IN 453, AFTER A DECADE of mayhem stretching from Constantinople to Paris, Attila the Hun died from the after-effects of one too many wedding nights. Following the odd drink or two, the great conqueror retired to bed, burst a blood vessel and died. In the morning, his terrified bride was found cowering beside the corpse. This sudden demise fired the starting gun on a frenzied race for power among his sons, which quickly degenerated into outright civil war. Events then took a yet more dangerous turn. Attila’s Empire consisted not just of Huns but large numbers of non-Hunnic subjects besides. The civil war was quickly exploited by some of them as an opportunity to throw off Hunnic control. The lead in the revolt was taken by a king of the Gepids called Arderic – the result, a huge battle in 454 on the (unidentified) River Nedao in the old Roman province of Pannonia.
There an encounter took place between the various nations Attila had held under his sway. Kingdoms with their peoples were divided, and out of one body were made many members not responding to a common impulse. Being deprived of their head, they madly strove against each other . . . And so the bravest nations tore themselves to pieces . . . One might see the Goths fighting with pikes, the Gepids raging with the sword, the Rugi breaking off the spears in their own wounds, the Suevi fighting on foot, the Huns with bows, the Alans drawing up a battle-line of heavy-armed and the Herules of light-armed warriors.1
It’s a famous description, and, even if rhetorical rather than properly descriptive, neatly introduces the issue central to this chapter.
We have already seen that the rise of Hunnic power was responsible for two bouts of mass migration into the Roman Empire. On the face of it, it also prompted major population displacements beyond the frontier. To start with, there are the Huns themselves. In the run-up to the collapse of Rome’s east European frontier in 376, they were operating to the north-east of the Black Sea, somewhere opposite the Caucasus. But Roman Pannonia, where the battle of the Nedao took place, encompassed the south-eastern fringes of the Great Hungarian Plain west of the Carpathians, and the Empire of Attila was centred primarily in the Middle Danubian region, thousands of kilometres from the Caucasus. At the same time, as the battle narrative again underlines, Huns never fought alone. In the 370s, during their first attacks on the Goths north of the Black Sea, Iranian-speaking Alan nomads were also involved, Uldin’s following contained Germanic-speaking Sciri, and after driving other Huns out of Pannonia in 427 east Roman forces were left with large numbers of their Gothic allies to resettle. A generation later, Attila’s Empire incorporated at least three more clusters of Goths, together with Germanic-speaking Gepids, Rugi, Sueves (those left behind, presumably, in 406), Sciri and Heruli, not to mention Iranian-speaking Alans and Sarmatians.2 The vast majority of these non-Huns, like the Huns themselves, were living in and around the Middle Danube c.450 AD. But many of them had not occupied land in the Middle Danube in the fourth century, and neither would they in the sixth. Not only did the Huns themselves move west into the heart of Europe, but they seem to have been responsible in some way for gathering many other groups together on the Great Hungarian Plain, most of whom subsequently left as Attila’s Empire collapsed.
The migration issues raised by even this bare outline of the Hunnic period in central Europe are clear. What, first of all, brought the Huns to the heart of Europe, and what form did their own migratory process take? And how are we to conceive of the demographic displacements involving the other peoples of Attila’s Empire? Was this a case of elite transfer, or something larger-scale?
Of all the migrants featured in this book, the Huns are perhaps the most mysterious. They wrote absolutely nothing themselves, but that’s pretty much par for the first-millennium course. More problematic is the fact that very little appears about them even in Roman sources until the time of Attila, or perhaps half a generation before: the later 420s onwards, but above all the 440s. By that date, profound transformations had distanced the Hunnic world from its counterpart of c.370, when the region north of the Black Sea first felt the weight of Hunnic assault. The reason for this dearth of information is not hard to deduce. From a Roman perspective, the crises of 376–80 and 405–8 both saw the Huns push other groups across the imperial frontier. These migrants then proceeded to generate huge disruption on Roman territory. It was only natural for Roman commentators to concentrate on them rather than on the Huns who had caused the initial problem.
