicultural character effectively erected barriers around Hunnic identity. The Huns’ lack of bureaucratic capacity left their subjects with at least their intermediate leaderships intact, thereby perpetuating the structures around which their existing sense of group identity might survive. At the same time, the exploitation they had to endure gave them the incentive to maintain these identities, since they were the only vehicle through which they might be able to overthrow Hunnic domination, either by escaping into the Roman Empire or at some point regaining their political independence by force. Neither of these options would be possible for a group that fragmented and lost all capacity for group action. There is every reason, then, why old identities should not have slipped easily away under Hunnic rule.

  Nor, it must be stressed, is the view of the Hunnic Empire which emerges from the historical evidence – one riven with internal tension between ruler and ruled – remotely contradicted by the archaeological evidence, even if you do take the view that the Huns’ invisibility stems from their having s
tarted to bury their dead in ways previously associated with their Germanic subjects. When it comes to archaeological evidence, in fact, a degree of methodological confusion sometimes prevails. Everyone is now clear, in an intellectual world that has moved on from culture history, that individual groups cannot be assumed to have each had their own distinctive material cultures. But it is sometimes assumed that if a regionally distributed material culture does not show up any very clear differences, then there can’t have been any clear distinctions of identity within it. This, however, is just an inverse application of the old mistaken assumption behind culture history: that distinct groups should have distinct material cultures. If you can’t use differences within a regional pattern of material culture necessarily to talk about separate political identities, then equally you cannot use the lack of them to deny the possible existence of political distinctions. Identity is about mental and political structures – claims made by individuals and the willingness of groups to recognize those claims – not material cultural structures. This seriously limits the capacity of archaeological evidence to speak to identity debates, except in unusual circumstances, often when there is other information available about particular material items endowed with special significance. The fact that everyone within Hunnic Europe used broadly the same material culture does not mean that there were no crucial status divides or group identities operating within it.49

  Collapsing Identities

  The narrative of the Hunnic Empire’s collapse – complimenting the evidence for its creation and maintenance – confirms just how important these internal identities were, even if further reconfigurations were again part of the process. The Empire was destroyed from within, when its various subject peoples reasserted their independence militarily after Attila’s death. If they had all been subsumed voluntarily into an equal Hunnic identity, why should this have happened? Acting collectively, they had been able to extract from the Roman Empire the huge sums of gold that show up in the Middle Danubian burials. This was a level of predation which, separately, they were quite unable to match, as is underlined both by the general absence of gold in earlier Germanic remains and the capacity of the east Roman Empire to rebuild its control of the Balkans in the later fifth century after Hun-inspired unity had collapsed.50 Indeed, the energy the non-Huns put into escaping from Hunnic rule demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the lower status and the scope for exploitation inherent in their position meant that the costs for them of being part of the Empire were not generally compensated for by the gains flowing to some of them because of the greater predatory capacity generated by its existence. When the chance presented itself on Attila’s death, a scramble for independence quickly followed.

  Like their initial incorporation, the process of breaking away from Hunnic control involved further renegotiation of group identities. If all, or even many, of the denser concentrations of subjects had had their overall leaderships suppressed as part of their incorporation into the Hunnic Empire, then a rush for position and power of the kind that brought Edeco and the Sciri together would have ensued right across Attila’s domain. And certainly, Valamer, as we have seen, had to unite what became the Amal-led Goths by defeating other dynasts, and may well have been recruiting non-Gothic manpower in addition. Aside from the large named population units that emerge as successor states to the Hunnic Empire in the later 450s and early 460s, many smaller groupings also figure fleetingly in our sources, like the Sorosgsi, Amilzuri, Itimari, Tounsoures and Boisci mentioned in different fragments of Priscus’ history. Several of these found their way on to Roman soil as the Hunnic Empire collapsed, and something of the chaotic nature of the action as they were resettled by the Roman state is reflected in their subsequent line-up, as reported by Jordanes:

  The Sarmatians and the Cemandri and certain of the Huns dwelt in Castra Martis . . . The Sciri together with the Sadagarii and certain of the Alani . . . received Scythia Minor and Lower Moesia . . . The Rugi, however, and some other races asked that they might inhabit Bizye and Arcadiopolis. Hernac, the younger son of Attila, with his followers, chose a home in the farthest reaches of Scythia Minor. Emnetzur and Ultzindur, kinsmen of his, won Oescus, Utus and Almus in Dacia.51

  These groups were each assigned to just one or to a few Byzantine military bases in the northern Balkans, so none of them can have been particularly large. Similar groups, presumably, were also being subsumed into the bigger kingships which began to emerge from Hunnic imperial collapse. Among the descendants of Theoderic the Amal’s following in Italy in the late 540s, for instance, were Bittigure Huns. These had previously been commandeered by the sons of Attila in the 460s to fight Theoderic’s uncle Valamer, and must have renegotiated their political allegiance at some point in the meantime.52 This could have happened on any number of occasions, of course, but the reshuffling of the Hunnic imperial pack in the aftermath of Attila’s death is an obvious possibility.

