OTTO J. M AENCHEN - HELFEN
THE WORLD OF
Studies in Their History and Culture
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THE WORLD OF THE
Studies in Their History and Culture
By OTTO J. MAENCHEN-HELFEN Edited by Max Knight
Few persons know more about the Huns than their reputation as savage horsemen who flourished at the beginning of the Middle Ages and the name of one of their leaders, Attila. They appeared in Europe from "somewhere in the East/' terrorized the later Roman Empire and the Germanic tribes, caused the greatest upheaval that the Mediterranean world had ever seen — the Great Migrations — and vanished. Illiterate, they left no written records; such literary evidence of them as exists is secondary, scattered in the writings of contemporary and later reporters, fragmentary, biased, and unreliable. Their sole tangible relics are huge cauldrons and graves, some of which con- tain armor, equestrian gear, and ornaments.
Who were the Huns? How did they live? Professor Maenchen-Helfen dedicated much of his life to seeking answers to these ques- tions. With pertinacity, passion, scepticism, and unsurpassed scholarship he pieced together evidence from remote sources in Asia, Russia, and Europe; categorized and interpreted it; and lived the absorbing detec- tive story presented in this volume. He spent many years and extensive resources in exploring the mystery of the Huns and in exploding popular myths about them. He investigated the century-old hypothesis that the Huns originated in the obscure border- lands of China, whence in the course of sev- eral generations they migrated westward as far as Central Europe. In his quest for infor-
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THE WORLD OF THE
Studies in Their History and Culture By J. OTTO MAENCHEN-HELFEN
EDITED BY MAX KNIGHT
University of California Press / Berkeley / Los Angeles j London j 1973
University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England
Copyright © 1973, by
The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number : 79-94985 International Standard Book Number: 520-01596-7 Designed by James Mennick Printed in the United States of America
Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Foreword . . xiii
Editor's Note . . , . . . . . xvi
Fragments from the Author's Preface . . . xix
Author's Acknowledgments (Fragments) . . . xxiv
I. The Literary Evidence 1
Equations . .... 5
Cassiodorus, Jordanes 15
LL History IS
From the Don to the Danube .... 18
The Huns at the Danuhe . .... 26
The Invasion of Asia 51
Illdin 59
Charaton Z3
Octar and Ruga 81
Attila 94
Attila's Kingdom 125
The Huns in Italv 129
Collapse and Aftermath 143
The First Gotho-Hnnnic War .... 152
The Second Gotho-Hunnic War . . . 162
The Rnri 165
ILL Economy 169
Camels 172
Hunnic Agriculture? 174
Housing 178
v
Copyrighted material
VI • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
Income in Gold . . . . . . . 180
Trade , . . . . . . . . 186
Silk . . . . . . . . . 188
Wine . . . . . . . . . 189
IV. Society 190
Aristocracy 198
Slaves . . . . . . . . 199
V. Warfare 201
General Characteristics , . , . , 201
Horses . . . . . . . . 203
Bows and Arrows . . . . . . 221
Swords . . . . . . . . 233
Lances . . . . . . . . 238
The Lasso . . . . . . . . 239
Armor . . . . . . . . 241
Huns in the Roman Army . 255
VI. Religion 259
The Huns and Christianity . 260
Seers and Shamans . . . . . . 267
Divine Kingship? 270
Strava . . . . . . . . 274
Thp SarrftH Sword . . . . . . 278
Masks and Amulets . . . . . . 280
Eidola . . . . . . . . 286
VII. Art . . . . . . . . . 297
Gold Diadems . . . . . . . 297
Cauldrons . . . , . , , , 306
Mirrors . . . . . . . . 337
Personal Ornaments . . . . . . 354
VIII. Race . . . . . . . . . 358
The Hsiung-nu . . . . . . . 367
Europoids in East Asia 369
IX. Language 376
Speculations about the Language of the Huns . 376
Transcriptions 379
Etymologies 382
Germanized and Germanic Names . . . 386
Iranian Names 390
CONTENTS • VII
Turkish Names . . . . . . .392
Names of Undetermined Origin . . . 412
Hybrid Names 422
Conclusions . . 441
X, Early Huns in Eastern Europe .... 444
XL Appendixes 456
1. The Chronicle of 452 . . . . . 456
2. Armenian Sources . . . . . . 457
3. Figures in Olympiodorus .... 459
4. The Alleged Loss of Pannonia Prima in 395 459
5. Religious Motifs in Hunnic Art? . . . 461
X1L Background: The Roman Empire at the Time of
the Hunnic Invasions, by Paul Alexander . . 464
Bibliography 486
Abbreviations 486
Classical and Medieval Register . . . . 494
Sources . . . . . . . . 503
Index 579
Copytighted inafetial
List of Illustrations
FIGURE PAGE
1 A horse with a "hooked" head and bushy tail represented on 205 a bronze plaque from the Ordos region. From Egami 1948, pi. 4.
2 Grave stela from Theodosia in the Crimea with the representation
of the deceased mounted on a horse marked with a Sarmatian 212 tamga, first to third centuries a.d. From Solomonik 1957, fig. 1.
3 Two-wheeled cart represented on a bronze plaque from the Wu- 216 huan cemetery at Hsi-ch'a-kou. From Sun Shou-tao 1960, fig. 17.
4 Bronze plaque from Sui-yuan with the representation of a man 217 holding a sword with a ring handle before a cart drawn by three horses. From Rostovtsev 1929, pi. XI, 56.
5A Miniature painting from the Radziwil manuscript showing the wa- 218
gons of the Kumans. From Pletneva 1958, fig. 25. 5B Miniature painting from the Radziwil manuscript showing human 218
heads in tents mounted on carts. From Pletneva 1958, fig. 26.
6 Ceramic toy from Kerch showing a wagon of Late Sarmatian type. 219 From Narysy starodav'noi istorii Ukrains'koi RSR 1957, 237.
7 Detail of a Sasanian-type silver plate from a private collection. 229 Detail from Ghirshman 1962, fig. 314.
8 Detail of a Sasanian silver plate from Sari, Archaeological Museum, 230 Teheran. Detail from Ghirshman 1962, pi. 248.
9 Silver plate from Kulagysh in the Hermitage Museum, Leningrad. 232 From SPA, pi. 217.
10A Scabbard tip of a sword from Altlussheim near Mainz. From J. 233
Werner 1956, pi. 58:4. 10B Detail of the sword from Altlussheim near Mainz. From J. Werner 234
1956, pi. 38 A.
11 Stone relief from Palmyra, datable to the third century a.d. 235 Ghirshman 1962, pi. 91.
12 Agate sword guard from Chersonese, third century a.d. From 237 Khersonesskii sbornik, 1927, fig. 21.
12A Bronze pendant said to have been found in a grave at Barnaul, 243 Altai region, showing a man in scale armor and conical hat with
IX
X ■ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
an hour-glass-shaped quiver, datable to the fourth century a.d. From Aspelin 1877, no. 327.
12B Two horsemen in scale armor shown in gold pendants from western 244 Siberia. From Kondakov and Tolstoi, 3, fig. 49.
12C The representation of a Sarmatian member of the Roxolani tribe in 246 a detail of the marble relief from Trajan's Column, in the Forum of Trajan, Rome. Datable to the second decade of the second cen- tury a.d. Photos courtesy Deutsches archaologisches Institut, Rome.
13 Mask-like human heads stamped on gold sheet from a Hunnic burial 281 at Pokrovsk-Voskhod. From Sinitsyn 1936, fig. 4.
14 Mask-like human heads stamped on silver sheet on a bronze phalera 281 from kurgan 17, Pokrovsk. From Minaeya 1927, pi. 2:11.
15 The representation of the head of a Scythian in clay from Transcau- 283 casia. Photo courtesy State Historical Museum, Moscow.
16 Bronze mountings from a wooden casket from Intercisa on the Da- 284 nube. From Paulovics, AE\, 1940.
17 Flat bronze amulet in the shape of an ithyphallic human figure of 286 Sarmatian type. (Source not indicated in the manuscript. — Ed.)
18 Sandstone pillar in the shape of a human head from kurgan 16 289 at Tri Brata near Elista in the Kalmuk steppe. (Height 1 m.) From Sinitsyn 1956b, fig. 11.
19 Chalk eidola from an Alanic grave at Baital Chapkan in Cherkessia, 291 fifth century a.d. From Minaeva 1956, fig. 12.
20 Chalk figure from a Late Sarmatian grave in Focsani, Rumania. 293 (Height ca. 12 cm.) From Morintz 1959, fig. 7.
21 Stone slab at Zadzrost', near Ternopol', former eastern Galicia, 295 marked with a Sarmatian tamga. (Height 5.5 m.) From Drachuk,
SA 2, 1967, fig. 1.
22 Fragment of a gold plaque from Kargaly, Uzun-Agach, near Alma 298 Ata, Kazakhstan. (About 35 cm. long.)
Photo courtesy Akademiia Nauk Kazakhskoi SSR.
23 Hunnic diadem of gold sheet, originally mounted on a bronze pla- 300 que, decorated with garnets and red glass, from Csorna, western Hungary. (Originally about 29 cm. long, 4 cm. wide.) From Archdo- logische Funde in Ungarn, 291.
24A-C Hunnic diadem of gold sheet over bronze plaques decorated 301 with green glass and flat almandines, from Kerch. Photos courtesy Rheinisches Museum, Bildarchiv, Cologne.
25 Hunnic diadem of thin bronze sheet over bronze plaques set with con- 302 vex glass from Shipovo, west of Uralsk, northwestern Kazakhstan. From J. Werner 1956, pi. 6:8.
26 Hunnic diadem of gold sheet over bronze plaques set with convex 302 almandines from Dehler on the Berezovka, near Pokrovsk, lower Volga region. From Ebert, R V 13, "Sudrussland," pi. RV 41 :a.
27 Hunnic diadem of gold sheet over bronze plaques (now lost) set with 303 convex almandines, from Tiligul, in the Romisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, Mainz. From J. Werner 1956, pi. 29:8.
28 Bronze circlet covered with gold sheet and decorated with conical 304 "bells" suspended on bronze hooks, from Kara Agach, south of
THE WOULD OF THE HUNS ■ XI
Akmolinsk, central Kazakhstan. (Circumference 49 cm., width ca.
4 cm.) From J. Werner 1956, pi. 31:2. 29A Terminal of a gold torque in the shape of a dragon, decorated with 304
granulation and cloisonne garnets, amber, and mother-of-pearl.
From Kara-Agach, south of Akmolinsk, central Kazakhstan. From
IAK 16, 1905, p. 34, fig. 2. 29B Gold earrings from Kara-Agach, central Kazakhstan. From IAK 305
16, 1905, fig. 3:a-b.
30 Silver earring decorated with almandines and garnets from kur- 305 gan 36, SW group, near Pokrovsk. From Sinitsyn 1936, fig. 10.
31 Fold earring from Kalagya, Caucasian Albania. From Trever 1959, 305 167, fig. 18.
32 Fragment of a bronze lug of a cauldron from BeneSov, near Opava 307 (Troppau), Czechoslovakia. (Height 29 cm., width 22 cm., thickness
1 cm.) From Altschlesien 9, 1940, pi. 14.
33 Hunnic bronze cauldron from Jedrzychowice (Hockricht), Upper 308 Silesia, Poland. (Height 55 cm.) From J. Werner 1956, pi. 27:10.
34 Hunnic bronze cauldron found at the foot of a burial mound at Tortel, 309 Hungary. (Height 89 cm., diam. 50 cm.) From Archaologische Funde in Ungarn, 293.
35 Hunnic bronze cauldron found in a peat bog at Kurdcsibrak, in the 310 Kapos River valley, Hungary. (Height 52 cm., diam. 33 cm., thick- ness of wall 0.8 cm., weight 16 kg.) From Fettich 1940, pi. 11.
36 Hunnic bronze cauldron from Bantapuszta, near Varpalota, Hungary. 311 From Takats, AOH, 1959, fig. 1.
37 Fragment of a bronze cauldron from Dunaujvaros (Intercisa), 311 Hungary. From Alfoldi 1932, fig. 6.
38 Hunnic bronze cauldron from a lake, Desa, Oltenia region, Rumania. 312 (Height 54.1 cm., diam. 29.6 cm.) From Nestor and Nicolaescu- Plopsor 1937, pis. 3a-3b.
39 Fragment of a bronze lug from a lake, Hotarani, Oltenia region, 313 Rumania. (Height 16.2 cm., width 19.7 cm.) From Nestor and Nicolaescu-Plopsor 1937, pi. 39:1.
40 Fragment of a bronze lug probably from western Oltenia, Rumania. 313 (Height 8.4 cm.) From Nestor and Nicolaescu-Plopsor 1937, pi. 39:2.
41 Fragment of a bronze lug found near the eastern shore of Lake Mo- 314 tistea, from Bosneagu, Rumania. (Height 18 cm.) From Mitrea 1961, figs. 1-2.'
42 Fragments of a lug and walls of a bronze cauldron from Celei, 314 Muntenia, Rumania. From Takats 1955, fig. 13:a-d.
43 Hunnic bronze cauldron from Shestachi, Moldavian SSR. From 315 Polevoi, Istoriia Moldavskoi SSR, pi. 53.
44 Bronze cauldron from Solikamsk, Perm region, USSR. (Height 9 cm.) 316 From Alfoldi 1932, fig. 5.
45 Bronze cauldron found in the sand near the Osoka brook, Ul'yanovsk 317 region, USSR. (Height 53.2 cm., diam. 31.2 cm., weight 17.7 kg.) From Polivanova, Trudy VII AS 1, 39, pi. 1.
46 Bronze cauldron from Verkhnu Konets, Komi ASSR. From Hampel, 318 Ethnologische Mittheilungen aus Ungarn 1897, 14, fig. 1.
XII • LIST OF ILLUSTRATIOUS
47 Bronze cauldron from Ivanovka, gubernie Ekaterinoslav, USSR. 319 From Fettich 1953, pi. 36:4.
48 Bronze cauldron found near Lake Teletskoe, in the High Altai, 320 now in the State Historical Museum, Moscow. (Height 27 cm., diam. 25-27 cm.) Photo courtesy State Historical Museum, Moscow.
49 Fragment of a bronze lug from Narindzhan-baba, Kara-Kalpak 321 ASSR. From Tolstov 1948, fig. 74a.
50 Fragment of a bronze lug, allegedly found "on the Catalaunian 322 battlefield." (Height 12 cm., width 18 cm.) From Takats 1955,
fig. l:a-b.
51 Bronze cauldron from Borovoe, northern Kazakhstan. From 324 Bernshtam 1951a, fig. 12.
52 The representation of a cauldron in a detail of a rock picture from Pis 326 annaya Gorain the Minusinsk area. From Appelgren-Kivalo, fig. 85.
53 Representation of cauldrons in a rock picture from Bol'shaya Bo- 327 yarskaya pisanitsa, Minusinsk area. From Devlet, SA 3, 1965, fig. 6.
54 Bronze cauldron of a type associated with Hsiung-nu graves at 331 Noin Ula and the Kiran River. From Umehara 1960, p. 37.
55 Ceramic vessel from the Gold Bell Tomb at Kyongju, Korea, showing 334 the manner in which cauldrons were transported by nomads. From Government General Museum of Chosen 1933, Museum Exhibits Il- lustrated V.
56 Clay copy of a Hunnic cauldron of the Verkhnii Konets type (see 335 above, fig. 46), from the "Big House," Altyn-Asar, Kazakhstan. (Height 40 cm.) From Levina 1966, fig. 7:37-38.
57 Chinese mirror of the Han period found in burial 19, on the Torgun 338 Biver, lower Volga region. From Ebert, R V, «Siidrussland, » pi. 40: c:b.
58 A Sarmatian bronze disc in the shape of a pendant-mirror, of a 342 type found in the steppes between Volga and lower Danube, from the first century b.c. to the fourth century a.d. From Sinitsyn 1960,
fig. 18:1.
59 Bronze mirror of a type similar to that shown on fig. 58, but provided 343 with a tang that was presumably fitted into a handle. From Gush- china, SA, 2, 1962, fig. 2:5.
60 Bronze pendant-mirror from the cemetery at Susly, former German 344 Volga Republic. From Rau, Hiigelgrdber, 9, fig. la.
61 Bronze pendant-mirror from the cemetery at Susly, former German 344 Volga Republic. From Rykov 1925, 68.
62 Bronze pendant-mirror from Alt- Weimar, kurgan D12. From Rau, 344 Ausgrabungen, 30, fig. 22b.
63 Bronze pendant-mirror from kurgan 40 in Berezhnovka, lower Erus- 345 lan, left tributary of the Volga. From Khazanov 1963, fig. 4:9.
64 Bronze pendant-mirror from kurgan 23, in the "Tri Brata" ceme- 345 tery, near Elista, Kalmuk ASSR. From Khazanov 1963, fig. 4:8.
65 Bronze pendant-mirror from the lower Volga region. From Kha- 345 zanov 1963, fig. 4:6.
66 Bronze pendant-mirror from a catacomb burial at Alkhaste, north- 345 western Caucasus. From Vinogradov 1963, fig. 27.
67 An imitation of a Chinese TLV mirror from Lou-Ian. From Ume- 346
hara, O bei, 39, fig. 7.
THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
XIII
68 Small bronze mirror with simplified decoration from Lo-yang. 347 From Lo-yang ching 1959, 80.
69 Small bronze mirror with simplified decoration from Lo-yang. 347 From Lo-yang ching 1959, 82.
70 Bronze mirror from Mozhary, Volgograd region, now in the Hermi- 348 tage Museum, Leningrad, datable to about a.d. 200. (Diam. 7.4 cm.) From Umehara 1938, 55.
71 Bronze mirror from Kosino in Slovakia. From Eisner, Slovensko 349 v praveku 1933, fig. 2:7.
72 Bronze pendant-mirrors from the Dnieper and Volga regions. From 350 Solomonik 1959, fig. 6.
73 Sarmatian imitation of a Chinese mirror (cf. the example from 351 Lo-yang, above, fig. 69), from Norka, lower Volga region. From Berkhin 1961, fig. 2:2.
74 Small bronze plaque showing a horseman with prominent cheekbones 370 and full beard, from Troitskovavsk in Transbaikalia. From Petri, Dalekoe proshloe Pribaikal'ia 1928, fig. 39.
75 Bronze plaque from the Ordos region, showing a man of Europoid 371 stock with wide open eyes and moustache. British Museum. Photo
G. Azarpay.
Ccpyiigrtled material
Foreword
Few scholars would care to risk their reputation in taking on the monu- mental task of straightening out misconceptions about the Huns, and inci- dentally about the many peoples related to them, allied with them, or con- fused with them. At the foundation there are philological problems of mind- boggling proportions in languages ranging from Greek to Chinese; above that, an easy but solidly professional familiarity with primary sources for the history of both Eastern and Western civilizations in many periods is re- quired; finally, a balanced imagination and a prudent sense of proportion are needed to cope with the improbabilities, contradictions, and prejudices prevailing in this field of study. The late Professor Otto Maenchen-Helfen worked on this immense field of research for many years, and at his death in 1969 left an unfinished manuscript. This is the source of the present book.
Maenchen-Helfen differed from other historians of Eurasia in his unique competence in philology, archaeology, and the history of art. The range of his interests is apparent from a glance at his publications, extending in sub- ject from "Das Marchen von der Schwanenjungfrau in Japan" to "Le Cicogne di Aquileia," and from "Manichaeans in Siberia" to "Germanic and Hunnic Names of Iranian Origin." He did not need to guess the identities of tribes, populations, or cities. He knew the primary texts, whether in Greek or Russian or Persian or Chinese. This linguistic ability is particularly necessary in the study of the Huns and their nomadic cognates, since the name "Hun" has been applied to many peoples of different ethnic character, including Ostrogoths, Magyars, and Seljuks. Even ancient nomadic people north of China, the Hsiung-nu, not related to any of these, were called "Hun" by their Sogdian neighbors. Maenchen-Helfen knew the Chinese sources that tell of the Hsiung-nu, and thus could evaluate the relationship of these sources to European sources of Hunnic history.
His exceptional philological competence also enabled him to treat as human beings the men whose lives underlie the dusty textual fragments that allude
xv
XVI • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
to them, and to describe their economy, social stratifications, modes of trans- portation and warfare, religions, folklore, and art. He could create a reliable account of the precursors of the Turks and Mongols, free of the usual Western prejudice and linguistic limitations.
Another special competence was his expertise in the history of Asian art, a subject that he taught for many years. He was familiar with the newest archaeological discoveries and knew how to correlate them with the available but often obscure philological evidence.
To define distinctive traits in the art of a people as elusive as the Huns requires familiarity with the disjointed array of archaeological materials from the Eurasian steppe and the ability to separate materials about the Huns from a comparable array of materials from neighboring civilizations. To cite only one example of his success in coping with such thorny problems, Maenchen-Helfen's description of technical and stylistic consistencies among metal articles from Hunnic tombs in widely separated localities dispels the myth of supposed Hunnic ignorance of metal-working skills.
Archaeological evidence also plays a critical role in the determination of the origin of the Huns and their geographical distribution in ancient and ear- ly medieval times, as well as the extent of Hunnic penetration into eastern Europe and their point of entry into the Hungarian plain. Maenchen-Helfen saw clearly how to interpret the data from graves and garbage heaps to yield hypotheses about the movements of peoples. "He believed in the spade, but his tool was the pen," he once said about another scholar — a charac- terization that perfectly fits Maenchen-Helfen himself. Burial practices of the Huns and their associates indicate that Hunnic weapons generally orig- inated in the east and were transmitted westward, while the distribution of loop mirrors found in association with artificially deformed skulls — a Hun- nic practice — gives proof of Hunnic penetration into Hungary from the northeast. (An unpublished find of a sword of the Altlussheim type recently discovered at Barnaul in the Altai region, east Kazakhstan SSB, now in the Hermitage Museum, is a forceful argument in favor of Maenchen-Helfen's assumption about the eastern connections of this weapon. See A. Ur- manskii, "Sovremennik groznogo Attily," Altai 4 [23], Barnaul 1962, pp. 79- 93.) His findings define and bring to life the civilization of one of the most shadowy peoples of early medieval times.
Maenchen-Helfen's account opens in medias res, with a tribute to that ad- mirable Boman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, whose view of the Hunnic incursions was, despite his prejudices, in some respects clearer than that of Western historians. Abrupt as this beginning may seem, the author per- haps intended the final version of his book to begin with such a striking evaluation of a basic text. In so doing, he underlined the necessity for sharp
FOREWORD • XVII
and well-reasoned criticism of the sources of the history of the Huns. From the beginning these people were denigrated and "demonized" (to use his own term) by European chroniclers and dismissed as avatars of the eternal but faceless barbarian hordes from the east, against whom vigilance was always necessary, but whose precise identity was of little importance. The bulk of the book discusses the history and civilization of the "Huns proper," those so familiar — and yet so unfamiliar — to Europeans. (Here we use the term "civilization" purposefully, since reports of this folk have tended to treat them as mere barbaric destroying agents — "vandals" spilling blood across the remnants of the declining Roman Empire. Maenchen-Helfen saw them with a clearer vision.)
The style is characteristically dense with realia. Maenchen-Helfen had no need to indulge in generalizations (read "unfounded guesses"). But he was not absorbed in details to the exclusion of a panoramic view. He saw, and presents to us here, the epic character of the great drama that took place on the Eurasian stage early in our era, the clash of armies and the interaction of civilizations. The book is a standard treatise not likely to be superseded in the predictable future.
GUITTY AZARPAY
Peter A. Boodberg Edward H. Schafer
Capf igtHtKi malarial
Editor's Note
In early January 1969 Professor Otto Maenchen-Helfen brought a beauti- fully typed manuscript from the Central Stenographic Bureau of the univer- sity to the University of California Press. It seemed to represent the final result of his monumental study of the Huns, to which he had devoted many years of research and travel. A few days later, on January 29, he died. In the memorial speeches at the Faculty Club in Berkeley, several friends men- tioned that he had truly completed his lifework, and that his manuscript was ready to go to press.
The impression that the delivered manuscript pages constituted the com- plete manuscript turned out to be erroneous. Mr. Maenchen had brought only the first of presumably two batches of manuscript. The chapters re- presenting that second batch were not in final form at the time of his death, the bibliography was missing, footnotes were indicated but the sources not stated, an introduction and a complete preface were lacking, the illustrations were scattered in boxes and desk drawers and not identified. There was no table of contents, and the chapters were not numbered; although some group- ings of chapters are suggested in the extant part of the author's preface, it was not clear in what order he intended to arrange his work.
On Mrs. Maenchen's suggestion I searched the author's study and even- tually found a tentative draft of a contents page. It was of unknown age, and contained revisions and emendations that required interpretation. On the basis of this precious page, the "Rosetta Stone of the manuscript," the work was organized.
