Heruli

• 1. Introduction

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  The Heruli sacked Athens. A seafaring war band from somewhere near the Sea of Azov arrived by fleet in 267 AD, slipped through the Bosphorus, and swept south through Greece, plundering Sparta, Corinth, Argos, and the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia before reaching the city that had once defined the ancient world. The Athenians had to defend themselves with local militias, and a writer named Dexippus made himself famous for his role in that defense. His account became a source for historians for centuries afterward.

  Who were these people? That question turns out to be genuinely hard to answer. The Heruli left almost no writings of their own, no coins, no monuments that can be unambiguously identified. What survives is a scattered record of other peoples writing about them across nearly three centuries: Roman military records, Greek chronicles, the histories of Procopius, the letters of Cassiodorus. They appear in those records as raiders, as soldiers, as a kingdom on the Danube, and finally as a few thousand men fighting on opposite sides of someone else's war. The puzzle of where they came from, what language they spoke, whether they were even a coherent people or something stranger, has occupied scholars from the post-World War Two era right up to 2021.

• 2. A People Without a Clear Origin

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  Jordanes, writing in the sixth century, described Scandinavia as a place "like a workshop or even better the womb of nations", a phrase that proved enormously influential on medieval and modern writers alike. He specifically mentioned the Heruli in a discussion of that region, noting that the Danes had driven them out of their own settlements there, though he did not specify when. This single passage launched centuries of debate about whether the Heruli were originally a Scandinavian people who migrated south to the Black Sea before the third century, or whether they were a Danubian people who later sent a splinter group north.

  The contemporary historian Procopius, writing at the same time as Jordanes, supplied an account that complicates the picture further. After the Herulian kingdom on the Danube collapsed, he said, one group moved north, crossing through the lands of the Slavs, then empty lands, then the Warini, then the Danes, before sailing across a stretch of ocean to the island the Romans called Thule, where they settled near the Geats. He also mentioned that when the king of the remaining Heruli at Belgrade was murdered, his people sent an embassy all the way to the Heruli in Scandinavia to bring back a new king. Peter Heather, reviewing this account, described it as "entirely plausible", though he noted that others had dismissed it as a fairy story.

  In 2021 Prostko-Prostyński argued there was "no doubt" about Scandinavian origins, reasoning that the Heruli who migrated north would not have ventured that far without a pre-existing connection to the place. Roland Steinacher, reviewing that argument, called it debatable. The linguist Alvar Ellegård took an even more skeptical position, arguing that the most that could be said with reasonable certainty was that a small group of Eruli lived in Scandinavia for about 38-40 years in the first half of the sixth century. Ellegård went further still, proposing that the Heruli were not a tribe in the conventional sense at all, but a wandering brotherhood of warriors that came into being north of the Danube in the late third century, somewhere between what is now Passau and Vienna. That proposal gained few followers.

• 3. Raiders From the Sea

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  In 267 a Heruli fleet departed from the Sea of Azov, passed the Danube delta, and pushed through the Bosphorus. They took Byzantion and the neighboring settlement of Chrysopolis before withdrawing to the Black Sea. Emerging again, they raided Cyzicus, entered the Aegean, and troubled the islands of Lemnos, Skyros, and Imbros before landing on the Peloponnese. The raids of 267 and the campaign beginning in 269 were among the last and largest in a series of seaborne assaults on Roman provinces that had begun in the 250s. These forces operated in coalition with Goths and other peoples the Romans labeled "Scythians", and together they had seized the fleet of Black Sea Greek cities to make the raids possible.

  The campaign of 268 ended badly for the Heruli when the emperor Gallienus defeated them at the river Nestos using a new mobile cavalry force. What happened next is striking: a Herulian chief named Naulobatus became, in the words of the surviving record, the first barbarian known from written sources to receive imperial insignia from the Romans, gaining the rank of Roman consul. It is highly likely, scholars note, that the defeated Heruli were then absorbed into the Roman military. This pattern, raiding against Rome followed by service within it, would repeat itself for the next three centuries.

  The second campaign, which modern researchers such as Steinacher and Prostko-Prostyński now believe began in 269 and ended in 270, was larger still. Thousands of ships reportedly left from the mouth of the Dnieper, carrying a force that included Peuci, Greutungi, Gepids, Heruli, and others. They split in the Hellespont. One group attacked Thessaloniki and was decisively defeated by the emperor Claudius at the Battle of Naissus, the site of modern Niš in Serbia. A Herulian chieftain named Andonnoballus reportedly switched to the Roman side during that engagement, providing another early example of Heruli entering Roman service after a military reverse. The second group sailed south and raided Rhodes, Crete, and Cyprus, with many managing to return safely to harbor in the Crimea.

• 4. Soldiers of the Empire

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  By the fourth century the Romans had established a formal Herulian auxiliary unit within the Western Roman Empire, and scholars have argued this implies the Heruli were already settled somewhere inside the empire's borders. This unit, the Heruli seniores, was stationed in northern Italy and was lightly equipped, often paired alongside the Batavian unit called the Batavi seniores. The two units shared a standard and frequently operated together.

  In 360, Ammianus reported that Julian the Apostate, then serving as Caesar in Gaul, sent the Heruli and Batavi together with other light forces to Britain. While they were there, the emperor Constantius II ordered Julian to transfer his best units, including the Heruli and Batavi, east for campaigns against the Parthians. Ammianus states that this order triggered a revolt, because many of these soldiers had left homes beyond the Rhine under a promise that they would never be led beyond the Alps. The revolt made Julian emperor. In 366, fighting for the Romans near the Rhine against the Alamanni under a commander named Charietto, the Batavian and Herulian units lost their shared standard when Charietto was killed in battle. Two years later, in 368, both units were again in Britain, this time under Count Theodosius.