As a result, our ignorance of the Huns is astounding. It is not even clear what language they spoke. Most of the linguistic evidence we have comes in the form of personal names – Hunnic rulers and their henchmen – from the time of Attila. But by then (for reasons that will become apparent later in the chapter), Germanic had become the lingua franca of the Hunnic Empire and many of the recorded names are either certainly or probably Germanic – so no help there. Iranian, Turkish and Finno-Ugrian (like the later Magyars) have all had their proponents, but the truth is that we do not know what language the Huns spoke, and probably never will.3 The direct evidence we have for the motivations and forms of Hunnic migration is equally limited. According to Ammianus, there was nothing to explain: ‘The origin and seedbed of all evils . . . I find to be this. The people of the Huns . . . who dwell beyond the Sea of Azov near the frozen ocean, are quite abnormally savage.’ They were just so fierce that it was natural for them to go around hitting people. Similar images of Hunnic ferocity are found in other sources. Zosimus, drawing on the contemporary historian Eunapius, records the panic generated by the Huns’ first attacks on the Goths, while the sixth-century Jordanes portrays them as the offspring of expelled Gothic witches and evil spirits.4 Tempting as it is to leave the issue there, we do need to be just a touch more analytical if we’re going to find a convincing explanation of the migratory processes at work among the Huns in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.
What we can say is that, originally, the Huns were nomadic pastoralists from the Great Eurasian Steppe. This vast landscape runs for thousands of kilometres from the fringes of Europe to the western borders of China. Summer rainfall is sparse and the characteristic vegetation is grass, so that its populations tended to depend more on herding than their neighbours; but, contrary to received images, they did do some arable agriculture and depended on economic exchanges with more settled populations to make up for any shortfalls in grain, which still provided much of their staple diet. That the Huns were nomads is suggested both by their geographical location when they are first encountered – east of the River Don, which marks the boundary where average rainfall drops below the levels that make widespread arable agriculture possible without irrigation – and by the famous description that Ammianus provides of them. Gibbon loved it, and the words are hugely evocative:5
Their way of life is so rough that they have no use for fire or seasoned food, but live on the roots of wild plants and the half-raw flesh of any sort of animal, which they warm a little by placing it between their thighs and the backs of their horses. They have no buildings to shelter them . . . not so much as a hut thatched with reeds is to be found among them. They roam at large over mountains and forests and are inured from the cradle to cold, hunger and thirst . . . .Once they have put their necks into some dingy shirt they never take it off or change it till it rots and falls to pieces from incessant wear . . . None of them ploughs or ever touches a plough-handle. They have no fixed abode, no home or law or settled manner of life, but wander like refugees with the wagons in which they live. In these their wives weave their filthy clothing, mate with their husbands, give birth to their children, and rear them to the age of puberty. No one if asked can tell where he comes from, having been conceived in one place, born somewhere else, and reared even further off.
Sadly – because the image has a certain romance – its basic implication that the Huns were constantly and randomly on the move is deeply mistaken.
