Huns

• 1. Introduction

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  The Huns arrived at the Volga River by 370 CE and within decades had shaken the foundations of the Roman world. They were a nomadic people from Central Asia, first recorded living east of the Volga in a region that was then considered part of Scythia. Their appearance on the edges of Europe set in motion a cascade of migrations that pushed Goths, Alans, Vandals, and many other peoples into Roman territory. The questions they raise are still debated today: where exactly did they come from, what language did they speak, what did they actually believe, and how did a group that left almost no written record manage to build an empire that stretched from the Danube to the edges of the known world?

• 2. The Origins Problem

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  Joseph de Guignes, a French scholar working in the 18th century, was the first to propose that the European Huns were descended from the Xiongnu, a people who had menaced the northern frontiers of China from the 3rd century BCE to the late 1st century CE. After a devastating defeat at the hands of the Han dynasty, the northern branch of the Xiongnu retreated northwest; their descendants may have traveled across the Eurasian Steppe over generations before emerging on the Roman frontier. Recent archaeogenetic studies have found that some Hun-era individuals carried DNA similar to populations in ancient Mongolia, lending partial support to the connection.

  Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen was the first scholar to challenge this tradition by insisting that written sources alone were not sufficient and that archaeology had to carry equal weight. His work made the Xiongnu-Hun link genuinely controversial. Walter Pohl cautions that none of the great confederations of steppe warriors was ethnically homogenous, and that the same name was applied to different groups for reasons of prestige or geographic association. Hyun Jin Kim argues instead that the term "Hun" was "not primarily an ethnic group, but a political category", and sees a fundamental political and cultural continuity running from the Xiongnu through the European Huns. The name itself offers few clues: proposed etymologies range from Turkic roots meaning "ferocious" or "force" to an Iranian root akin to the Avestan word for "skill", while Christopher Atwood suggests the name may derive from the Ongi River in Mongolia and may have been a dynastic name before it became an ethnic label.

• 3. Life on the Steppe

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  Ammianus Marcellinus claimed that the Huns "are almost glued to their horses"; Zosimus went further, writing that they "live and sleep on their horses"; Sidonius observed that a Hun child barely learned to stand before a horse took him on its back. Ancient sources uniformly deny that the Huns practiced any agriculture, though Maenchen-Helfen notes archaeological finds of grain cultivation among steppe peoples and Kim classifies the Huns as "agro-pastoralist". Maenchen-Helfen also suggests the Huns may have kept small herds of Bactrian camels in what is now Romania and Ukraine, a practice attested for the Sarmatians.

  Ammianus says the bulk of the Hunnic diet came from the meat of their herds, with mutton, sheep's cheese, horse meat, and mare's milk forming the core of what they ate. In times of scarcity, they may have boiled horses' blood for food. The Altziagiri, one Hunnic tribe recorded by Jordanes, grazed near Cherson on the Crimea in summer and moved north to winter quarters, illustrating the pattern of seasonal movement that Maenchen-Helfen describes as typical of pastoral nomads. Their economy was not self-contained: as contact with Rome grew, tribute and raiding became central to their material life. Denis Sinor argues that by Attila's time the Hunnic economy had become almost entirely dependent on plunder and payments from Roman provinces. Roman gold coins circulated as currency across the whole of the Hunnic Empire.

• 4. Attila and the Wars with Rome

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  From 434, the brothers Attila and Bleda ruled the Huns jointly, described as being as ambitious as their uncle Rugila. In 435 they compelled the Eastern Roman Empire to sign the Treaty of Margus, which granted the Huns trade rights and an annual tribute. When the Romans broke the treaty in 440, the two brothers attacked the fortress and marketplace of Castra Constantias on the Danube and then razed the cities of Margus, Singidunum, and Viminacium. A truce in 441 held only two years; when Constantinople again failed to pay, Hunnic armies swept toward the city, sacked several others, and forced the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II to sign the Peace of Anatolius in autumn 443. The annual tribute ultimately agreed upon reached 2,100 pounds of gold.

  Bleda died in 445, and Attila became sole ruler. He invaded the Balkans and Thrace in 447. His westward campaign in 451 was triggered in part by Honoria, sister of the Western Roman Emperor Valentinian III, who had sent Attila a ring asking for his help to escape a betrothal to a senator; Attila claimed her as his bride and demanded half the Western Roman Empire as dowry. His army entered Gaul, attacked Metz, moved past Paris and Troyes, and laid siege to Orleans. The combined Roman and Visigoth force met the Huns at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. The following year he crossed the Alps into northern Italy, sacking cities as he went. Three envoys, including Pope Leo I, met Attila at the Mincio river near Mantua and persuaded him to withdraw. Before Attila could attack Constantinople, he died in 453 of a hemorrhage on his wedding night. The Roman writer Priscus, who visited Attila's camp in person, described him as "short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey; and he had a flat nose and tanned skin."

