Dan Snow's History Hit - How and Why History: Attila the Hun

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

Known as the Scourge of God, Attila the Hun was one of the greatest Barbarian rulers in history. Renowned for his brutality, sacking and pillaging the lands and cities he conquered, Attila became one of the most feared enemies of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. But how did Attila rally his people to take on the might of Rome and why was he so successful? As part of our new 'How and Why History' series, Rob Weinberg asks the big questions about this notorious figure to Professor Peter Heather of Kings College London.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

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we're going to explore history's big how and why questions with top historians, writers, academics. We'll be ranging from the ancient world right up until the most recent times. You're going to get a one-stop overview of history's most famous names and the big world-changing events. So listen to this one. If you like it, search for How and Why History wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe. We're going to publish a new episode of this podcast every Tuesday for eight weeks, but you can get all 24 produced episodes on the How and Why History feed. Another one on Pearl Harbour is already there. It's brilliant. In this first episode, Attila the Hun comes under the spotlight.

Enjoy. He was a man born into the world to shake the nations, the scourge of all lands, who in some way terrified all mankind by the rumours noised abroad concerning him. He was haughty in his walk, He was haughty in his walk, rolling his eyes hither and thither, so that the power of his proud spirit appeared in the movement of his body. He was indeed a lover of war, yet restrained in action, mighty in counsel, gracious to suppliants, and lenient to those who were once received under his protection. He was short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head. His eyes were small. His beard was thin and sprinkled with grey. He had a flat nose and a swirly complexion,

revealing his origin. Attila the Hun, one of the greatest barbarian rulers in history. Also known as the Scourge of God, Attila was renowned for his brutality, sacking and pillaging the lands and cities he conquered, and becoming one of the most feared enemies of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. But how did Attila rally his people to take on the might of Rome? Why was Attila so successful? And what was his lasting

legacy? To answer the big questions on this notorious figure, History Hits Rob Weinberg met Professor Peter Heather of King's College London. This is How and Why History. Peter, thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Who was Attila the Hun? Attila the Hun is the nephew of the first really powerful Hunnic king that we hear about in the sources, a man called Ruzsa or Rua, depending on which source you read. And he comes to power over the Hunnic Imperial Confederation probably in about 440. The details of that are not clear. What we really see is what he does next. Who were the Huns? Where were they located?

At the time that Attila comes to power over the Huns, they're located in what's now the Great Hungarian Plain, the Pushta. And that is about 440. They'd probably been there for about a generation, for about 30 years, since around about 410. Before that, like many nomad groups, we find them operating in a similar step zone above the Black Sea in the south of what's now the Ukraine. And that's where they first come to the notice of Roman commentators in roundabout 370, so 40 years before they move to Hungary. What were they like as a people before Attila? Were they military people?

It's very difficult to know too much about exactly what the Huns were like. Our main Roman sources are much more interested in the way in which they interact with the Roman world than in telling us anything very dramatic about the Huns themselves. The descriptions they give us of the Huns are stereotypical nomad descriptions. They describe nomads, they describe them wrongly in many ways. The first big description is by a Roman historian called Ammianus Marcellinus, dating to about 390, and he turns out he has a stock nomad 101 description which he uses of every nomad.

The nation of the Huns surpasses all other barbarians in wildness of life, and though the Huns do just bear the likeness of men, they are so little advanced in civilization that they make no use of fire, nor any kind of relish in the preparation of their food, but feed upon the roots which they find in the fields and the half-raw flesh of any sort of animal. I say half-raw because they give it a kind of cooking by placing it between their own thighs and the backs of their horses.

And he says things like they're born in one place, they're weaned in another, they're constantly on the move. We know that that's actually not correct, they're constantly on the move. We know that that's actually not correct, that proper nomads cycle their herds between stock sets of winter and summer pasture. There's a rhythm to their year. Movement is crucial. You're putting together places that don't have grass in winter with places that don't have grass in summer. So you create a complete grass portfolio for all your animals. So it's not random, constant movement. But that's not what Ammion says. Then, every so often, there can be periodic crises that push the Huns out of a rhythm of movement

between one set of summer and winter pastures and into a new area. And that's clearly what happens around about the year 370 which is when they start to make this impact at that point on the fringes of the Roman world rather than on the Roman world directly. Were the relations between the Huns and the Romans initially cordial then? The relations between the Romans and the Huns initially were substantially indirect actually because the first impact the Romans record is that of the Huns on a whole series of subject peoples, semi-subdued clients would be the best way of putting it, like Goths and others who live around the fringes of the Roman world. And the impact that Ammianus Marcellinus, our first detailed commentator on Hunnic history, records