  Ellegård argued that the pairing with the Batavi should be understood not as a connection to the Batavi's original Lower Rhine homeland, but to their quarters in this period at Passau, known as Castra Batava on the Danube, close to where the Heruli would later establish their kingdom. In about 314, the Heruli had already been listed in the document known as the Laterculus Veronensis as one of the barbarian peoples living under Roman domination, alongside the Rugii and Sciri.

• 5. The Danubian Kingdom

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  After the death of Attila in 453 and the Battle of Nedao in 454, when his sons lost control of the subject peoples, the Heruli were among several groups able to consolidate a kingdom in the Middle Danubian region. Procopius described it as lying north of the Danube. It ruled over a mixed population that included Suevi, Huns, and Alans. Peter Heather assessed this kingdom as "middle-sized", comparable to the Rugian one but clearly less powerful than the Gothic, Lombard, or Gepid confederations, which generated far more durable political entities. Heather estimated its military capacity at somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 men.

  The kingdom's end came through conflict with the Lombards. Procopius reported that by the time Anastasius became emperor in 491, the Heruli had forced the Lombards and surrounding peoples to pay tribute and had effectively run out of enemies to fight. Three years later, in 494, King Rodulf was pressured by his followers to attack the Lombards despite existing treaties. He died in the battle that followed. Many modern scholars place the final destruction of the kingdom somewhat later, in the period 493-511, because Theoderic, who ruled Italy from 493, maintained correspondence with Herulian royalty preserved in the Variae of Cassiodorus. In one letter he adopted a Heruli king as an adult, presented him with weapons, and described this as a tradition of non-Roman peoples. Theoderic wove the Heruli into a network of alliances that also included the Visigothic king Alaric II, who reigned from 484 to 507.

  A panegyric delivered to Theoderic by Magnus Felix Ennodius in 507 indicates that large numbers of Heruli had been killed by Theoderic's forces at their own settlements, apparently after some of them had turned against him.

• 6. Commanders, Kings, and the End

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  Under the Eastern Roman emperors, individual Herulian commanders became prominent figures in some of the sixth century's biggest conflicts. Pharas led a Herulian cavalry unit under Belisarius in 530 in the Iberian War against the Persians in what is now eastern Georgia. He then fought under Belisarius again in Carthage in 533-534 against the Vandals, where he played what Procopius described as a very notable role in the Roman victory. After a failed revolt of Arian soldiers in Africa in 536, in which 400 Heruli participated, the Herulian cavalry unit was disbanded.

  Narses brought approximately 2,000 Heruli to Italy in 538 for the Gothic Wars, commanded by leaders named Aluith, Phanitheos, and Visandus. When Narses left Italy in 539 the Heruli remained, eventually suffering a heavy defeat by the Ostrogoths at Treviso in 540, in which Visandus was killed. A second Herulian force, led by a commander named Philemuth, was recruited personally by Narses around 545, probably from Singidunum, the settlement that would become Belgrade. In 552, Philemuth and 3,000 mounted Heruli were finally shipped to Italy, where they participated in the conquest of Rome. Philemuth died in 553 and was replaced by a kinsman named Fulkaris, who died fighting Franks near Parma. Fulkaris was eventually succeeded in 554 by Sinduald, described as an Italian king of a tribe called the Breoni in the mountains of Tyrol, who claimed descent from the Heruli who had entered Italy under Odoacer generations earlier.

  Sinduald was the last Heruli to leave a clear trace in the historical record. After Justinian died in 566, Sinduald rebelled against Rome and had himself declared king of the Heruli. Narses had him executed in 567. Around the same time, the Pannonian Avars were establishing control of the Middle Danube, Slavic languages were spreading through the region, and what remained of the Heruli near Belgrade was disappearing into the surrounding political order. Peter Heather wrote that by around 540 "being a Herule had ceased to be the main determinant of individual behaviour", and that after that point a sense of identity probably remained only in small fragments, with no future in the prevailing circumstances.

• 7. How Others Saw Them

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  Roman and Greek writers returned again and again to a cluster of descriptions of the Heruli: physically imposing, swift on their feet, violent, undisciplined, and willing to fight with very little protective armor. Jordanes reported that in Scandinavia the Heruli had been the tallest people, even though the Scandinavians in general were taller than the people of Germania. He also relayed the description of the Heruli of the Azov region as a people "swift of foot, and on that account were the more swollen with pride, for there was at that time no race that did not choose from them its light-armed troops for battle". Paul the Deacon, writing about the period when King Rodulf was defeated by the Lombards, added that the Heruli were already famous from many victories and fought naked, covering only what modesty required.

  Procopius supplied the most detailed and hostile portrait. Writing from personal experience with the Heruli in the Roman military, he described their armor as consisting of a shield and a thick jacket. He noted that Herulian slaves went into battle without even a shield, and were only permitted to carry one after proving themselves in combat. He reported customs he found shocking, including an arrangement by which the elderly and the ill were killed ceremonially by relatives, and an expectation that widows would hang themselves to preserve their reputations. After the conversion to Christianity of the Herule king Grepes in 528, along with twelve relatives and some nobles, Procopius acknowledged that the Heruli became somewhat gentler, but he did not otherwise moderate his judgment of them.

  Magnus Felix Ennodius grouped the Heruli with the Franks and Saxons in his life of the fifth-century saint Anthony of Lerins, saying that all three peoples had committed acts "in the manner of wild beasts" and believed their gods were appeased by human slaughter, even offering their own kin. The name "Heruli" itself remains etymologically uncertain; the most speculative proposals connect it to the Old English word earl, to runic inscriptions using the form erilaR, and even to Germanic words for werewolves and beings with magical powers. None of those proposals have been verified, though the connection to military title and warrior brotherhood has a long history in the scholarship.