As we’ve seen, Priscus was not the first east Roman historian-cum-diplomat to visit the Huns. In 411/12, Olympiodorus had taken to sea with his parrot, braving fierce storms off Constantinople, then skirting Athens and up the Adriatic to Aquileia on its northern shore. Unfortunately, only a brief summary of this embassy survives, but it does contain one piece of crucial information:
Olympiodorus discusses Donatus and the Huns and the natural talent of their kings for archery. The historian describes the embassy on which he went to them and to Donatus and . . . tells how Donatus was deceived by an oath and wickedly killed, how Charaton, the first of the kings, flared up with rage at the murder and how he was calmed down and pacified with regal gifts.32
The extract is not without mystery; not least concerning the identity of Donatus – opinions differ as to whether he was a Hun or not – and of his killers. Some have supposed that the arrival of Olympiodorus’ embassy did not merely coincide with Donatus’ death, but was an earlier and more successful enactment of the kind of plot that Priscus found himself embroiled in.33 But the key point is that in 411/12 the Huns were ruled by a series of kings (how many is not specified), and that these kings operated according to a ranking system which clearly marked out Charaton as senior. It sounds highly reminiscent, in fact, of the hierarchical system of another nomadic group, the Akatziri, whose fate came to Priscus’ attention during his own embassy. When the Romans arrived at the Huns’ camp, Onegesius was away with Attila’s eldest son subduing this group. The opportunity to do so had come about in an interesting fashion, as Priscus describes:
The [Akatziri] had many rulers according to their tribes and clans, and the Emperor Theodosius sent gifts to them to the end that they might unanimously renounce their alliance with Attila and seek peace with the Romans. The envoy who conveyed the gifts did not deliver them to each of the kings by rank, with the result that Kouridachus, the senior in office, received his gifts second and, being thus overlooked and deprived of his due honours, called in Attila against his fellow kings.
Apart from allowing one the pleasure of imagining the report of the Roman ambassador who had managed to make such a mess of his mission,34 the passage gives us some idea of the kind of political system operating among the Huns in the early 410s.35
The contrast with Attila’s time, a generation or so later, could not be more marked. Priscus spent a great deal of time at the Hunnic court, and devoted many words to its structure and modes of operation. As we have seen, there was then an inner core of leading men – Onegesius first, then others such as Edeco, Scottas and Berichus – whom Attila treated with great respect; but none of them enjoyed any kind of royal dignity. In all of this information, there is not the slightest indication that the Huns had more than one ruler: Attila himself. The multiplicity of power-sharing kings of 411 had given way to a monarch in the literal sense of the word. Of the process that ended up with supreme power in one man’s hands, no account survives. As you would expect, all the indications suggest, however, that it was not a peaceful evolution. The final act in the drama was Attila’s murder of his brother Bleda. By that stage, power had anyway narrowed to just two members of the same family – which suggests that Rua (or Ruga), the uncle whom the brothers succeeded, must have played a major role in reducing the number of Hunnic royal lines.