is that the Huns cause absolute chaos in the Gothic world. Maybe not suddenly. The time frame is very vaguely described in Ammianus' account. A lot of modern reconstructions imagine it happening overnight. I think what Ammianus is telling us is that it's over about a generation, 20 years or so, that the Huns undermined stability in the Gothic world. But undermine it they do, and the end result, which is what the Romans notice, in the Gothic world. But undermine it, they do. And the end result, which is what the Romans notice, is the sudden appearance of two very large, very much armed bodies of Goths on the Roman frontier,

because they're being displaced from their homelands by Hunnic activity. So we have an essentially agricultural nomadic community. How then did Attila as their leader become this feared enemy of the Roman Empire? There's always a great military potential to nomadic groups. They are fabulous horsemen. They in fact run, when they're proper nomads, they run a whole constellation of animals. Because the thing is that horses are, as anyone who looks after horses will tell you, eat a hell of a lot and don't give you all that much in return. Horses are the sort of sports car of the nomad range of stock. So you have horses who are used for rounding things up, also for warfare because you're always stock raiding. It's a very marginal existence. Also for warfare, because you're always stock raiding.

It's a very marginal existence. If the grasslands get a bit dry, your animals start to die. You might need to supplement their numbers. You might need to establish rights over a slightly larger piece of grazing. It's a very marginal existence, the existence of nomads. Alongside the horses, then, you have everything from cattle to sheep to goats to camels which eat absolutely every piece of green stuff that there is available. What Attila does, he's standing at the end of a process where this unfolds in the sort of three political generations that separate his appearance as leader in 440

from the first arrival of the Huns to the notice of Romans, you know, 370, 70 years before that, he stands at the end of a process which has two dimensions to it. One is a political unification of the Huns themselves. One is a political unification of the Huns themselves. The thing about the nomad existence is that you have to spread out. If you concentrate all your animals in one place, they eat all the damn grass, there's nothing left, and they all die. So the sort of social and political structure of nomadic entities is quite devolved. nomadic entities is quite devolved and the Roman sources from the generation before Attila so around about 410 when they're making that move into Hungary suggest that at that point the Huns didn't have one single leader they actually had a series of ranked kings who stood in relation to one another but led their own separate contingents.

And that is a perfectly good form and perfectly effective form of nomadic socio-political organization, which you find amongst other groups as well. But by the time we get to Attila in 440, there's no sign whatsoever of any of these other ranked kings. They've all disappeared. no sign whatsoever of any of these other ranked kings. They've all disappeared. So one process that's going on here is the elimination of these separate ruling lines that previously run their own chunks of the Huns, as it were. The second process, which is going on simultaneously, is the building of a confederation that consists not just of Huns, but of large numbers of these mostly Germanic, but not solely Germanic speaking client entities that had stood around the fringes of the Roman world. A whole bunch of Goths, for instance, flee into the Roman world in the 370s

under the first impact of the Huns, but there are a lot more Goths out there, and many of those end up as part of the military confederation that Attila is leading by the 440s. And there are lots of others besides Swayve, Skiri, Lombard, Sarmatians, the list of subject peoples that Attila ran is endless. Part of his career is spent increasing the numbers of those subject peoples, but he inherited quite a lot of subjects to start with. So the sort of building of the Hunnic war machine on the fringes of the Roman world has these two facets. How were the Huns equipped then to attack the main Roman military centres? What makes the Huns so effective on the fringes of the Roman world against Roman clients is actually the reflex bow, which is a sort of standard weapon of steppe nomads.

When you look at the archaeological evidence, there's something a bit weird about the Hunnic version of this bow. Up to the Huns, you find that the bows are about 100 centimetres in length, and they're symmetrical. Hunnic bows are asymmetric, which means that they're longer on one side. And if you think about it, you're firing this bow from horseback, the gap between your arm and the back of the horse is fixed. You can't extend that, so that stays at about 50cm. But the top part of the Hunnic bow is made longer. I've never managed to find someone who's willing to build an asymmetric bow to find out what the effect of that is. But I take it, although it must mess up the trajectory and aiming it makes it more powerful

that is presumably the point but on the basis of this weaponry they also have swords and they have lances as well for fighting from horseback what our Roman sources describe in rather rhetorical but nonetheless compelling ways is that the Huns are capable of running riot through these different largely Germanic clients who dotted around the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire. When attacked they will sometimes engage in regular battle then going into the fights in order of columns they fill the air with varied and discordant cries. More often, however, they fight in no regular order of battle, but by being extremely swift and sudden in their movements, they disperse,