You could work out that there is some kind of problem, in fact, just from the description itself. It was Ammianus’ standard practice, and one generally required of those working in the classical historical genre, to introduce interesting new protagonists with some kind of digression, and by the fourth century AD such moments were loaded with high expectation. The audience was looking for highly coloured descriptive rhetoric and extensive reference to well-known classical authors. Ammianus’ Hunnic digression did not disappoint. But not only is it full of rhetoric and quotation, there is another still more obvious problem. In the surviving books of his History, Ammianus had cause to introduce to his readers three sets of nomads – Alans and Saracen Arabs, alongside the Huns – and in each case the digression is more or less identical, with just a few details altered. Essentially, Ammianus had at his disposal nomad digression 101, and just hit the recall button whenever he needed to employ it. This raises the issue of what status to accord the details that are specific to each version. In the case of the Huns, Ammianus has some interesting things to say about their political leadership, which we will return to shortly, and records that they kept meat under their saddles as part of a curing process. This used to be discounted as a misunderstood treatment for saddle sores until a modern anthropologist-cum-historian found Mongols doing the same in the 1920s, so perhaps we do need to take seriously at least something of what Ammianus says. On the other hand, one of the few details he recorded of the Saracens is that both men and women enjoyed sex enormously, and you can’t help wondering how he knew. But in general, the fact that desert Arabs from the fringes of the Fertile Crescent as well as Iranian-speaking Alans and Turkic or Finno-Ugrian Huns from the Great Eurasian Steppe are described in extremely similar terms should have been enough to set the alarm bells ringing, and for some it did.6
These suspicions have been confirmed by the comparative evidence about nomadic lifestyles gathered more recently by anthropologists. There are of course almost as many differences between different nomad groups as there are nomad groups in the first place. According to the types of grazing and animals available, practices and organization vary enormously. But there are nonetheless some important features in common, and one of the key ones is that nomads do not usually either move at random, or that far – long-distance treks being punishing for both humans and animals. Eurasian groups observed at first hand in the twentieth century, for instance, tended to move a limited distance twice a year between designated blocks of summer and winter grazing. In the case of the Khazaks, before Stalin sedentarized them, this distance was about seventy-five kilometres. Stock-raising subgroups then slowly cycled their herds around within the pasture blocks, keeping their distance from one another so that the grass had time to grow after each subgroup’s visit. Other parts of the population, in the meantime, occupied fixed camps and some even grew crops. The purpose of the longer-distance moves in this regime is to connect two blocks of grazing land, neither of which could provide year-round support. Summer pasture, typically, might be up in the hills where it was too cold for grass in winter; winter pasture in reasonably adjacent lowlands where heat and the lack of rainfall limited grazing in the summer months. Essentially, nomadism builds two landscapes into a complete grazing portfolio. In this set-up, movement fulfils a designated function and could never just be random. A nomadic existence is potentially fragile anyway, highly dependent upon rainfall in what are by definition marginal landscapes; but setting off into the wild blue yonder without knowledge of a potential destination’s carrying capacity or, equally important, established rights to graze there, would have been to invite economic disaster.7
What this means, of course, is that the intrusions of Huns into the Alanic-dominated world north-east of the Black Sea, and then subsequently into the heart of Europe, cannot be viewed – as J. B. Bury did, for instance, in a famous set of lectures given in the 1920s – as a natural extension of their nomad economy. The Huns did not just meander around the Great Eurasian Steppe until they happened to come across its western edge north of the Black Sea and take a liking to it. The decisions to switch their centres of operation westwards – in two distinct stages separated by about a generation – must have been taken for specific reasons, and carefully calculated. The potential gains of these moves had always to be balanced against the dangers of failing to find, or – more likely – establish, rights over sufficient grazing for their flocks at the new destinations.8
As to what reason or reasons led the Huns to move westwards, no easy answers are available. Roman sources are of little use. Ammianus’ view that attacking other barbarians was just something that came naturally to Hunnic megabarbarians does not get us very far. The available evidence does suggest three factors, however, two possible and the other more certain, that made it generally likely that Hunnic groups would want to move west. One of the possible factors is climate change. Around the year 400 AD, western Europe was basking in a climatic optimum, with long hot summers and plenty of sunshine. But what was good for western Europeans was less good for the world beyond the Don, where the same climatic optimum meant that there was less summer rainfall to make the grass grow. Given these conditions, it would be only natural to expect greater competition for grazing among steppe nomads, and the modern world provides us with a nasty parallel for what can happen. At the heart of the Darfur conflict are Sudanese nomad populations driven out of their old homelands as global warming turns pasture into desert. The trouble with applying this argument to the fourth century, however, is that, for the moment at least, it is impossible to know how severe or, indeed, limited the effects of fourth-century climate change actually were. There are no precise data. And in their absence, the chances are that any effects were fairly marginal. But as we shall see in subsequent chapters, a sequence of nomadic groups exploded out of this same steppe in the mid-to-late first millennium, and more were to follow, which strongly suggests that Eurasian nomadism was not facing any fundamental ecological challenge. And in any case, like the Tervingi and Greuthungi when faced with the Hunnic menace, Huns under ecological pressure could have moved in any of several directions, and adducing climate change would still leave us having to explain why they moved westwards.