The naked violence of Bleda’s murder is probably a fair indication of how the other surplus kings had been removed. The first negotiations between Constantinople and Attila and Bleda, before they attacked Viminacium in 441, resulted in the return, as we have seen, of two fleeing Hunnic royals, Mama and Atakam, who were promptly impaled. They could have been cousins of Attila and Bleda, for Rua had at least two brothers, but might equally have been descended from royal lines suppressed earlier by Rua. The whole fugitive issue, which so bedevilled Hunno-Roman diplomacy in the 440s, was clearly concerned with Hunnic royals and ex-royals of one kind or another. Maximinus and Priscus had to listen to the names of seventeen fugitives being read out – a very small number, so we are clearly dealing here with individuals who posed some kind of threat at the highest level. It is also possible that some of the lesser kings had accepted demotion rather than face extinction. (When something similar was happening among Goths in the decade after Attila’s death, though most of the minor royals died fighting or fled from the scene, at least one was willing to be demoted to leading-noble status.36)
Set against what we know about nomad anthropology, political centralization – the first of the two transformations that concern us here – must also have been associated with a broader transformation among the Huns. Devolved power structures occur very naturally among nomadic groups, because their herds cannot be concentrated in large groupings, for fear of overgrazing. In the nomad world, the main purpose of any larger political structure is simply to provide a temporary forum where grazing rights can be negotiated, and a force put together, if necessary, to protect those rights against outsiders. This being the case, the permanent centralization of political power among the Huns strongly implies that they were no longer so economically dependent upon the produce of their flocks. Priscus provides a number of clues to the nature of these economic adjustments. As we saw in Chapter 4, nomads always need to form economic relationships with settled agricultural producers. This was clearly the case with the Huns, and commercial exchanges were still taking place in the 440s.37 But by the time of Attila, the main form of exchange between Hunnic nomad and Roman agriculturalist was not grain in return for animal products, but cash in return for military aid of one kind or another. This form of exchange had its origins in previous generations, when Huns had performed mercenary service for the Roman state. Uldin and his followers were the first we know of to have fulfilled this role, in the early 400s, and larger Hunnic forces may have aided Constantius in the 410s, and certainly supported Aetius in the 420s and 430s.
Shortly after, military service for pay evolved into demands for money with menaces. Precisely when the line was crossed is impossible to say, but Attila’s uncle Rua certainly launched one major assault on the east Roman Empire with cash in mind, even if he also provided mercenary service for the west. By the reign of Attila, targeted foreign aid had become tribute, and it clearly emerges from Priscus’ record of Romano-Hunnic diplomacy that the main thing the Huns wanted from these exchanges, and from their periodic assaults across the frontier, was cash and yet more cash. As we saw earlier, the first treaty between Attila and Bleda and the east Romans fixed the size of this annual tribute at seven hundred pounds of gold – and from there the demands could only escalate. Hunnic warfare against the Romans also brought other one-sided economic exchanges in its wake: booty, slaves and ransoms such as the one Priscus and Maximinus negotiated.38
By the 440s, then, military predation upon the Roman Empire had become the source of an ever-expanding flow of funds into the Hunnic world. To overthrow a system of ranked but more or less equal kings, the king-who-would-be-preeminent needed to convince the followers of the other kings that they should transfer their loyalties to him. Cornering the market in the flow of funds from the Empire was the ideal means of putting sufficient powers of patronage into the hands of just one man, and rendering the old political structures redundant. Only by controlling the flow of new funds could one king outbid the others in the struggle for support. Already in the mid- to late-fourth century, Huns had presumably been raiding and intimidating both other nomads and Germanic agriculturalists north of the Black Sea, but real centralization only became possible once the main body of the Huns was operating close to the Roman world. Raid and intimidate the Goths and you might get some slaves, a bit of silver and some agricultural produce, but that was about it – not enough to fund fullscale political revolution. But do the same vis-à-vis the Roman Empire, and the gold would begin to roll in, first in hundreds of pounds annually, then thousands – enough to transform both economic and political systems.
While the argument is not susceptible to proof, we could
understand these transformations as an adaptation away from nomadism, rather than a complete break with the past. As mentioned earlier, in normal circumstances nomads rear a range of animals to make full use of the varying qualities of available grazing. The horse figures primarily as an expensive, almost luxury animal, used for raiding, war, transport and trade; its meat and milk provide only a very inefficient return in terms of usable protein compared with the quality and quantity of grazing required. As a result, nomads generally keep relatively few horses. If, however, warfare becomes a financially attractive proposition, as it did when the Huns came within range of the Roman Empire, then nomads might well start to breed increasing numbers of horses for war – evolving, in the process, into a particular type of militarily predatory nomadic group. This could never have worked as a subsistence strategy out on the steppe, where the potential proceeds from warfare were so much less.
