HUNS

The Huns included Asiatic peoples speaking Mongolic or Turkic languages who dominated the Eurasian steppe from before 300 B.C. In the third century A.D. the Great Wall of China, 2,400 kilometers long, was built to fend off "western barbarians." The reverse impact of attacks set off a domino effect of westward migrations. Just after A.D. 370 the Huns crossed the Volga River and conquered the Alans, who had dominated the steppe north of the Caucasus Mountains for millennia. The Huns destroyed the Ostrogothic empire in the Dnieper–Don interfluve in A.D. 375 and defeated the Visigoths at the Dniester River the next year. In his work Getica the sixth-century historian Jordanes described a century of Hun subjugation, with Latin translations of passages from eyewitness accounts by the Byzantine Rhetor Priscus. Copies of this compilation biased medieval historiography. Records by a Roman officer, Ammianus Marcellinus, from the late fourth century A.D. form another collection of topics (beginning with the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.) that still may be found in the curricula of many European schools.

Roman infighting in A.D. 395 permitted the Huns to conquer the Roman Balkan provinces and then invade present-day southern Poland. In 406 fleeing German peoples broke into the western Roman Empire at the Rhine. The Huns exploited this situation by offering lucrative mercenary services to the Romans against the intruders. After attacking the Balkans, the Huns moved the seat of their empire into the southern Great Hungarian Plain in about 425. Several late Sarmatian settlements in this area show evidence of violent destruction. The Romans paid Hun mercenaries in money and war booty and provided them access to Roman areas ravaged by Germanic migrations, including Pannonia (A.D. 434). The Huns' expansion is marked by finds in more than 150 archaeological sites across the Carpathian Basin. The finds include large metal cauldrons in Hungary (fig. 1), which are also depicted in rock art in the Altai Mountains in Siberia and southern Russia and western Mongolia.

The empire of the Huns filled a geopolitical vacuum between the two Roman Empires and even acted as a power broker. Huns conducted ambitious military campaigns in both directions. They raided Byzantine territories (A.D. 408, 441–443, and 447–449), occupying a series of cities and approaching Constantinople. In 442 the Huns extorted 6,000 pounds of "war compensation" plus 2,100 pounds of gold annually from Byzantium. This was the heyday of their empire. In 445 Attila, the new king of the Huns, attacked the western Roman Empire. He turned back before Ravenna, however, after an earthquake in 447 destroyed the Theodosian Wall in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), built against the Huns in 408. Damage to the wall left the city vulnerable. The allied Gepid and Ostrogothic infantries slowed Attila's move on Constantinople, allowing months for the reconstruction of the wall. The siege was canceled, but the Huns conducted prolonged peace negotiations with Byzantium. It was then that Rhetor Priscus, who documented the last decades of the Hun empire (434–455), visited Attila's court in 449 with a Byzantine delegation.

Possibly under Byzantine inspiration, Attila moved west in 451, until the Romans and Visigoths and their allies stopped him at Orléans. His army united Gepids, Ostrogoths, Skirs, Alans, and Sarmatians, who faced fellow barbarians in the battle of Catalaunum. Fighting to a draw, the Huns retreated to the Great Hungarian Plain. Early in A.D. 452, Attila raided northern Italy, advancing beyond Mediolanum (modern-day Milan). In the summer, however, he was forced back by heat, epidemics, and the news that Byzantine forces had crossed the Danube River into Hun territory. Early the next year, amid preparations against Byzantine intrusion, Attila died unexpectedly. Subsequent infighting weakened the empire, and even his victorious son could not quell vassals, who defeated the Huns under Gepid leadership (A.D. 455). The Huns fled toward the Pontic steppe. Barbarians emerging after Hun rule finished off both Roman Empires, although written sources attribute much of this destruction to the Huns.

Although western chroniclers of the fifth through seventh centuries detailed Attila's plundering of Gaul and Italy (451–452), the exploits of the Huns in Byzantium remained underrepresented in the historical record. Medieval Catholic propaganda also profited from an unauthenticated encounter between Pope Leo I and Attila. The bishop of Rome became the savior confronting "flagellum dei" (scourge of God), Saint Augustine's term for Gothic King Alaric transposed to Attila in medieval Italy. Attila's popular descriptive, "the Dog-Headed," is a reminder of artificial skull deformation, a custom evidenced in fifth-century burials in the Hun confederacy. Attila's life spans nearly a hundred and twenty-four years in documents, of which he spent forty-four as king. In reality, he ruled for eight years before dying at about the age of forty-five.

In German tradition Attila's image varied between bloodthirsty despot and generous monarch. Christian Hungarians started considering Hun ancestry when the Nibelungenlied, a High German epic, was written in about 1200. Although the Turkic name Onugarian had been used haphazardly in western sources to denote Magyars (Ungar, Hungar, and Vengr) and other warlike equestrian barbarians, it was not linked specifically with Huns (Hsiung-nu) until the Middle Ages. In about 1283 Simon Kézai, "a loyal priest," crafted an influential legend comparable to the Niebelungenlied with a heavy Hungarian emphasis. It was dedicated to King László IV of eastern Cumanian extraction, who was involved in a power struggle with his noblemen and the church. An apocryphal relation to Attila possibly attained paradigmatic significance when steppic tradition had to be reconciled with Christianity.

Despite differences in ethnohistory, language, and physical makeup, the images of Huns and conquering Hungarians hopelessly converged. Coincidentally, both Huns and Magyars launched ruthless raids on their neighbors and beyond from the Carpathian Basin, but with a five-hundred-year time gap between them (Huns in 425–452 and Hungarians in 899–955). Their renowned light cavalry tactics also were similar. By the sixteenth century the Hungarian nobility were considered the glorious descendants of Huns who had re-conquered Attila's empire. In the nineteenth century the theory of Hun ancestry spread without social content in the public education system in Hungary, and the myth has become "historical knowledge," periodically resuscitated even today.

In contrast to this passionate historical interest, the Huns have been studied archaeologically in Hungary only since 1932. The three tumultuous decades of their empire left a rich but scattered archaeological heritage in Hungary. (Even in central Asia only a very few Hun finds predate the fourth century A.D.) Stylistically, Alans and Germanic tribes shared many predominantly "Hun" elements in their attire. "Cicada" brooches represent one of the characteristic artifact types. The archaeological traces of the Huns include not only grave goods and hoards but also destruction layers at Antique settlements. Crude architectural structures over such strata often are linked to Hun occupation.

HUNS

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