The other possible factor is political revolution. At least two of the nomadic groups that followed the Huns out of the steppe into Europe in the later first millennium did so, in part, because they were under political and military pressure from other nomadic groups to their east. The sixth-century Avars were on the run from the Empire of the Western Turks, while the ninth-century Magyars moved from north of the Black Sea to the Great Hungarian Plain because of the attacks of Petchenegs. In the absence of specific information about the western steppe in the fourth century, it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that the Huns too were facing this kind of pressure.9
But even if we allow the Huns a negative element to their motivation deriving from a combination of potential climatic and political factors, there is no doubting that this coexisted, as has proved to be the case in so many flows of migration, with some very positive reasons for moving west. Roman sources describing the Huns’ initial impact on the outer fringes of the Empire offer no substantial explanation of what was going on, but later materials are highly suggestive. From c.390 and particularly the 420s onwards, we find Huns engaged in a variety of activities in relation to the Roman world. Sometimes they raided it. A huge raiding party targeting both the east Roman and Persian Empires passed through the Caucasus in 395, before the Hunnic main body had moved on to central Europe, and there are indications of other smaller raids in this era besides. Sometimes Huns served the Empire as mercenaries. As early as the 380s, the activities of a body of Huns and Alans led to diplomatic confrontation between the western Emperor Valentinian II and the usurper Maximus. In the 400s, likewise, Uldin provided military support for Stilicho, before his ill-advised incursion into east Roman Dacia. With the arrival of Huns in large numbers in central Europe from c.410 onwards, however, mercenary service reached its apogee. They were possibly already providing major military support to the de facto ruler of the western Empire, Flavius Constantius, in the 410s, but it was in the time of Aetius, from the 420s, that they became a crucial bulwark of the western Empire. Not only did Aetius use their support to keep himself in power against Roman rivals, but they were also deployed to keep in check the aggressive ambitions of the other barbarian groups now well established on western imperial territory: most notably in major campaigns against the Visigoths and the Burgundians in the 430s. Then, finally, as Hunnic power grew in the time of Attila, the Huns turned from raiding and mercenary service to large-scale invasion. Two massive attacks on the east Roman Balkans, in 442 and 447, were followed by invasions of Gaul and Italy in 451 and 452.10
What all of these activities had in common was that they were different methods of tapping into the greater wealth available within the more developed economy of the Mediterranean-based Roman world. Raiding, obviously enough, was all about movable shiny stuff and other forms of negotiable booty, and this too was the point of mercenary service. For all his Hunnic connections – and Aetius had spent three years among them as a hostage – they did not fight for him without receiving generous payment. And even Attila’s invasions were undertaken with cash in mind. We have very detailed accounts of the diplomatic contacts that preceded and followed these attacks, and Attila’s central concern was always the size of the diplomatic subsidy he could secure. Extra territory and other types of gain were of only marginal interest.11 If it is legitimate to import this vision of the Huns’ basic attitude towards the Roman Mediterranean back to the 370s, and there is no obvious reason why not, then the Huns’ decisions to move westwards in two stages make complete sense. Increased proximity to the political centres of the Roman world in northern Italy and Constantinople meant greater opportunities for extracting a share of Roman wealth. In other words, the Huns were acting like the Goths and the other largely Germanic-speaking predators of the third century AD: their migrations were a response to fundamental inequalities of wealth. Like the Goths, they were moving from the less developed outer periphery of the Empire, and perhaps from beyond even that, into richer inner zones where there was a wide variety of wealth-generating opportunities available to groups able, like themselves, to deploy military force of sufficient potency.
