Empires and Barbarians (38 page)

What all of these activities had in common was that they were different methods of tapping into the greater wealth available within the more developed economy of the Mediterranean-based Roman world. Raiding, obviously enough, was all about movable shiny stuff and other forms of negotiable booty, and this too was the point of mercenary service. For all his Hunnic connections – and Aetius had spent three years among them as a hostage – they did not fight for him without receiving generous payment. And even Attila’s invasions were undertaken with cash in mind. We have very detailed accounts of the diplomatic contacts that preceded and followed these attacks, and Attila’s central concern was always the size of the diplomatic subsidy he could secure. Extra territory and other types of gain were of only marginal interest.
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If it is legitimate to import this vision of the Huns’ basic attitude towards the Roman Mediterranean back to the 370s, and there is no obvious reason why not, then the Huns’ decisions to move westwards in two stages make complete sense. Increased proximity to the political centres of the Roman world in northern Italy and Constantinople meant greater opportunities for extracting a share of Roman wealth. In other words, the Huns were
acting like the Goths and the other largely Germanic-speaking predators of the third century
AD
: their migrations were a response to fundamental inequalities of wealth. Like the Goths, they were moving from the less developed outer periphery of the Empire, and perhaps from beyond even that, into richer inner zones where there was a wide variety of wealth-generating opportunities available to groups able, like themselves, to deploy military force of sufficient potency.

It is also possible to say something useful about the developing nature of the Hunnic migration flow. No source gives us figures for the size of Hunnic migration units, but all the contemporary evidence indicates that the initial expansion into the northern Pontus was carried forward essentially by warbands: small groups of all-male warriors. Vithimer, the king of the Greuthungi whose death sparked the move of the Goths to the Danube in 376, fought many skirmishes –
multas clades
– against the Alans whom the Huns had displaced into his realm. This strongly implies that, while hugely destabilizing in aggregate, no individual engagement at this point was that large. Ammianus also records that Vithimer was able to hire some Huns to help him fight off the Alans. This has sometimes been discounted as a copying error, but there is no good reason to believe so. The report fits into a context where multiple small-scale warbands were operating on a more or less individual basis. The fact that Vithimer’s predecessor Ermenaric was able to resist the Huns ‘for a long time’ (
diu
) also suggests a sequence of smaller engagements rather than a set-piece confrontation. In similar vein, we find Huns operating in a variety of places and employing a variety of strategies for self-advancement as Rome’s eastern European frontiers collapsed.

Aside from the Huns who fought for Vithimer, others are recorded raiding the lands of the Tervingi (twice), signing up as mercenaries with some Alans to fight with the Tervingi and Greuthungi against Rome south of the Danube in 377, and raiding the Empire off their own bat from north of the Danube with Carpo-Dacians in tow in the early 380s.
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There is every reason to suppose that these were all independent groups of Huns, not the same one popping up in different places, and none of the recorded action requires military forces of any great size. One of the specific things Ammianus says about the Huns of this era in his digression, in fact, is that they were not governed by kings but by ‘improvised leaders’. This is a slightly slippery phrase whose meaning has been much debated, but again it fits well with a
picture of small independent Hunnic units. It is also striking that this era threw up no Hunnic leaders who were individually significant enough to be mentioned by name.
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This recalls the first small-scale phases of Slavic and Viking raiding in, respectively, the sixth and ninth centuries. In both of these cases, it was only as raiding groups increased in scale that individual leaders came to be named.