Several chapters mentioned in this page were not in final form. But three- ring folders in the author's study, neatly filed on shelves, bore the names of most missing chapter headings. The contents of these folders were in various stages of completion. Those that appeared to be more or less finished except for final editing were incorporated into the manuscript; also sections which, although not representing complete chapters but apparently in final form,
XIX
xx • editor's note
were included and placed where they seemed to fit mostly logically. In sev- eral instances, different drafts of the same subject were found, and it was necessary to decide which was the most recent one. Occasionally, also, only carbon copies of apparently finished sections were in the folders.
Errors in judgment in these editorial and compiling activities cannot be ruled out, but wherever doubts existed about the preferred version or the placement of a fragment the material was excluded. Many notes, isolated pages, and drafts (frequently written by hand, with various kinds of emenda- tions) remain in the author's study, including undoubtedly valuable research results.
In retyping the parts of the manuscript that existed only in draft form with many emendations and hand-written corrections, every effort was made not to introduce errors, such as misspellings of foreign words, especially in the notes and bibliography. For errors that undoubtedly slipped in never- theless, the author is not responsible.
Although the work addresses itself to specialists, it is of interest to a broader range of educated readers who cannot, however, be expected to be familiar with some of the events, persons, institutions, and sources the author takes for granted. For these readers Professor Paul Alexander has provided an introduction; in deference to the author it was placed as "background" at the end of the book, but it may usefully be read first, as a preparation for the text.
The editorial preparation of the manuscript required the help of an un- usually large number of persons, reflecting the wide range of the author's competence. The Russian references were checked by the author's friend, the late Professor Peter A. Boodberg, who delivered the corrected pages just a few days before his death in the summer of 1972. The Chinese references were checked or supplied by Professor Edward H. Schafer, also a friend of the author. The Latin and Greek passages were translated by Professor J. K. Anderson and Dr. Emmy Sachs; Mr. Anderson also faithfully filled lacunae in the footnotes and unscrambled mixups resulting from duplicated or omitted footnote numbers. Professors Talat Tekin and Hamid Algar checked and interpreted Turkish references. Professor Joachim Werner of Munich counseled on the Altlussheim sword. Questions about Gothic, Iranian, Hun- garian, Japanese, and Ukrainian references or about historical (ancient and medieval) and many other aspects of the text that needed interpretation were answered by a long list of scholars contributing their services to the cause.
Miss Guitty Azarpay (to whom the author used to refer fondly as his fa- vorite student) selected and painstakingly identified the illustrations. She also verified references with angelic patience.
THE WORLD OF THE HUNS • XXI
The formidable task of compiling a bibliography on the basis of an in- complete set of cards and of the text itself was performed by Mrs. Jane Fontenrose Cajina. The author's working cards, assembled over many years, were not yet typed in uniform style, many entries were missing, and many lacked essential information. For Russian transcriptions in the bibliography and bibliographical footnotes (but not in the text), the Library of Congress system was used.
The map was drawn by Mrs. Virginia Herrick under the supervision of Professor J. K. Anderson. The index was prepared by Mrs. Gladys Castor.
The editor is indebted to all these many competent and sympathetic helpers; clearly, without their devotion the conversion of the Maenchen pa- pers into the present volume would not have been possible.
Max Knight
Fragments from the Author's Preface
[Among the author's papers were several fragments, partly written in pencil, bearing the notation "for the preface," and evidently intended to be worked into a final draft. He may have wished to say more; all we found is presented below. — Ed.]
The author of the present volume, in his early seventies, may make use of the privilege, usually granted to men in the prime of their senility, to say a few words about himself, in this case the sources of his interest in the Huns. All my life I have been fascinated by the problems of the frontier. As a boy I dug Roman copper coins along the remnants of the earthen walls that, as late as the seventeenth century, protected Vienna, my native town, from the East. Two blocks from the house in which I was born there still stood in my youth a house above whose gate a Turkish stone cannon ball from the siege of 1529 was immured. My grandfather spent a year in jail for fighting in 1848 with the revolutionaries against the Croatian merce- naries of the Habsburgs. My doctoral dissertation dealt with the "barbarian" elements in Han lore. In 1929 I lived for months in the tents of Turkish- speaking nomads in northwestern Mongolia, where the clash between "higher civilization," represented by Tibetan Lamaism, and the "primitive" beliefs of the Turks was strikingly visible. In Kashmir, at Harwan, I marveled at the artificially deformed skulls on the stamped tiles of Kushan times, those
skulls that had impressed me so much when I first saw them in the museum in Vienna and that I had measured as a student. In Nepal I had another chance to see the merging of different civilizations in a borderland. I spent many days in the museum at Minusinsk in southern Siberia studying the "Scythian" bronze plaques and cauldrons. In Kabul I stood in awe before the inscription from Surkh Kotal: it brought back to me the problems of
XXIII
XXIV • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
the barbarians at China's border about which I had written a good deal in previous years. Attila and his avatars have been haunting me as far back as I can recall.
In the history of the Western world the eighty years of Hun power were an episode. The Fathers assembled in council at Chalcedon showed a sub- lime indifference to the barbarian horsemen who, only a hundred miles away, were ravaging Thrace. They were right. A few years later, the head of Attila's son was carried in triumphal procession through the main street of Constantinople.
Some authors have felt that they had to justify their studies of the Huns by speculating on their role in the transition from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. Without the Huns, it has been maintained, Gaul, Spain, and Africa would not, or not so soon, have fallen to the Germans. The mere existence of the Huns in eastern Central Europe is said to have retarded the feudaliza- tion of Byzantium. This may or may not be true. But if a historical pheno- menon were worth our attention only if it shaped what came after it, the Mayans and Aztecs, the Vandals in Africa, the Burgundians, the Albigenses, and the crusaders' kingdoms in Greece and Syria would have to be wiped off the table of Clio. It is doubtful that Attila "made history." The Huns "perished like the Avars" — "sginuli kak obry," as the old Russian chroniclers used to say when they wrote about a people that had disappeared forever.
It seems strange, therefore, that the Huns, even after fifteen hundred years, can stir up so much emotion. Pious souls still shudder when they think of Attila, the Scourge of God; and in their daydreams German university professors trot behind Hegel's Weltgeisl zu Pferde. They can be passed over. But some Turks and Hungarians are still singing loud paeans in praise of their great ancestor, pacifier of the world, and Gandhi all in one. The most passionate Hun fighters, however, are the Soviet historians. They curse the Huns as if they had ridden, looting and killing, through the Ukraine only the other day; some scholars in Kiev cannot get over the brutal destruction of the "first flowering of Slavic civilization."
The same fierce hatred burned in Ammianus Marcellinus. He and the other writers of the fourth and fifth centuries depicted the Huns as the savage monsters which we still see today. Hatred and fear distorted the picture of the Huns from the moment they appeared on the lower Danube. Unless this tendentiousness is fully understood — and it rarely is — the literary evidence is bound to be misread. The present study begins, there- fore, with its reexamination.
The following chapters, dealing with the political history of the Huns, are not a narrative. The story of Attila's raids into Gaul and Italy need not be told once more; it can be found in any standard history of the declining
FRAGMENTS FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE ■ XXV
Roman Empire, knowledge of which, at least in its outlines, is here taken for granted. However, many problems were not even touched on and many mistakes were made by Bury, Seeck, and Stein. This statement does not reflect on the stature of these eminent scholars, for the Huns were on the periphery of their interests. But such deficiencies are true also for books which give the Huns more room, and even for monographs. The first forty or fifty years of Hun history are treated in a cursory manner. The sources are certainly scanty though not as scanty as one might believe; for the invasion of Asia in 395, for instance, the Syriac sources flow copiously. Some of the questions that the reign of Attila poses will forever remain unanswered. Others, however, are answered by the sources, provided one looks, as I have, for sources outside the literature that has been the stock of Hunnic studies since Gibbon and Le Nain de Tillemont. The discussions of chronology may at times tax the patience of the reader, but that cannot be helped. Eunapius, who in his Historical Notes also wrote about the Huns, once asked what bearing on the true subject of history inheres in the know- ledge that the battle of Salamis was won by the Hellenes at the rising of the Dog Star. Eunapius has his disciples in our days also, and perhaps more of them than ever. One can only hope that we will be spared a historian who does not care whether Pearl Harbor came before or after the invasion of Normandy because "in a higher sense" it does not matter.
The second part of the present book consists if monographs on the econo- my, society, warfare, art, and religion of the Huns. What distinguishes these studies from previous treatments is the extensive use of archaeological material. In his Attila and the Huns Thompson refuses to take cognizance of it, and the little to which Altheim refers in Geschichte der Hunnen he knows at second hand. The material, scattered through Russian, Ukrainian, Rumanian, Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, and latterly also Mongolian pub- lications, is enormous. In recent years archaeological research has been pro- gressing at such speed that I had to modify my views repeatedly while I was working on these studies. Werner's monumental book on the archaeology of Attila's empire, published in 1956, is already obsolete in some parts. I expect, and hope, that the same will be true of my own studies ten years from now.
Although aware of the dangers in looking for parallels between the Huns and former and later nomads of the Eurasian steppes, I confess that my views are to a certain, I hope not undue, degree influenced by my experiences with the Tuvans in northwestern Mongolia, among whom I spent the summer of 1929. They are, or were at that time, the most primitive Turkish-speaking people at the borders of the Gobi.
XXVI • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
I possibly will be criticized for paying too little attention to what Robert Gobi calls the Iranian Huns: Kidara, White Huns, Hepthalites, and Hunas. In discussing the name "Hun" I could not help speculating on their names. But this was as far as I dared go. The literature on these tribes or peoples is enormous. They stand in the center of Altheim's Geschichte der Hunnen, although he practically ignores the numismatic and Chinese evidence, on which Enoki has been working for so many years. Gobi's Dokumente zur Geschichte der iranischen Hunnen in Baktrien und Indien is the most thorough study of their coins and seals and, on this basis, of their political history. And yet, there remain problems to whose solution I could not make a mean- ingful contribution. I have neither the linguistic nor the paleographic know- ledge to judge the correctness of the various, often entirely different, read- ings of the coin legends. But even if someday scholars wrestling with this recalcitrant material do come to an agreement, the result will be relatively modest. The Huna Mihirakula and Toramana will remain mere names. No settlement, no grave, not so much as a dagger or a piece of metal exists that could be ascribed to them or any other Iranian Huns. Until the scanty and contradictory descriptions of their life can be substantially supplemented by finds, the student of the Attilanic Huns will thankfully take cognizance of what the students of the so-called Iranian Huns can offer him; but there is little he can use for his research. A recently discovered wall painting in Afrosiab, the ancient Samarkand, seems to show the first light in the dark- ness. The future of the Hephthalite studies lies in the hands of the Soviet
and, it is hoped, the Chinese archaeologists. 'Ev (ivQoj yaq r\ aArjOeia.
I am aware that some chapters are not easy reading. For example, the one on the Huns after Attila's death draws attention to events seemingly not worth knowing, to men who were mere shadows; it jumps from Germanic sagas to ecclesiastical troubles in Alexandria, from the Iranian names of ob- scure chieftains to an earthquake in Hungary, from priests of Isis in Nubia to Middle Street in Constantinople. I will not apologize. Some readers surely will find the putting together of the scattered pieces as fascinating as I did, and I frivolously confess to an artistic hedonism which to me is not the least stimulus for my preoccupation with the Dark Ages. On a higher level, to pacify those who, with a bad conscience, justify what they are doing — His- torical Research with capital letters — may I point out that I fail to see why the history of, say, Baja California is more respectable than, say, that of the Huns in the Balkans in the 460's. Sub specie aeternitatis, both dwindle into nothingness.
Anatole France, in his Opinions of Jerome Coignard, once told the wonder- ful story of the young Persian prince Zemire, who ordered his scholars to
FRAGMENTS FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE ■ XXVII
write the history of mankind, so that he would make fewer errors as a mon- arch enlightened by past experience. After twenty years, the wise men ap- peared before the prince, king by then, followed by a caravan composed of twelve camels each bearing 500 volumes. The king asked them for a shorter version, and they returned after another twenty years with three camel loads, and, when again rejected by the king, after ten more years with a single elephant load. After yet five further years a scholar appeared with a single big book carried by a donkey. The king was on his death bed and sighed, "I shall die without knowing the history of mankind. Abridge, ab- ridge I" "Sire," replied the scholar, "I will sum it up for you in three words: They were born, they suffered, they died I"
In his way, the king, who did not want to hear it all, was right. But as long as men, stupidly perhaps, want to know "how it was," there may be a place for studies like the present one. Dixi et salvavi animam meam ....
0. M.-H.
Author's Acknowledgments
(Fragments)
[The author left some pencil jottings of names on several slips of paper under headings indicating that he wished to acknowledge them in the preface. Some are not legible, others lack initials. They are consolidated here, initials added when known, and the spelling of unidentified names as close as the handwriting permitted. Within the various countries, the order is random; the list of country names includes France, Rumania, Taiwan, and Korea, but the names of the scholars whom the author undoubtedly intended to acknowledge under these headings are lacking. The fragments include acknowledgments of help received from the East Asiatic Library and the Interlibrary Borrowing Service of the University of California. The notes must have been written at various times throughout the years, and it is obvious that the list is not complete. — Ed.]
In Austria: R. Gobi, Hancar.
In England: Sir Ellis Minns, E. G. Pulleyblank.
In Germany: J. Werner, K. Jettmar, Tauslin.
In Hungary: Z. Takats, L. Ligeti, D. Czallany, Gy. Moravcik, K. Csegledy, E. Liptak.
In Italy: M. Bussagli, P. Daffina, L. Petech. In Japan: Namio Egami, Enoki, Ushida.
In Soviet Union: K. V. Golenko, V. V. Ginsburg, E. Lubo-Lesnichenko, C. Trever, A. Mantsevich, M. P. Griaznov, L. P. Kyzlasov, I. A. Zadneprovsky, I. Kozhomberdiev, M. Saratov, A. P. Okladnikov, S. S. Sorokin, B. A. Litvinsky, I. V. Sinitsyn, Gumilev, Belenitsky, Stavisky.
In Sweden: B. Karlgren.
In Switzerland: K. Gerhart, I. Hubschmid.
In United States: P. Boodberg, E. Schafer, R. Henning, A. Alfoldi, R. N. Frye, E. Kantorowicz, L. Olschki, K. H. Menges, N. Poppe, I. Sevcenko.
XXIX
THE WORLD OF THE
Copyrighted materia!
I. The Literary Evidence
The chapter on the Huns written by the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (330-400 a.d.) is an invaluable document.* Coming from the pen of "the greatest literary genius which the world has seen be- tween Tacitus and Dante,"1 it is also a stylistic masterpiece. Ammianus' superiority over the other writers of his time who could not help mentioning the Huns becomes evident from their statements about the first appear- ance of the savage hordes in the northern Balkan provinces. They tell us in a few scanty words that the Goths were driven from their sites by the Huns; some add the story of a doe which led the Huns across the Cim- merian Bosporus. And this is all. They did not care to explore the causes of the catastrophe of Adrianople, that terrible afternoon of August 9, 378, when the Goths annihilated two-thirds of the Roman army, else they would have found that "the seed and origin of all the ruin and various disasters"2 were the events that had taken place in the transdanubian barbaricum years before the Goths were admitted to the empire. They did not even try to learn who the Huns were and how they lived and fought.
It is instructive to compare the just quoted words of Ammianus with the following passage by the historian-theologian Paulus Orosius (fl. 415 a.d), St. Augustine's disciple:
In the thirteenth year of the reign of Valens, that is, in the short in- terval of time that followed the wrecking of the churches by Valens and the slaughtering of the saints throughout the East, that root of our miseries simultaneously sent up a very great number of shoots. The race of the Huns, long shut off by inaccessible mountains, broke
* For historical and cultural background see Chapter XII by Paul Alexander.
1 Stein 1959, 331.
2 Ammianus XXXI, 2, 1.
1
2 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
out in a sudden rage against the Goths and drove them in widespread panic from their old homes."3
If the Arian heresy of Valens was the root of all evils and the attack of the Huns on the Goths only a shoot, then it was clearly a waste of time and effort to occupy oneself with the Huns. There was even the danger that by looking too closely at gesta diaboli per Hunnos one might lose sight of the devil himself. Orosius pays attention only to supernatural agents, God or the demons. Unconcerned about the antecedents of a happening or its consequences unless they could be used for theological lessons, Orosius, and with him all the Christian authors in the West, showed no interest in the Huns. Ammianus called the battle of Adrianople another Cannae.4 He never doubted, even when all seemed lost, that every Han- nibal would find his Scipio, convinced that the empire would last to the end of the world:5 "To these I set no boundary in space or time; unlimited power I have given them." (His ego nec metas rerum nex tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi.6) Among the Christians, Rufinus was the only one who could say that the defeat of Adrianople was "the beginning of the evil for the Roman Empire, then and from then on."7 The others saw in it only the triumph of orthodoxy, indulging in lurid descriptions of the way in which the accursed heretic Valens perished. Orosius adduced the death of the unfortunate emperor as proof for the oneness of God.
Demonization
Possibly the lack of interest in the Huns had still another reason: the Huns were demonized early. When in 364 Hilary of Poitiers predicted the coming of the Antichrist within one generation,8 he repeated what during the two years of Julian's reign many must have thought. But since then Christ had conquered, and only an obdurate fanatic like Hilary could see in the emperor's refusal to unseat an Arian bishop the sign of the approaching end of the world. Even those who still adhered to the chiliasm of the pre-Constantine church, and took the highly respected Divinae institutiones of Lactantius as their guide to the future, did not expect to hear themselves the sound of Gabriel's trumpet. "The fall and ruin of the world will soon take place, but it seems that nothing of the kind is to be feared as long as the city of Rome stands intact."9
3 Hist. adv. Pagan. VII, 33, 9-10.
4 XXXI, 13, 19.
5 Christ 1938, 68-71.
6 Virgil, Aen. I, 278.
7 Hist, eccles. XI, 13.
8 Contra Arianos V, PL 10, 611.
9 Dtv. Inst. VII, 25.
THE LITERARY EVIDENCE ■ 3
The change set in early in 387. Italy had not been invaded by bar- barians since Emperor Aurelian's time (270-275). Now it suddenly was threatened by an "impure and cruel enemy." Panic spread through the cities; fortifications were hastily improvised.10 Ambrose, who shortly be- fore had lost his brother Saturus, found consolation in the thought that he was "taken away that he might not fall in the hands of the barbarians. . . . that he might not see the ruin of the whole earth, the end of the world, the burial of relatives, the death of fellow-citizens." It was the time which the prophets had foreseen, "when they felicitated the dead and lamented the living" (gratulabantur mortuis et vivos plangent).11 After Adrianople, Ambrose felt that "the end of the world is coming upon us." War, pesti- lence, famine everywhere. The final period of the world's history was drawing to its close. "We are in the wane of the age."12
In the last decade of the fourth century, an eschatological wave swept over the West from Africa to Gaul. The Antichrist already was born, soon he would come to the throne of the empire.13 Three more generations, and the millennium would be ushered in, but not before untold numbers would have perished in the horrors which preceded it; the hour of judgment drew nearer, the signs pointing to it became clearer every day.14
Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38:1-39:20) were storming down from the north. The initial letters suggested to some people, said Augustine, who himself rejected such equations, identification with the Getae (Goths) and Massagetae.15 Ambrose took the Goths to be Gog.16 The African bi-
10 Ambrose, De excessu fratris I, 1, 31. The date, February 378, has been definite- ly established by O. Faller, ed., CSEL 73, *81-*89.
11 Lactantius, Div. Inst. VII, 16; Epitome 66.
12 Ambrose, Expositio evangelii sec. Lucam X, 10-14, CSEL 32, 458. Composed at the end of 378 (Rauschen 1897, 494; Palanque 1935, 534, 535: Dudden 1925, 693).
13 "There is no doubt that the Antichrist has already been born; firmly established already in his early years, he will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power." (Non est dubium, quin antichristus malo spiritu conceptus iam natus esset, et iam in an- nis puerilibus constitutus, aetate legitima sumptums imperium.)
St. Martin apud Sulpicius Severus, Dialogus I (II), 14, 4, CSEL 1, 197.
14 Q. Julius Hilarianus, De cursu temporum (written in 397), PL 13, 1097-1106; Paulinus of Nola, Ep. XXXVIII, 7, CSEL 29, 330 written in 397 (Reinelt 1903, 59). In the East such fears (and hopes) rarely were expressed. Cf. John Chrysostom, In Ioannem homil. XXXIV, PG 59, 197-198, delivered in Antioch about 390 a.d.
15 Augustine, De civ. Dei XX, 11. "Of course those people, whom he calls Gog and Magog, are not to be understood as if they were barbarians settled in some part of the earth or Getae and Massagetae as some presume because of the initial letters of their names..." (Gentes quippe istae, quas appellat Gog et Magog, non sic sunt accipiendae, tamquam sint aliqui in aliqua parte terrarum barbari constituti, siue quos quidam sus- picantur Getas et Massagetas propter litteras hornm nominum primas, etc.)
16 Ambrose, De fide II, 16.
4 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
shop Quodvultdeus could not make up his mind whether he should identify Magog with the Moors or the Massagetae.17 Why the Massagetae ? There were no Massagetae in the fifth century. But considering that Themistius, Claudian, and later Procopius called the Huns Massagetae,18 it seems probable that those who identified Magog with the Massagetae thought of the Huns. In the Talmud, where the Goths are Gog,19 Magog is "the country of the kanths" (Sogdian kant), that is, the kingdom of the white Huns.20
Jerome did not share the chiliastic fears and expectations of his con- temporaries. In reshaping Victorinus of Poetovio's Commentary on the Revelation he substituted for the last part, full of chiliastic ideas, sections from Tyconius.21 But when in 395 the Huns broke into the eastern pro- vinces, he, too, feared that "the Boman world was falling,"22 and the end of Borne meant the end of the world.23 Four years later, still under the impression of the catastrophe, he saw in the Huns the savage peoples kept behind the Caucasus by the iron gates of Alexander.24 The ferae gentes were Gog and Magog of the Alexander legend. Flavius Josephus (37/8- 100 a.d.), the first to speak of Alexander's gates,25 equated the Scythians and Magog.26 Jerome, who followed him,27 identified Herodotus' Scythians with the Huns,28 in this oblique way equating the Huns and Magog. Orosius did the same; his "inaccessible mountains" behind which the Huns had been shut off were those where Alexander had built the wall to hold back
17 Liber de promissionibus et praedicationibus Dei, PL 51, 848.
18 See footnotes 40, 51, 52.
19 L. Ginzburg 1899, 58, 468.
20 O. Klima, Archiv Orientdlni 24, 1956, 596-597.
21 CSEL 49, 138-153. Without naming Ambrose — he spoke only of him as "a distinguished contemporary" (uir nostrae aetatis haud ignobilis) — Jerome rejected his identification of Gog and Magog (Hebraicae quaestiones in libro geneseos 10, 21).
22 Romanus orbis ruit. (See Ep. LX, 6.)
23 "At the end of the world, when the empire of the Romans must be destroyed" (In consummatione mundi, quando regnum destruendum est Romanorum). See Comm. in Danielem VII, 8, PL 25, 531.
24 Ep. LXXVII, 8. For Syriac versions of the legend, see F. Pfister, Abh. Berlin 3, 1956, 30-31, 36-39; N. V. Pigulevskaia, Orbeli Anniversary Volume, 423-426.
25 BJ VII, 7, 4.
26 AJ I, 6, 123.
27 Hebraicae quaestiones in libro geneseos X, 21, written in 391. Cf. Cavallera 1922, 1, 146-147; 2, 28.
28 Ep. LXXVII, 8-9. In quoting Herodotus I, 104-106, Jerome made two mistakes: Cyaxares instead of Darius, and twenty instead of twenty-eight years. His knowledge of ethnographic literature was poor. Cf. Luebeck 1872, 21. Isidorus (Elym. IX, 2, 66) copied Jerome.
THE LITERARY EVIDENCE ■ 5
Gog and Magog. In the sixth century, Andreas of Caesarea in Cappadocia still held the view that Gog and Magog were those Scythians in the north "called Hunnica by us" aneq HaXovfxsv Ovvvix&P If even the sober Jerome was inclined, for a time, to see in the Huns the companions of the apo- calyptic horsemen, one can easily imagine how the superstitious masses felt.30
After 400, the chiliastic fears were somewhat abated.31 But behind the Huns the devil still was lurking. The curious story in Jordanes32 about their origin almost certainly is patterned on the Christian legend of the fallen angels:33 The unclean spirits "bestowed their embraces on the sor- ceresses and begot this savage race." The Huns were not a people like other peoples. These fiendish ogres,34 roaming over the desolate plains beyond the borders of the Christian cecumene, from which they set out time and again to bring death and destruction to the faithful, were the offspring of daemonia immunda. Even after the fall of Attila's kingdom, the peoples who were believed to have descended from the Huns were in alliance with the devil. They enveloped their enemies in darkness vno rivag fxayelag.35 The Avars, whom Gregory of Tours called Chuni, "skilled in magic tricks, they made them, that is, the Franks, see illusionary im- ages and defeated them thoroughly" (magicis artibus instructi, diversas fantasias eis, i.e., Francis ostendunt et eos valde superant).36
To be sure, this demonization of the Huns alone would not have pre- vented the Latin historians and ecclesiastic writers from exploring the past of the Huns and describing them as Ammianus did. But the smell of sulphur and the heat of the hellish flames that enveloped the Huns were not conducive to historical research.
