No visitor to the 1954 spectacle film Attila the Hun would have been surprised to learn that hordes of barbarian Huns were murdering, looting and burning. The idea of Attila, the Scourge of God, as a ruthless savage has stuck with the general public. But was he?
He was small in stature, with a broad chest. His skin color was dark. His broad head had small eyes and his nose was flat. His hair was a bit gray, including the thin, flaxen beard at the bottom of his chin. Furthermore, Attila was home to an ambitious and haughty ruler, a cunning diplomat and a master blackmailer, but also a defeatable general.
This knowledge is not based on surviving portraits or texts written by Huns themselves, because there are none. We owe the description of its appearance to the sixth-century Gothic historian Jordanes, who had copied it from a lost work written a hundred years earlier by Priscus, a Greek historian and diplomat in the Roman service. Priscus could have known what Attila looked like, having seen him with his own eyes when he was part of a diplomatic mission to Attila's court in 448.
Geopolitical crisis
The Roman Empire, divided into eastern and western empires since 285, was still a large and wealthy empire, but it was faltering in the fifth century. Certainly the western part, which had to watch from the then capital Ravenna how Vandals plundered Rome in 410 and Visigoths founded their own empire within the Roman Empire after 418 in Spain and large parts of France. In the eastern capital Constantinople (now Istanbul), Emperor Theodosius II feared that Attila and his Huns would appear at his gate.
The geopolitical crisis had begun after the year 376, when two great Gothic peoples from the east, the Greutungers and the Tervingers, with men, women, children and all their possessions showed up at the empire border at the Danube and asked for asylum in the Roman Empire. . They were on the run from the Huns, says Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman historian of the time.
That doesn't mean they were hot on their heels, because it wasn't until twenty years later that the Huns would launch their first attack on the Roman Empire via the Caucasus. But the world to the north and east of the Danube had indeed started to move and the Huns probably played an important, if not a decisive role in this.
The exact origin of the Huns is uncertain. One scientist sees them as Chinese, the other makes a connection with Mongolian or Turkic peoples. It is only certain that they came from somewhere over five thousand kilometers long Eurasian steppe and that they were a nomadic people with a great equestrian tradition.
The Huns were, as it were, fused with their horses and their wooden saddles. When they moved west, they still consisted of different and structureless groups, each with its own king, including two brothers of Attila's father.
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It is known from historical and anthropological research that nomadic peoples do not usually wander around at random. They have fixed habits and favorite destinations. They usually migrate with their herds to specific higher elevations, cooler grasslands in the summer and return to selected lower elevations in the winter. With sedentary peoples in the area they exchange meat and skins for grain, for example.
In the case of the Huns, there will not always have been voluntary barter. They were known as good fighters, who could attack quickly and unexpectedly when mounted on their horses. In addition, they had special composite bows with which they could cover distances of up to 500 meters and shoot through armor.
In the course of the fourth century there must have been a reason for the Huns to give up the old nomadic existence in Central Asia. They went on profitable raids to the west, beyond the Volga River. At one point, the peoples who lived there felt so cornered that they themselves also began to move westward, towards the border of the Roman Empire.
Solitary Ruler
By the early fifth century, the Huns had penetrated into the Roman province of Pannonia, in what is now Hungary. Yet then the biggest problem for Roman power was not the Huns, but other peoples who preyed on the riches of the Romans. Sometimes a Hun king went on a rampage, such as Uldin, but it also happened that the Romans gratefully used the services of the Huns for payment in the battle against, for example, the Goths and Visigoths.
The Huns also came in handy during the struggle for supremacy of the western Roman Empire after the death of Emperor Honorius in 423. General Aetius, who had come to know the Huns well when he had spent his early years as a hostage at Uldin's court, recruited a large Hun army to assist pretender Joannes to the throne. Joannes was murdered, but Aetius managed to get the new emperor Valentinian III to appoint him commander of the troops in Gaul by threatening the Huns.
Attila did not play a significant role at that time. He was presumably born sometime between 390 and 400. His father's name was Mundzuk; more is not known about him and Attila's childhood. Only after the death of his uncles Octar and Rugila, who in the sources is also called Ruga and Rua, Attila comes to the fore. He and his brother Bleda were proclaimed king shortly after 435.
Reading between the lines, we have to conclude that something was changing around the Huns' kingship. Attila, Bleda and Rugila more than once threatened an attack if the Romans did not hand over some named Huns who had taken refuge with the Romans. It appears that these were other Hun kings who had to be eliminated. In the end, Attila did not even hesitate to have his brother killed (there is also a story that Bleda had first tried to kill Attila) and to be crowned sole ruler in 445.