and then rapidly come together again in loose array, spread havoc over vast plains, and, flying over the rampart, they pillage the camp of the enemy almost before he has become aware of their approach. It must be owned that they are the most terrible of warriors because they fight at a distance with missile weapons, having sharpened bones admirably fastened to the shaft. When in close combat with swords, they fight without regards for their own safety. And while their enemy is intent upon parrying the thrust of the swords, So while galloping around on horseback and firing arrows is not terribly good when it comes to taking large-scale fortresses, which is what the Romans have to offer,

what the Huns certainly have is manpower and abundance. And by the time of Attila, with all these subject peoples now part of a much enlarged Hunnic empire, then the kind of armies that Attila is putting into place are huge, an awful lot of people. And when it comes to siege warfare, which is what you need to be able to do to defeat and take on and overcome large-scale Roman defences, then manpower is crucial. And the few detailed sieges that are described are all about digging trenches, building ladders,

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So what was the sequence of Attila's campaigns? The sequence is this. In the early 440s, he makes his mark. At this point, he's ruling with his brother, Bleda, they mount a very impressive campaign in the Roman Balkans, bits of what's now Serbia, and they capture dramatically a few fortresses. In the mid 440s they mount a bigger campaign, 447, in the Roman Balkans again. So this is all territory controlled by Constantinople. They threaten Constantinople. They don't actually launch a formal attack on it, but they do ransack most of the Roman Balkans actually in that year. And this is the horrible year as far as the Romans are concerned, when they defeat two separate Roman armies. and it's the year where the Romans have to beg for peace. There's then a gap, and we have quite extensive records of some of the diplomatic exchanges that happened in the gap,

and to different Roman ambassadors, Attila would say different things. So there's one where he claims that he's thinking about attacking Persia, but actually Hungary to Persia through the Caucasus is really quite a long way. I don't think this was meant seriously. What he does eventually do is attack westwards in the early 450s, first into Roman Gaul and then into Roman Italy. His attempts to conquer Gaul weren't so successful. Why did he fail? I think he fails in Gaul. Well, it's not a total failure.

You have to think about why is he making war at all? What's the purpose of warfare within this structure? And I think it follows from the nature of the structure. All these different subject peoples are there because they've been conquered. They didn't vote to join some kind of Hunnic Confederation and actually the long-running theme in the Roman sources and the great sort of Roman counter strategy to Hunnic success is that you can always sow trouble among the subject peoples. You can always get them to try and come over to you. They don't want to be there. They are given some share of the booty from the campaigning, but they're clearly unwilling

arrow fodder for the Hunnic armies. So you've got to think that the Hunnic Confederation has this core of Huns and then a whole bunch of other people who probably don't want to be there and who are trying to get away from Hunnic control as and when they can. There are, in other words, a lot of inner tensions and problems within this Hunnic imperial structure. The point of warfare on the scale that Attila's mounting it emerges from thinking about that structure. And I think it's twofold. One, it keeps them all busy.

If you march them out and keep them fighting, they won't start fighting you. Point them in a direction and keep them under control. But secondly, as long as you're victorious, then of course it gives you some booty to hand out to them and the archaeological materials make it clear that some of the gold that Attila got was passed around. you some booty to hand out to them and the archaeological materials make it clear that some of the gold that Attila got was passed around. But also you establish your own

victoriousness by winning victories over the Romans. So it's a kind of stick and carrot approach. They're scared of you anyway. They don't like you but they're scared of you and if you keep on winning victories they're even more scared of you and if you pass out a bit of gold to keep them or their leaderships at least happy in the interim then you're winning on all fronts. So as I understand it and think about this structure you have to use it. It is a war machine and if you don't use it it will start to fight amongst itself, either different subject peoples fighting to throw off Hunnic domination or different subject peoples fighting each other, which they also do after Attila's death. Basically, you've got to think about a whole bunch of people who really don't want to be there, who are forced to be there with an awful lot of resentments.

And warfare is the way of keeping those resentments under control. Basically, Attila has to campaign on a pretty regular basis. The big question has always been, why did he turn to Gaul? Turn to the West, as it's sometimes talked about in the literature. But what people are not thinking about there is that he's got to go somewhere. He's got to use this machine or it will start to fragment. It will start to go somewhere. He's got to use this machine or it will start to fragment. It will start to fight itself. And basically, he's got everything out of the Roman Balkans, out of Constantinople, that he's likely to get, quite staggering sums of gold

following those great victories in 447. So he's done that. The East Romans don't really have anything else readily to hand. You can't get past Constantinople, start attacking Asia Minor. That's not possible. So we need another target. Persia, I think he was only joking, but it's too far away. Gaul is the next place to go. But Gaul is much further away than the Balkans. And this is not an organized military force with lots of logistic support.