Equations
How did the Eastern writers see the Huns? One should expect the Greek historians to have preserved at least some of the ethnographic cu- riosity of Herodotus and Strabo. But what we have is disappointing.
29 Commentarius in apocalypsin ch. LXIII, PG 106, 416c.
30 The tendency to identify the enemies of the Christians with Gog or Magog led sometimes to strange results. Vincent of Beauvais turned Qaghan into Gog Chan (Rock- hill 1900, 21, n. 1, and 108, n. 1).
31 E. Ch. Bahut, Revue d'hist. et de litt. religieuses, N. S. 1, 1920, 532.
32 Getica 121-122.
33 Maenchen-Helfen 1945c, 244-248.
34 "Ogre"<Hongre, Hungarian.
35 John of Antioch, fr. 151, EI 145.
36 Hist. Franc. IV, 29.
6 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
Instead of facts they serve us with equations. The Latin chroniclers of the fifth century, in calling the Huns by their proper name, were less guided by the intention to be precise than forced to be factual by their ignorance of literature. They knew next to nothing about the Scythians, Cimmerians, and Massagetae, whose names the Greek authors constantly interchanged with that of the Huns. However, even at a time when there still existed a Latin literature worthy of its illustrious past, the Latin writers, both prosiasts and poets, shunned the circumlocutions and equations in which the Greeks indulged. Ausonius rarely missed an opportunity to show how well read he was, yet he refrained from replacing the real names of the barbarians with whom Gratian fought by those he knew from Livy and Ovid.37 Ambrose, too, avoided the use of archaic or learned words. The Huns, not the Massagetae, attacked the Alans, who threw themselves upon the Goths, not the Scythians.38 In Ambrose, the former consularis, Roman soberness and aversion to speculation were as much alive as in Ausonius, the rhetor from Bordeaux. A comparison of Pacatus' panegyric on Theodosius with the orations of Themistius is revealing: The Gaul called the Huns by their name;39 the Greek called them Massagetae.40
As in the West, many writers in the East lacked interest in the invaders. They looked on them as "bandits and deserters,"41 or they called them Scythians, a name which in the fourth and fifth centuries had long lost its specific meaning. It was widely applied to all northern barbarians, whether they were nomads or peasants, spoke Germanic, Iranian, or any other tongue. Nevertheless, in the vocabulary of the educated the word retained, however attenuated, some of its original significance. The as- sociations it called forth were bound to shape the way in which the bar- barians were seen. That makes it at times difficult to decide whom an author means. Are Priscus' "Royal Scythians" the dominating tribe as in Herodotus, or are they the members of the royal clan, or simply noblemen ?
37 Praecatio consulis designati pridie Kal. Ian. fascibus sumptis 31-35; Epigr. XXVI, 8-10; Ephemeris 7 (8), 18.
38 Exposilio evangelii secundum Lucam X, 10.
39 XI, 4.
40 Or. XV, Harduin 1684, 207c : "The stubbornness of the Scythians, the reckless- ness of the Alans, the madness of the Massagetae." Except Or. IX, 121b, and Or. XIV, 181b, where "Scythians" means all transdanubian barbarians, the Scythians are the Goths Or. VIII, 114c; X; XVI, 210d, 211b; XVIII, 219b; XIX, 229b, c).
In Or. XI, 146b, Athanaric is called Zxvdrjg rj rirrjQ. The Alans are called by their proper name in Or. XXX IV, 8. The Massagetae, the third of the peoples who in the 380's devastated the northern Balkans, must, therefore, be the Huns. In Or. XXXIV, 24, Themistius makes a sharp distinction between Scythians and Massagetae.
41 For instance, Basil the Great, Ep. 268.
THE LITERARY EVIDENCE ■ 7
It is not enough to say that the phrase is merely one of the several instances of Priscus' literary debt to Herodotus. It certainly is. But it would be strange if the man who used this and other expressions of the great his- torian would not, here and there, have succumbed to the temptation to see the Huns as the ancients had seen the Scythians.
The Greek historians equated the Huns and the Cimmerians, Scythians, and other peoples of old not just to display their knowledge of the classics or to embellish their accounts,42 but first of all because they were con- vinced that there were no peoples which the wise men of the past had not known. And this, in turn, was not so much narrow-minded traditional- ism— it was that, too — as, to use a psychological term, a defense mechanism. Synesius of Cyrene (ca. 370 — 412), in his "Address on Kingship," explained why there could not be new barbarians:
Now it was not by walling off their own house that the former rulers prevented the barbarians either of Asia or Europe from entering it. Rather by their own acts did they admonish these men to wall off their own by crossing the Euphrates in pursuit of the Parthians, and the Danube in pursuit of the Goths and Massagetae. But now these nations spread terror amongst us, crossing over in their turn, assuming other names, and some of them falsifying by art even their countenances, so that another race new and foreign may appear to have sprung from the soil.43
This is carrying the thesis of the identity of the old and new barbarians to absurdity. But it is, after all, what so many Boman generals said so many times on the eve of a battle: our fathers conquered them, we shall conquer them again. The ever recurring oi ndXai serves the same pur- pose. It deprives the unknown attacker of his most frightening feature: he is known and, therefore, needs not be feared.
In the equation of the Huns and the peoples of former times both mo- tives, the emotionally conditioned reductio ad noium and the intention ■f the learned historian to show his erudition, play their role, whereby the former, I believe, is more often in the service of the latter than is usual- ly assumed. With which of the known peoples an author identified the Huns depended on his information, the circumstances under which he wrote, and the alleged or real similarity between the known and the barely known. The result was invariably the same. All speculations about the origin of the Huns ended in an equation.
42 See Agathias III, 5, ed. Bonn 147, on his reasons for calling the fortress St. Stephen by its former name Onoguris.
43 De regno XI; Fitzgerald 1930, 1, 27.
8
THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
Philostorgius, in his Ecclesiastical History written between 425 and 433, "recognized" in them the Neuri.44 A well-read man, he may have come across a now lost description of the Neuri which reminded him of what he had heard of the Huns. One could think that Philostorgius, less critical than Herodotus, believed the werewolf stories told about the Neuri.45 Synesius46 and Jerome47 were probably not the only ones to compare the Huns with wolves. It was not beyond Philostorgius to identify the "wolf- ish" Huns with the werewolves of Scythia. But the most likely expla- nation of his belief is the location of the Neuri: They were the northern- most people, the Huns came from the extreme North — ergo the Huns were the Neuri. To say that they lived along the Rhipaean Mountains, as Phil- ostorgius did, was merely another way of placing them as far north as possible; since the legendary Aristeas48 the Rhipaean Mountains were regarded as the region of the eternal snow, the home of the icy Boreas.
Procopius' identification of the Huns with the Cimmerians49 is neither better nor worse than his assertion that the Goths, Vandals, and Gepids were in former times called Sauromatae.50 As a rule Procopius, like The- mistius and Claudian,51 equated the Huns and the Massagetae.52 The later Byzantine writers repeated monotonously the formula: the former x, the present y.
There is finally the historian Eunapius of Sardes (ca. 345 — 420). The following fragment from him shows (in Vasiliev's opinion) what a conscien- tious historian Eunapius was:
Although no one has told anything plainly of whence the Huns came and by which way they invaded the whole of Europe and drove out the Scythian people, at the beginning of my work, after collecting the accounts of ancient writers, I have told the facts as seemed to me reliable; I have considered the accounts from the point of view of their exactness, so that my writing should not depend merely on probable statement and my work should not deviate from the truth. We do
44 Hist, eccles. IX, 17, Bidez 1960, 123.
45 Herodotus IV, 107.
46 The "wolf" in the Egyptian Tale is "the Hun." Cf. Griitzmacher 1913, 59; Ch. Lacombrade REA 48, 1946, 260-266.
47 Ep. LX, 16.
48 According to Mullenhoff, DA 3, 24, the source of Damastes, quoted by Stepha- nus Byzantinus 630, 6; doubted by Rostovtsev 1913, 24, n.2.
49 VIII, 5, 1.
50 III, 22, 2.
51 The Massagetae in In Ruf. I, 310, correspond to the Chuni in Cons. Stil. I, iii.
52 The passages are listed in Moravcsik, BT 2, 183 ; Evagrius III, 2 ; Bidez 1960, 100 9-11.
THE LITERARY EVIDENCE ■ 9
not resemble those who from their childhood live in a small and poor house, and late in time, by a stroke of good fortune, acquire vast and magnificent buildings, and none the less by custom love the old things and take care of them. . . . But we rather resemble those who first using one medicine for the treatment of their body, in the hope of help, and then through their experience finding a better medicine, turn and incline towards the latter, not in order to neutralize the effect of the first one by the second but in order to introduce the truth into erroneous judgment, and, so to speak, to destroy and enfeeble the light of a lamp by a ray of the sun. In like manner we will add the more correct evidence to the aforesaid, considering it possible to keep the former material as an historical point of view, and using and adding the latter material for the establishment of the truth.53
All this talk about medicines and buildings, the pompous announ- cement of what he is going to write on the Huns, is empty. Eunapius' description of the Huns is preserved in Zosimus.54 It shows what a wind- bag the allegedly conscientious historian was. One half of it Eunapius cribbed from Ammianus Marcellinus;55 the other half, where he "collected the accounts of the ancient writers," is a preposterous hodgepodge. Euna- pius calls the Huns "a people formerly unknown,"56 only to suggest in the next line their identity with Herodotus' Royal Scythians. As an al- ternative he referred to the "snub-nosed and weak people who, as Hero- dotus says, dwell near the Ister [Danube]." What he had in mind was Herodotus V, 9, 56, but he changed the horses of the Sigynnae, "snub- nosed and incapable of carrying men," into "snub-nosed and weak people" {oifiovc, xal ddvvdrovg dvdgai; cpegeiv into ai/xovg xal dodeveag dvdqoi-
Ammianus Marcellinus
Seen against this background of indifference, superstition, and ar- bitrary equations, Ammianus' description of the Huns cannot be praised too highly. But it is not eine ganz realistische Sittenschilderung, as Rostov- tsev called it.58 For its proprer evaluation one has to take into account
53 ES 84-85, translated by Vasiliev 1936, 24-25.
54 Moravcsik, BT 1, 577.
55 Macnchen-Helfen 1955b, 392. I have not been convinced by A. F. Norman (CQ 7, 1957, 133, n. 1) that Eunapius and Ammianus used the same sources.
56 Zosimus IV, 20, 3.
57 This has long been recognized by Satterer 1798, 4. Thompson (1948, 17, n. 2) erroneously refers to Herodotus IV, 23.
58 Rostovtsev 1931, 103.
10 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
the circumstances under which it was written, Ammianus' sources of in- formation, and his admiration for the styli veteres.
He most probably finished his work in the winter 392/3,59 that is, at a time when the danger of a war between the two partes of the empire was steadily mounting. In August 392, the powerful general Arbogast proclaimed Eugenius emperor of the West. For some time Theodosius apparently was undecided what to do; he may have thought it advisable to come to an agreement with the usurper who was "superior in every point of military equipment."60 But when he nominated not Eugenius but one of his generals to hold the consulship with him, and on January 23, 393, proclaimed his son Honorius as Augustus, it became clear that he would go to war against Eugenius as he had against Maximus in 388. There can be little doubt that the sympathies of Ammianus, the admirer of Julian, lay from the beginning not with the fanatic Christian Theodosius but with the learned pagan Eugenius.61 Ammianus must have looked with horror at Theodosius' army, which was Roman in name only. Although it cannot be proved that the emperor owed his victory over Maximus to his dare-devil Hun cavalry,62 they certainly played a decisive role in the campaign. Theodosius' horsemen were "carried through the air by Pegasi";63 they did not ride, they flew.64 No other troops but the Hun auxiliaries could have covered the sixty miles from Emona to Aquileia in one day.65 Ammianus had all reasons to fear that in the apparently inevitable war a large contingent of the Eastern army would again consist of Huns. It did.66
Ammianus hated all barbarians, even those who distinguished them- selves in the service of Rome:67 He called the Gallic soldiers, who so gal- lantly fought the Persians at Amida, dentatae bestiaef8 he concluded his work with an encomium for Julius, magister militiae trans Taurum, who, on learning of the Gothic victory at Adrianople, had all Goths in his ter- ritory massacied. But the Huns were the worst. Both Claudian69 and
59 Maenchen-Helfen 1955a, 399.
60 Orosius, Hist. adv. Pagan. VII, 35, 2.
61 Ensslin 1923, 9.
62 As assumed by Gibbon 3, 165, followed by Seeck, Geschichte 5, 213-21 .
63 Pacatus XXXIX, 5.
64 Non cursus est, sed volatus (ibid. XXXIX, 1).
65 Ibid. XXXIX, 2. Only cabinet scholars reject the " hyperboles " of the orator (Galletier 1949, 57 n. 6).
66 John of Antioch, fr. 187, EI 119.
67 Ensslin 1923, 31-32.
68 XIX, 6, 3.
69 In Ruf. I, 324-325.
THE LITERARY EVIDENCE ■ 11
Jordanes70 echoed Ammianus when they called the Huns "the most in- famous offspring of the north," "fiercer than ferocity itself." Even the headhunting Alans were "in their manner of life and their habits less savage" than the Huns.71 Through long intercourse with the Romans, some Germans had acquired a modicum of civilization. But the Huns were still primeval savages.
Besides, Ammianus' account is colored by the bias of his informants. He went to Rome sometime before 378 where, except for a short while in 383, he spent the rest of his life. The possibility that he met there some Hun or other cannot be entirely ruled out,72 but it is inconceivable that a Hun who at best understood a few Latin orders could have told Ammianus how his people lived and how they fought the Goths. The account of the war in South Russia and Rumania is based largely on re- ports which Ammianus received from Goths. Munderich, who had fought against the Huns, later dux limitis per Arabias,™ may have been one of his informants. One could almost say that Ammianus wrote his account from a Gothic point of view. For example, he described Ermanaric as a most warlike king, dreaded by the neighboring nations because of many and varied deeds of valor;74 fortiter is a praise which Ammianus did not easily bestow on a barbarian. Alatheus and Saphrax were "experienced leaders known for their courage."75 Ammianus names no less than eleven leaders of the Goths,76 but not one of the Huns. They were a faceless mass, terrible and subhuman.
Ammianus' description is distorted by hatred and fear. Thompson, who believes almost every word of it, accordingly places the Huns of the later half of the fourth century in the "lower stage of pastoralism."77 They lived, he says, in conditions of desperate hardship, moving incessantly from pasture to pasture, utterly absorbed by the day-long task of looking after the herds. Their iron swords must have been obtained by barter or capture, "for nomads do not work metal." Thompson asserts that even after eighty years of contact with the Romans the productive power of the
70 Getica 12.
71 Ammianus XXXI, 2, 21.
72 In De Tobia I, 39, CSEL 32, 540 (written about 389: Palanque 1935, 528; Dudden 1925, 696, suggests probably later than 385 ; cf. also Rauschen 1897, 432, n. 2), Ambrose mentions a Hun " who was known to the Roman emperor."
73 XXXI, 3, 5.
74 Ibid., 3, 1.
75 Ibid., 3, 3.
76 Ermanaric, Vithimir, Viderich, Alatheus, Saphrax, Athanaric, Munderich, La- garimanus, Alaviv, Fritigern, and Farnobius.
77 Thompson 1948, 41-43.
Copyrighted material
12 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
Huns was so small that they could not make tables, chairs, and couches. "The productive methods available to the Huns were primitive beyond what is now easy to imagine." To this almost unimaginable primitive economy corresponds an equally primitive social structure, a society without classes, without a hereditary aristocracy; the Huns were amorphous bands of marauders. Even the Soviet scholars, who still hate the Huns as the murderers of their Slavic ancestors, reject the notion that the economy and society were in any way primitive.78
Had the Huns been unable to forge their swords and cast their arrow- heads, they never could have crossed the Don. The idea that the Hun horsemen fought their way to the walls of Constantinople and to the Marne with bartered and captured swords is absurd. Hun warfare presupposed a far-reaching division of labor in peacetime. Ammianus emphasizes so strongly the absence of any buildings in the country of the Huns that the reader must think they slept the year round under the open sky; only in passing does Ammianus mentions their tents and wagons. Many may have been able to make tents, but only a few could have been cartwrights.
The passage which, more than any other, shows that Ammianus' descrip- tion must not be accepted as it stands is the following, often quoted and commented on: Aguntur autem nulla severilatc regali; sed tumultuario primatum duclu contcnli, perrumpunl quidquid incident.™ In Rolfe's trans- lation, "They are subject to no royal constraint, but they are content with the disorderly government of their important men, and led by them they force their way through every obstacle." It is not very important that this statement is at variance with Cassiodorus-Jordanes' account of the war between the Goths and Balamber, king of the Huns, who later married Vadamerca, the granddaughter of the Gothic ruler Vinitharius;80 whoever Balamber was, Cassiodorus would not have admitted that a Gothic princess could have become the wife of a man who was not some sort of a king. More important is the discrepancy between Ammianus' statement and what he himself tells about the deeds of the Huns. Altough the cul- tural level of Ermanaric's Ostrogoths and the cohesion of his kingdom must not be overrated, its sudden collapse under the onslaught of the Huns would be inexplicable if the latter were nothing but an anarchic mass of howling savages. Thompson calls the Huns mere marauders and plunderers. In a way, he is right. But to plunder on the scale the Huns did was impossible without a military organization, commanders who planned a campaign and coordinated the attacking forces, men who gave
78 See, for example, Pletneva, SA 3, 1964, 343.
79 XXXI, 2, 7.
80 Gelica 130, 248, 249.
THE LITERARY EVIDENCE ■ 13
orders and men who obeyed them. Altheim defines tumultarius ductus as eine. am dein Augenblick erwachsene, improvisierte Ftlhrung,*1 which renders Ammianus' words better than Rolfe's "disorderly government." However, the warfare of the Huns reveals at no time anything that could be called improvised leadership.82
For some time the misunderstanding of the Hunnic offensive tactics — sudden, feigned flight and renewed attack — was, perhaps, inevitable.83 But Ammianus wrote the last books fourteen years after Adrianople. He must by then have known or, at least, suspected that the early reports on the Huns' improvised leadership were not true. Yet he stuck to them, for those biped beasts had only "the form of men."84 He maintained that their missiles were provided with sharp bone points.85 He may not have been entirely wrong. But the tanged Hun arrowheads of which we know are all made of iron. Ammianus made the exception the rule.
In describing the Huns, Ammianus used too many phrases from earlier authors. Because the Huns were northern barbarians like the Scythians of old and because the styli veleres wrote so well about the earlier bar- barians, Ammianus, the Greek from Antioch, thought it best to paraphrase them. One of the authors he imitated was the historian Trogus Pompeius, a contemporary of the emperor Augustus. Ammianus wrote: "None of them ever ploughs or touches a colter. Without permanent seats, without a home, without fixed laws or rites, thye all roam about, always like fu- gitives. . . restless roving over mountains and through woods. They cover themselves with clothes sewed together from the skins of forest rodents." (Nemo apud eos arat nec stivam aliquando contingil. Omnes sine sedibus fixis, absque lare vel lege aut ritu stabili dispalantur, semper fugienlium similes. . . vagi monies peragrantes el silvas. Indumenlis operiunlur ex pellibus silveslrium murum consarcinalis.)66 This clearly is patterned on
81 Altheim and Stiehl 1954, 259.
82 It is not quite impossible that Ammianus concluded from the impetuosity of Hun warfare that the savages aguntur nulla severitate regali. He may have thought of what Hippocrates said about the courage of the Europeans, who were more warlike than the Asiatics because they had no kings, ov fSaoilevovrai. " Where there are kings there must be the greatest cowards. For men's souls are enslaved, and refuse to run risks readily and recklessly to increase the power of somebody else. But independent people, taking risks on their own behalf and not on behalf of others., are willing and eager to go into danger, for they themselves enjoy the prize of victory " (De aere, ch. 23, Loeb 132-133).
83 Harmatta 1952, 289.
84 XXXI, 2, 3.
85 Ibid., 2, 9.
86 Ibid., 2. 10. Cf. XIV, 4, 3, on the Saracens, and XXI, 8, 42, on the Alans and Costobocae.
Copyrightod malarial
14 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
Trogus' description of the Scythians: "They do not till the fields. They have no home, no roof, no abode. . . used to range through uncultivated solitudes. They use the skins of wild animals and rodents." (Neque enim agrum exercent. Neque domus illis ulla out tectum aut sedes est. . . per in- cultas solitudines errare solitis. Pellibus ferinis ac murinis utuntur.)61
It could be objected that such correspondences are not so very remarkable because the way of life of the nomads throughout the Eurasian steppes was, after all, more or less the same. But this cannot be said about other statements of Ammianus which he took from earlier sources. "From their horses," he wrote, "by day and night every one of that nation buys and sells, eats and drinks, and bowed over the narrow neck of the animal re- laxes in a sleep so deep as to be accompanied by many dreams."88 His admiration of Trogus here got the better of him. He had read the following description of the Parthians: "All the time they let themselves be carried by their horses. In that way they fight wars, participate in banquets, attend public and private business. On their backs they move, stand still, carry on trade, and converse." (Equis omni tempore vectantur; illis bella, illis convivia, illis publica et privata officia obeunt; super illos ire, consistere, mercari, colloqui.)89 Ammianus took Trogus too literally; he rendered "all the time" (omni tempore) by "day and night" (pernox et perdiu) and had, therefore, to keep the Huns on horseback even in their sleep.
Ammianus' description of the eating habits of the Huns is another example of his tendency to embroider what he read in old books. The Huns, he says, "are so hardy in their form of life that they have no need of fire nor of savory food, but eat the roots of wild plants and the half- raw flesh of any kind of animals whatever, which they put between their thighs and the backs of their horses, and thus warm it a little."90 This is a curious mixture of good observation and a traditional topos. That the Huns ate the roots of wild plants is quite credible; many northern barbarians did. Ammianus' description of the way the Huns warmed raw meat while on horseback has been rejected as a misunderstanding of a widespread nomad custom; the Huns are supposed to have used raw meat for preventing and healing the horses' wounds caused by the pres- sure of the saddle.91 However, at the end of the fourteenth century, the Bavarian soldier, good Hans Schiltberger, who certainly had never heard
87 Justin II, 11. Cf. Rostovtsev 1931, 95.
88 XXXI, 2, 6.
89 Justin XL I, 3, 4.
90 XXXI, 2, 3.
91 Solymossy 1937, 134-140. I retract my consent to Solymossy's view (Maenchen- Helfen 1945b, 233).
THE LITERARY EVIDENCE ■ 15
of Ammianus Marcellinus, reported that the Tatars of the Golden Horde, when they were on a fast journey, "took some meat and cut it into thin slices and put it into a linen cloth and put it under the saddle and rode on it. . . . When they felt hungry, they took it out and ate it."92
The phrase "Their mode of living is so rough that they eat half-raw meat" (ita uictu sunt asperi, ut semicruda carne uescantw) is taken from the geographer Pomponius Mela (fl. 40 a.d.), who described the Germans as "Their mode of living is so rough and crude that they even eat raw meat" {uictu ita asperi incultique ut cruda etiam carne uescantur)93 The Cimbri, too, were said to eat raw meat.94 Syroyadtsy, a Russian word for the Tatars, possibly means "people who eat raw [meat]," syroedtsy.95 Like so many northern peoples, the Huns may, indeed, have eaten raw meat. Ammianus, however, goes one step further; he maintains that the Huns did not cook their food at all, which is disproved by the big copper cauldrons for cooking meat, one of the leitmotifs of Hunnic civilization. But Ammianus felt he had to force the Huns into the cliche of the lowest of the barbarians.96
All this is not meant to dismiss Ammianus' account as untrustworthy. It contains a wealth of material which is repeatedly confirmed as good and reliable by other literary testimony and by the archaeological evidence. We learn from Ammianus how the Huns looked and how they dressed. He describes their horses, weapons, tactics, and wagons as accurately as any other writer did.
Cassiodorus, Jordanes
In his Hunnophobia, Ammianus was equaled by Cassiodorus (487-583), of whose lost Gothic History much has been preserved in Jordanes' The Origin and Deeds of the Gelae, commonly called Getica. But Cassiodorus had to explain why the Huns could make themselves the lords of his heroes,
92 Schiltberger 1885, 62.
93 III, 3, 2. Like everything he says about the Huns, Jerome's assertion that the Huns, Hunorum nova jeritas, live on half raw meat (Adv. Iovinian. II, 7, PL 23, 295) goes back to Ammianus. He wrote the invective in 393; cf. Cavallera 1922, 2, 157.