Attila is playing a game
Attila now turned his gaze to Constantinople. In 447 he successfully attacked camps and cities in the Balkans. This made it crystal clear that the Huns meanwhile also mastered the art of besieging and how to deal with battering rams. To avert an attack on the eastern capital, Emperor Theodosius II agreed to a ransom of seven hundred kilograms of gold and sent a diplomatic mission with gifts to the army camp of Attila in 448.
This was the mission described by the diplomat Priscus, and his text reveals something about his character in addition to Attila's appearance. According to several sources, he would have had a prediction that he would become world ruler. He therefore did not feel inferior to the Romans. On the contrary, he was playing a mental game with them.
First Attila withdrew his troops towards the Hungarian plains. The diplomats were allowed to follow in his footsteps, but had to keep their distance. When they pitched their tents along the way, his people made sure that the group with Priscus was not on a site that was higher than the plot on which Attila's tent stood.
Then several times he had the message conveyed that there was no point in talking and that they might as well go back to Constantinople. He then set the condition that the Romans had to hand over some of the Huns that had fled. When that condition was met, the diplomats were given the opportunity to placate people from his entourage with gifts.
The settlement of Attila
After a month on the road, Attila finally settled in one of his permanent settlements in the area along the Danube. They were in no way reminiscent of the abodes of half savages. Instead of tents, there were wooden shelters built on a circle of stones. Wooden walls surrounded the houses, but they were more ornamental than defensive. Only Attila's shelter, which was also the largest, had towers.
At a banquet Attila was throwing, Priscus and the other diplomats could see benches lined the edge. The king himself sat on a bench in the middle. Behind him was a staircase that led to his bed, which was closed off from the room with transparent curtains. While everyone drank from silver cups and ate from precious plates, he himself settled for a simple wooden cup and plate. His clothing was also modest. For example, he did not wear richly decorated boots.
Priscus also wrote about meeting a Greek-speaking Roman. He said that after the conquest of Viminacium, which the Huns had taken during their campaign in 447 in present-day Serbia, he had first been a slave to the Huns, but after brave behavior in the fight against Romans and others, he had been able to redeem himself. He did not want to leave the Huns, because with them, unlike the Romans, there was no class justice.
The Greek-speaking Roman was not the only "stranger" among the Huns. They were known for taking in people from other nations very pragmatically, such as the East Germanic Odoacer, who worked his way up to become an advisor to Attila.
The diplomatic mission ended without concrete results. Although a direct attack on Constantinople had been averted, the danger remained. Exactly what Attila wanted, who then launched a major attack in Gaul. Here, however, he was stopped by Aetius in a bloody battle at Troyes in 451, only to suffer a second defeat a year later in northern Italy. In 453 he died somewhere in present-day Hungary.
How important his unifying role had been became apparent afterwards. Some Huns went to serve in the army of the Eastern Roman Empire, the rest gradually merged into other peoples, in Serbia, Bulgaria and near the Black Sea. Attila's Hunnic Empire quickly disintegrated after his death.
Scientists on the Huns
The Austrian scientist Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen gave with his book The World of the Huns. Studies in Their History and Culture (University of California Press,1973) the Huns in the west have their own culture and background. As an ancient historian and sinologist, he read both Western and Eastern sources. He associated the Huns with the Xiognu, a steppe people who lived as early as the third century BC. had a vast empire in Asia.
No real proof has ever been found. Or as Peter Heather, then a lecturer at Oxford, now a professor of Medieval History at London College, wrote in The Fall of the Roman Empire (Macmillan, 2005):'There is a gap of a few centuries and a few thousand kilometers between the Xiognu and the Huns.” He also nuanced the destructive significance of Attila and the Huns for the fall of the Roman Empire. Yes, Attila was no sweetheart and both the western and eastern realms suffered from him, but in the end the threat was transient.
Christopher Kelly of Cambridge University thought very differently and titled his book Attila the Hun. Barbara Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire (Bodley Head, 2008). Hyun Jin Kim, a South Korean researcher at the University of Melbourne, agreed with Kelly that the Huns brought down the Roman Empire, but in The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013 ) he almost saw it as a credit.
Like Maenchen-Helfen, Kim went back to Eastern sources to make it clear that the Huns were not a disorganized gang, but rather a well-organized empire.