It is also possible to say something useful about the developing nature of the Hunnic migration flow. No source gives us figures for the size of Hunnic migration units, but all the contemporary evidence indicates that the initial expansion into the northern Pontus was carried forward essentially by warbands: small groups of all-male warriors. Vithimer, the king of the Greuthungi whose death sparked the move of the Goths to the Danube in 376, fought many skirmishes – multas clades – against the Alans whom the Huns had displaced into his realm. This strongly implies that, while hugely destabilizing in aggregate, no individual engagement at this point was that large. Ammianus also records that Vithimer was able to hire some Huns to help him fight off the Alans. This has sometimes been discounted as a copying error, but there is no good reason to believe so. The report fits into a context where multiple small-scale warbands were operating on a more or less individual basis. The fact that Vithimer’s predecessor Ermenaric was able to resist the Huns ‘for a long time’ (diu) also suggests a sequence of smaller engagements rather than a set-piece confrontation. In similar vein, we find Huns operating in a variety of places and employing a variety of strategies for self-advancement as Rome’s eastern European frontiers collapsed.
Aside from the Huns who fought for Vithimer, others are recorded raiding the lands of the Tervingi (twice), signing up as mercenaries with some Alans to fight with the Tervingi and Greuthungi against Rome south of the Danube in 377, and raiding the Empire off their own bat from north of the Danube with Carpo-Dacians in tow in the early 380s.12 There is every reason to suppose that these were all independent groups of Huns, not the same one popping up in different places, and none of the recorded action requires military forces of any great size. One of the specific things Ammianus says about the Huns of this era in his digression, in fact, is that they were not governed by kings but by ‘improvised leaders’. This is a slightly slippery phrase whose meaning has been much debated, but again it fits well with a picture of small independent Hunnic units. It is also striking that this era threw up no Hunnic leaders who were individually significant enough to be mentioned by name.13 This recalls the first small-scale phases of Slavic and Viking raiding in, respectively, the sixth and ninth centuries. In both of these cases, it was only as raiding groups increased in scale that individual leaders came to be named.
But if the Hunnic expansion behind the crisis of 376–80 was being powered by warbands, the collapse of Rome’s central European frontier a generation later saw migration on a much larger scale. A hint that the size of Hunnic groups operating on the fringes of the Empire was growing is already there in the sources before this second crisis. Around the year 400, contemporary Roman sources finally mention a Hunnic leader by name: Uldin. He was powerful enough to provide useful military assistance to the Empire on occasion, with a following composed of Huns and Sciri. But although given to the occasional boast that his power stretched from where the sun rose to where it set, events put him firmly in perspective. His attempt to seize east Roman territory was defused without military action when his leading followers abandoned him, and at that point he disappears from our sources to where the sun of history doesn’t shine. This is not the career profile of a genuine predecessor of Attila. To my mind, Uldin’s sudden and otherwise inexplicable switch from ally to invader strongly suggests that his power base was not strong enough for him to hold his own in the face of the new Hunnic groups who became dominant there from c.410 onwards, almost certainly because these newcomers were turning up in larger and more organized bodies.14
The evidence for this is straightforward. When the east Roman diplomat and historian Olympiodorus visited the newly arrived Huns in the Middle Danube region in 411/12, he found them ruled by multiple kings ranged in order of precedence. At the time of the visit, the Huns had been in central Europe for only a handful of years, with no time for such a complex political order to emerge from a mass of independent warbands, and, in fact, a similar system is documented among another group of fifth-century steppe nomads, the Akatziri. It is overwhelmingly likely, therefore, that the second stage of Hunnic migration westward was actually led by the kings that Olympiodorus encountered. Indeed, given the numbers of Germani and others that the Huns displaced from the Middle Danube in the process – many tens of thousands, as we have seen – it is doubtful that a series of independent warbands could have mustered enough force to take over this new landscape. The kings’ presence makes it apparent that the move from north-east of the Black Sea to the Great Hungarian Plain had been accomplished by much larger and more organized social units than the warband activity that underlay the earlier crisis of 376–80.15