But if the Hunnic expansion behind the crisis of 376–80 was being powered by warbands, the collapse of Rome’s central European frontier a generation later saw migration on a much larger scale. A hint that the size of Hunnic groups operating on the fringes of the Empire was growing is already there in the sources before this second crisis. Around the year 400, contemporary Roman sources finally mention a Hunnic leader by name: Uldin. He was powerful enough to provide useful military assistance to the Empire on occasion, with a following composed of Huns and Sciri. But although given to the occasional boast that his power stretched from where the sun rose to where it set, events put him firmly in perspective. His attempt to seize east Roman territory was defused without military action when his leading followers abandoned him, and at that point he disappears from our sources to where the sun of history doesn’t shine. This is not the career profile of a genuine predecessor of Attila. To my mind, Uldin’s sudden and otherwise inexplicable switch from ally to invader strongly suggests that his power base was not strong enough for him to hold his own in the face of the new Hunnic groups who became dominant there from c.410 onwards, almost certainly because these newcomers were turning up in larger and more organized bodies.
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The evidence for this is straightforward. When the east Roman diplomat and historian Olympiodorus visited the newly arrived Huns in the Middle Danube region in 411/12, he found them ruled by multiple kings ranged in order of precedence. At the time of the visit, the Huns had been in central Europe for only a handful of years, with no time for such a complex political order to emerge from a mass of independent warbands, and, in fact, a similar system is documented among another group of fifth-century steppe nomads, the Akatziri. It is overwhelmingly likely, therefore, that the second stage of Hunnic migration westward was actually led by the kings that Olympiodorus encountered. Indeed, given the numbers of Germani and others that the Huns displaced from the Middle Danube in the process – many tens of thousands, as we have seen – it is doubtful that a series of
independent warbands could have mustered enough force to take over this new landscape. The kings’ presence makes it apparent that the move from north-east of the Black Sea to the Great Hungarian Plain had been accomplished by much larger and more organized social units than the warband activity that underlay the earlier crisis of 376–80.
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Overall, therefore, the evidence suggests that Hunnic migration into Europe took a form we have encountered before, in the third century, and will encounter again in the ninth. The initial impulse came from warbands on the make, without their having had, at this early date, any necessary intention to migrate. But when the warband activity proved highly profitable, larger and more organized groups became involved, probably aiming to maximize the amount of wealth that could be extracted by actually seizing total control of the landscape. In this case, the Huns’ later actions suggest that the attraction was not the land of the Middle Danube in terms of its agricultural potential (the attraction of England, eventually, for ninth-century Danes or eleventh-century Normans), but the fact that it was conveniently placed for maximizing profits via closer ties of various kinds with the Roman world. As a result, small-scale raiding north of the Black Sea elided into a population flow of steadily increasing momentum, until large-scale group migration emerged as the logical mechanism for maximizing profits by seizing control of the Great Hungarian Plain.

The exact size of the Hunnic groups involved in these two main phases of migration is unknowable. The kind of Gothic political unit whose stability was undermined by the aggregate action of Hunnic warbands and displaced Alans in the first phase of c.370
AD
could field perhaps ten thousand warriors in total. But it is hard to extrapolate from this to the size of any attacking Hunnic force, and for two reasons. First, the Hunnic assault was indirect. Political stability north of the Black Sea was undermined over a long period by multiple raids and small-scale attacks, not head-on confrontation, and in the end it was Hun-generated upheavals among the Alans, rather than the Huns themselves, that led the Gothic Greuthungi to take their momentous decision to move in 375/6. So we don’t have to be thinking of anywhere near enough Huns to defeat ten thousand Goths in a set-piece battle. Second, like the nineteenth-century Boers, the Huns enjoyed a telling advantage in military hardware. One of their
characteristic weapons was the composite reflex bow, long known on the steppe. Now, however, they employed a longer bow – up to 150 centimetres rather than the usual 100 – than had previously been seen on the western steppe. This gave them longer-range hitting power whose effects are visible in the rhetoric of Roman sources. These report Huns able to devastate the ranks of their Gothic opponents while themselves staying safely out of range. The Huns’ other characteristic weapon was a long cavalry sabre, which could do an excellent job of mopping up at closer quarters once the opposition ranks had broken.
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But exactly how big an advantage the bow gave them is uncertain. Flintlock rifles allowed the Voortrekkers to operate highly effectively against odds of about 10 to 1. Commandos numbering in their hundreds could rout Zulu and Matabele forces in their thousands at almost no cost to themselves. With this much advantage, an entire Gothic client state could have been defeated by groupings of no more than about a thousand Huns. But even the Huns’ longer bow was probably not as big an advantage as a rifle.

