“The barbarian people of the Huns… grew so strong that they took over a hundred cities and nearly endangered Constantinople. They have left Thrace so devastated that it will never look the way it once did.
Hypatius (Heather 2006: 395).
This article has a double function: to briefly analyze the Hun people and their main leader, Attila, commenting on those activities that have made them so famous both today and throughout history. In general, the Huns as a people have been identified only with Attila, a figure who has become the paradigm of cruelty, barbarism and chaos; Along the following lines, it is hoped to be able to demonstrate that the Huns go beyond Attila, and that he is a more complex figure than, a priori, it may seem.
The Hun people.
The origin of the Hunsor its ethnic characterization, It has been a topic that has occupied a large number of scholars since the eighteenth century. (de la Vaissière 2015: 175 et seq.). Since then they have been assigned various origins: Turks, Mongolians, Iranians… the truth is that even today it is extremely complex to relate them to a specific ethnic group. One of the most common theories is the one that relates the Huns to the Xiongnu (Fields 2006: 11 and ss), a confederation of tribes that harassed the Chinese border from the end of the 3rd century BC to the end of the 1st century AD, when they would eventually be returned to the Eurasian steppes, although the evidence linking the Huns to that confederation is not very strong.
If we go to their own Hunswe did not find anything related to its origins, it has not reached us not even a founding myth. The truth is that this story should have been collected by Roman sources since no Hunnic literature has been preserved, nor their language, of which we barely know a few words. “The Huns will have to be seen through the eyes of others” (Kelly 2015: 208). The truth is that the evidence is scarce to provide sufficiently precise information, so, at least for now, the Huns should be classified as one of the many peoples that inhabited the great Eurasian steppe.
When they appeared on the Roman scene around the fourth century, they were stunned. Despite their attempts to relate them to other steppe peoples (such as Scythians or Sarmatians) it was obvious that the Huns were a new people in the eyes of the Romans, although as they are described by Jordanes, shared some traits with other steppe peoples: “they are short in stature, quick in their bodily movement, alert riders, broad-shouldered, skilled in the use of the bow and arrow, and have firm necks that are always straight as a matter of pride” (Coulston 2008: 225). Of course, one should not fall into the error of considering that the Huns came from a specific place with defined limits and united by strong ties. In the steppes, the nomadic groups are relatively small and are made up of a certain number of families that move, normally twice a year, in search of fertile pastures with which to feed the animals that accompanied them, although in no case are they migrations random (Heather 2010: 249). There is nothing that can be related to a centralized leadership, but, quite possibly, power fell on a series of caudillos who exercised their power autonomously (Goldsworthy 2009: 396). They were tremendously austere societies, adapted to the harshness of the terrain and that, as some authors have stated, they needed some of the elements that agricultural (sedentary) societies produced (Man 2006: 73 and ss.).
War.
Within the set of elements that constituted the success of a nomadic people like the Hun, it is necessary to underline the war aspect What one of the most important within the vertiginous rise experienced by the Hun people until arriving, in the middle of the 5th century, to control a huge confederation of peoples, putting the Empire (Eastern and Western) in check. The Huns, as a nomadic people that they were, they practiced archery on horseback, a technique that was by no means new and with which the Romans had previously encountered in their fights against the Avars or Parthians. This way of warfare had three main components: the skilled nomad, the little Turkish horse, and the composite bow (Penrose 2005: 289), so let’s break it down.
The Hun who wielded a bow did so with exquisite mastery, their way of life meant that from their childhood they learned to handle the bow and ride a horse, so each Hun warrior had a formation that made them resemble elite units As for the execution of the type of war they practiced, it was not easy at all. As for their horses, these were smaller than Westerners, but also stronger; the extreme conditions of the steppes also hardened the beasts, which were more suitable for, in addition to being workhorses, towing the heavy chariots that transported the Hun world through the enormous steppe first, and then towards Central Europe (Penrose 2005 : 290).