It is impossible to prove that this is what happened, but one relevant factor is the size of the fifth-century Hunnic homeland, the Hungarian Plain: while providing good-quality grazing, it was much smaller than the plains of the Great Eurasian Steppe the Huns had left behind. Its 42,400 square kilometres amount to less than 4 per cent of the grazing available, for instance, in the republic of Mongolia alone. And because the grazing was now so limited, some historians have wondered whether the Huns were evolving towards a fully sedentary existence in the fifth century. This is a possible argument, but not a necessary one. The Hungarian Plain notionally provides grazing for 320,000 horses, but this figure must be reduced so as to accommodate other animals, forest and so on; so it would be reasonable to suppose that it could support, maybe, 150,000. Given that each nomad warrior requires a string of ten horses to be able to rotate and not overtire them, the Hungarian Plain would thus provide sufficient space to support horses for up to 15,000 warriors. I would doubt that there were ever more Huns than this in total, so that, as late as the reign of Attila, there is in fact no firm indication that the Huns did not retain part of their nomad character.39 Whatever the case, the real point is that, once they found themselves within hailing distance of the Roman Empire, the Huns perceived a new and better way to make a living, based on military predation upon the relatively rich economy of the Mediterranean world.
Priscus’ evidence also implicitly documents the other fundamental change that made Attila’s Empire possible. At his court, Maximinus and Priscus were interacting primarily with an inner core of second-rankers, rather than with Attila himself. Identifying the language group that ancient personal names belong to is fraught with danger, but the names of these men are extremely interesting. There is no doubt that Onegesius and Edeco possessed Germanic or Germanicized names, while Berichus and Scottas probably did. And both Attila (‘Little Father’) and Bleda are also Germanic. This doesn’t mean that these individuals were necessarily of Germanic rather than Hunnic origin (though they may have been), because we know that by the mid-fifth century ‘Gothic’ – probably the collective term for a number of mutually comprehensible Germanic dialects spoken across central and eastern Europe – was one of the main languages of the Hunnic Empire, and was spoken at Attila’s court. Hence, in addition to their original Hunnic names (and the argument continues over what type of language the Huns originally spoke), important figures in the Hunnic Empire seem to have had Germanic or Germanicized names as well.40 Why had Germanic languages come to play a prominent role in the Hunnic Empire?
The explanation lies in the broader evolution of Attila’s Empire. As far back as the 370s when they were attacking Goths beyond the Black Sea, Huns were forcing others they had already subdued to fight alongside them. When they first attacked the Greuthungi, starting the avalanche that ended at the battle of Hadrianople (see p. 167), they were operating in alliance with Iranian-speaking Alan nomads. And whenever we encounter them subsequently, we find that Hunnic forces always fought alongside non-Hunnic allies. Although Uldin, as we saw in Chapter 5, was not a conqueror on the scale of Attila, once the east Romans had dismantled his following, most of the force they were left with to resettle turned out to be Germanic-speaking Sciri.41 Likewise, in the early 420s, east Roman forces intervening to curb Hunnic power west of the Carpathian Mountains found themselves left with a large number of Germanic Goths.42
In the years preceding the rise of Attila, the process of incorporation continued apace. By the 440s, an unprecedented number of Germanic groups found themselves within the orbit defined by the formidable power of Attila the Hun. For example, his Empire contained at least three separate clusters of Goths. One group, dominated by the Amal family and their rivals, would later become central to the creation of a second Gothic supergroup: the Ostrogoths. Another Gothic group was led in the mid-460s by a man called Bigelis, while a third remained under the tight control of Attila’s sons until the later 460s. In addition, Germanic-speaking Gepids, Rugi, Suevi (left behind in 406), Sciri and Heruli were all by this point under direct Hunnic control, and a looser hegemony may also have been exercised over Lombards and Thuringians, as well as over at least some subgroups of the Alamanni and Franks.43 We can’t put figures on this vast body of Germanic-speaking humanity, but the Amal-led Goths alone could muster ten thousand-plus fighting men, and hence had maybe a total population of fifty thousand. And there is no reason to suppose that the other groups were much, if at all, smaller. Many tens of thousands, therefore, and probably several hundreds of thousands, of Germanic-speakers were caught up in the Hunnic Empire by the time of Attila. In fact, by the 440s there were probably many more Germanic-speakers than Huns, which explains why ‘Gothic’ should have become the Empire’s lingua franca. Nor do these Germani exhaust the list of Attila’s non-Hunnic subjects. Iranian-speaking Alanic and Sarmatian groups, as we saw earlier, had long been in alliance with the Huns, and Attila continued to grasp at opportunities to acquire new allies.