There is no direct evidence, either, for the size of the larger forces that Hunnic kings led on to the Great Hungarian Plain. To judge by Mongol analogies, each Hunnic warrior required many ponies to remain fully mobile. This perhaps provides an indirect indication of the total possible size of Hunnic forces, since it has been calculated that the Great Hungarian Plain could provide grazing for no more than about a hundred and fifty thousand horses. Extrapolating backwards, this number of horse could serve somewhere between fifteen and thirty thousand Hunnic warriors, which is perfectly plausible, but obviously no more than a guess. Lacking better information, I would suspect that the expansionary raiding of c.370, which did not take on the full might of the Gothic client states directly, of course, was undertaken by war parties of a few hundred, and the large-scale group move into central Europe of the early fifth century by a force somewhere in the region, again, of ten to twenty thousand warriors. But this too is only a best guess, and others could legitimately produce very different estimates.

If we can’t get very far with numbers, the comparative migration literature does prompt several more general observations about the Hunnic expansion into central Europe. The first stage of activity recalls the way in which many better-documented migration flows build up on the back on the activities of ‘scouts’, which demonstrate to a
broader population the benefits of relocation. And although not something observed in the modern world, even the en bloc migration of large Hunnic groups in phase two is in accord with the fundamental principle that migration units will be of a size and nature that are appropriate to the task of accessing wealth in the particular context in which the migrant flow is operating. For the same reasons we have met before, the kind of large-scale predatory migration eventually undertaken by the Huns also necessarily involved women and children. The numerous dependants of large military forces assembled from non-professional sources cannot be left behind in safety when the military activity encompasses any intent to migrate. As with so many of the other immigrants we have encountered, moreover, the Huns had established traditions of mobility which, all the comparative evidence again emphasizes, must have greatly facilitated their decision to respond to potential gains to be had from the Roman world by upping sticks and moving closer towards it. The biannual migrations common to the nomadic lifestyle meant that the Huns had a greater than usual capacity to organize large-group movement.

As with the Goths, Vandals and Alans on Roman soil, another major reason why there was a substantial chronological gap between the two main phases of Hunnic intrusion into Europe must have been the need to build up geographical knowledge about the new possibilities that opened up for them after they had displaced Goths and Alans from regions north of the Black Sea. From this perspective, the massive Hunnic raid launched into the Roman and Persian Empires through the Caucasus in 395 can be seen as part of a learning curve. This caused huge disruption and attracted a great deal of coverage in Roman sources, not least because one group of raiders even got close to the Holy Land. But the raiders suffered heavy losses, and the experiment was never repeated.
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This does not suggest that the Huns themselves viewed the raid as a major success, and its relative failure may well have played a role in their eventual decision to move further west on to the Hungarian Plain rather than in any other direction. The knowledge of European geography necessary to make this move was no doubt also built up from feedback from the activities of smaller Hunnic groups we find west of the Carpathians before 405 – some of the mercenaries employed there in the 380s, for instance, or indeed the Huns of Uldin.

As has been observed in so many other cases, moreover, the
process of migration triggered major sociopolitical restructuring among the Huns. When Olympiodorus visited them in 411/12 he encountered, as we have just seen, a political structure based on a series of ranked kings, which was highly appropriate for a nomadic society. Economic logistics require nomad populations to be relatively dispersed. Bunched populations with herds would quickly lead to exhausted grazing and economic disaster. At the same time, subgroups need their own organization for matters such as settling disputes, and the larger group has to be able to act decisively as one on occasion, above all to protect the grazing rights upon which all depend. Well-organized devolution rather than centralized rule is a natural political form for nomadic societies, therefore, and a kingly hierarchy fits the bill nicely.
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