The Huns shatter Germanic kingdoms and Roman defenses as they establish their powerbase in the Pannonian Plain. Their relentless attacks devastate the Balkans and push the tribes of Europe to flee to the safety of the western empire – with disastrous consequences.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to A history of Romania.
Season 1, Episode 21: Friends on a coin’s edge
Last episode, the Huns burst onto our stage and destroyed Gothic hegemony north of the Danube. Some Gothic leaders fought the invaders and were beaten; others took refuge in the empire; while the rest laid down their arms and swore allegiance to their conquerors.
We have no detailed accounts of what the Huns were doing in the last decades of the 4th century, but we know that, after they appeared on the steppes north of the Black Sea in 375, they continued to move westwards towards Central Europe. The Huns weren’t united under a single ruler, but operated as confederate clans whose leaders came together in council to negotiate grazing rights and organize campaigns. These leaders and their bands of horse archers galloped into yet undiscovered lands and subjugated the tribes they encountered, thus securing the way for their families, who travelled behind them in wagons with their flocks and herds by their side. Of all the lands they came across, the Huns decided to stop on the Pannonian Plain. This region of wide grasslands – bounded by the Carpathians to the North and East, and by the Alps to the South and West – reminded the Huns of their steppe homeland, and here, they settled into their familiar rhythms of grazing sheep and horses while moving between summer and winter pastures every year.
Though the Huns were nomads, they had long traded with the settled peoples who lived near them on the Eurasian steppes from whence they came; it’s how they acquired cauldrons, swords, and wagons. They may have enslaved artisans to repair their equipment while on the move, but these prisoners wouldn’t have been able to craft all the goods that the Huns needed on a daily basis; only the blacksmiths and carpenters who lived in agricultural societies could meet that demand. And so, after their initial spree of destruction that decimated Gothic power, the Huns looked to establish a working relationship with the agricultural communities in the region. They went to the chieftains they had just defeated and told them: “Give us your best pastures, make goods for us, and send us food, and we won’t kill you.”
The conquered chieftains had little choice but to accept. The only good part of the deal – besides not being killed – was that they were allowed to maintain control over their communities with minimal interference from their overlords. The Huns didn’t care to administer villages of farmers; they wanted to have their supremacy recognized, receive regular tribute, and enjoy the freedom of the grasslands while riding for glory and loot.
As such, the average person had very few interactions with the Huns. People continued their yearly agricultural rhythms, practiced their customs, and followed the directives of their village elders. Everyday life remained much the same for Gothic villagers as well as for the Romanized refugees who had sought the protection of Gothic chieftains. In fact, these Gothic and Romanized individuals saw the Huns as a common oppressor, which naturally drew them closer to each other. Archeologists have found Gothic-style fibulas and bone combs next to Roman-style vases and broaches in the same settlements, which suggests that these two groups lived as neighbours, traded with each other, worked alongside each other, and built communities together.
Plus, as we’ve seen last episode, Christianity continued to spread organically throughout the region despite the persecutions of the Gothic elite; the common people didn’t participate in these purges, and some were in fact sympathetic to the Christians. With every convert, the Gothic population became closer to the Romanized one as its members embraced Christian beliefs and added another link between the two groups. We can see this change in the archeological record as well. Traditionally, the Goths cremated their dead, but starting in the 4th century, they slowly began to bury them instead, in accordance with Christian custom and that of Romanized people; by the middle of the 5th century, incineration was completely replaced by inhumation. And so, it seems that, after the arrival of the Huns, the Gothic populace drew closer to their Romanized neighbours and adopted some of their customs.
The Gothic nobility, however, presents a different story. Hunnic clan leaders had dozens of subject chieftains under them, and they elevated the most collaborative amongst them to keep their people in line. We know, for instance, that in the 5th century, the Goths north of the Danube once again had a king, and he was considered one of the most important subjects of the Huns. This man was tasked with bringing in the required tribute from his people, and he sat alongside the Hunnic leadership in their war councils, but of course, in a subordinate position. In effect, the Huns had removed the top leadership and placed themselves in charge, but the political structure below remained unchanged; the main difference was that the Goths now no longer fought for themselves but at the behest of their overlords. The nomads demanded absolute loyalty from the kings under their dominion, and in return, they allowed them to lead their own forces and take a part of the loot from raids.
Indeed, after the Huns permanently settled on the Pannonian Plain, they began supplementing their own forces with contingents from the tribes under their rule. By the beginning of the 5th century, the armies led by the Huns were mostly made up of confederate warriors. Hunnic horse archers would lead the way, while Goths and other subject peoples would fight in their traditional style, on foot with spears, swords, and javelins. Going forward, I’ll refer to this composite army simply as “the Hunnic army” for the sake of clarity; but we should remember that the majority of its members were warriors from tributary peoples, and that only a part of it was Hunnic, along with its leadership.