• 5. The Hunnic War Machine

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  Ammianus Marcellinus recorded in detail what made the Huns so difficult to fight: they advanced in wedge-shaped formations with savage war cries, then suddenly scattered into bands that attacked from every direction, dealing heavy casualties before the enemy could organize a response. At close range they used iron swords; at distance they fired arrows tipped with sharpened bone, and they also threw plaited cloth nooses over opponents to entangle their limbs and bring them down. Ammianus acknowledged that "you would not hesitate to call them the most terrible of all warriors."

  Their composite reflex bows, often called the "Hun-type," measured between 120 and 150 centimeters and were made of flexible wood, strips of antler or bone, and animal sinew. They were difficult to make and were evidently objects of great value; the graves of Hunnic princes have been found buried with golden ceremonial bows across a wide area from the Rhine to the Dnieper. Maenchen-Helfen argues that a feigned retreat, pretending to flee and then turning to attack a disordered enemy, was an important tactic, also mentioned by Zosimus and Agathias. The Huns were, however, not always successful in pitched battle; they suffered defeat at the Battle of Toulouse in 439 and lost at the Battle of Nedao in 454. Christopher Kelly argues that Attila deliberately avoided large-scale engagements with the Roman army when possible, preferring the threat of war as a tool to extract tribute. The Huns were also capable of besieging walled cities, and Peter Heather suggests they acquired this knowledge through Roman engineers, defectors, or pressure on Silk Road city-states.

• 6. Society, Belief, and Material Life

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  The Hunnic language is almost entirely lost. Only three words are recorded in ancient sources as being genuinely Hunnic, and all three appear to belong to an Indo-European language; everything else about the language must be inferred from personal names and tribal names. Scholars have proposed that it may have been Turkic, Mongolic, Eastern Iranian, or Yeniseian, but given how little survives, many hold it to be unclassifiable. Priscus, who visited Attila's court, noted that the jester Zerco made guests laugh with a "promiscuous jumble of words, Latin mixed with Hunnish and Gothic."

  Artificial cranial deformation, the practice of binding infants' skulls to lengthen them, appears in European burials from the Pontic Steppe as early as the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, and became common in the Carpathian basin in the 5th century. During the Hunnic period, between 50% and 80% of all burials in the Carpathian basin show individuals who underwent the practice. Kim suggests the goal was to create a physical distinction between nobility and the general populace; Susanne Hakenbeck argues instead that it marked kinship and family affiliation.

  Attila's funeral, as recorded by Jordanes drawing possibly from Priscus, involved the Huns cutting their hair and disfiguring their faces with swords as part of a rite of mourning. His coffin was placed in a silk tent while horsemen circled it singing funeral songs called the strava. The coffin was then buried in precious metals along with weapons, and the slaves who dug the grave were killed to protect its location. Maenchen-Helfen connects a large number of Hunnic bronze cauldrons found deposited near or in running water to possible spring rituals. The worship of Tengri, the sky deity, is attested for Caucasian Huns in the Armenian chronicle attributed to Movses Dasxuranci, which records that they worshipped trees and burnt horses as sacrifices, and "made sacrifices to fire and water and to certain gods of the roads, and to the moon and to all creatures considered in their eyes to be in some way remarkable."

• 7. Afterlives and Legends

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  After the collapse of the Hunnic Empire following the Battle of Nedao around 454, the memory of the Huns found a second life in two very different traditions. In Christian hagiography, the Huns became the archetypal instrument of divine punishment. An anonymous medieval biography of Pope Leo I turned his 452 meeting with Attila near the Mincio into a miracle: the apostles Peter and Paul appeared to Attila holding swords over his head and threatening to kill him unless he followed the pope's command. The legend of Saint Ursula placed 11,000 holy virgins at Cologne just as the Huns besieged it; after Ursula and her companions were killed by Hunnic arrows, their souls rose as a heavenly army and drove the Huns away. Cities with similar legends include Orléans, Troyes, Metz, Modena, and Reims.

  In Germanic heroic legend, the Huns occupy a more ambiguous position. The Nibelungenlied and the Old Norse Poetic Edda and Völsunga saga place the Huns and Attila at the center of the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom on the Rhine in 437. In legends surrounding Dietrich von Bern, based on the historical Theoderic the Great, Attila and the Huns offer refuge and support after Dietrich has been driven from Verona. Continental Germanic traditions paint a notably more favorable portrait of Attila than the Scandinavian sources do. By the 13th century, the Middle High German word for Hun, hiune, had become a common synonym for giant, so that prehistoric megalithic structures in northern Germany came to be called Hunengräber, "Hun graves", a name that continued into the modern era. Hungarian medieval chronicles meanwhile built an elaborate tradition claiming that the Hungarians, and especially the Székely ethnic group, descended directly from the Huns, a claim that mainstream scholarship has not supported.