  In the slightly longer term and larger scale, this was very much the fate of the Rugi. They formed one of the initial successor kingdoms to the Hunnic Empire, but then threw in their lot with Theoderic after Odovacar had destroyed their independence. The Gepids and Lombards carried on this tradition of gathering fragments under their wing. Defeated Heruli joined the former (although, at first at least, they didn’t like the terms they were offered), and by the time the Lombards left for Italy in the late 560s they took with them, according to Paul the Deacon, Sueves, Heruli, Gepids, Bavarians, Bulgars, Avars, Saxons, Goths and Thuringians. The first three names on this list, at least, represent human flotsam and jetsam from the post-Hunnic Middle Danube.53 The adjustments in political identity involved in creating the successor kingdoms after Attila’s death should not be underestimated. Some, perhaps all of them, were not culturally homogeneous groupings, closed to outsiders and replicating themselves over time through in-marriage, but new kingships stitched together out of a variety of remnants who shared a basic interest in breaking away from Hunnic control. Even the Gepids, who were seemingly less under the Hunnic cosh in Attila’s lifetime and already had their own king, may have been picking up new recruits as the Empire collapsed. But this was all the more true of groups like the Sciri and Amal-led Goths, who found – or refound – their unity at this point, and it is entirely likely that others about whom we have no information – such as the Rugi, Sueves and Heruli – had equally messy origins.

  Nor were these kingships ‘peoples’ in a second important sense of the term as it has traditionally been used. As we have seen, three hundred years of growing economic complexity had created, or greatly reinforced, social inequalities in the Germanic world. For the Amal-led Goths among Attila’s former subjects, we have explicit evidence that this meant that their populations contained warriors of two unequal statuses, probably to be equated with freemen and freedmen. The same is true of the Lombards who intruded themselves into the Middle Danubian region in force only after Attila’s sons had given up the struggle. When it comes to understanding group identity, this adds an important extra dimension. Only higher-status warriors benefited fully from the existence of the group to which they belonged, via the rights and privileges it conferred upon them, and only they can be supposed to have been completely committed to that group’s identity. The significance of this shows up in the historical narratives. At one point, in the course of the Byzantine conquest of Ostrogothic Italy, all the higher-status warriors in a Gothic force in Dalmatia were killed. The remaining, lower-status, warriors immediately surrendered. And throughout Procopius’ narrative of that war, losses among the higher-status group were a particular cause of alarm and despondency among the Goths.54

  At least the bigger entities to emerge from the Hunnic Empire, then, were not ‘peoples’ in the traditional sense of the word. Neither culturally nor hierarchically homogeneous, they were a complex of political alliances and statuses that, as well as the two strands of militarized manpower, probably incorporated unarmed slaves. That said, it would not be right to
go from one simplistic extreme to another: from the old view of these entities as entirely closed population groups, to the opposite – that they were mere flags of convenience with no internal structure or stability. This is not the place for a full discussion, but two important observations are worth making. First, group identities were not dependent on royal families, which, in one line of research, have been seen as providing social cement for highly disparate improvised groupings in the form of a mere pretence of ethnic belonging. The Lombards took kings from a variety of dynastic lines, not from one uniquely royal one, and even managed to continue to exist as Lombards without any kings at all in certain periods. This is a well-known point, but it has sometimes not been recognized that the Gothic evidence is much more similar than it initially appears to be. In the 520s, when he was seeking to secure the Italian throne for his minor grandson against a series of rivals – some from within the dynasty, some from without – Theoderic the Amal, Valamer’s long-lived nephew, issued a huge amount of propaganda stressing that his was a uniquely royal line, the only one fitted to rule these Goths. Cassiodorus also helped him ‘prove’ the point from Gothic history, by producing a genealogy which showed that the grandson was the seventeenth generation of kingship within the family. But kings are always saying this kind of thing, and should not be believed, especially when, in this case, Theoderic’s claims about the past do not hold up when compared with what can be learned from more contemporary sources. Cassiodorus’ Amal genealogy, likewise, was cobbled together from a mixture of Gothic oral history and Roman written history, with touches of biblical inspiration thrown in. Amal domination had in fact been built up over these Goths in stages from as recently as c.450. Hence it ceases to surprise that, when Theoderic’s line failed to produce a suitable male heir, it was simply axed: almost literally, when his nephew Theodahad was murdered for his leadership failings in 536, just a decade after the great king’s death.55