Overall, therefore, the evidence suggests that Hunnic migration into Europe took a form we have encountered before, in the third century, and will encounter again in the ninth. The initial impulse came from warbands on the make, without their having had, at this early date, any necessary intention to migrate. But when the warband activity proved highly profitable, larger and more organized groups became involved, probably aiming to maximize the amount of wealth that could be extracted by actually seizing total control of the landscape. In this case, the Huns’ later actions suggest that the attraction was not the land of the Middle Danube in terms of its agricultural potential (the attraction of England, eventually, for ninth-century Danes or eleventh-century Normans), but the fact that it was conveniently placed for maximizing profits via closer ties of various kinds with the Roman world. As a result, small-scale raiding north of the Black Sea elided into a population flow of steadily increasing momentum, until large-scale group migration emerged as the logical mechanism for maximizing profits by seizing control of the Great Hungarian Plain.
The exact size of the Hunnic groups involved in these two main phases of migration is unknowable. The kind of Gothic political unit whose stability was undermined by the aggregate action of Hunnic warbands and displaced Alans in the first phase of c.370ADcould field perhaps ten thousand warriors in total. But it is hard to extrapolate from this to the size of any attacking Hunnic force, and for two reasons. First, the Hunnic assault was indirect. Political stability north of the Black Sea was undermined over a long period by multiple raids and small-scale attacks, not head-on confrontation, and in the end it was Hun-generated upheavals among the Alans, rather than the Huns themselves, that led the Gothic Greuthungi to take their momentous decision to move in 375/6. So we don’t have to be thinking of anywhere near enough Huns to defeat ten thousand Goths in a set-piece battle. Second, like the nineteenth-century Boers, the Huns enjoyed a telling advantage in military hardware. One of their characteristic weapons was the composite reflex bow, long known on the steppe. Now, however, they employed a longer bow – up to 150 centimetres rather than the usual 100 – than had previously been seen on the western steppe. This gave them longer-range hitting power whose effects are visible in the rhetoric of Roman sources. These report Huns able to devastate the ranks of their Gothic opponents while themselves staying safely out of range. The Huns’ other characteristic weapon was a long cavalry sabre, which could do an excellent job of mopping up at closer quarters once the opposition ranks had broken.16 But exactly how big an advantage the bow gave them is uncertain. Flintlock rifles allowed the Voortrekkers to operate highly effectively against odds of about 10 to 1. Commandos numbering in their hundreds could rout Zulu and Matabele forces in their thousands at almost no cost to themselves. With this much advantage, an entire Gothic client state could have been defeated by groupings of no more than about a thousand Huns. But even the Huns’ longer bow was probably not as big an advantage as a rifle.
There is no direct evidence, either, for the size of the larger forces that Hunnic kings led on to the Great Hungarian Plain. To judge by Mongol analogies, each Hunnic warrior required many ponies to remain fully mobile. This perhaps provides an indirect indication of the total possible size of Hunnic forces, since it has been calculated that the Great Hungarian Plain could provide grazing for no more than about a hundred and fifty thousand horses. Extrapolating backwards, this number of horse could serve somewhere between fifteen and thirty thousand Hunnic warriors, which is perfectly plausible, but obviously no more than a guess. Lacking better information, I would suspect that the expansionary raiding of c.370, which did not take on the full might of the Gothic client states directly, of course, was undertaken by war parties of a few hundred, and the large-scale group move into central Europe of the early fifth century by a force somewhere in the region, again, of ten to twenty thousand warriors. But this too is only a best guess, and others could legitimately produce very different estimates.