While on campaign, the rulers of these subject peoples, such as the Hun-appointed king of the Goths, spent several months with the Hunnic clan leaders in their camp. Some of these collaborators sought to emulate their lords to gain their favour. One way to do so would’ve been to wear Hunnic-style clothes and jewellery. Another was to perform artificial cranial deformation. This Hunnic custom involved binding an infant’s head between two pieces of wood to distort its normal growth. The distinctive, elongated shape that resulted was intended to showcase the person’s high social status. Archeologists have found Gothic chieftains buried with Hunnic jewellery, and some had deformed skulls; evidently, supporters of the regime showed their loyalty by subjecting their children to this custom. It was an effective way to help them advance in the hierarchy, but their efforts to get closer to their overlords also widened the gulf between them and their own people, who flatly rejected Hunnic ways.
After the Huns broke Gothic sovereignty north of the Danube, they came to directly border the empire. Their warriors had seen the grandeur of the old Roman cities in the former province of Dacia, had heard of the empire’s riches from the Goths, and could now ride within sight of the imperial cities on the north bank of the Danube. They had no doubt that the plunder they could take from the Romans would eclipse anything they’d already stolen from the tribes of Europe.
In the winter of 384-385, less than a decade after first encountering the Goths, a Hunnic raiding party crossed the frozen Danube and plunged into Thrace. Guess which communities were most affected? That’s right, the Gothic refugees who had followed Fritigern into the empire. As you’ll recall, after repeated betrayals and bloody battles, Fritigern’s followers had finally received land in the empire in exchange for military service. Though these communities were supposed to act as a buffer near the border, their warriors weren’t present to repulse the Hunnic raid; as dictated by their treaty, they were on campaign with the Roman emperor, which at that moment meant fighting a usurper in Italy. The civil war on the peninsula brought heavy casualties for the Gothic warriors, and they suspected that the emperor was putting them in the most dangerous situations to sap their strength and save his own troops.
When these Gothic warriors returned from their deployment and saw their ravaged villages, they were furious; not only were they being treated like expendable arrow fodder, but they hadn’t even been allowed to be here to protect their wives, their children, and their parents. And so, the Goths in the empire elected a king named Alaric, and he promptly led them in revolt and on a pillaging campaign through the Balkans. The Romans couldn’t immediately engage them in battle since the imperial army still hadn’t recovered from the disaster at Adrianople; the best it could do was contain the Goths in the Balkans, but even these efforts weren’t fully successful; the rebels made it as far South as Athens, and sacked the ancient city.
The Goths despoiled the countryside as they sought to feed their families and take revenge on the Romans, but Alaric knew that his forces couldn’t subsist on plundered supplies indefinitely, so he tried to negotiate with both the eastern and the western emperor. Alaric wanted to be made a general in the imperial army so that he could defend the border autonomously, and so that his people would receive provisions from the central government. But neither emperor wanted to supply the Goths; in their minds, they were savage barbarians squatting on imperial land, and they didn’t want to legitimize them.
After a few years of stalemate, the emperor in Constantinople contacted a Hunnic leader named Uldin to attack the Goths in exchange for some coin. Alaric was desperate for supplies and dreaded a fight against the Huns, so he decided to abandon the Balkans and move into Italy; he hadn’t been able to threaten Constantinople, but he could perhaps threaten the court of the western emperor and pressure him to agree to a settlement. So, in the spring of 401, the Goths crossed the Alps, searching for a new homeland. In response to their advance, the western emperor moved his capital from Milan on the exposed plains of northern Italy, to Ravenna, a city on the northeast coast of the peninsula that was surrounded by marshes and so was almost impossible to besiege.
In the ensuing campaign, Roman forces defeated Alaric’s Goths in two major battles. But instead of expelling them from the empire, the court in Ravenna decided to use the defeated warriors to its advantage. In 405, Alaric was made a general, was told to defend Pannonia on the other side of the Alps, and was given pay and provisions for his chieftains. This lenient deal was basically what Alaric had asked for since the beginning; unfortunately, it had taken a few thousand deaths to convince the Romans to agree. By legitimizing Alaric and tasking him with defending the Pannonian border, the western empire created a buffer against invaders such as the Huns while also preventing the eastern emperor from sending any other troublesome barbarians its way.