This is a ramshackle army that has to carry most of its own food or support itself from ravaging the countryside. The problems of warfare get greater over distance, much greater. It's a geometric progression of difficulty for this force. But Attila does need to use it and I think that's what he's doing in Gaul. What was it about Attila the Hun that has led to his name being known to us down the centuries? Why was he so feared? He is the one barbarian, in inverted commas, leader of the period of Rome's fall,

who has the military capacity not just to defeat Roman field armies in open battle, but actually to conduct successful sieges. No one else can do that. There are two or three other occasions when Goths or Vandals achieve very substantial military victories, but they do not have the capacity to take heavily fortified, defended Roman cities. Attila did. This is due, I think, to the massive manpower that he had at his disposal. But this does absolutely set him apart from any of the other groups that we find operating in the period where the western half of the Roman Empire is coming apart.

How then did Attila himself die? Attila's death is one of those great stories. It's told in a 6th century source, but one that's probably drawing on a much more contemporary historical account. And what we're told is that on the latest of many wedding nights, he drank too much, went off to bed with his bride-to-be, and suffered from massive hemorrhage, nosebleed, and choked on his own blood. And the next morning, the Hunnic warriors find him dead with the unfortunate young lady in tears, cowering beside him.

Attila the Hun's become a popular figure in fiction, in films. What was he like? Were there any descriptions of him? We've got one absolutely fabulous eyewitness description of Attila, which is completely ignored by all TV producers because it's not what they want to hear. They want Attila to be the biggest, hairiest, meanest barbarian you've ever seen. That's not what our Roman ambassador, who met him and had dinner with him on several occasions, describes. The picture emerges, it's so fascinating. The great thing the Huns get from all their warfare with the Romans is gold. That's what they want.

And actually the archaeological remains of the Hunnic Empire are all about bling. So, you know, everything. Fittings for your horses, spurs, bits to attach to your bow, they're all made of gold. So you've got to imagine the Hunnic court full of these grandees absolutely covered in bling. But in that context,

the description of Attila is very striking. What Priscus, the ambassador, describes is a not very large man, completely modestly dressed, says he's clean, unlike most of the other ones who are described as dirty and smelly. But Attila is completely clean, but he doesn't wear any of this grandiose jewellery, just very plain woolen clothing. And when he sits down to dinner, everyone else is being served off gold and silver plate. Attila eats from wooden plates and drinks from a wooden goblet and just has simple foods.

It is not the sort of great barbarian conqueror that's being described, but the kind of mastermind. The cunning, canny mastermind who's in control of what goes on. And that's, I think think also reflected in his policies to my mind what you've really got to have in mind is someone more like Michael Corleone out of the Godfather not some huge hairy barbarian. What was the legacy of Attila and the Hunnic people after his death? The legacy of the Huns is substantial in different dimensions actually. Obviously there's the mythical dimension is very substantial. Attila is a figure in medieval Germanic heroic literature and he's there because the medieval Germanic poets are reading these late Roman sources. And he's described in those sources as the ruler of Scythia and Germania.

So this extraordinary figure. So Attila has an afterlife in all kinds of heroic poetry. More immediately, his empire collapses quickly and dramatically after his death. So he dies in 453 and just 16 years later the last two of his sons that we know about are asking for asylum in the East Roman world. What had happened in between is that that aura of invincibility that Attila had was not inherited by his successors, who fought amongst themselves over his inheritance. And all those subject peoples who didn't want to be part of Attila's Hunnic structure start to revolt. And one by one in the intervening decade and a half they had re-established their independence of Hunnic control. So the Hunnic empire collapses very quickly as quickly as they've been built

and the control of Attila's dynasty is lost and they become the last one becomes a kind of Roman clout on East Roman soil. But it has a sort of indirect impact then on the sort of final phase of the collapse of the West Roman Empire, because the collapse of this Hunnic umbrella over all these subject peoples turns loose a whole bunch of separate coalitions who then start to become players in their own right in the unfolding political story of carving out bits of Roman territory under their own direct control. So Theoderic's Ostrogoths, who famously take over Italy in the 490s, they are one fragment that derives from Attila's Hunnic Empire, and there are several others that follow the same kind of trajectory. Peter Heather, thank you for joining us.

My pleasure. How and Why History Thank you. of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Here are the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.