94 Cf. Norden 1921, 13-14.
95 Spuler 1947, 440.
96 How even such a careful observer as Procopius fell victim to the topos is illustrated by two passages on the Moors. They have, he says in IV,6 , 13, " neither bread nor wine nor any good things [Ammianus' saporati cibi] but they take grain, either wheat or bar- ley, and without boiling it or grinding it to flour or barley meat, they eat it in a manner not a whit different from that of animals. " A few pages later (IV, 7, 3), Procopius tells of a Moorish woman who " crushed a little grain, and making it a very thin cake, threw it into the hot ashes on the hearth. For this is the custom of the Moors to bake their loaves. "
16
THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
the Ostrogoths, and rule over them for three generations. His Huns have a wicked greatness. They are greedy and brutal, but they are a courageous people. Attila was a cruel and voluptuous monster, but he did nothing cowardly; he was like a lion.97 According to Ammianus,98 the Huns "fur- rowed the cheeks of children with the iron from their very birth," words which Cassiodorus copied. But whereas Ammianus continued "in order that the growth of hair, when it appears at the proper time, may be checked by the wrinkled scars," Cassiodorus wrote "so that before they receive the nourishment of milk they must learn to endure wounds."99
In his account of the early history of the Goths, Jordanes followed Cassiodorus, though not always verbatim. For the proper evaluation of the Gothic tradition about the struggle against the Huns in South Russia, one has to keep in mind that it has come down to us in an expurgated and "civilized" form. In Ostrogothic Italy the memory of the great wars fought side by side with the Huns and against them must still have been alive. Cassiodorus' sources were songs, cantus maiorum, cantiones, carmina prisca, and stories, some of them told "almost in the way historical events are told" (pene storico ritu). The pene must not be taken seriously. Cassiodorus wrote his Gothic History "to restore to the Amal line the splen- dor that truly belonged to it." He wrote for an educated Roman public whose taste would have taken offense at the crude, cruel, and bloody as- pects of early Germanic poetry. A comparison of the Getica with Paul the Deacon's History of the the Langobards shows to what extent Cassio- dorus purged the tradition of his Gothic lords all of barbaric features.
But this is not all. The Origo gentis Langobardorum, written about 670, one of Paul's sources, is full of pagan lore. More than two hundred years after the conversion of the Danes to Christianity, the old gods, scanti- ly disguised as ancient kings, still were wandering through the pages of Saxo Grammaticus. In the 530's when Cassiodorus wrote his history, there still were alive men whose fathers, if not they themselves in their youth, had sacrificed to the old gods. The Gothic "Heldenlieder" were certainly as pagan as those of the Danes and Langobards. The original breaks through in a single passage in the Getica, taken over from Cassiodorus: "And because of the great victories the Goths had won in this region, they thereafter called their leaders, by whose good fortune they seemed to have conquered, not mere men but demigods, that is, ansis."100 Even here Cassiodorus euhemerized the tradition. Everywhere else the pagan elements are radi-
97 Getica 181, 212, 259.
98 XXXI, 2,2.
99 Getica 127.
100 Ibid., 78.
THE LITERARY EVIDENCE ■ 17
cally discarded. The genealogy of the Amalungs, which in the carmina and fabulae was almost certainly full of gods, goddesses, murder, and homicide, reads like a legal document.
Where, as in the account of the war between the Ostrogoths and the Huns, Cassiodorus-Jordanes and Ammianus differ, Ammianus' version is, without the slightest doubt, the correct one. We cannot even be sure that Cassiodorus' quotations from Priscus are always exact. However, because so much of our information on the Huns is based on these quo- tations, they have to be taken as they are. Occasionally (as, for instance, in the story of Attila and the sacred sword, or in the description of Attila's palace) Cassiodorus renders the Priscus text better than the excerpts which the scribes made for Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century. And for this alone we must be grateful to the stammering, confused, and barely literate Jordanes. But to elevate him to the ranks of the great historians, as some years ago Giunta tried, is a hopeless undertaking.101
101 Giunta 1952. Momigliano (1955, 207-245) tried to prove that Cassiodorus fin- ished his Gothic History in Constantinople in 551; Jordanes, a Gothic bishop of Italy, is supposed to have summarized it in agreement with Cassiodorus in order to reach a larger public which was to be won over to a policy of conciliation between the Goths and the Romans. Momigliano's arguments are unconvincing. It is inconceivable that anyone in Constantinople would have read more than a page of a book written in such atrocious Latin as the Getica.
II. History
From the Don to the Danube
The first chapters of Ammianus Marcellinus' last book contain the only extant coherent account of the events in South Russia before 376. From his Gothic informants Ammianus learned that the Huns "made their violent way amid the rapine and slaughter of the neighboring peoples as far as the Halani."1 Who those peoples were obviously no one could tell him, and the monumenta Vetera supplied no information about them; they were among those "obscure peoples whose names and customs are unknown."2 Ammianus' actual information begins with the Hun attack on the Alans: The Huns overran "the territories of those Halani (bordering on the Greuthungi [Ostrogoths]) to whom usage has given the surname Tanaitae [Don people]."
This passage has been variously interpreted.3 How far to the east and west did the "Don people" live? In one passage Ammianus locates all Alans— and that would include the Tanaitae — "in the measureless wastes of Scythia to the east of the river,"4 only to say a few lines later that the Alans are divided between the two parts of the earth, Europe and Asia,5 which are separated by the Don.6 The Greuthungi-Ostrogoths7 were the western neighbors of the Tanaitae, but in another passage Am- mianus puts the Sauromatae, not the Greuthungi, between the Don and
1 Ammianus, XXXI, 2, 12.
2 XXII, 8, 38.
3 See, e.g., the articles in Rosenfeld 1956 and 1957a, and Altheim 1956a and 1956b.
4 XXXI, 2, 13.
5 XXXI, 2, 17.
6 XXII, 8, 27.
7 On the Greuthungi-Ostrogoths, see Rosenfeld 1957b, 245-258.
18
HISTORY • 19
the Danube,8 and in still another one (following Ptolemy, Geography V, 9, 1) also east of the Don.9
Ammianus suffered from a sort of literary atavism, garbling the new reports with the old.10 The chapter on the Alans in book XXXI includes a lengthy dissertation on the peoples whom the Alans "by repeated vic- tories incorporated under their own national name."11 Ammianus pro- mises to straighten out the confused opinions of the geographers and to present the truth. Actually, he offers the queerest hodgepodge of quota- tions from Herodotus, Pliny, and Mela,12 naming the Geloni, Agathyrsi, Melanchlaeni, Anthropophagi, Amazons, and Seres, as if all these peoples were still living in his time.
The Huns clashed with Alanic tribes in the Don area. This is all we can retain from Ammianus' account. If Ammianus had used the term Tanaiiae as Ptolemy used it,13 the "Don people" would have lived in European Sarmatia. But a river never formed a frontier between seminomadic herds- men, and certainly not the "quietly flowing" Don. The archaeological evidence is unequivocal: In the fourth century Sarmatians grazed their flocks both east of the Don as far as the Volga and beyond it, and west of the river to the plains of Rumania. Exactly where the Huns attacked cannot be determined; like the later invaders, their main force probably operated on the lower course of the river.
Ammianus' account of an alliance between a group, or groups, of Alans and the Huns cannot be doubted. In the 370's and 380's Huns and Alans are so often named together, that some kind of cooperation of the two peoples would have to be assumed even without Ammianus' explicit state- ment:
The Huns killed and plundered them [i.e., the Tanaitae] and joined the survivors to themselves in a treaty of alliance, [reliquos sibi con- cordandi fide, paeta iunxerunt]; then in company with them they made more boldly a sudden inroad into the extensive and rich cantons of Ermenrichus.14
8 XXXI, 2, 13.
0 XXI, 8, 29.
10 Thomson 1948, 352.
11 XXXI, 2, 13-16.
12 Malotet 1898, 15.
13 Ptolemy, Geog. Ill, 5, 10. On the Tanaitae, see Kotsevalov 1959, 1524-1530; Boltunova 1962, 92-93.
14 XXXI, 3, 1.
20
THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
For a long time [di'u],15 the king of the Greuthungi "did his best to main- tain a firm and continued stand, but as rumor gave wide currency to and exaggerated the horror of the impending danger," he killed himself. His successor Vithimiris
resisted the Halani for a time [aliquantisper], relying on other Huns, whom he paid to take his side. But after many defeats which he sus- tained, he was overcome by force of arms and died in battle. In the name of his little son, Viderichus, the management of affairs was under- taken by Alatheus and Saphrax, experienced generals known for their courage; but since the stress of circumstances compelled them to aban- don confidence in resistance, they cautiously retreated until they came to the river Danastius.16
Ammianus' account has been rejected by the Croatian scholar L. Haupt- mann, who thought that either Ammianus made a bad blunder or that the text was corrupt.17 Not Hunis aliis fretus Vithimir must have re- sisted the Alans but *Halanis aliis frelus, the Huns. Hauptmann referred to Jordanes, in whose account the only enemies of the Ostrogoths are, indeed, the Huns. But Jordanes' compilation is tendentious from beginning to end. He not only retained the transfiguration of the early history of the Goths as he found it in Cassiodorus; he also changed what he read in Ammianus in favor of the Alans.18 They were, wrote Ammianus, Hunis per omnia suppares (XXXI, 2, 21); Jordanes, Getica 126, changed this into pugna pares. According to Ammianus, the Alans were, in comparison with the Huns, viclu mitiores et cultu; Jordanes replaced mitiores by dis- similes, and cultu by humanitate. He read in Ammianus that the Alans attacked the Ostrogoths after Ermanaric's death. But this did not fit the picture of the noble Alans, so he left it out.
The fights between the Alans and Goths also are attested by Bishop Ambrose of Milan (374-397 a.d.). In the Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, probably written at the end of 378,19 he summarized the events which led to the disaster of Adrianople; "The Huns threw themselves upon the Alans, the Alans upon the Goths, and the Goths upon the Taifali and Sarmatae; the Goths, exiled from their own country, made us exiles in Illyricum, and the end is not yet."20
15 The war between the Huns and the Ostrogoths, usually dated in 375, is actually undatable ; cf. O. Seeck, Hermes 41, 1906, 526.
16 XXXI, 3, 3.
17 Hauptmann 1935, 18.
18 On Jordanes' pro-Alanic prejudices, see Mommsen 1882, p. x.
19 Rauschen 1897, 484; Dudden 1925, 681; Palanque 1935, 57-58, 499-500.
20 X, 10, CSEL 34, 4, 458.
HISTORY . 21
The information Ambrose received in Milan was not quite correct. Ermanaric's kingdom collapsed under the onslaught of the Huns. But the testimony of both Ammianus and Ambrose leaves no doubt that at one time in the apparently long struggle the main enemies of the Goths were, indeed, Alans. Were they only those Alans who had made an al- liance with the Huns? This is possible. But the following strange story told by Jordanes might preserve a dim memory of an uprising of Alanic groups within the Ostrogothic kingdom:
Now although Hermanaric, king of the Goths, was the conqueror of many tribes, as we have said above, yet while he was deliberating on this invasion of the Huns, the treacherous tribe of the Rosomoni [Ro- somonorum gens infida], who at that time were among those who owed him homage, took this chance to catch him unawares. For when the king had given orders that a certain woman of the tribe I mentioned, Sunilda by name, should be bound to wild horses and torn apart by driving them in opposite directions (for he was roused to fury by her husband's treachery to him), her brothers Sarus and Ammius came to avenge their sister's death and plunged a sword in Hermanaric's side. Enfeebled by this blow, he dragged out a miserable existence in bodily weakness. Balamber, king of the Huns, took advantage of his ill health to move an army into the land of the Ostrogoths.21
Whereas Sunilda is unquestionably a Germanic name, the derivation of Sarus from Gothic sarwa, "weapon, armor," and of Ammius from Gothic *hama, "to arm,"22 is unconvincing. There is no satisfactory etymology of Rosomoni.23 Sarus occurs later as the name of a Goth,24 but this does
21 Getica 129-130.
22 Brady 1949, 18-19.
23 The Germanic etymologies of Rosomoni are listed by Schonfeld 1911, 194-195, and G. Vetter 1938, 98-99. Brady thought that in oral tradition Roxolani could have been distorted into Rosomoni, but Mullenhoff (Jordanes 164) was probably right in rejecting such an explanation: De Rhoxolanis in mythis fabulisque Gothorum cogitare absurdum est. For the same reason it is unlikely that, as I thought for awhile, Rosomoni, v. 1. Rosomani, *POZOMANOI, might go back to be misread POEOAANOI. Tre- tiakov's equation Rosomoni = Rus (Tretiakov 1953, 25) is as wild as the one suggested by Vernadsky (1959, 68) who takes -moni to be Ossetic mojnae, "man, husband"; the Rosomoni are "the Ros men."
Vernadsky finds pre-Ossetic "Ruxs- Alans" and Antes everywhere. The Acara- gantes (recte Argaragantes) in Hungary, for instance, are supposed to be the "voiceless Antes," Ossetic seqserseg, their enemies, the Limigantes, the "weak Antes," Ossetic Isemaeg (Vernadsky 1959, 70). Vernadsky overlooked the gigantes, corybantes, Gara- mantes, and the Ants in Christian Morgenstern's "Ant-ologie. " His writings are full of such absurdities, based on willkurliche Interpretation teilweise unbrauchbarer Quellen
22 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
not necessarily make Sarus of the Rosomoni a Goth. The name can be compared with Sarosius or Saroes,25 who in about 500 was king of the Alans in the Caucasus. Sarakos in an inscription from Tanais (early third cen- tury a.d.) probably is derived from the Sarmatian word that corresponds to Avestic sara-, Ossetic sdr-, "head";26 Sarus could mean "caput, captain." Saphrax (Safrax) and Lagarimanus, prominent leaders of the Goths, had Iranian names;27 they might have been Alans. Although it cannot be proved that the Rosomoni were rebellious Alans, the discessus of an Alanic gens at a time when Alans attacked the Ostrogoths seems more likely than the treachery of Gothic noblemen.
It was almost certainly the concordia with large groups of Alans which enabled the Huns to move against Ermanaric. Ammianus does not say what the terms of the alliance were. When one considers that those Alans who in 418 subjugated themselves to the palrocinium of the Vandal king, retained their tribal organization until the end of the Vandal kingdom, it may be assumed that the Hunno-Alanic alliance guaranteed the Iranian partner a considerable degree of independence and a large share in the loot. It was certainly not the first time that other tribes joined the Huns, nor was it the last. In some cases the alliance seems to have resulted in a real symbiosis, in others the tribes united temporarily for raids and loot- ing expeditions. The Hunno-Alanic alliance lasted three decades.
Ammianus' account on the Alanic attacks on the Goths is borne out by Ambrose, but there seems to be no other authority to confirm what it says about the Huns who sided with Vithimir. Why should Huns, even if they were paid by the Gothic king, fight for him at a time when his sit- uation was so obviously hopeless? If they stayed with those hordes which not even the great Ermanaric could withstand, they could expect to loot at their hearts' desire; shortly afterward, the Huns who broke into the land of the Visigoths were quickly so loaded down with booty that they had to break off the attack.28 Were the Huns siding with the Goths a
und haltlose Namenetymologien (F. Dolger, BZ 42, 1950, 133); cf. also W. B. Henning, BSOAS 21: 2, 1958, 315-318, D. M. Lang, BSOAS 22, 2, 1959, 371; and A. V. Soloviev, BZ 54, 1961, 135-138. In the following, I will refer no more to Vernadsky's etymolo- gies.
24 Olympiodorus 57a n.12 ; his brother Singericus (60a 13) has a Germanic name.
25 Menander, EL 4 4 23, 4 5 3 23;30; Theophanes Byz., fr. 4, HGM IV, 44822 = FUG IV, 271.
26 Zgusta 1955, sec. 199; cf. Abaev 1949, 180.
27 Cf. Maenchen-Helfen 1957b, 281.
28 Ammianus, XXXI, 3, 8.
HISTORY • 23
part of the people who had crossed the Don ? Or did Huns live west of the river, tribes which found themselves as threatened as the Goths and decided, when Vithimir appealed for their help, to make common cause with the Germans against the invaders?
A passage in the Getica of Jordanes, going back to the fifth-century historian Priscus, gives the answer. "Like a whirlwind of nations the Huns swept across the Alpidzuri, Alcildzuri, Itimari, Tuncarsi, and Boisci who bordered that part of Scythia."29 As we shall see, the first two names stand for one, the Turkish name *Alp-il-cur, which cannot be separated from the Hunnic names ending in -cur. The other names will occupy us later. In the present context this one name, *Alpilcur, suffices to prove the exist- ence of Turkish-speaking nomads 30 on or near the northeastern shore of the Black Sea before the Huns came. In the 430's the same peoples, listed in the same order and now under Hun domination, had their pas- tures along the Danube.31 Whether they migrated or were settled there by their Hun lords is of minor importance. What matters is that their alliance withstood all the vicissitudes of those stormy decades. Because in both passages the *Alpilcur are named first, they apparently were the leading tribe. Overrun by the Huns near the Maeotis, they were, sixty years later, still bitterly opposed to their masters; they made a treaty with the Ro- mans. In a later chapter I shall come back to those "Huns before the Huns."
Ermanaric 's Kingdom
It is often assumed that Attila ruled over all the peoples once under the king of the Ostrogoths, Ermanaric. Archaeologists perhaps would have hesitated to attribute graves in the forests of central Russia to the nomadic Huns had they not believed that at one time Ermanaric's Goths had ruled there. The assertion of the West Roman ambassadors at At- tila's court that the Hun king was the lord over the islands in the ocean would not have been so widely accepted were it not for Jordanes' statement that the Aesti on the Baltic coast were Ermanaric's subjects. Lack of criticism and chauvinistic bias either enlarged the Gothic realm out of all proportions or practically denied its existence.32
29 Getica 126.
30 Although neither Priscus nor Jordanes says anything about their way of life, they must have been nomads. There were no Turkish farmers in South Russia before, almost a millennium later, the Tatars in the Crimea settled down to plough their fields and tend to their orchards.
31 Priscus, EL 1214_5. Contrary to the text, nQoaoixovoi xdv "Iaxqov, Thomp- son 1948, 71, locates them near the Azov Sea.
32 The map in Vorgeschichte der deulsclien Stamme III, 1185, published by the Reichsamt fur Vorgeschichte in der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei
Copyiighied malarial
24 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
Jordanes' description of it is almost a hymn.33 "Some of our ancestors," he wrote, "have justly compared Hermanaric to Alexander the Great." Obviously it was Jordanes' source Cassiodorus, not an illiterate Goth, who made this comparison and called Ermanaric "the ruler of all nations of Scythia and Germania." Jordanes listed thirteen peoples which the Amalung ruler Ermanaric conquered in the north: Golthescytha, Thiudos, Inaunxis, Vasinabroncae, Merens, Mordens, Imniscaris, Rogas, Tadzans, Athaul, Navego, Bubegenes, Coldas. The uncertain readings and the queer forms of these names make them an ideal hunting ground for name chasers. Tomaschek took Athaul for the name of a Hunnic tribe, Turkish *ataghul, "archer."34 Mullenhoff thought that scytha in Golthescytha was Latinized chud, the designation of Finnish tribes in the early Russian chronicles.35 Marquart took golthe for another form of Scoloti, connected it with thiudos, dismissed scytha as a gloss, and arrived thus at "the Scolotic peoples."36 He and Grienberger had no doubts that thiudos was Gothic, meaning "peo- ples," but Grienberger suspected in golthe Latin gothice, connected scytha and thiudos, and translated "in Gothic, the Scythian peoples."37 To discuss these and equally fanciful etymologies would be a waste of time. The Mordens38 are the Mordvins and the Merens the Mari.39 Whether Erma- naric actually domuerat them is more doubtful. The ethnic names may merely reflect the extent of the geographical knowledge of Jordanes or his sources.
Ermanaric is also said to have subdued the Aesti on the Baltic coast "by his wisdom and might." which probably means no more than that there existed some trade relations between the Goths and the tribes in the amber countries, as they possibly existed in Hunnic times40 and under the great Ostrogothic king Theoderic (Theodoric).41
on the eve of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, turned eastern Europe to the Urals into Ermanaric's «Hoheitsgebiet.» Altheim 1951, 73, claimed even Dagestan in the eastern Caucasus for the Goths.
33 Gelica 116-120.
34 SB Wien 117, 1889, 39.
35 Jordanes, index 160.
36 Marquart 1903, 378, n. 3.
37 ZfDA 39, 1895, 158.
38 Mogdia in Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De admin, imp.; Jenkins 1949, 168 46.
39 Matthews 1951, 29-30. To the literature listed there, add B. Munkacsi, KCsA 1, 1921, 62 ; A. Pogodin, MSFOU 67, 1933, 326-330 ; E. Lewy, Transactions of the Philo- logical Society 1946, 133-136 ; J. V. Farkas, Saeculum 5, 1954, 331 ; Collinder 1962, 23-24.
40 J. Werner, index, s.v. Bernstein, Bernsteinperle.
41 Cassiodorus, Variae V, 2.
HISTORY • 25
After the conquest of the northern peoples, Ermanaric "reduced to his sway" the Heruli near the Azov Sea, which is quite credible. Since the middle of the third century a tribe of the East Hermanic Heruli had dwelt on the shores of the Maeotis.42
Finally, Ermanaric attacked and subjugated the Venethi. Translated from the hymn into prose: "from time to time the Goths made raids into Slavic territory in the northwest." In the confused account of the years following Ermanaric's death, Jordanes speaks of a war between a section of the Ostrogoths and the Antes, led by King Boz.43 After the victory over the Antes, the Goths were attacked by the Huns and defeated on the river Erac.44
The boundaries of the Ostrogothic "empire" cannot be defined because it had none. Around a more or less compactly settled Gothic area lay the sites of various tribes. Some of them may have paid regular tribute; others only bartered their goods, presumably mostly furs, for what the Goths got either from the Bosporan kingdom or the Danube provinces; still others occasionally may have joined the Ostrogoths in looting expeditions. The rapid collapse of Ermanaric's kingdom clearly indicates its lack of coherence.
To analyze once more Ammianus' account of the war between the Huns and the Visigoths, the southern neighbors of the Ostrogoths, is not our task. This has been done by all the historians of the Migration Period, most competently and succinctly, in my opinion, by Patsch.45 The Visi- goths under Athanaric expected the attack of the Huns on the right bank of the Dniester but could not hold it; they retreated behind the Sereth. The larger part of the people decided to seek a new home in the empire; Athanaric and his followers marched through Oltenia into Caucalandis locus. According to Patsch, Caucaland was the mountainous part of the Banat, between the rivers Maros, Theiss, and Danube.46 The objections
42 Rappaport 1899, 48.
43 His identification with Buz in the Igor Song (cf. Shakhmatov 1919, 10 ; Perets 1926, 24) was called to question by A. Mazon (Revue des etudes slaves 19, 1939, 259-260) and has been conclusively refuted by N. Zupanic, Sitnla 4, 1961, 121-122. For the Sla- vic etymology, see S. Rospond, Voprosy iazykoznaniia 14: 3, 1965, 8. Boz might be an Iranian name, cf. Bwzmyhr (Frye 1952, 52; W. B. Henning, BSOAS 21: 2, 1958, 38, n. 41; Burzmipuhr in A 246, 1958, 353; D'iakonov and Lifshits 1960, 23). Bul- garian Bezmer is, in I. Dulchcv's opinion, Boz-Mihr (Archiv orientdlni 21, 1953, 356).
44 Either the Tiligul, N. Zupanic, Ethnograf 14, 1930, 113-121, or the lower Dnieper, E. Kh. Skrzhinskaia, V V 12, 1957, 25. This Erac had, of course, nothing to do with the Erax in Lazica (Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De admin, imp., ch. 45).
45 Patsch 1928, 2, 59-63.
46 Ibid., 64-65.
26 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
to his thesis47 are based on doubtful equations of the name Cauca; they disregard the events in the late 370's, which definitely point to Visigoths in the eastern Banat. I, therefore, accept Patsch's location.48
From about 376 on, the Huns were the rulers of a large area in South Russia. They stood at the lower Danube. The picture that can be drawn from Ammianus is not wrong but onesided. He says nothing about the fate of the Bosporan kingdom, the life of the peoples whom the Huns overran, their economy, their social institutions, their interrelations. It would be unfair to blame Ammianus. He wrote a history of the Roman Empire, not one of the barbarians. Fortunately the cultures of the peoples west of the Don can, at least in their outlines, be reconstructed, mainly with the help of the archaeological material.