You see, the western and eastern emperors didn’t fully trust each other. It’s true, the Roman empire was technically led by two brotherly colleagues, and their respective realms had the same legal code, formed a united market, and shared the same culture and history. But the court in Ravenna and the one in Constantinople each had their own bureaucracy and army, and officials didn’t transfer from one to the other. The emperors did collaborate when a problem affected them both and when they had the resources to spare, but most times, each emperor needed all the resources at his disposal to protect his own borders, his own capital, and his own throne. The divergence between the interests of the West and those of the East began after the death of Constantine when his sons had divided the empire between themselves, and these differences only deepened as successive emperors were faced with more and more challenges. The empire didn’t experience an extended period of peace where it could focus on unity; invaders and usurpers multiplied from the middle of the 4th century, forcing the emperors to be reactive and focus foremost on the survival of their own regime.
Though they faced more challenges, emperors had fewer resources to draw on compared to a few decades ago. After the disaster at Adrianople in 378, the Roman army could no longer comfortably face its opponents in battle; defeat could lead to catastrophic losses that couldn’t be easily replaced, while victory would not necessarily bring security. There were always more barbarians on other fronts, as well as usurpers ready to take advantage of a weakened imperial army to make a bid for the throne. Instead of wearing out the army by defeating each enemy in turn, emperors preferred to win over their enemies with riches; it was much cheaper to hand over a chest of coins to a barbarian leader than it was to provision an army for months on end – and lose thousands of soldiers that wouldn’t be replaced for years. It’s why the court in Ravenna had struck a deal with Alaric to add his warriors to the empire’s defenses rather than annihilating them.
It’s also how the court in Constantinople dealt with the Huns. We already saw how, in the year 400, the eastern emperor wanted to hire Uldin and his warriors as mercenaries to fight Alaric’s Goths. In 408, Uldin crossed the Danube and raided deep into the Balkans; just as the Romans had no trouble offering coin to whoever would fight for them, the Huns had no trouble stealing riches from whoever couldn’t defend them. Imperial forces were unable to stop Uldin’s devastating raids, so the emperor sent negotiators to pay him off. The sum Uldin wanted was way too large, so the negotiators pivoted and opened communications with his senior officers, offering them coin if they withdrew their forces. Faced with disunity and insubordination, Uldin was forced to race back across the Danube, leaving the empire in peace before the end of summer. The lesson which the imperial government learned was that the best course of action was to use its vast wealth to pay barbarians not to attack it or to pay them to fight on its behalf to wear down its enemies while maintaining its own armies intact.
It’s also worth mentioning that the emperors increasingly chose to remain in their fortified capitals – whether Ravenna or Constantinople. It was simply too dangerous to lead armies in person, as the death of Valens had shown, and they preferred to let their generals do the campaigning. Delegating these responsibilities did protect the emperors, but it also gave these commanders immense influence at court; they were the ones who kept the empire safe and they were the ones who took the most momentous decisions. It was, for instance, the commander of the western armies that had defeated Alaric and negotiated his settlement in Pannonia. In this way, generals became potential rivals for the throne, and emperors had to balance the threat of invaders roaming their realms with that of subordinates trying to increase their power at court. It was a damaging combination that made the Romans suspicious of one another, reduced their unity, and made them less able to focus on common threats.
In the early 5th century, Hunnic clans occasionally raided the empire, and, at times, served as mercenaries employed by the emperors. But the Hunnic leadership wasn’t fully focused on the Romans; they were busy strengthening their position in and around the Pannonian Plain. The Huns waged a relentless war against tribes native to the area, and either subjugated them or forced them to abandon their ancestral lands and move westwards. On the last day of the year 406, a large group of Vandals, Alans, and Suebi crossed the frozen Rhine; they overwhelmed the empire’s frontier defenses and marched into Gaul to escape the Huns. This invasion cut off the province of Britannia from the rest of the western empire, and a local commander declared himself emperor to take charge of the region, since its inhabitants now had to fend for themselves.
As the court in Ravenna was grappling with invasion and separatism, the emperor ordered the execution of his top general, since he had simply become too influential. This was the same general who had defeated and made peace with Alaric a few years before, and now that he was dead, a faction hostile to the Goths became dominant at court. Its members convinced the emperor to declare Alaric an enemy of the state and to massacre any Gothic warriors that were currently serving in Italy.
When news reached Alaric in the autumn of 408, he was outraged, and immediately marched on Italy to avenge the murder of his warriors and negotiate a new treaty that would guarantee the Goths would remain in the empire. Alaric knew that Ravenna was too well fortified to assault, so he instead marched for the city of Rome; the emperor was much more likely to talk if the spiritual heart of the empire were threatened. As the Goths set up a siege of the city, the emperor did indeed send envoys to talk, but they stalled as much as possible to give him time to marshal an army. This stalemate lasted for 18 months, by the end of which Alaric had had enough of the deception of the imperial envoys; in August of 410, he ordered an assault on the city, and the starved citizens of Rome couldn’t repulse the attack on their own. What followed were three days of plunder, during which the Goths stripped the city of the riches it had accumulated over the past millennium.