As for the bow, this will be, at least in my opinion, the element that made the Huns a war force of enormous power. The use of the compound bow was not exclusive to the Hun people, but had been used since ancient times by peoples such as the Persians or other nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples. Constructed from wood, bone, horn, and sinew, Hun compound (or recurve) bows had been modified by increasing their overall length. If the Scythian bow was around 80 centimeters, the Hun could well exceed 130 cm (Heather 2006: 207), although its shape became asymmetrical so that the upper part was longer than the lower part and thus allowed the arch to be driven on horseback; that modification made Hun bows extraordinarily powerful and powerful tools, while conferring on them an invaluable technological superiority. The Hun Archesso, they were of a high quality and their manufacture, in addition to taking a long time, had to be undertaken by an expert craftsman (Goldsworthy 2009: 398). Other Hun weapons were the sword and the lasso, both of which were secondary weapons brought to bear at the end of the fray. The tactic used by the Huns was to rain down continuous arrows on dense enemy formations, galloping away whenever the possibility of close combat arose. Once the enemy had been sufficiently pierced, the Huns charged with the aforementioned secondary weapons in order to finish off the remnants of the often battered enemy army (Man 2006: 101).
The migration to the west.
when all goes well the steppe can remain in peace, but sometimes, this it shakes and it gets hot exerting pressure that ends up finding an escape valve exemplified in the threat to those adjoining territories to the steppes, that are occupied by sedentary societies. The Hun migratory processes of the late fourth and early fifth centuries were not generated by chance; that is to say, that they did not all get lost at once and decided to continue towards who knows where until they came face to face with other peoples and finally with the Romans (simple argument if they exist but which seems to be the most widespread at a popular level). The steps of the Huns were, almost certainly, very calculated and responded to objectives defined in advance after having weighed pros and cons (Heather 2010: 249).
Although it can be stated with almost total certainty that This displacement did not occur randomly. It is much more complicated to find an explanation that helps to understand why the Huns began this migration, which would have so many consequences for the entire Western world. Different hypotheses have been postulated, and it is possible that there is some truth in all of them. First, that there was a political revolution in the steppes that must have consisted of the appearance of another nomadic group in the east that put pressure on the Huns, just as it would happen in the 6th century with the Avars and in the 9th with the Magyars. The second of the “negative” explanations has to do with a possible climate change in the steppes, which would have produced a decrease in rainfall causing the amount of grass to decrease alarmingly (Heather 2010: 250). Although there are also “positive” explanations, such as the fact that the Huns moved in the search of nail riches that they were impossible to obtain in the steppe and that the Roman and Persian empires could provide them (Goldsworthy 2009: 397).
Whatever the reason for the migration, the truth is that in the middle of the 4th century the Danubian border was greatly affected by the displacement of the Huns, who defeated the Gothic kingdom located north of the Roman border and caused the displacement of thousands of people to the north bank of the Danube; Before the Goths, other peoples such as the Alans, a nomadic people located north of the Black Sea, had been affected by the Hun advance and were subjugated under their power (Thomson 1996: 26 and ss). The migration of the Greutungian Goths ended up leading to the Battle of Adrianople in 378 (in which some bands of Huns and Alans participated), a true catastrophe for Rome. Apparently, the migration of the Goths had been caused by bands of Hun warriors, who soon after begin to appear successively in Roman sources. Is The first migration would be much more limited than that which, a generation later, produced the collapse of the borders of Central Europe (405-408). and that has been considered as a mass migration (Heather 2010: 259). Ultimately, the Huns would settle on the Great Hungarian Plain, where the heart of their short-lived “empire” would be located. All those peoples who decided to march did so because “the dangers inherent in trying to rebuild their lives on Roman soil were less disturbing than the idea of living under Hun domination” (Heather 2006: 266).
The Huns between the migration and the rise of Attila.
The relations between the Huns and the Empires of the West and the East between 390 and the arrival of Attila to power will vary, since, as soon as they act as mercenaries as they commit acts of pillage and looting (Heather 2010: 250); and although it is a strange relationship, the truth is that they spent decades moving around that dichotomy. In the first decade of the 5th century we begin to have news, for the first time, of a Hun leader: a certain Uldino; is the first name we know of a Hun leader (Thomson 1996: 33), so the possibility has been raised that Roman sources echo this leader due to the relative power he accumulated, which must have been greater than that of the leaders of the war bands that we know had been operating around the Danube for decades. However, the power of him was not to be…