The Huns at the Danube
In the summer of 376, tens of thousands of Visigoths were encamped on the northern bank of the lower Danube around Durostorum (modern Silistra), anxiously waiting for permission to cross the river and settle in Thrace. They were the greater part of the proud nation which only a few years before had forced the Romans to deal with their leader Atha- naric as an equal of the king of kings. Now, defeated by the Huns (see preceding section) and starving, they were deadly scared lest their enemies fall upon them again before they were admitted to a refuge in the empire.
Permission came in the fall. The Visigoths, shortly followed by Ostro- goths,49 Taifali,50 and other transdanubian barbarians,51 crossed the Da-
47 C. C. Giurescu, Revista istoricd. rom&na 5-6, 1935-36, 564; K. K. Klein, PBB 79, 1957, 302-307; I. Nestor, 7s/. Rom. 1, 1960, 697-699; R. Vulpe, Dacia, N. S. 5, 1961, 387, n. 110.
48 The famous treasure of Pietroassa in the district Buzau has, therefore, nothing to do with Athanaric.
49 Led by Vithericus, Alatheus, and Safrax (Ammianus XXXI, 4, 12; 5, 3).
50 Ammianus speaks of them only once; in the late fall of 377, autumno vergente in hiemem, the Romans almost annihilated a horde of Taifali who shortly before, nuper, had crossed the Danube (XXXI, 9, 3-4). But Zosimus (IV, 25, 1) names them next to the Goths, and in the Epit. de caes. XLVII, 3, they take the second place among the invaders. The Taifali were apparently a numerous people. Before 370 they held Oltenia and the western part of Muntenia (Patsch 1925, 189, n. 2). How far to the east of the Aluta River their territory expanded could be determined only if the exact location of Athanaric's defense line, which "skirted the lands of Taifali" (Ammianus XXXI, 3, 7), were known; for recent attempts to localize it, see R. Vulpe, Dacia 4, 1960, 322. There is no proof for the constantly repeated assertion that the Taifali were Germans. It should be noted that in Gaul Taifali and Sarmatians were settled together (Praelec- tus Sarmataram et Taifalorum gentilium, Not. Dign. [occ] 42, 65); cf. Barkoczi 1959,452.
51 Multarum gentium bellicus furor (Ambrose, Ep. XV, 5); "other tribes that for- merly dwelt with the Goths and Taifali" (Zosimus IV, 25, 1).
HISTORY • 27
nube. The following struggle between the Visigoths52 and the East Romans, which for years raged throughout Thrace, at times engulfing large tracts of Macedonia, has been thoroughly studied. This is understandable and legitimate. The Germanic invaders developed into great nations; in France and Spain they shaped the fate of the Western world. Except for the few years of Attila's reign, the Huns loomed on and beyond the periphery of the oecumene. Their history in the last decades of the fourth century seems to be bare of all interest. Even those scholars who made the Huns the special object of their studies paid no attention to it.53
It is true that our information about the Huns in that period is scanty, although not much scantier than for others. But this should be only a challenge to make the most of the few data. To extract from the annals, commentaries on the Bible, homilies, edicts, and poems the few passages dealing with the Huns and to determine what happened, when, and where, requires an inordinately large apparatus. But that cannot be helped if we want to learn how the Huns moved into central Europe.
Visigoths and Huns Cooperate
After the sanguinary battle Ad Salices in the northern Dobrogea between Visigoths and imperial troops (see Chapter XII) in the summer of 377, the Romans retreated behind the Haemus (Balkans). Their losses were not quite as heavy as those of the Visigoths. But even with the reinfor- cements being sent to him, the Roman commander could not risk another battle. The Visigoths were still far superior in numbers. Their strength was, however, at the same time their weakness. They were not an army, they were a whole people: women, children, sick people, old people, four or five times outnumbered the warriors. "Everything that could serve as food throughout the lands of Scythia and Moesia had been used up. All the necessities of life had been taken to the strong places, none of which the enemy even attempted to besiege because of their com- plete ignorance of these and other operations of the kind."54
The Romans hastily fortified the mountain passes. The Goths found themselves "crowded between the Hister [Danube] and the waste places." Their situation was rapidly getting desperate. Roman troops would easily have broken through the agyeres celsi or high ramparts of the Goths, ob- viously mere stockades: to the Goths they proved unconquerable. "Driv-
52 "The greatest and most excellent of all the Scythian peoples" (Philostorgius XI, 8).
53 Thompson (1948) gives the almost twenty years between the battle of Adrianople and the invasion of Asia in 395 half a page.
54 Ammianus XXXI, 8, 1, 4.
28 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
en alike by ferocity and hunger," they attacked time and again, only to be driven back. Hemmed in by the sea to their left, the mountains to the right and in front of them, in their back the Danube, the Goths could not hold out much longer. "Compelled by dire necessity they gained an alliance with some of the Huns and Halani by holding out the hope of immense booty." As soon as the Roman commander heard of this, he evacuated his positions and retreated to the Thracian plain.
Ammianus Marcellinus gives a picturesque account of the events fol- lowing. But instead of telling his readers what actually happened, he describes at great length and with gruesome details the horrors of the barbarian invasion. We hear much about the misery of women and free- born men driven along by cracking whips, but we do not learn why the Romans retreated. The Huns had as little experience in storming even improvised fortifications as the Visigoths. In the mountains their horse- men were as good as lost. The few who might have sneaked behind the Roman lines could be cut down easily. The Goths did not need more men; they had enough. Besides, Ammianus himself stresses that the number of the Huns and Alans was small, Hunnorum et Halanorum aliquos. Why, then, did the blockade break down? Looking at the map, Seeck found the answer: the Huns most probably crossed the Danube far to the west. Riding down the Morava valley to Naissus (modern Nis, Yugoslavia) and turning east, they threatened the rear of the Romans.55 Saturninus, the Roman commander, had no choice. He left the passes. The Goths were saved.
A strategic move on such a scale required more than an agreement between the Visigoths and "some" Huns. It presupposed on the part of the Huns the capacity of throwing hundreds of horsemen into action. What the status of their leaders was we do not know. But whether they were "kings," or phylarchoi (tribal chieftains), or hetmans, whether their men followed them out of loyalty, or to gain military laurels, or simply in order to make, in the shortest time, as much booty as possible, is irre- levant compared with the fact that these horsemen could be assembled, that their leaders did come to an agreement with the Visigoths, that the Huns were kept together over hundreds of miles. The very first account of a Hun raid into the Balkan provinces refutes the view that for half a century after the invasion of South Russia Hun society consisted of a large number of tiny independent groups. But the problems of Hun so- ciety will occupy us in another context.
55 Seeck, Geschichle 5, 109, 468-469.
HISTORY • 29
It sometimes has been maintained that the Huns fought at Adrianople (see Chapter XII) side by side with the Goths.56 Adrianople (378 a.d.) was a Gothic victory. "The Roman legions were massacred by the Goths" (Romanae legiones usque ad internicionem caesae sunt a Gothis), wrote Jerome one year after the catastrophe, and none of those who made use of his chronicle had in this respect anything to add from other sources. Ammianus' account of the battl eis far from being as precise as one would expect from an author of his military experience and grasp for essentials. Yet so much is certain: the decision fell with the arrival of the Ostrogoths. Fritigern's Visigoths could not withstand the fierce attack of the Roman cavalry. Driven back to their wagons, hard pressed by the advancing legions, they were rescued by Alatheus' and Safrax's Ostrogothic horsemen. The Visigothic leader avoided giving battle as long as he could, partly because he still hoped to come to an understanding with the emperor, but mostly because he did not dare to fight alone. The Romans had their Saracen horses; Fritigern needed desperately the Ostrogothic cavalry. Had they not rushed in just in time, the Visigoths in all probability would have been defeated, if not annihilated. The sudden Ostrogoth attack threw the Romans into confusion, then into panic, and what followed was a massacre.
Adrianople, one of the decisive battles of history, was won by equitatus Gothorum. It is true that there were a few men of other tribes with them, but these were not Huns. Ammianus speaks specifically of Halanorum manus.™ Had the account been written by Jordanes, we might suspect that he did not want to give the Huns credit for a Gothic victory. Am- mianus had no reason to prefer the Alans to the Goths. In his narrative the Huns reappear after the battle. When the Goths set up their camp at Perinthus at the Sea of Marmara, they were Hunis Halanisque per- mix/i.58 The Huns had stayed away from the fight. Their descendants, the "Massagetae" in the Roman army in Africa, did the same more than once. They waited to see who would win. The Huns were out for looting, and had no desire to spill their blood pour le roi des Goths.
In the following two years our sources repeatedly name Huns, Goths, and Alans together,59 but whether the Huns looted and burned down the villages of the unfortunate population of Thrace alone or as the allies of the Goths is not known. Some contemporary authors saw in the Huns
56 Thompson (1948, 25) is more cautious ("not impossible").
57 XXXI, 12, 17.
58 Ibid., 16, 3.
59 Themistius, Or. XV, K. W. Dindorf 1932, 25235-2531 ; Pacatus XIV, 4; CM I, 243; II, 60, 3792.
30 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
the worst villains. They were "more fierce than any kind of destruction" (pmni pernicie atrociores).60 Orosius names the Huns and Alans before the Goths.61
After 380, neither Huns nor Alans are mentioned among the barbar- ians in the Balkan provinces.62 Goths served in the imperial armies by the thousands. The Roman commanders Botherich, Eriulf, Fravitta, Gainas, and Rumorid were Goths. But we do not hear of Hun contingents or Hun officers. The Huns returned beyond the Danube.
Although the Huns did not fight at Adrianople, indirectly they might have decided the outcome of the battle. The following chronological and geographical deliberations seem to lead away from the Huns. But without them the events in the barbaricum (the territories beyond the Roman frontiers) cannot be reconstructed.
The Huns Threaten Pannonia
In the beginning of June 378, Gratian's army, which was supposed to join as quickly as possible the Eastern Romans hard-pressed by the Visigoths, finally set out for Thrace. The young emperor's frivolous wish to present himself to Valens as the victor over mighty barbarians in the West delayed the march for at least a month.63 But now Gratian hurried. He led his troops in long marches, porrectis itineribus, from Felix Arbor on Lake Constance to Lauriacum, the present Lorch in Upper Austria.
There the army, which had marched 300 milia,M rested for a short time.65
Gratian himself "sent on ahead by land all his baggage and packs, and
60 Epit. de caes. XLVII, 3.
61 Hist. adv. Pagan. VII, 34, 5.
62 For the chronology of Theodosius' campaigns against the Goths in 380, see Enss- lin 1948, 12-14. Gregory of Nazianzen (De vita sua, PG 37, 1098) has some additional information about Theodosius' headquarters.
63 Gratian was "already on his way to the regions of the east," when he learned that the Alamannic Lentienses had suffered a crushing defeat at Argentaria near Colmar (Ammianus XXXI, 10, 11). The emperor left Trier after April 20 (Cod. Theodos. VIII, 5, 35), so the battle must have been fought at the end of April or early in May. "Filled with confidence at this happy success ... Gratian turned his line of march to the left and secretly crossed the Rhine," probably near Basel. Although the campaign in the Black Forest was carried out "with incredible energy and conspicuous rapidity" (Am- mianus XXXI, 10, 18, perhaps following a panegyric ; cf. Seeck, Hermes 41, 1906, 484), Gratian could not have resumed his march east before the beginning of June at the ear- liest.
64 Ilin. Anion. CCXXXV, 1-237, 5.
65 As shown by the great number of siliquiae and half-siliquiae coined in Trier, 364-378, which were found at Lorch; Elmer, "Geldverkehr in Lauriacum und Orilava," Num. Zeitschr. (Vienna) 67, 1934, 31-32.
HISTORY . 31
descending the Danube. . . came to Bononia [in Pannonia superior; now Banostor] and entered Sirmium [in Pannonia inferior; now Sremska Mitro- vica]. Having been delayed there four days, he went on over the same river to Castra Martis,66 although attacked by intermittent fevers. In that region the Halani unexpectedly fell upon him, and he lost a few of his followers."67 It was the first encounter with the enemy.
Gratian would not have dared to sail down the Danube with only "a band of light-armed troops," unless he could have been sure that the Quadi, Jazygi, and Sarmatae on the left bank of the river would keep the peace. They still suffered from the defeats which three years before Valentinian had inflicted on them. The Quadi were forced to provide recruits for the Roman army and the alliance with the Sarmatae Argaragantes in the Banat had been renewed. To prevent the recurrence of surprise attacks like those which in 374 and 375 carried the barbarians deep into Roman ter- ritory, the frontier fortifications were greatly strengthened.68 Pannonian soldiers could be detailed for service in Britain.69 In the spring of 378, Gratian's general Frigeridus with his Pannonian and transalpine auxiliaries joined the forces in Thrace.70 Gratian had nothing to fear from the peoples east of the Danube. But only a few months later Valeria, the easternmost province of Pannonia, was overrun by Goths, Huns, and Alans.
Assuming that Gratian traveled as fast as Emperor Julian (a.d. 360- 363) who, in the summer of 361, in exceptionally good weather, sailed with three thousand men from "the place where the river is navigable" to Sirmium in eleven days,71 Gratian could have arrived in Bononia at the end of June or early in July. He probably was in Martis Castra not later than the middle of July. Whether he could have joined Valens be- fore August 9 the day of the fateful battle, is a moot question. The letter he sent to Valens shows that he was determined to throw his cavalry into the struggle as fast as he could.72 Yet a passage in Zosimus' New History, composed in the sixth century, seems to indicate that Gratian suddenly stopped, turned around, and rode back to Sirmium.
Victor, commander of the horse, one of the few high officers to survive the massacre at Adrianople, fought his way, with some of his horsemen, "through Macedonia and Thessaly to Moesia and Paiones to inform Gratian,
66 The present Kula in Bulgaria. Patsch, PW 3, 1769.
67 Ammianus XXXI, 11, 6.
68 Patsch 1929, 31.
69 J. W. E. Pearce, Numismatic Chronicle 1939, 128-142 ; N. H. Baynes, BZ 38, 1939, 582.
70 Ammianus XXXI, 7, 3.
71 Zosimus III, 10, 2-3; Ammianus XXI, 9, 2.
72 Ammianus XXXI, 12, 4.
32 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
who was there, of what had happened."73 Paiones stands here for the province of Pannonia secunda.74 If Victor was indeed the first to report to Gratian the death of Valens and if he met him in Pannonia secunda, Gratian must have returned to Sirmium not, as is generally assumed, because he realized that after the annihilation of the Eastern army he alone was too weak to continue the fight with the Goths but before he learned about the catastrophe. Zosimus is not a very reliable author,75 his to ov /Li- ft dv may only mean "all the details." The most important single news, that of Valens' death, Gratian may have received while he was still marching east.76 If, however, he should have returned before, there could have been only one reason: his troops, although needed in Thrace, must have been needed even more urgently in Pannonia. Valens fought the Goths; Gratian had to fight the peoples driven into Pannonia by the Huns, and the Huns themselves.
Gratian had asked Bishop Ambrose, first in letters, later at their meeting in Sirmium,77 to write for him a treatise on the orthodox faith. Ambrose
73 'Enl Mvaovg xai ITaiovag dvadqa/imv avrodi diaTQifiovTi ru> rganavd) to av/i- fidv dnayyeXXei (Zosimus IV, 24, 3).
74 Zosimus used indiscriminately Paionia, Paioniai, and Paiones: Td Mvacbv ray/tiara xai JTaiovcov (I, 20, 2) = xd iv Mvaiq xai Ilaioviq ray /tiara (I, 21, 2) ; Ilaiovia = IJaiu- veq (II, 46, 1). He knew that Pannonia consisted of a number of provinces, rd ITaiovcov eQvr) (I, 48), but he did not care to state in which of them this or that event took place. Cibalis, Sirmium, and Mursa were just "towns in Pannonia" (II, 18, 2, 5; 45, 3). In the combination "Paionia and Mysia" or "Mysia and Paionia" (I, 13, 1; 20, 2; II, 48, 3; III, 2, 2; IV, 16, 3, 4; 29, 3, 4), Paionia always means Pannonia secunda, and Mysia means Moesia superior. E. Polaschek's interpretation of Paionia in IV, 24, 3, as the Macedonian Paionia {Wiener Prahistor. Zeitschr. 18, 1931, 243, n. 19) is not acceptable.
75 But Zosimus' addition to Eunapius (fr. 42, EL 597, 4-5) indicates that he had access to some sources which are now lost. According to Eunapius, Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly were ravaged by the Goths before the battle at Adrianople. Zosimus IV, 20, 7, copies Eunapius but adds "and Paionia."
76 Neither the rescript of toleration which Gratian issued immediately after he learned of his uncle's death nor the edict of September 25, 378 (Cod. Theodos. X, 2, 1) gives any indication as to the date when the news reached the emperor. The edict was issued under the names of Valens, Gratian, and Valentinian, but this does not necessar- ily indicate that Valens was still believed to be alive; cf. Seeck 1919, 111-112. Acting on the rescript of toleration, the Macedonians met in synod in Antioch in Caria before the end of 378 (Duchesne 1924, 2, 343, n. 1). It is impossible to determine when exactly they learned of the rescript. Seeck, who dated it between August 18 and September 25 (1919, 250), did not state his reasons. As far as I can see, there are none.
77 De fide III, 1. The council of Sirmium could not have been held during the four days Gratian spent in the city in July. This was most certainly not the time to discuss ecclesiastical affairs. If the council was held at all, which by now seems very likely (Dudden 1925, 189; Palanque 1933, 496-498 ; N. H. Baynes, English Historical Review 51, 1936, 303, 304), it must be dated in August.
HISTORY . 33
composed the first two books De fide "hastily and summarily, and in rough rather than exact form."78 He wrote them after he learned of the heretic Valens' death,79 which did not particularly grieve him. He hailed the young orthodox emperor Gratian as "the ruler of the whole world" who would conquer the Goths.80 In the midst of theological arguments and scriptural proofs for the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, there is a passage that calls for close attention: "Have we not heard," wrote Ambrose, "from all along the border, from Thrace and through Dacia ripensis, Moesia, and all of Valeria of the Pannonias [omnemque Valeriam Pannoniarum], a mingled tumult of blasphemers [sc. Arians] preaching and barbarians invading?"81 Ambrose left out Pannonia secunda, where evidently Gratian's main force stood. That he stressed the invasion of Valeria, of all Valeria, is all the more significant.
In De fide the Goths were still the only enemy. Ambrose soon received more exact, and more alarming news. "The Huns," he wrote now, "threw themselves upon the Alans, the Alans upon the Goths, and the Goths upon the Taifali and Sarmatians; the Goths, exiled from their own country, made us exiles in Illyricum, and the end is not yet."82 The blurred picture the Romans had of the happenings beyond the Danube became clearer: Athanaric's Visigoths, who had not joined Fritigern, threw themselves upon the Taifali in Oltenia and then upon the Sarmatians in Caucaland.83 Throughout the barbaricum, "as far as the Marcomanni and Quadi,"84 the peoples began to stir. We have no information about the resistance which the Sarmatians in Caucaland, the Banat, put up against the Goths. It must have been stubborn; the Argaragantes were known to be brave and resourceful.85 But it was overcome, and an apparently large group of Sarmatians was forced to cross the Danube into Valeria. In December 378, the retired general Theodosius, hastily called from Spain, defeated the invaders.86 Although the account of the battle by the church historian
78 De fide II, 129.
79 Dudden 1925, 189, n. 8.
80 De fide, I, 3; II, 136-142.
81 Ibid., II, 16.
82 Ibid.
83 See Appendix.
84 Ammianus XXXI, 4, 2.
85 Ibid., XXIX, 6, 14.
86 Theodoret, Hist, eccles. V, 5; Themistius, Or. XIV, 182c, XV, 188c, 198a. Pacatus (X, 2-4) barely touches Theodosius ' military activities before his elevation to the throne. Synesius (De regno III, PG 1061) seems to refer to Theodosius' victories in 374, not in 378. Theodoret's account has long been doubted. Tillemont 1738, 5, 715-716 (co- pied by G. Kaufmann, Philologus 31, 1872, 473-480) had to defend it against Baronius;
34 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
Theodoret is heavily embroidered, it is substantially true. One passage even sheds light on the composition of the invading hordes. "Many of the barbarians," wrote Theodoret, "were slain by their own countrymen." Evidently the Sarmatae Limigantes, the "slaves" of the Argaragantes,87 turned against their lords and killed them with the weapons they were supposed to use against the Romans.
Theodosius' victory may have slightly eased the pressure on one sector of the front. But it was a mere episode in the gigantic struggle. In January 379, when Gratian proclaimed Theodosius emperor, the situation was al- most hopeless. "The cities are devastated, myriads of people are killed, the earth is soaked with blood, and a foreign people [XaoQ alX6yhoaao^\ is running through the land as if it were theirs."88 Gratian could no longer from his headquarters in Sirmium direct the operations on a front that reached from western Hungary to the Black Sea. Eastern Illyricum, com- prising the dioceses of Dacia and Macedonia, was added to the praetorian prefecture Oriens, to be governed by Theodosius as Valens' successor.89 The division of Illyricum into an eastern and a western portion was ne-
Wietersheim-Dahn II, 62-63, called it ein albernes Marchen; other historians who re- jected it are quoted by Rauschen 1897, 39. The authenticity of the account is by now generally acknowledged; Seeck, Geschichte 5, 124-125; Stein 1959, 1, 295; Dudden 1925, 173. Theodoret erroneously located the battle in Thrace. It was fought at a consi- derable distance from Sirmium. The Sarmatians would not have dared to attack Ora- tian's forces in Pannonia secunda. Theodosius' friendship with Maiorian, whom he took with him as magister ulriusque militiae when he assumed the command in the East (Sidnonius, Paneg. on Maiorian 107-115), dated from 378, when the general was com- mander of Aquincum. All this points to Valeria.
87 Ammianus XVII, 13, 1; XIX, 11, 1.
88 Gregory of Nazianzen, Or. XXII, 2, PG 35, 1140. On the date, see Gallay 1943,
252.
89 The much discussed administrative history of Illyricum concerns us only inso- far as it touches the military history of the years 379-395. Most earlier dissertations are by now superseded by Mazzarino 1942, 1-59. Cf. also Greenslade 1945; Demougeot 1947; Palanque 1951, 5-14; Grumel 1952, 5-46. With the removal of the Gothic danger, a separate Illyrian prefecture became superfluous. In the autumn of 380, Macedonia and Dacia fell back to the West and seemed to have remained Western until 387, the year in which Maximus drove Valentlnian II from Italy. From then on, eastern Il- lyricum was neither Eastern nor Western but Theodosian. There are good reasons to assume that the actual control passed to Theodosius as early as 383; cf. Pearce 1938, 235- 237. In 384, he handed the prefecture back to Valentinian II; Lot 1936, 334. It was merely a polite gesture. Whatever the administrative and ecclesiastical status of Il- lyricum from 383 to 395 may have been, it belonged for all practical purposes, and, first of all, militarily to the East. From the Drina to the Black Sea, the Huns faced the armies of Theodosius.
HISTORY • 35
cessitated by purely military reasons. Gratian took over the fight against the invaders of Pannonia.
The ecclesiastical historians Socrates and Sozomen speak vaguely about the tribes from the banks of the Hister, or just barbarians.90 The Roman orator Symmachus (ca. 340-402), too, refers to the victories of the two emperors without saying who the enemies were.91 The poets are, fortunately, more specific. From Pacatus and Ausonius we learn that the peoples who had driven the Sarmatians against and west of the Danube were now attacking the limes themselves and piercing them at many points. Theo- dosius was still in Spain when the Goths, Huns, and Alans broke into Va- leria. "Whatever the Goth wastes, the Huns plunders, the Alan carries off, Arcadius will later wish [to recapture]" (Quidquid atterit Gothus, quid- quid rapit Chunus, quidquid aufert Halanus, id olim desiderabit Arcadius).92 "Alas, I have lost the Pannonias" (Perdidi infortunata Pannonias) laments the res publica, imploring Theodosius to come to her rescue. Pacatus was exaggerating. Pannonia was not yet lost, but it was under heavy attack. At the end of 378, Ausonius, friend and teacher of Gratian, consul for 379, received in Trier good news:
All foes now vanquished (where the mixed Frankish and Suebian hordes vie in submission, seeking to serve in our Roman armies; and where the wandering bands of Huns had made alliance with the Sarma- tians; and where the Getae with their Alan friends used to attack the Danube — for victory borne on swift wings me the news of this), lo now the Emperor comes to grace my dignity, and with his favor crowns the distinction which he would fain have shared.93
It perhaps would be wrong to attach too great importance to the differentiation between Sauromatae and Alani and the alleged alliance between the barbarians, though the Sarmatians, attacked by the Goths, actually might have turned to the Huns for help. The victories cannot have been as decisive as they looked from far-away Trier — for the war went on.