The fall of the Eternal City shocked the Mediterranean world, from the court in Constantinople to the Hunnic war council on the Pannonian Plain. The western empire had shown itself incapable of defeating an enemy within its borders and unable to stop the sack of one of its most important cities. It was a striking revelation of its weakness, and this weakness emboldened its enemies. Though Alaric had failed to reach an agreement with the emperor, he had also shown that the emperor couldn’t expel him. The migratory peoples now inside the western empire – the Goths, Vandals, Alans, and Suebi – understood that if the emperor didn’t want to negotiate with them, they could impose themselves through force and leave him no other option but to accept their settlement.
Meanwhile, back in the East, the Huns had been living on the Pannonian Plain for over a generation now, and the children born on these grasslands viewed them as their new homeland. By the 420s, the leadership on the Plain had consolidated around two brothers, Octar and Rua. These two men had removed all other rivals to power, done away with the old clan council system, and ruled by terrorizing anyone who thought of rebelling while rewarding loyal followers with a continuous stream of loot.
We get a glimpse at their style of leadership from a large treasure found in a Gothic settlement on the southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains. The Gothic chieftain of this community was undoubtedly a staunch supporter of the Huns and had participated in several campaigns with his own warriors alongside his overlords. In his residence, archeologists have found a golden eagle-headed fibula, a cup made of silver and gold and encrusted with precious stones, an ornately decorated golden plate, and numerous other items made of precious metals. Octar and Rua had most likely given him these valuable objects as his portion of the loot from a raid. This Gothic chieftain might’ve looked at that land he administered and the wealth he had accumulated and been thankful that his grandfather hadn’t followed Fritigern into the empire; it was much better to ride with the Huns in profitable raids than to cower with the Romans inside their city walls.
Attacks on the empire were indeed lucrative, but they had to be launched when the Roman army was preoccupied elsewhere, and even then, you didn’t know how much plunder you’d bring back. Octar and Rua realized that they needed a more predictable stream of income to keep the riches coming. So, in 422, as the Romans were engaged against the Persians, they led their forces into Thrace and forced the emperor in Constantinople to agree to an annual payment of 350 pounds of gold in exchange for peace. This regular tribute allowed the brothers to keep their supporters happy while they focused on further consolidating their power north of the Danube.
Indeed, some Hunnic clans were unhappy with the leadership of Octar and Rua, perhaps because they felt they didn’t receive their fair share of the spoils or perhaps because they were excluded from important decisions. Whatever the reason, dissident Hunnic leaders sometimes fled to Roman territory and offered their services to the emperor in Constantinople. Octar and Rua threatened war if these fugitives weren’t repatriated, as they posed a threat to their legitimacy and power. Not wishing to antagonize the nomads, the court in Constantinople handed over several Hunnic nobles, who were promptly crucified. Peace was preserved, for now, but the Huns and Romans were far from friends.
Back in the West, the situation had only deteriorated since the sack of Rome. The court in Ravenna had been unable to defeat all the migratory peoples roaming inside its realms using its own army. It had at times paid the Huns as mercenaries, and had been forced to give land to the Goths in southern Gaul in exchange for their help. Amidst the chaos, the Vandals migrated from Gaul to Hispania and from there crossed to North Africa. The fertile provinces of this region had so far been protected from barbarian raids, and they provided much of the tax revenue that paid for the western armies and the majority of the grain that fed the citizens of the Italian peninsula.
Faced with this menace, the court in Ravenna approached its counterpart in Constantinople and argued that they needed to act together to remove the barbarians from North Africa; if left unaddressed, they could infest the Mediterranean with pirate ships and attack the rich provinces of the East, like Egypt and Syria. The eastern emperor agreed and combined his forces with those of the West to form an expedition to retake North Africa in 432.
When Rua heard that the empire’s armies were engaged in an amphibious assault in the Mediterranean, he gathered his army and invaded Thrace. By this point, his brother Octar had died and left him as sole leader. Rua now held all the power, but that also meant that he had to keep the coin flowing if he wanted to keep his position. So, he let his warriors pillage as they wished while in the empire, but his real goal was Constantinople; with the imperial armies away, there had never been a better time to force the emperor to increase the tribute. But as the Hunnic army drove towards Constantinople in the summer of 434, Rua unexpectedly died. At once, the Hunnic advance halted as his subordinates raced back to the Pannonian Plain to establish their own authority. We have no details about the power struggle that ensued amongst the high-ranking Hunnic nobility, but we know that, by the end of the year, two of Rua’s nephews had solidified their position as leaders of the Huns. These were Bleda and his younger brother Attila.
Next time, we’ll follow these brothers as they take the Hunnic confederation their uncle had built and transform it into what the Romans will call the scourge of God.
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