As this catalogue makes clear, the Hunnic Empire was all about incorporating people, not territory: hence Attila’s virtual lack of interest in annexing substantial chunks of the Roman Empire. He took two Middle Danubian provinces from the western Empire as the price of his alliance with Aetius, as we saw in Chapter 6, but otherwise showed interest only in establishing a cordon sanitaire between himself and the east. Although there are many brief chronicle references to Attila’s military forces as ‘Huns’ or (if they’re archaizing) ‘Scythians’, from all the sources that go into any detail it is clear that his armies, like those of his less powerful predecessors, were always composites, consisting both of Huns and of contingents from the numerous other peoples incorporated into his Empire.44
Archaeological evidence confirms the point (map 12). Since 1945 a mass of material has been unearthed from cemetery excavations on the Great Hungarian Plain and its environs, dating to the period of Hunnic domination there. (Some treasure hoards have been discovered, but no one has ever found any of Attila’s camps, since only post-holes would remain.) In this material, ‘proper’ Huns have proved extremely hard to find. In total – and this includes the Volga Steppe north of the Black Sea as well as the Hungarian Plain – archaeologists have identified no more than two hundred burials as plausibly Hunnic. These are distinguished by bows, non-standard European modes of dress,45 cranial deformation (some Huns bound the heads of babies, which provoked a distinctive elongated skull), and the presence of socalled Hunnic cauldrons. So either the Huns generally disposed of their dead in ways that did not leave traces, or some other explanation is required for the scarcity of Hunnic material.46 What these fifth-century Middle Danubian cemeteries have produced in large quantities, however, are the remains – or what look like the remains – of the Huns’ Germanic subjects (unfortunately, it isn’t possible to tell the latter apart from one another on the strength of archaeological finds alone).47 These remains have close fourth-century antecedents in Gothic- and other Germanic-dominated areas east and north of the Carpathian Mountains. Those that interest us here – the fifth-century finds – mark the emergence
of what has been christened the ‘Danubian style’ of Germanic burial.48
The Danubian style is characterized by inhumation rather than cremation,49 with a large number of objects being deposited in a relatively small number of rich burials. (Many other individuals were buried with few or no grave goods at all.) These characteristic objects included items of personal adornment: particularly large semicircular brooches, plate buckles, earrings with polyhedric pendants, and gold necklaces. Weapons and military equipment have also been quite commonly found: saddles with metal appliqués, long straight swords suitable for cavalry use and arrows. The remains also show up some odd ritual quirks; it became quite usual, 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 women, in particular, wore their clothes – gathered with a safety-pin, or fibula, on each shoulder, with another closing the outer garment in front – all reflect the patterns observable in definitely Germanic remains of the fourth century. These habits and items were then pooled and developed further among the massed ranks of Attila’s subjects on the Great Hungarian Plain in the fifth.
One possible answer to the question of the lack of Hunnic burials, then, is that, quite simply, they started to dress like their Germanic subject peoples, in just the same way that they learned the Gothic language. If so, it would be impossible to tell Hun from Goth – or anyone else – in the cemetery evidence. But even if our ‘real Huns’ are lying there in disguise, as it were, this doesn’t alter the fact that there were an awful lot of Germani buried in and around the Great Hungarian Plain in the Hunnic period. What we’re looking at in the richly furnished Danubian-style burials are the remains of many of Attila’s elite Germanic followers. Date and geographical placement make this a dead certainty.50
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History Page 40