90 Socrates V, 6, 572; Sozomen VII, 4.
91 Ep. I, 95.
92 Pacatus XI, 4.
93 Praecatio consults designati pridie Kal. Ian. fascibus sumplis 31-35. I follow the text and translation of H. G. E. White, Loeb I, 51-52. For another translation, see Jasinski 1935, 1, 35-37. The reading of v. 33 is not quite certain. Toll (1671, 345, n.14) suggested Sauromatae . . . Chunus; Schenkl, MGH AA V, 2, 18, note, sua iunxerat agmina Chunis. The meaning, however, is clear.
36 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
Gratian stayed in Sirmium throughout February and the first half of March. On April 5, he was in Tricciana,94 the present Sagvar, a town on the road from Sopiana to Arrabona, about 10 miles south of the north- western shore of Lake Balaton.95 What he did in northern Pannonia we again learn from a few passages in Ausonius. The Gallic rhetor may have somewhat exaggerated the emperor's exploits but he did not invent them, as the outcome of the fighting shows. In the thanksgiving for his con- sulship, addressed to Gratian at Trier at the end of 379,% Ausonius extols the young ruler for having "pacified in a single year the Danubian and the Rhenish frontiers."97 He hails him as Sarmalicus "because he has conquered and forgiven [vincendo et ignoscendo] that people."98 In an epigram Ausonius praises Gratian, who "midst arms and Huns ferocious and Sauromatae dangerous in stealth, whatever rest he had from hours of war, in camp he lavished it all on the Clarian muses."99 In a nightmare Ausonius saw himself as a disarmed Alan prisoner of war dragged through the streets.100
By the middle of June the situation had so much improved that Gratian could hand over the command to one of his generals and leave for Italy.101 Besides, the new uprising of the Alamanni in the West required his pre- sence on the Rhine.
Hunnic Pressure on the Lower Danube
We need not follow the struggle between the Visigoths and Theodosius' armies. If there were still Huns among the barbarians, they were at the most a few stragglers who had been separated from their hordes, or broken men. But the Hunnic danger was by no means over. In the winter 381/2, Sciri and Carpodacians, "mixed with Huns," crossed the Danube,
94 Seeck 1919, 109, convincingly amended Triv. in the subscription of Cod. Theodos. XI, 36, 26, into Trice, i.e., Tricciana.
95 A. Graf 1936, 122-123.
96 Jouai 1938, 235-238, contra Rauschen 1897, 27, 44-45, who dated the poem, less probably, in September.
97 Gratiarum Actio ad Gratianum Imperatorem pro consulalu II, 7-8.
98 The Alans, whom Gratian "at an enormous price" won to his side (Epit. de caes. XLVII, 6; Zosimus IV, 35, 2), were probably among those whom he "forgave." Gratian was so fond of the Alans that he sometimes wore their dress. "When he fled from Paris to Lyon, he had barely three hundred horsemen with him; the army almost to the last man had gone over to Maximus. The loyal horsemen were evidently the emperor's beloved Alans.
99 Epigr. XXVI, 8-10, written 379 (Jouai 1938, 241).
100 Ephemeris 7 (8), 17-18. On the date, end of 379 or 380, see Pichon 1906, 309-312.
101 At the beginning of July, Gratian was in Aquileia (Seeck 1919, 250).
HISTORY . 37
to be driven back after a few skirmishes.102 The episode seems to be sig- nificant only insofar as it shows that the Huns were unable to prevent more active tribes north of the Danube from acting on their own. Yet Theodosius could not have failed to realize that the terrible horsemen who had made themselves masters, though as yet not absolute masters, of the teeming mass of barbarians in "Scythia" might someday prove to be a greater danger to his pars than the Goths. He made peace with the Visigoths in the fall of 382.
Weakened by epidemics,103 their bands thinned out by desertions, deadly tired of incessantly moving from place to place, the Visigoths were more than willing to come to some agreement with the emperor. They wanted land to settle and, if they could get them, subsidies. Theodosius wanted soldiers. The peace treaty gave the Goths large tracts in Moesia inferior and eastern Dacia ripensis;104 it gave the emperor troops to guard the Danube from Oescus (on the Danube near the confluence with the river Golem Iskr) to Durostorum. Themistius' New Year's address of January 1, 383, must not be taken literally. After his experiences with the barbarians Theodosius could not have expected that, like the Celts in Galatia,105 the Goths would become good and law-abiding Roman cit-
102 Zosimus IV, 34, 6, p. 190. The date is not quite certain. Zosimus places the short campaign between the submission of Athanaric and his retainers (Athanaric died shortly afterward, on January 25, 381) and Promotus' victory over the Greuthungi in 386. As a rule, the transdanubian barbarians timed their raids so that they crossed the river as soon as it was frozen in order to recross it with their booty before the thaw set in. In the second half of December and in January of the years 383, 384, and 385, Theodosius was in Constantinople. But he issued no laws between January 13 and Feb- ruary 20, 382, time enough to rush to the frontier and drive the robbers back, provided he actually took part in the action. In 381, the Huns on the lower Danube apparently kept quiet. Terentius, bishop of Tomis in Scythia minor, left his flock to take part in the council at Constantinople. Cf. N. Q. King, TU 63, 1937, 635-641, which indicates that at the time Scythia minor was comparatively safe.
The Sciri, probably the descendants of those named in the famous Protagenes in- scription, cannot be localized. Carpodaci means Daci in the land of the Carpi; cf. U. Kahrstedt, Prdhist. Zeitschr. 4, 1912, 83-87.
103 "The Goths were perturbed and terrified not by groundless fear nor by unne- cessary suspicion but because of a raging epidemic and an excessively hot and unhealthy climate. Lastly they then fled in order to escape; afterward they returned and asked for peace in order to live" (Non enim inani metu, nec superflua suspicione, sed saeviente lue et ardenti pestilentia perturbati Gothi ac territi sunt. Denique tunc fugerunt, ut vae- derent; regressi postea pacem rogaverunt, ut viverent), (Ambrose, Ep. XV, PL 16, 989; written early in 383, Palanque 1933, 508-509.)
104 Schmidt 1934, 185.
105 Or. XVI (Themistius), 121c, d.
38 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
izens. But he certainly hoped they would serve him as a defense.106 A year before, Athanaric's retainers were settled on the right bank of the river "to prevent any incursions being made against the Romans."107 Zo- simus, like Themistius, did not name the potential enemy. Eunapius of Sardes was explicit. The emperor, he wrote, gave the Goths cattle and land, expecting them to form "an unconquerable bulwark against the inroads of the Huns."108 As federates the Visigoths were bound to serve whenever and wherever they were called, but their main and permanent assignment was to defend themselves. By fighting for their new home, they fought for Rome. As long as they held the watch on the Danube, the northern Balkan provinces, except easternmost Scythia minor, seemed to be safe. For a few, all too few years, the Roman population in the rav- aged towns and villages enjoyed a modicum of peace. In 384 or 385 a barbarian horde crossed the frozen Danube near its mouth and took Halmyris.109 But this was outside the Gothic territory. Shortly after- wards Hunnic hordes raided Scythia.uo
In 386, again to the east and west of the Gothic watch on the Danube, barbarians struck, in some parts deeply, into Roman lands. An edict of July 29, 386, gives a strange picture of the situation in the Balkans: "Because the procurators of the mines within Macedonia, Dacia mediterranea, Moesia, and Dardania,111 who are customarily appointed from the decurions and who exact the usual tax collections, have removed themselves from this compulsory public service by pretending fear of the enemy [simulate hoslili me tu], they shall be dragged back to the fulfillment of their du- ties."112 The procurators were certainly willing to use any excuse for shirk-
106 Ibid., 212a.
107 Zosimus IV, 34, 5.
108 pr FUQ iv, 33. The fragment does not, as if often assumed, refer to 376 but to 382. In 376, the Goths were not given land and cattle. It was only in 382 that they went — for awhile, at least — behind the plough in Thrace; Or. XVII (Themistius), 212a, b.
109 philostorgius, Hist, eccles. X, 6, pp. 127-128. At the time of the raid Eunomius was in Halmyris, where he was exiled after the death of Gratian (X, 5), at the latest at the beginning of 385. He was sent to Caesarea in Cappadocia before the death of Flacilla (X, 7). Flacilla died before the winter of 386 (Seeck, Geschichte 5, 521). This raid has been strangely misdated and misplaced. Giildenpenning (1885) dated it in the winter, 381/2; Rauschcn (1897, 198) confused it with the invasion of the Grcuthungi in 386; Seeck, Geschichte 5, 519) thought the barbarians were the Sarmatians against whom Bauto fought, but that was in Hungary whereas Halmyris was in the Dobrogea.
110 Callinicus LXI. Thompson 1948, 36, erroneously dated the raid in 395; he over- looked that it took place in Hypatius' twentieth year, i.e., 385 or 386.
111 On the mines in the Balkan peninsula, cf. Cantacuzene 1928, 75ff.
112 Cod. Theodos. I, 32, 5 = Cod. lust. XI, 7, 4.
HISTORY • 39
ing their most unpleasant duties, but they could not invent an enemy if there was none. The sequence in which the four provinces are named leaves no doubt that it was the Morava-Vardar Valley in which the enemy operated; that they could spread fear as far as Macedonia shows that the raiders were swift-riding horsemen. They may not have been many; still they were strong enough to overrun the Roman troops, pro- bably by-passing fortified places, and returning unmolested with their booty from where they came. There was no other enemy then and there which could make such raids into the western Balkans but the trans- danubian Huns.
The invaders in the East were Germans. In the summer of 386, Greuthun- gi, led by Odotheus, and their allies appeared on the left bank of the lower Danube and asked Promotus, master of the soldiers in Thrace, for per- mission to cross the river; they wanted land for settlement. When their request was rejected, they tried to force their way into the empire. Pro- motus inflicted a crushing defeat on them.113
Zosimus, following two sources, tells the same event twice. He gives a detailed account of the stratagem by which Promotus deceived the bar- barians; the poet Claudian indulges in a gory description of the slaughter of the Greuthungi. But neither of these two authors, shows any interest in the antecedents of the short war: it was just another outbreak of the well- known "insanity" of the savages. Though unlikely, it is not impossible that Zosimus' sources contained more about the Greuthungi and the reasons why they trekked south. For it was a trek, the migration of a very large group of peoples in search of a new home. Zosimus stresses that they had their wives and children with them. How many they were we are not told. Claudian certainly exaggerates the number of boats manned by the flower of barbarian youth and sunk by the Romans. But even if their number was not three thousand, as he wrote, but only one thousand, with no more than three or four men in each, we would arrive at a figure of close to ten thousand arms-bearing men. A German army could number a quarter or a fifth of the population. However, even if the Greuthungi, together with all the tribes and fractions of tribes which joined them,114 numbered not fifty but thirty or twenty thousand (both of Zosimus' sources call them "an immense horde"), the fact that such a great mass was able to defy their Hun lords and break through to the Danube is most significant.
113 Claudian, 4th Cons. lion. 623-635; Zosimus IV, 35 and 38-39. The chroniclers (CM I, 386; II, 62) have only a few lines.
114 From verses 22-28 in Claudian's 3rd Cons. Hon., nothing can be learned about the allies of the Greuthungi. Honorius, born September 9, 384, was still crawling when his father "came home victorius from his conquest over the tribes of the Danube" and
40 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
In 381, five years before, a few Huns had joined the Sciri and Carpo- dacians on a quick looting expedition. This time it was a whole people, led by an Ostrogothic prince,115 that threw off the Hunnic yoke. No wonder that Cassiodorus-Jordanes ignores the trek of the Greuthungi: The other Ostrogoths, those who followed the Amalungs, Cassiodorus records, did not dare to rise against the Huns. Unfortunately, we know nothing about the circumstances under which the Greuthungi were able to escape the Huns. There might have been dissension among their masters; perhaps those Huns who ruled over the Greuthungi were engaged in a looting ex- pedition in the north. But the fact remains that many thousand of the "human cattle" broke through the Hunnic fences. Hun power in the plains north of the lower Danube was still not firmly established.
Hunnic Horsemen Ride to Gaul
The situation at the borders of Pannonia and in the plain east of the Danube remained fluid also. Only a small part of the Sarmatians made peace with the Romans. The war with the others lasted throughout 383.116 Whether the victory that Valentinian's troops117 won over the elusive enemy in the spring of 384 was as decisive as it looked to the spectators in the Colosseum118 in Rome is rather doubtful. The continuous attempts
brought him "Scythian bows, belts won from the Geloni a Dacian spear, or Suebian bridle." The Scythians are evidently the Greuthungi; cf. In Eutrop. II, 180, where the Greuthungus Tarbigilus is called a Scythian. On the Geloni, see n. 165. The Da- cians are named because they lived north of the river. The longhaired Suebus is, as in 4th Cons. Hon. 655, the symbol of the unconquered Germans. Claudian transferred the Suebi from the West to the East, as he also did in Bell. Gild. 37. For the buckles and belt plaques studded with jewels, cf. Cons. Stil. II, 88; Carm. min. XXIX, 12; Rapt. Pros. II, 94 (Parthica quae tantis variantur cingula gemmis); they were not character- istic of any particular barbarian people.
115 Odotheus = *Audatius (Schonfeld 1911).
116 "Already before, the Roman people had explicitly agreed to the burial of the slain Sarmati" (Dudum fando acceperut Romanus populus caesorum funera Sarmalarum). (Symmachus, Rel. II, 47, MGH AA 6, 1, 315-316.) For the date, the summer of 384, see Seeck, Geschichte 5, 195, 512; cf. also McGeachy 1942, 102. In Symmachus, dudum means as a rule "for years"; cf. Hartke 1940, 89-90.
117 Seeck, Geschichte 5, 208, suggested that they were under the command of Bauto. This is unlikely. As long as the tension between Maximus and the court in Milan lasted, the place of the generalissimo was in Italy, not at the Danube.
118 have seen the host of the conquered nation led in chains and those so sa- vage faces changed by a wretched pallor" ( Vidimus catenatum agmen viclae gentis induci illosque lam truces vultus misero pallore), (Symmachus, Rel. II, 47, MGH AA 6, 1, 315- 316). The edict of January 30, 400 (Cod. Theodos. VII, 20, 12), provides for the drafting
HISTORY • 41
of the Sarmatians to cross to the right bank of the Danube have their parallel in the migration of Odotheus' Greuthungi; they, too, seemed to have tried to shake off the Huns and find new pastures. Of the Huns themselves we get only a glimpse.
In the spring of 384, Hunnic horsemen rode through Noricum and Raetia towards Gaul, allies of the legitimate ruler, barbarians thrown against barbarians, called forth from their tents in the East as they were to be called so often afterward. The only source for the first appearance of the Huns in western Europe is a short passage in a letter of Bishop Am- brose to Valentinian II.119 It is not easy to date. Ambrose alludes to events of which we know little or nothing. Yet in view of the absence of any other information about the Huns in those years, even the smallest bit of information is of value.
On his return from Trier to Milan in December 383,120 Ambrose met in southern Gaul the troops of the usurper Maximus. They were on the march to occupy the passes over the Maritime Alps and the blocks along the Riviera. In Italy Ambrose saw the imperial army on its way in the opposite direction with the same destination. In the four months that had elapsed since Gratian was murdered, Maximus had made himself the undisputed master of Gaul; he could have invaded Italy anytime, and would not have hesitated could he have been sure that he had to fight there only the troops of Gratian's little brother Valentinian or, rather, of Bauto, his Frankish generalissimo.
Bauto was an experienced and resourceful soldier but his troops were few and, except for the Gothic mercenaries, not reliable. On the one side stood Maximus, a most orthodox man; on the other, the Arian empress- dowager Justina — the boy Valentinian did not count — and the pagan Bauto. When four years later Maximus marched into Italy, he met prac- tically no resistance. Bauto's army would have fought better in 383 and 384, before Justina began to "persecute" the orthodox majority of her subjects, but it almost certainly would have been defeated had Maximus
of Laeti, Alamanni, Sarmatians, vagrants, sons of veterans, persons who "are subject to draft and ought to be enlisted in our most excellent legions." The Sarmatians were evidently those in Italy and Gaul under the command of special praefecti (Not. Dign. [occ] XL 1 1, 33-70). It is unlikely that nearly all those Sarmatian settlements were es- tablished long before Gratian, as Barkoczi (1959, 7:4, 444-446, 452-453) assumes ; quite a number of them must have included those Sarmatians who fought the Romans as late as the 380's.
119 Ep. XXV-XXVIII, PL 16, 1081-1082.
120 Palanque 1933, 510.
42 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
decided to march. It was only the fear of Theodosius, ruler of the East, that held Maximus back. It was only the hope for help from the East that kept Bauto up. Maximus knew that an attack on Italy meant war with Theodosius. Bauto displayed all his forces along the western frontier; their task was to hold out as well as they could until Theodosius' armies joined the battle.
Maximus did strike, but not at Italy. He instigated the Juthungi to reassume their raids into Raetia.121 Still suffering from their defeats in 378 and 379, kept in check by the greatly strengthened garrisons along the limes Rations,122 the Juthungi did not move until the summer of 383. At that time, when a terrible famine hit a vast part of the Western empire, and particularly Italy,123 "the second Raetia learned the danger of her own fertility. For being used to security from her own poverty, she drew an enemy on herself by her abundance."124 The invaders were the Juthungi. Gratian was about to march against them when the greater danger in the West forced him to leave the defense of the province to the troops stationed there and throw the mobile army into Gaul to stop Maximus.125
In the first month of 384, the Juthungi were preparing a new attack. It is unlikely that Maximus concluded a formal alliance with the bar- barians; all they needed was the consent, perhaps even only the tacit consent, of Maximus to the invasion of Raetia. If they pressed the attack, if they crossed the Alpine passes, Bauto was lost. Maximus could just walk into Italy, not as aggressor but as savior of the Roman world from the bar- barians.
It was then that Bauto turned to the Huns and Alans.126 From Am- brose's letter we learn nothing about the strength of the Hunnic and Alanic cavalry, the men who led them, the battles they fought. He speaks only
121 Ambrose, Ep. XXV-XXVIII, PL 16, 1081-1082.
122 Cod. Theodos. XI, 16, 15, of December 9, 382.
123 Palanque 1931, 346-356.
124 Ambrose, Ep. XVIII, XXIII, PL 16.
125 According to Socrates (V, 11, 2), followed by Sozomen (VII, 13, 1), and John of Antioch (fr. 78, EL 116). Maximus "rebelled against the Roman Empire and attacked Gratian, who was wearied in a war with the Alamanni." This cannot be true. On June 16, Gratian was still in Verona. He was assassinated in Lyon on August 25. Gratian must have arrived in northern Gaul in the first week of August at the latest. This would leave about fifty days for the march from Verona across the Brenner Pass into Raetia, the war with the Juthungi, and the march from the Danube to Paris, an impossibi- lity; cf. Rauschen 1897, 142.
126 Chuni alque Alani. . . Adversus Iuthungum Chiinus accitus est. The edition of the Benedictines of St. Maur, reprinted by Migne, has Hunni and Hunnus. The only work of Ambrose available in a critical edition in which the ethnic name occurs is De Tobia. There it is spelled Chunus. This was most probably also the spelling in the letter.
HISTORY • 43
in passing about their triumphs. It seems that they crushed the Juthungi in one great sweep. Their task was fulfilled. The Juthungian danger was removed. The Huns could return to their country.
But they did not return. They kept riding west, "approaching Gaul" (appropinquantes Galliae). When the news reached Milan, Bauto must have been horrified. Athough Theodosius had decided to defend Italy, he was anything but willing to assist Bauto in an attack on Maximus. If the Huns, Bauto's allies, broke into Gaul, Maximus must take this as an open declaration of war. They had to be stopped, and they were. Bauto purchased the retreat of the federates with gold.127 Again we are not told how much he paid them, but it may be assumed that they were richly compensated for the loss of booty they could have expected to make in Gaul. The Huns turned and rode home.128
In the history of the late Roman Empire all this would not deserve more than two lines; but for the study of the Huns the episode of 384 is of considerable importance. We can draw from it the following conclusions:
In one passage Ambrose names the Huns first, the Alans second, and in another one only the Huns, so the Huns were apparently not only the stronger but also the dominating group.
The Huns to whom Bauto turned for help cannot have lived deep in the barbaricum, far to the east. If their sites were not already west of the Danube, which is possible, they must have lived along or very close to the left bank of the river. As early as 384, large tracts of the Hungarian plain were held by the Huns and their Alanic allies.
The ductus of the Hun primates was not tumultuarius. As in 378, they made an agreement with a non-Hunnic power; they assembled the horse-
127 Tu [sc. Maxirne] fecisti incursari Rlietia, Valenlinianus suo tibi aaro pacem rede- mit (Ep. XXIV, 8, PL 16, 1081-1082). Ambrose knew, of course, that Valentinian bought peace for himself, not the murderer of his brother.
128 The intervention of the Huns took place after Ambrose's first embassy to Trier in the last month of 383 and before the second embassy of which he gave an account in Ep. XXIV. The letter has been dated in the winter of 384/5 (Rauschen 1897, 487), 386 (Richterm Ihm, Forster, quoted in Rauschen 1897, 487; Palanque 1933, 516-518; Dudden 1925, 345), and 387 (Tillemont 1738). Stein (1959, 1, 312, n. 4) thought it im- possible to determine whether Ambrose went on his second embassy before the middle of 384, or toward the end of the year, or early in 385. But at the end of Ep. XXIV, which Ambrose sent to Milan while he was still on his journey back, he implored Valentinian "to be on his guard against a man who concealed war under the cloak of peace." With the conclusion of a foedas between Theodosius and Maximus (Pacatus XXX) in August 384 (Seeck, Geschichte 5, 197, fn. pp. 513-514), the danger of an invasion of Italy was for the time being removed. It follows that Ambrose was in Trier in the spring or early summer of 384; cf. Seeck, Geschichte 5, 515; J. H. van Haeringen, Mnemosyne 1937, 233-239. In other words, the Huns were in Raetia in the early months of 384.
44 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
men, this time many more than in 378; they led them hundreds of miles through unknown lands. It would be absurd to suppose that Bauto's emissaries paid each Hun so and so many solidi. The gold was received by the Hun leaders. How they distributed it among their followers we do not know. But that they could keep their promise to ride back, al- though the temptation for a good number of the barbarians to take the money and continue looting must have been great, proves that the horse- men were firmly in their hands. These leaders, whatever their position, were men of authority.
Our information about the Huns, both west and east of the Carpathians, after 386 is even scantier than what we could extract from the very few sources so far. All we have are brief allusions in poetical works.
When in the summer of 387 Maximus offered to send a body of troops129 from Gaul to Italy to assist Valentinian against the barbarians who were threatening Pannonia,130 the situation along the middle Danube must have been very serious. Only the danger that the frontier defense might col- lapse completely and the barbarians pour into Italy itself could compel Valentinian, who had all the reasons to mistrust the unexpected readiness of his brother's murderer to help him, to accept the offer. Within a few weeks the "auxiliary" troops were, indeed, followed by Maximus' whole army, and Valentinian had to flee to Constantinople.
Zosimus, the only source for these events, wrote what his public ex- pected from him. He did not say who the enemies were, where they at- tacked, and what the outcome of the fighting was. His readers were in- terested only incidentally in history; they wanted to hear court gossip and malicious anti-Christian anecdotes. Neither did the pious crowd which filled the cathedral in Milan care who were the savages against whom the soldiers of their emperor or, for that matter, those of the other one in Gaul were fighting. In his sermons at Whitsuntide 387, Ambrose called them simply barbarus hostis.131 Fortunately, Pacatus is, though in a roundabout way, very explicit.
As is known, his Panegyric on Theodosius is the main source for the campaign against Maximus in 388. The army that the emperor assembled consisted almost wholly of barbarians. Theodosius made careful diplo- matic and military preparations; the peace with Persia was renewed,132
129 Seeck, Geschichte 5, 219, 519; Stein 1959, 1, 316.
130 Zosimus IV, 42, 5. The Paiones were Pannonians (see fn. 74), not the inhabi- tants of Paionia in Macedonia as Mazzarino (1942, 43-44) asserts.
131 Apologia Prophetae David XXVII, PL 14, 903; for the date, see Palanque 1933, 178-181 and 520-521; Dudden 1925, 1, 688, 713.
132 In 387 or 388 (Guldenpenning 1885, 154; Rauschen 1897, 258-259).
HISTORY • 45
the Saracens were appeased.133 Theodosius "accepted the barbarian peoples who vowed to lend him their help as fellow combatants."134 In concluding alliances with them, he not only removed the threat to the frontiers, he also increased the strength of his forces sufficiently to avoid the need to draft Roman citizens.
The barbarian horsemen fought magnificently. This was to be ex- pected. But what surprised all who knew their barbarians was the exem- plary discipline they held. "The army'11 — it is Christ who addresses the emperor135 — "gathered from many unsubdued nations, I bade to keep faith, tranquillity, and concord as if of one nation." Pacatus has nothing but praise for the allies:
0 memorable thing: There marched under Roman leaders and banners as Romans those who before had been our enemies, following the signs against which they had stood, and as soldiers filled the cities of Pan- nonia which they had emptied with fiendish devastation. Goths and Huns and Alans answered the roll call, changed guards, and rarely feared to be reprimanded. There was no tumult, no confusion, no looting in the usual barbarian way.136
In another passage Pacatus refers to the allies as barbarians who came "from the threatening Caucasus and the iced Taurus and the Danube which hardens the gigantic bodies." The last ones are evidently the Goths. Causasus and Taurus are not the mountains from which the Huns and Alans descended to join Theodosius but their original homes "somewhere in the east."137
Theodosius marched from Thessalonica up the Vardar and Morava valleys to Singidunum (modern Belgrade) and from there westward along the Sava to Siscia (modern Sisak, Yugovlavia), where he inflicted the first defeat on Maximus' troops. The second battle took place near Poetovio (modern Ptuj, Yugoslavia). The road from Singidunum via Siscia to Poe- tovio leads through Pannonia secunda and Savia. The towns which the Goths, Huns, and Alans raided before 388 were in those two provinces.
133 Pacatus XXXII, 2; cf. Galletier 1949, 98, n. 3.
134 Uti limiti manus suspecla decederet (Pacatus XXXII, 2). This phrase alone proves that the barbarians, omnes Scythicae nationes, were not federates in Pannonia; they came from beyond the borders (Alfoldi 1920, 08; Schmidt 1934, 201).
135 Ambrose, Ep. XL, 22, PL 16, 1109.
136 Pacatus XXXII, 4-5.
137 Taurus and Caucasus form one big mountain range (Pliny, HN VI, 37; Solinus XXXVIII, 10-13; Getica 7). The Caucasus is a part of the Taurus (Orosius, Hist. adv. Pagan. I, 42, 36-37). The sources of the Tanais are in the Caucasus, which is the norther- most part of the Taurus (Dionysius, Perieg. LXVI).
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46 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
It is most unlikely that Valeria had been immune to their inroads. In 387, the barbarians must have penetrated deep into Pannonia prima. Ambrose would not have spoken about a few marauders at the Danube; they would not have prompted Valentinian to accept Maximus' help.
Pacatus' testimony bears out the conclusions drawn here from Am- brose's letter: Eastern Hungary was Hun land. It certainly was not one great pasture for the herds and flocks of the Huns alone; there were also Alans and Goths, allied or subject to the Huns, Jazygian Sarmatians, Germanic tribes, and the aboriginal Illyric population. But the Huns were the lords.
If in 388 Huns fought for the Romans, four years later Hunnic horse- men ravaged again the unfortunate Balkan provinces. From Claudian's In Rufinum and his Panegyric on Stilicho's Consulship, we learn that Huns crossed the Danube and joined the German enemies of the Romans. Claudian's poems, the one a vitriolic invective, the other a hyperbolic eulogy, are not exactly reliable sources for the dark period that followed Theodosius' victory over Maximus. Still, Claudian is a paragon of exac- titude compared with Zosimus, whose anecdotic account permits the re- construction of the events of those years barely in their broadest outlines.
A good number of barbarians, apparently mainly Visigoths, deserted the imperial standards on the eve of the campaign in 388 and turned robbers. For almost four years they terrorized Macedonia, pillaging farms, investing highways, swiftly rushing out from their hiding places in the swamps and forests and as swiftly disappearing "like ghosts."138 Their ranks, swelled by more deserters after the end of the war in Italy, grew into large and well-organized bands, like the Vargi and Scamarae half a century later. In the summer of 391, the situation became so desperate that Theodosius granted civilians the right of using arms against the brigands,139 a bold measure when one considers how easily the miners and other proletarians could have joined the bands as they had joined the Goths in 378.
In the fall the emperor himself took the field. Already the first en- counters proved that the local forces were insufficient; after a severe de- feat in which he almost lost his life, Theodosius called in reinforcements from the army in Thrace. The result was that large hordes of transdanubian barbarians broke through the limes and poured deep into the plain north of the Haemus (Balkans). What until then was a punitive expedition, though on a great scale, became a horrible war.140 Jerome was not sure
138 Zosimus IV, 48-50; cf. also Eunapius, fr. 58 and 60.
139 Cod. Theodos. IX, 14, 2.
140 In the standard histories, the war of 391-392 is barely mentioned. The leader of the Visigoths was possibly Alaric (Mazzarino 1942, 256; Demougeot, 1947, 115).
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HISTORY • 47
that in the end the Goths might not conquer.141 John Chrysostom's letter to a young widow gives an idea of the magnitude of the catastrophe that befell Thrace. He consoled her by pointing out how much more miserable women like the empress were. Theodosius' wife
is ready to die of fear, and spends her time more miserably than cri- minals condemned to death because her husband ever since he assumed the crown up to the present day has been constantly engaged in war- fare and fighting. . . . For that which has never taken place has now come to pass; the barbarians leaving their own country have overrun an infinite space of our territory, and that many times over, and having set fire to the land, and captured the towns, they are not minded to return home again, but after the manner of men who are keeping hol- iday rather than making war, they laugh us all to scorn. It is said that one of their kings declared that he was amazed at the impudence of our soldiers, who although slaughtered more easily than sheep still expect to conquer, and are not willing to quit their own country, for he said that he himself was satiated with the work of cutting them to pieces.142
Theodosius returned to Constantinople in 391, "so depressed at what he and his army had suffered from the barbarians in the marshes that he decided to renounce wars and battle, committing the management of those affairs to Promotus."143 The experienced general had no better luck. Whether the enemy was actually as strong as Claudian indicates is not known. He never gives numbers in his poems; instead he heaps names upon names. In the invective against Rufinus Claudian lists Getae, Sarmatae, Daci, Massagetae, Alani, and Geloni,144 in the Panegyric on Stilicho, written three years later, Visi, Bastarnae, Alani, Huns, Geloni,
141 Scio quendam Gog et Magog tarn de prae.se.nti quam de Ezecliiel ad Gothorum nuper in terra nostra vagantium historiam retulisse; quod utrum verum sit, proelii ipsius fine monstrabitur (Jerome, Hebraicae quaestiones in libro geneseos X, 21, CCSL LXII, 11). Monstrabitur, the reading in the Codex Monacensis G299, formerly known as Frisingensis 99, saec. VIII-IX, is preferable to monstralur in the later codices. The war was still going on.
142 Ad viduam iunioram IV, PG 48, 605. The date, between May and June 392, has been definitely established by G. Brunner, Zeilschrift fiir katholische Theologie 65, 1941, 32-35. Brunner'S article escaped the attention of G. H. Ettllnger, who dates the treatise to 380-381 (Traditio 16, 1960, 374). The inscription on the equestrian statue of Theodosius, erected after the war, goes beyond the usual auxesis of the deeds of the hero; the emperor "destroyed the Scythians in Thrace" (Revue des etudes grecques 9, 1896, 43).
143 Zosimus IV, 50, 1.
144 In Ruf. I, 305-313.
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Getae, and Sarmatae.145 Promotus was killed in an encounter with the Bastarnae. Stilicho, his successor, is said to have scattered the Visigoths, and overthrown the Bastarnae;146 he would have annihilated the barbarian hordes, penned in the limits of a small valley, "had not a traitor [Bufinus] by a perfidious trick abused the emperor's ear and caused him to with- hold his hand; hence the sheathing of the sword, the raising of the siege, and the granting of treaties to the prisoners."147
Bufinus acted as did Stilicho three years later and again in 402 when he made a compact with the Visigoth king Alaric and allowed him to with- draw. What Claudian said in praise of Stilicho, he could have said about Bufinus: "Concern for thee, 0 Borne, constrained us to offer a way to es- cape to the beleaguered foe lest, with the fear of death before their eyes, their rage should grow the more terrible for being confined."148 The "pris- oners" with whom Bufinus, clearly with the consent of Theodosius if not at the emperor's direct instructions, concluded alliances were Goths and Huns.149 What the conditions of the foedera were, Claudian does not say. But many of the Huns did not ride back to their tents across the Danube; they stayed, as we shall see, in Thrace.
In the summer of 394, Theodosius again led an army against an usurper in the West, Eugenius. It was at least as strong as the one with which he had taken the field in 388. "The fortunes of Borne stood at a razor's edge."150 It was not, as six years earlier, a war between the legitimate ruler and an usurper; it was a war between Christ and Jupiter, the monks of the Thebais and Etruscan augurs, the God-loving East and the idol- worshippers of the West. Eugenius fought for the gods, and the gods fought for him. His soldiers carried on their standards the picture of Hercules Invictus151 and on the height of the Julian Alps stood golden statues of
145 Cons. Stil. I, 94-96.
146 In Ruf. I, 317; Zosimus IV, 51.
147 Cons. Stil. I, 112-115.
148 Bell. Goth. 96-98.
149 In Ruf. I, 320-322, is a difficult passage: Rufinus distulit inslantes . . . pugnasj Hunorum laturus opem, quos adfore bellojnorai et invisis mox se coniungere castris. Plat- nauer, Loeb I, 49, translates Hunorum laturus opem by "meaning to ally himself with the Huns," which is impossible. St. Axelson (Studia Claudianea, 23-24) assumes that Hunorum laturus opem is late Latin for Hunis laturus opem; this is entirely without foundation. At my request, Professor Harry L. Levy analyzed the passage in its context and rendered it by "postponed the impending battle, intending to give [to the Goths] the aid of the Huns, who he had ascertained would join the war and soon associate them- selves with the camp [of the Goths] hated [by the Romans]." Approximately the same interpretation had been suggested by Gesner in his edition of Claudian (1749). It seems that the Goths and the Huns fought their own wars.
150 [Reference missing in manuscript. — Ed.]
151 Theodoret, Hist, eccles., V, 24, 4, 17.
HISTORY • 49
Jupiter,152 ready to throw their thunderbolts at the Galilaeans should they dare to approach the sacred soil of Italy. In Rome, Nicomachus Flavianus, the leader of the turbulent pagan revival, read the coming victory of Eugenius in the entrails of the sacrificed bulls;153 in Constan- tinople, Theodosius waited anxiously for an answer from the prophetic hermit John of Lycopolis as to whether he or the godless tyrant would win the war.154 He prayed and fasted. "He was prepared for war not so much with the aid of arms and missiles as of fasts and prayers" (Praeparatus ad bellum non tamen armorum talorumque quam ieiimiorum orationumque subsidiis), said Rufinus,155 and all Christian authors are agreed that it was the power of God which granted Theodosius the glorious victory over the pagans. Ambrose compared him with Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and David.156 Yet when the emperor finally went to war he did not carry a sling; he marched at the head of a huge army.
Theodosius busied himself through the winter of 393/4 with elaborate military preparations.157 His recruiting officers in the East enlisted Arme- nians, Caucasian mountaineers, and Arabs. The Visigothic allies were ordered to furnish as many troops as they could. Even if those did not number more than twenty thousand, as Jordanes asserts,158 they must have formed a large contingent.159 Alans came, led by Saul,160 whom we shall meet soon again. And then came, to strengthen God's warriors, "many of the Huns of Thrace with their phylarchoi."161
The chronicler John of Antioch is the only one to mention the Huns. It is understandable that the church historians passed them over in silence; they were not interested in the composition of the auxiliaries.162 That Jordanes spoke only of the Goths is in no way remarkable. But the ab- sence of the Huns from the long list of peoples in Claudian requires an explanation.
152 Augustine, Be civ. Dei V, 26.
153 Sozomenus VII, 22.
154 Rufinus, Hist, eccles. XI, 33, PL 21, 539; Sozomenus, VII, 22.
155 Ibid.
156 Ep. LXII, 4, PL 16, 1239.
157 Philostorgius, Hist, eccles. XI, 2.
158 Getica 145.
159 According to Crosius (Hist. adv. Pagun VII), thirty-five more than ten thousand Goths were killed in the battle on the Frigidus; the number is grossly exaggerated.
160 Zosimus IV, 37; John of Antioch, fr. 187, EI 119.
161 John of Antioch, fr. 187, EI 119.
162 "Barbarian auxiliaries," Theodoret, Hist, eccles. V, 24, 3; "many barbarian auxiliaries from beyond the Ister," Socrates V, 25; "from the banks of the Ister," Sozo- menus VII, 24.
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The poet names Arabs, Armenians, Orientals from the Euphrates, Halys and Orontes, Colchi, Iberians, Medes from the Caspian Sea, Par- thians from the Niphates, and even Sacae and Indians.163 He mentions the Goths and, by a circumscription,164 the Alans. But the Huns do not exist for him, although he must have known that they fought for Theodosius. He may barely allude to them by listing the Geloni among the auxi- liaries.165
One could think that by ignoring the Huns Claudian expresses his abhorrence of those lowest of the barbarians, his reluctance to give them any credit for the victory of the good cause. But I believe the close relationship between the Huns and the hated Rufinus was the real, or at least, the stronger motive. It is true that Claudian depicts Ru- finus in the blackest colors as the devoted friend of the Goths. But when Stilicho, at Rufinus' orders, had to give up the command of the Eastern troops, these were not, as one would expect, afraid that now the Goths would be their masters. They feared, rather, that Rufinus would make them "the slaves of the foul Hun or the restless Alan."166 This is strange. The only explanation of which I could think would be Rufinus' decision to rely on the Huns and Alans to counterbalance the power of the Goths. It would have been not the most pleasant, but certainly the most efficient means. A few years later the anti-Gothic faction in Constantinople played, indeed, with the idea of allying itself with the Huns against the Goths,
163 Bell. Gild. 243-245; 3rd Cons. Hon. 68-72; Cons. Stil. I, 154-158.
164 Bell. Gild. 245.
165 It is doubtful that behind Claudian's Geloni a real people is hidden. Vegetius apparently took them for a poetic name of the Huns and Alans. He turned Claudian's Parlhis sagiltas lendere doclior,j eques Gelonis imperiosior in Fescennina de nupliis Ho- norii Augusti I, 2-3 into prose: ad peritiam sagillandi, quam in serenitale tua Persa mi- ratur, ad equitandi scientiam uel decorem, quae Hunorum Alanorumque natio uellit imi- tari (Epit. rei milit. Ill, 26). This, by the way, is another proof that the emperor whom Vegetius addressed was Valentinian III (see Cons. Stil. I, 109-110); the Geloni are named together with the Alans, Huns, and Sarmatae. Claudius imitated Statius (Achil. II, 419) but to fit the hexameter he transposed the weapons: Statius' falcemque Geles arcumque belonns became falce Gelonus. . . area Getae. Claudian's Geloni are still tattooing their Todies (In Ruf. I, 313) because Virgil (Georg. II, 115) had mentioned pictos Gelonos. The epithet "fur-clad" (4th Cons. Hon. 486) was applicable to any northern barbarians. Indeed, the Geloni are just one of the various savage peoples somewhere in the north; cf. Paneg. Prob. 119; Carm. min. 52, 76-77 (Gelonos sive Getas); In Eutrop. II, 103. In Epithal. 221, the Geloni are coupled with the Armenians, again far to the north, op- posed to Meroe, far to the south. In other words, they are what they were since Au- gustus' time, ullimi Geloni (Horace, Carm. II, 20, 19). The Geloni in Sidonius' Paneg. on Avitus 237, where they are still wearing the sickle sword, are a mere literary remi- niscence.
166 In Ruf. II, 270-271.
HISTORY • 51
the wolf against the lion.167 I suspect that Rufinus had the same intention. It cannot be a coincidence that in the autumn of 395 he had a Hunnic, not a Gothic, bodyguard; only after they were cut down to the last man could General Gainas' soldiers kill him.168
That he gave them land in Thrace points also to a most unusual and close relationship between Rufinus and the Huns. This is the only time that Huns were admitted into the empire. All other alliances with the Huns were concluded with tribes or tribal coalitions in the barbaricum. The Huns in Thrace must have numbered several thousand, for it is most unlikely that the Hun warriors, made Roman federates, should have been willing to live without their wives and children, herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, and their carts, which they obviously did not take with them when they broke into Thrace. They must have sent for them.
John of Antioch's explicit statement that the Huns lived under phy- larchoi allows us also to draw some conclusions as to their political or- ganization. In the usage of the Byzantine writers the term <pvXa.Q%o<; is not sharply defined; it is interchangeable with rj-ye/ucbv, rjyov/uevog, a.Q%(ov, and even fiaaiXevq. Phylarchos means the leader of any larger group; the phyle can be a tribe, comprising a number of clans, a multitude of tribes, or a whole people. If the Huns in Thrace had a king, a ruler over the phylarchoi, John could not have failed to say so. Their phylarchoi were almost certainly tribal leaders. But from this it does not necessarily follow that the Huns beyond the Danube were likewise divided into in- dependent tribes without a common leader. It is conceivable that those Huns who allied themselves with the Romans did not want to submit to a ruler over them. In any case, there evidently was no Hun ruler in the 390' s strong enough to enforce his will on all tribes, to prevent Hun groups from waging their own wars and making their own peace. Those in the Hungarian plain pillaged Pannonia, those in Rumania Thrace; they concluded alliances and broke them at their, not a king's, pleasure. This did not exclude the possibility of concerted action of groups of Huns on a large scale. Such was the great raid into Asia in 395.
The Invasion of Asia
In the summer of 395, large hordes of Huns crossed the Don near its mouth, turned southeast, and broke through the Caucasus into Persia and the Roman provinces to the south and southwest of Armenia.
167 The lions in Synesius' Egyptian Tale are the Goths, the wolves are the Huns; cf. Ch. Lacombrade, REA 48, 1946, 260-266.
168 CM I, 65034.
52 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
One group devasted the country south and west of the Anti-Taurus. When they crossed the Euphrates, the Romans attacked and destroyed them. Another group, led by Basich and Kursich, rode down the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates as far as Ctesiphon. On the report that a Persian army was on the march against them, they turned back but were overtaken. One band was cut down; the other, leaving their prisoners behind, fled through Azerbaijan and returned over the Caspian Gates to the steppes. A third group ravaged eastern Asia Minor and Syria.
In the following year the East was trembling with fear that the Huns, this time as the allies of the Persians, would come back. But the danger passed, possibly because the Romans came to an agreement with the Per- sians. When in 397 a few Hun hordes broke once more into Roman Ar- menia, they were easily driven back.
The cause of the invasion in 395 is said to have been a famine in the country of the Huns. Indeed, they drove away as many herds of cattle as they could. But first of all they made thousands of prisoners. The raid became a gigantic slave hunt.
These are, in broad outlines, the events. Instead of referring to the texts in footnotes, which themselves would require more notes, I shall discuss the various topics and problems one by one, incorporating the material that ordinarily would go into annotations.
The Sources
The sources flow so copiously that there is no need to make use of works of doubtful value as, for example, The Life of Peter the Iberian.169 Except Theodoret (see below), the Greek and Latin sources170 are adduced by all standard works, but most of the information contained in Syriac li- terature has been disregarded. I refer to the legend of Euphemia and the Goth,171 a mamre (poem) of Cyrillonas (fl. ca. 400),172 John of Ephesus
169 Cf. P.Peeters, Analecta Bollandiana 50, 1952-1959. According to the biography of St. Ephraem, attributed to Sem'on of Samosate, Edessa was besieged by the Huns while the saint was still alive; he died in 373. Such an important event should have taken a prominent place in the detailed report which Ammianus Marcellinus gives of the events in those years. He repeatedly mentions Edessa but says nothing about a siege by the Huns. The legendary biography evidently antedated the invasion of 394 by more than two decades. For the Armenian sources, see Appendix.
170 Claudian, In Ruf. II, 26-35; Jerome, Ep. LX and LXXVII; Socrates VI, 1; Philostorgius XI, 8.
171 Dobschiitz 1911, 150-199 (Greek); Burkitt 1913 (Syriac). It is probable but not certain that the Syriac version is the original; cf. Peeters 1914, 69-70.
172 On Cyrillonas (Qurilona), see Altaner 1960, 405.
Copyrighted material
HISTORY • 53
ca. 507-586) ; 173 and the Liber Chalifarum.™ In various respects they com- plement the Western sources. Some texts have been misunderstood and misinterpreted with the result that Hunnic history has been strangely distorted. Two examples will suffice.
The Arian historian Philostorgius (368 to after 433) begins his fairly detailed description of the Hunnic invasion of Asia in 395 with a brief summary of the earlier history of the people: "They first conquered and laid waste a large part of Scythia, then crossed the frozen Danube and, swarming over Thrace, devastated the whole of Europe."175 These lines have been quoted as referring to a Hunnic invasion of Thrace in the same year.176 Actually, Philostorgius telescoped three or more decades, from the Hunnic victory over the Goths to the repeated incursions into the Balkan provinces. The poet Claudian, too, is supposed to have described in the Invective against Rufinus an invasion of Europe by the Huns in 395. But the barbarians who devastated "all that tract of land lying be- tween the stormy Euxine and the Adriatic" were Goths, Geticae cavernae.111 Of the church historians, neither Socrates nor Sozomen178 mentions a Hunnic invasion of Thrace or any other province of the Balkans in 395. 179 The Eastern sources, though mainly concerned with the events in the Orient, know nothing of Hun raids into Thrace, not to speak of the "de- vastation of the whole of Europe."
Another often misunderstood passage occurs in Priscus' account of the East Boman embassy to Attila's court, Excerpta de legationibus Ro- manorum ad gentes (cited as EL), 46. In a conversation between the envoys from Borne and Constantinople, the West Boman Bomulus spoke about Attila's ambitious plans:
He desires to go against the Persians to expand his territory to even greater size. One of us asked what route he could take against the Persians. Bomulus answered that the land of the Medes was separated
173 Nau 1897, 60, trans, and annot. by Markwart 1930, 97-99. According to Mark- wart, the passage on the Hun Invasion of 395 is taken from the second book of John of Amid or Ephesus.
174 CSCO 4, third series, 106. A compilation of the eighth century based on two sixth-century chronicles.
175 Philostorgius XI, 8.
176 Sceck, Oeschichte 5, 274; Stein 1959, 1, 228; Thompson 1948, 26.
177 In Ruf. II, 36-38.
178 Hist, eccles. VIII, 25, 1, cited by Seeck, whom Thompson follows, as referring to 395, actually deals with events in 404-405.
179 Pseudo-Caesarius in Dialogus I (Sulpicius Severus), 68, speaks of the frequent crossings of the Danube by unnamed barbarians, not by the Huns in 395, as Seeck as- serted, again followed by Thompson.
54 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
by no great distance from Scythia and that the Huns were not ig- norant of this route. Long ago they had come upon it when a famine was in their country and the Romans had not opposed them on account of the war they were engaged in at that time. Basich and Kursich, who later came to Rome to make an alliance, men of the Royal Scythians and rulers of a vast horde, advanced into the land of the Medes. Those who went across say that they traversed a desert country, crossed a swamp which Romulus thought was the Maeotis, spent fifteen days crossing mountains, and so descended into Media. A Persian host came on them as they were plundering and overrunning the land and, being on higher ground than they, filled the air with missiles, so that, encompassed by danger, the Huns had to retreat and retire across the mountains with little loot, for the greatest part was seized by the Medes. Being watchful for the pursuit of the enemy, they took another road, and, having marched . . . days180 from the flame which rises from the stone under the sea, they arrived home.
The scribes, who made the excerpts, shortened the text, as they, in- cidentally, also shortened the immediately following story of the discov- ery of Ares' sword, much better preserved in the Getica. It is unlikely that Romulus merely said that the Romans did not oppose the Huns "because of the war they were engaged in at that time." He must have been more specific. And why should the Romans have opposed the Huns if their goal was Media? Evidently, Romulus spoke also about the Hun incur- sions into Roman territory, but the scribes omitted everything that had no immediate bearing on the invasion of Persian lands.
A comparison between Priscus and the Liber Chalifarum shows that both sources deal with the same invasion.
Priscus: "When the Persians counterattacked, the Huns retreated. The greater part of their loot was seized by the Medes."
Liber Chalifarum: "When the Huns learned that the Persians advanced against them, they turned to flight. The Persians chased them and took away all their loot."
Priscus is also in agreement with Jerome:
Priscus: "The Romans did not oppose them on account of war they were engaged in at that time."
Jerome, speaking of the Hun invasion in 395: "At that time the Roman army was away and held up by a civil war in Italy."
The war was the struggle between Stilicho and Rufinus in 395 (see Chapter XII). The Huns broke into Asia while the greater part of the
180 Lacuna in the codices B, M, P; "a few" in E, V, R.
HISTORY • 55
Eastern army stood in Italy or was on the march to Illyricum; it did not return to Constantinople and Asia Minor until the end of November.
It is hard to understand how in spite of their preciseness the texts could have been so often and so strangely misunderstood. Bury iden- tified the Huns with the Sabirs,181 Demougeot with the Hephthalites.182 Thompson dates the invasion of the Priscus account to 415-420;183 Gor- don, at least recognizing that the war in which the Romans were engaged had to be dated, decided on the one in the years 423-425.184 That the leaders of the Huns who came to Rome to conclude an alliance were the same who rode to the Tigris proves that their sites were in Europe. The Hunnish federates of the Romans were not Huns in Dagestan or the Kuban region; Aetius' friends lived on the Danube.
Basich and Kursich may have come to Rome in 404 or 407. Emperor Honorius was in Rome from February to July 404; two years later Stilicho defeated Radagaisus with the help of Hunnic auxiliaries. Except for the month of February, Honorius was again in Rome throughout 407, where he stayed until May, 408.185 In 409, Huns served in the Roman army.
The Chronicle of Edessa gives the most exact date: "In the year 706, the month tammuz (July 395), the Huns reached Osroene in northern Mesopotamia."186 They waged a veritable Blitzkrieg, so they cannot have crossed the Caucasus much earlier. The years in the Syriac sources vary slightly,187 but the texts agree in the main. "In the days of the emperors Honorius and Arcadius, the sons of Theodosius the Great, all Syria was delivered into their [i.e., the Huns'] hands by the treachery of the prefect Rufinus and the supineness of the general Addai."188 "But the Romans killed Rufinus, the hyparch of the emperor, while he was sitting at the feet of the emperor, for his tyranny was the cause of the coming of the Huns."189
They [i.e., the Huns] took many captives and laid waste the country, and they came as far as Edessa. And Addai, the military governor
181 Bury 1923, 1, 115, n. 1.
182 Demougeot 1951, 190, n. 384.
183 Thompson 1948, 31.
184 Gordon 1960, 202. To deal with Altheim's views would be a waste of time. Read- ing the Priscus passage a travers, he dates Basich's and Kursich's visit to Rome before instead of after the invasion which he thinks took place in the third (sic) century (Altheim 1962, 1, 15; 4, 319).
185 Seeck 1919.
186 TU 89, 1, 1892, 104.
187 The same month, without the year, in Michael the Syrian (Chabot 1904, 2, 3) and Bar Hebraeus (Wallis Budge 1932, 65), but in the year 708.
188 Joshua Stylites, W. Wright 1882, 7-8; Pigulevskaia 1940, 131.
189 Markwart 1930, 99.
56 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
[stratelales] at that time, did not give permission to the federates to go out against them because of treason in their midst.190
The rumor that Rufinus let the Huns into the empire was as current in the East as it was in the West. Rufinus was killed on November 27, 395. Addai (Addaeus), comes et magister utriusque militiae per orientem, is last named in an edict issued to him on October 3, 395.191
In 396, a new Hun invasion seemed to be imminent. "After a little while the Goths came again to Edessa with a certain general who had been sent by the emperor to his place to keep it from the enemies, the Persians, I mean, and the Huns, who had agreed to make war on this coun- try."192 Claudian, too, alluded to a threatening war with the Persians,193 but did not mention the Huns as their allies. We learn more about the feelings of the Syrians from the moving mamre of Cyrillonas:
Every day unrest, every day new reports of misfortunes, every day new blows, nothing but fights. The East has been carried into cap- tivity, and nobody lives in the destroyed cities. The West is being punished, and in its cities live people who do not know Thee. Dead are the merchants, widowed the women, the sacrifices have ceased. . . the North is threatened and full of fight. If Thou, 0 Lord, doest not intervene, I will be destroyed again. If the Huns will conquer me, oh Lord, why have I taken refuge with the holy martyrs? If their swords kill my sons, why did I embrace Thine exalted cross? If Thou willst render to them my cities, where will be the glory of Thine holy church? Not a year has passed since they came and devastated me and took my children prisoners, and, lo, now they are threatening again to humiliate our land. The South is also being punished by the cruel hordes, the South full of miracles, Thine conception, birth and crucifixion, still fragrant from Thine footsteps, in whose river Thou wert baptized, in whose siloe Thou hast cured, in whose jars was Thine precious wine, and in whose laps Thine disciples lay at the table.194
There was no other invasion of Syria in 397 as Claudian, against his better knowledge, asserted.195 He simply transferred the events of 395 to 397, equating the hated eunuch Eutropius with the equally hated Rufinus. No Greek or Syrian writer knows of a second coming of the Huns. Eu-
190 Burkitt 1913, 130-131 (Syriac); Dobschutz 1911, 150 (Greek).
191 Cod. Theodos. IV, 24, 6; Seeck 1919, 287.
192 Burkitt 1913, 146 (Syriac); Dobschutz 1921, 186 (Greek).
193 In Eutrop. II, 476-477.
194 Landersdorfer 1913, 15-16.
195 In Eutrop. I, 245-245; II, 114-115, 569-570.
HISTORY • 57
tropius fought some barbarian hordes, among whom there may have been Huns, in the Caucasus.196
The Course of the War
If Claudian is to be believed, the Huns crossed the Caucasus over the Caspia claustra,197 the Darial Pass; he adds: inopino tramite, "a pass where they were not expected,"198 because the northern barbarians came, as a rule, over the pass of Darband.199 It is difficult to determine how far the Huns penetrated into Asia Minor, Syria, and western Persia.
Socrates, Sozomen, and some Syriac sources describe the theater of the war in general terms: Armenia and other provinces of the East; Syria and Cappadocia; all Syria. In his commentary on Ezekiel ^%:\Q-\2,im probably written before 435,201 Theodoret wants to prove that Gog and Magog, whom he identifies with the Scythian peoples, live not far from Palestine. He reminds his readers that "in our times the whole Orient was occupied by them." The Scythians are the Huns, as in Jerome. They made war on the Phrygians, Galatians, Iberians, and Ethiopians. The first three names stand for Ooyag^id, ropeo, and Qo$e"k in the Septua- ginta as interpreted by Josephus.202
Philostorgius is more specific: The Huns broke through Greater Ar- menia into Melitene, reached from there Euphratesia, riding as far as Coelesyria.203 Claudian speaks of Cappadocia, Mount Argos, the Halys River, Cilicia, Syria, and the Orontes. Jerome names the cities on the Halys, Cydnus, Orontes, and Euphrates.204 The Huns came as far as An- tioch and Edessa.205
Two Syriac sources give more details. There are, first, the excerpts from the Ecclesiastical History of John of Ephesus:
196 Ibid., II, praef. 55; II, 367. Fargues (1933, 44, 89) greatly overrated Eutropius' victories.
197 In Ruf. II, 28.
198 Cf. Claudian, 4 th Cons. Hon. 102: Inopinus [Theodosius] utrumque [Maximus and Eugeniusj perculit et clausos monies, ut plana, reliqu.it.
199 Lydus, De magislratibus, Wunsche 1898, 140. The Huns returned over it. The "flame which rises from the stone under the sea" (Priscus) points to the oil country of Baku; cf. Markwart 1901, 97.
200 PG 81, 1204.
201 Cf. M. Richard, Revue des sciences philosophiques et ttidologiques 84, 1935, 106.
202 Jerome, Comm. in Ezechielem XI, PL 35, 356.
203 Philostorgius XI, 8.
204 In Ruf. II, 30-35; In Eutrop. I, 245-251; Jerome, Ep. LX, 16.
205 In Eutrop. II, 30-35; Jerome, Ep. IX, 16 (obessa Antiochia); LXXVII, 8; Bur- kitt 1913, see n. 190.
58 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
In the same year the Huns invaded the country of the Romans and devastated all regions of Syria along the Cahja mountains, namely Arzon, Mipherqet, Amid, Hanzlt, and Arsamisa t.206 When they had crossed the Euphrates, the bridge was cut off and the troops of the Romans gathered from various sides against them and annihilated them, and no one of the Huns escaped.
"Syria" here means Mesopotamia; the cities named are on and to the north of the. upper Tigris. The author continues to describe how the Huns, by cutting the aqueduct, forced the people who had taken refuge in the fortress of Zijat to surrender; most of them were massacred, the rest led away into captivity.
The Liber Chalifarum gives the following account:
In this year the cursed people of the Huns came into the land of the Romans and ran through Sophene, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Cappadocia as far as Galatia. They took many prisoners and with- drew to their country. But they descended to the banks of the Eu- phrates and Tigris in the territory of the Persians and came as far as the royal city of the Persians. They did no damage there but de- vastated many districts on the Euphrates and Tigris, killed many people and led many into captivity. But when they learned that the Persians advanced against them, they turned to flight. The Persians chased them and killed a band. They took away all their plunder and liberated eighteen thousand prisoners.
In the history of the Huns the invasion of Asia was an episode, though an important one. Three things can be learned from it. First, it shows what great distances the Huns were able to cover in one campaign, some- thing often overlooked in the historical interpretation of isolated Hunnic finds. Second, the Huns carried many young people, "the youth of Syria,"207 into captivity. Although this could have been surmised, the explicit testi- mony of the texts is definitely welcome. Third, there are a few lines in Theodoret which, as the whole text, have been ignored by all students of the Huns. According to Theodoret, many people in the regions over- run by the Huns joined them. Some were forced; we may assume that they had to do slave labor, collecting fuel, attending to the more unpleasant jobs in the households of the upper-class Huns, and so forth. But others ran over to the Huns and fought voluntarily in their ranks. Theodoret
206 Arzon is Arzanene; Mipherqet, Martyropolis; ArsomlSat, Arsamosata.
207 Claudian, In Eutrop. I, 250.
HISTORY • 59
did not paraphrase Ezekiel, nor did he interpret the words of the prophet; Ezekiel did not say that the Israelites would join the armies of Gog and Magog.
Theodoret's source is unknown. He was a small child when the Huns came dangerously close to Antioch, his birthplace.208 What he says about the flight to the Huns he may have heard from older people. At any rate, it is most remarkable. I shall come back to it in another con- text.
Uldin
After the shadowy Balamber,209 Uldin is the first Hun mentioned by name. The literary evidence contains enough material for a picture, if not of the man, of his deeds. We know when and where he led his Huns into battle, and we even get a glimpse of the happenings in Hunnia.
In 400, Uldin was the ruler of the Huns in Muntenia, Rumania east of the Olt River. When Gainas, the rebellious former magister militum praesentalis, and his Gothic followers fled across the borders (see Chap- ter XII), Uldin "did not think it safe to allow a barbarian with an army of his own to take up dwellings across the Danube." He collected his for- ces and attacked the Goths. The short but sanguinary campaign ended with a Hunnic victory. Gainas was killed.210 Because only eleven days later211 his head was displayed in Constantinople,212 the last fight probably took place near Novae, the place at the Danube nearest to the capital, connected with it by a first-rate road.213
Gainas wanted to join his countrymen; he fled "to his native land" (etg td ot^eta).214 It follows that in Muntenia Goths lived under Hun rule. We do not know how far to the east and north Uldin' s realm ex- tended. In the west his power reached to the banks of the Danube in Hun- gary, which is evident from the alliance he concluded with the West Roman generalissimo Stilicho in 406.215
208 Born about 393 (H. Opitz, PW 5a, 1791).
209 Getica 248.
210 Zosimus V, 22, 1-3.
211 Seeck, Geschichte 5, 570 ad 32525.
212 Cf. Beshevliev 1960.
213 It took Maximus' embassy thirteen days to cover the somewhat longer dis- tance from Constantinople to Serdica (EL 123).
214 Zosimus V, 21, 9.
215 Referring to Zosimus (V, 22, 3), H. Vetters (1950, 39) maintains that in 400 Fravittas led a Roman army against Uldin in Thrace. He misunderstood the text. Fra- vittas fought fugitive slaves and deserters who pretended to be Huns.
CnpynghlM mate rial
60 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
At the end of 405,216 Italy, barely recovering from the first Gothic war, again was invaded by Goths. Under their king Radagaisus the bar- barians descended on Venetia and Lombardy,217 overran Tuscany, and were nearing Rome when they were finally stopped. The regular Roman army was too weak to stem the Germanic flood. Stilicho turned to Uldin the Hun, and Sarus the Goth, for help. Near Faesulae the Hun auxiliaries encircled a large part of Radagaisus' hordes;218 he tried to escape but was captured and executed (April 406). The survivors were sold as slaves.219 What happened to those Goths who had not been with Radagaisus is not known. Some seem to have been enrolled in Stilicho's army,220 others may have fought their way back to their transdanubian homes. The Gothic nation was "forever" extinguished. At least this was to be read on the triumphal arch erected in 406,221 just four years before Alaric took Rome.
It has often been assumed that the Gothic invasion was a repetition of the events in the 370's. The Goths of Radagaisus are supposed to have
216 Seeck, Geschichle 5, 375; Stein 1959, 1, 380; Mazzarino 1942, 75; Demougeot 1951, 354. N. H. Baylies' arguments for dating the invasion to 404 (JRS 12, 1922, 218-219, reprinted in Byzantine Studies and Other Essays, 339-340) are unconvincing.
217 From Zosimus' statement (V, 26, 3) that Rhodogaisus, "having collected 400,000 of the Celtic and Germanic peoples which dwell beyond the Ister and the Rhine, made preparations for passing over to Italy," Seeck (Geschichte 5, 588) concluded that Ra- dagaisus marched over the Brenner Pass. He identified the "Celtic peoples" with the Alamanni. But Zosimus' account of the Gothic invasion is a mixture of good informa- tion and nonsense. For the year 405-406 he was on his own. Eunapius, one of the authors he plagiarized, ended his history in 404, and Olympiodorus, the other, began his in 407. Zosimus apparently found in the latter a short retrospective of the events preceding Alaric's campaign in 408, enough to produce another galimatias. He main- tained, for example, that Stilicho defeated Radagaisus beyond the Danube.
Demougeot (1951, 356-357) does not refer to Zosimus but she, too, assumes that Radagaisus came over the Brenner Pass. The road over the Julian Alps was, in her opinion, protected by Alaric and the fortress Ravenna. But Ravenna was by-passed by more than one invader, and Alaric stood at that time in Epirus.
Flavia Solvia, near Leibnitz an der Mur, was probably destroyed by Radagaisus' Goths; W. Schmidt, Jahreshefte d. ostcrr. archaolog. Inst. 19-20, 191, Beiblatt 140.
218 Exercitum tertiae partis hostium circumactis Chunorum auxiliaribus Stilicho usque ad internecionem delevit (CM I, 65251).
219 Orosius VII, 37, 16. According to Marcellinus Comes (CM II, 69), the prisoners were sold by Uldin and Sarus.
220 Olympiodorus, fr. 9, has suffered in the epitomized form in which we read the passage in Photius: "The chief men [xeq^aXai&xai] of the Goths with Rhodogaisus, about 12,000 in number, called optimati, are defeated by Stilicho who enters an alliance with Rhodogaisus." In the original, the object of ngoarjraiQLaaro was of course not Rhodogaisus but the optimati; cf. Baynes 1955, 333, n. 11, and Mazzarino 1942, 302. Mazzarino (1942, 377, n. 4) tries in vain to make sense of those 12,000 optimati. It is just another of Olympiodorus' fantastic figures; see Appendix.
221 CIL VI= Dessau 1916, 798.
HISTORY • 61
fled from the Huns who themselves were pushed westward by other no- madic groups which, in turn, were set in motion by an upheaval in the Far East. It is the well-known billiard ball theory, the primum movens being hidden "in the vast plains of Eurasia." Nothing in our authorities indicates that behind Radagaisus stood another barbarian leader whose people were pushed by still another one, and so on.222 All we know is that the Goths came from the countries across the Danube.
If they actually were fleeing, it was not a headlong flight. Although the figures in Orosius and Zosimus are grossly exaggerated,223 we may believe that Radagaisus led, indeed, a large army into Italy.224 The Gothic warriors were not raiders; they were the armed part of a people on the trek to a new home. From the fact — if it is a fact — that Radagaisus was a pagan,225 some scholars have concluded that his hordes were Ostrogoths, because by 400 all Visigoths are supposed to have been good Christians. But the Visigoth Fravittas, consul in 401, East Roman general, was a staunch pagan, and among the Visigoths beyond the Roman border there must have been many thousands not yet baptized.226 Besides, a little- noticed entry in the Chronicle of 452 proves that there were Arian Christians among the Goths of Radagaisus.227 Patsch might well have been right in assuming that a good part of them came from Caucaland.228
There is no reason to assume that Stilicho's Hunnic auxiliaries came from far away, or, specifically, from the Dobrogea.229 Huns had camped in Hungary since 378. They are, as we saw, well attested there in the middle 380's. They certainly did not voluntarily give up the land, and no enemy was strong enough to drive them out. Stilicho concluded an alliance with the Huns in Hungary. Uldin was king of the Huns to the west and to the east of the Carpathian Mountains, in the Alfold as well as in Muntenia.
222 Gibbon (3, 261) connected Radagaisus' march on Rome almost directly with the rise of the Hsien-pei power at "the eastern extremities of the continent of Asia." 228 More than 200,000 Goths (Orosius VII, 37, 4).
224 Agmen ingens (Augustine, De civ. Dei V, 23); cum ingenti exercitu id (Sermo CV, 10, 12, PL 38, 264).
225 Orosius (VII, 37, 5) asserts that Radagaisus "had vowed the blood of the entire Roman race as an offering to his gods," but the barbarian invaders of Italy, from the Cimbri on, wanted land to settle, with the conquered working for them, not a graveyard. Augustine even "knew" the name of Radagaisus' chief god; it was Jupiter (Sermo CV, 10, 13), which is not the interpretatio romana but pure invention.
226 Zosimus V, 20, 1; Philostorgius IX, 8, Bidez 1960, 139; Suidas, s.v.&odpidag, Adler 1938, III, 758-759.
227 Ex hoc Arriani, qui Romano procul fuerant orbi fugati, barbarorum nationum, ad quas se contulere, praesidio erigi coepere (CM I, 65251).
228 Patsch 1925, 67.
229 Baynes 1955, 337.
62 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
He was not the ruler of all Hun tribes; not even Attila at the height of his power was. But Uldin could throw his horsemen into Italy and Thrace. In the winter of 404/5 Uldin broke into the Balkan provinces. We read in Sozomen:
About this time the dissensions by which the church was agitated were accompanied, as is frequently the case, by disturbances and com- motions in the state. The Huns crossed the Ister and devastated Thrace. The robbers in Isauria, gathered in great strength, ravaged the towns and villages between Caria and Phoenicia.230
When Sozomen interrupts his narrative of the synods, elections of bishops, and the fights between the various cliques at the metropolitan sees to deal with secular events, he treats them, with rare exceptions, only as they have a bearing on the never-ending struggle between ortho- doxy and heresy. The dates of the ecclesiastical history are given as pre- cisely as possible; political events take place "about the same time." Still, I think Uldin's first invasion of Thrace can be dated fairly well.
The "dissensions" were the fights of the patriarch of Alexandria Theo- philus (384-412) against John Chrysostom. Chapters 20 to 24 of Book VIII cover the period from the autumn of 403 to November 404.231 In chapter 26 Sozomen gives the translation of the letters which in the fall of 404 Pope Innocent sent to John.232 In chapter 27 he mentions the death of Em- press Eudoxia (October 6, 404), the death of Arsacius (at the end of 405),233 and the ordination of Allicus, his successor (late in 405, or in 406).234 There- fore, the invasion of Thrace falls somewhere between 404 and 405. I be- lieve it can be dated even more precisely. From John Chrysostom's letters we know that the Isaurians broke out of the valleys of Mount Taurus in the summer of 404, probably in June.235 They were soundly defeated.236
230 Hist, eccles. VIII, 25, 1.
231 Ch. 20: autumn and winter 403; ch. 21: Easter 404; ch. 23: second exile of John Chrysostom, Sancta Sophia destroyed by fire, June 9, 404; ch. 23: persecution of the Joannites; ch. 24: death of Flavian, bishop of Antioch, September 26, 404; edict "Rec- tores provinciarum" (Cod. Theodos. XVI, 4, 6), November 18, 404.
232 Late in the fall of 404 (Baur 1930, 2, 289).
233 N0vemDer H, 405, according to Socrates VI, 20; the date is not certain (Baur 1930, 2, 305).
234 Baur 1930, 2, 291.
235 As a rule, the Isaurians did not come down from their mountains before Whit- sunday; cf. John Chrysostom, Ep. XIV, 4, PG 52, 617. In 404, Whitsunday was on June 5.
236 Arbazacius defeated them while Empress Eudoxia was still alive. (Zosimus V, 25, 2-4.)
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HISTORY • 63
In the following year they repeated their raids, this time extending their ravages over nearly the whole of Asia Minor.237 In 404, the Isaurians were unable to take walled towns,238 so the conquests of both towns and vil- lages, of which Sozomen speaks, must fall in the year 405. The transda- nubian barbarians used to cross the river in winter, when the fleet was immobilized and they could recross while it was still frozen. All these considerations lead to the winter of 404/5 as the most probable date of the Hun invasion of Thrace.
Sozomen is the only early writer to mention it. The account of Ni- cephorus Callistus (1256-1311) is a paraphrase, but one with a notable exception: He gives the name of the Hun leader — Uldin.239 Nicephorus' main source was probably a compilation of the tenth century, based on Philostorgius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius.240 Which of these authors named Uldin cannot be determined. It may have been Philo- storgius, of whose works we have only excerpts; it may have been Sozomen himself, because it is unlikely that the Sozomen text, as we have it, is word for word identical with the original. The possibility that Nicephorus him- self supplied the name Uldin may be ruled out. He was too dependent on his sources to alter them; the best he could do was to dress up what others had written before him. Whatever Nicephorus' ultimate author- ity, there was one in which Uldin was named as leader of the Huns 404-405.
Sozomen mentions the invasion only in passing. It may have been a quick raid, or the Huns may have been looting the unfortunate pro- vinces for weeks or months. Still, it was in importance far surpassed by the one which, a few years later, carried Uldin's horsemen deep into Thrace.
In the summer of 408, the Huns crossed the Danube.241 As usual, well informed about the situation in the Balkans, they chose the right time to attack. In the spring of 408, Stilicho abandoned his plan to throw Alaric's Visigoths into Illyricum. Shortly afterward they were on the march to Italy.
With the danger of a Gothic invasion over, the greater part of the East Roman troops was moved to the Persian frontier where hostilities were expected to break out any day.242 The government in Constanti-
237 Baur 1030, 2, 312-313.
238 Zosimus, V, 24, 2-4.
239 Hist, eccles. XIII, 35, PG 146, 1040.
240 Moravcsik, BT 1, 459.
241 Guldenpenning 1885, 202-204; Seeck Geschichte 5, 408-409; Bury 1923, 1, 212- 213; Stein 1959, 1.
242 Sozomen IX, 4, 1. As the edict of March 23, 409 (Cod. lust. IV, 63, 4) shows, the tension ended with the conclusion of a new commercial treaty.
64 • THE WORLD OF THE HUNS
nople was well aware that the transdanubian Huns might take advantage of the weakening of the Balkan army to make inroads into the border provinces. In April, 408, Herculius, praetorian prefect of Illyricum, was instructed "to compel all persons, regardless of any privilege, to provide for the construction of walls as well as for the purpose and transport of supplies in kind for the needs of Illyricum."243 If the Huns should by-pass the strong places along the limes, they could, for awhile, plunder the help- less villages, but eventually they would be caught between the uncon- quered towns in the interior and the troops holding out in the fortifications along the frontier, and forced back into the barbaricum. What the Romans could not expect was that the Huns would take the strategically impor- tant fortress Castra Martis in Dacia ripensis by treachery.244 Whether other fortified places fell into the hands of the Huns is not known but is possible.
Our main source for Uldin's second invasion is again Sozomen's Ec- clesiastical History. The other one, Jerome's Commentary on Isaiah, has been ignored by all students of the Huns. Commenting on 7:20-21, Je- rome wrote:
But now a large part of the Roman world resembles the Judaea of old. This, we believe, cannot have happened without God's will. He does by no means avenge contempt of him by Assyrians and Chal- daeans, rather by savage tribes whose face and language is terrifying, who display womanly and deeply cut faces, and who pierce the backs of bearded men as they flee.
(Ac nunc magna pars Romani orbis quondam Iudaeae similis est; quod absque ira Dei factum non putamus, qui nequaquam conlemptum sui per Assyrios ulciscitur, et Chaldaeos: sed per feras gentes, et quondam nobis incognitas, quarum et vultus et sermo lerribilis est, et femineas
243 Cod. Theodos. XI, 17, 4, dated "III Id. April. Constantinop. Basso et Philippo conss." (i.e., April 11, 408), is practically identical with the edict issued on April 9, 412 (Cod. Theodos. XV, 1, 9). Seeck (1919, 28-29) first presumed that both edicts should be dated April 9, 407, when Alaric threatened to march into eastern Illyricum; later (Geschichte 5, 68) he conceded that both edicts provided for the protection to the towns exposed to Hun attacks. Stein (1959, 1, 376, n. 4), with some hesitations, referred XI, 17, 4 to the year 412. Thompson (1948, 29) dates both edicts to 412, Mazzarino (1942, 75, n. 2) to 407. However, there can be little doubt that the