If we can’t get very far with numbers, the comparative migration literature does prompt several more general observations about the Hunnic expansion into central Europe. The first stage of activity recalls the way in which many better-documented migration flows build up on the back on the activities of ‘scouts’, which demonstrate to a broader population the benefits of relocation. And although not something observed in the modern world, even the en bloc migration of large Hunnic groups in phase two is in accord with the fundamental principle that migration units will be of a size and nature that are appropriate to the task of accessing wealth in the particular context in which the migrant flow is operating. For the same reasons we have met before, the kind of large-scale predatory migration eventually undertaken by the Huns also necessarily involved women and children. The numerous dependants of large military forces assembled from non-professional sources cannot be left behind in safety when the military activity encompasses any intent to migrate. As with so many of the other immigrants we have encountered, moreover, the Huns had established traditions of mobility which, all the comparative evidence again emphasizes, must have greatly facilitated their decision to respond to potential gains to be had from the Roman world by upping sticks and moving closer towards it. The biannual migrations common to the nomadic lifestyle meant that the Huns had a greater than usual capacity to organize large-group movement.
As with the Goths, Vandals and Alans on Roman soil, another major reason why there was a substantial chronological gap between the two main phases of Hunnic intrusion into Europe must have been the need to build up geographical knowledge about the new possibilities that opened up for them after they had displaced Goths and Alans from regions north of the Black Sea. From this perspective, the massive Hunnic raid launched into the Roman and Persian Empires through the Caucasus in 395 can be seen as part of a learning curve. This caused huge disruption and attracted a great deal of coverage in Roman sources, not least because one group of raiders even got close to the Holy Land. But the raiders suffered heavy losses, and the experiment was never repeated.17 This does not suggest that the Huns themselves viewed the raid as a major success, and its relative failure may well have played a role in their eventual decision to move further west on to the Hungarian Plain rather than in any other direction. The knowledge of European geography necessary to make this move was no doubt also built up from feedback from the activities of smaller Hunnic groups we find west of the Carpathians before 405 – some of the mercenaries employed there in the 380s, for instance, or indeed the Huns of Uldin.
As has been observed in so many other cases, moreover, the process of migration triggered major sociopolitical restructuring among the Huns. When Olympiodorus visited them in 411/12 he encountered, as we have just seen, a political structure based on a series of ranked kings, which was highly appropriate for a nomadic society. Economic logistics require nomad populations to be relatively dispersed. Bunched populations with herds would quickly lead to exhausted grazing and economic disaster. At the same time, subgroups need their own organization for matters such as settling disputes, and the larger group has to be able to act decisively as one on occasion, above all to protect the grazing rights upon which all depend. Well-organized devolution rather than centralized rule is a natural political form for nomadic societies, therefore, and a kingly hierarchy fits the bill nicely.18
But when a second east Roman historian and diplomat – the famous Priscus – visited the Huns in the mid-440s in the time of Attila, the system of ranked kings had disappeared. Attila was surrounded by many great men, and although he had originally shared power with his brother, there were no other individuals of royal rank to be seen. No source records how the system of ranked kings was swept away, but one major bone of diplomatic contention between Attila and Constantinople was the protection it accorded to Hunnic fugitives of prominence.19 I take it, therefore, that Attila’s line, at the latest in the time of his uncle Rua who was active in the 430s, had ousted and/or demoted the other kings – a political process we have already observed among Alaric’s Goths, and will observe again among the Ostrogoths and Merovingian Franks.
This all relates to migration, and for the following reasons. What went on in these cases, in broad terms, was that one leader came to monopolize the political support that used to be divided between several. This requires the successful leader to have access to unprecedented wealth so as to outbid his rivals in the patronage stakes and win over enough of their supporters, in the process forcing them either to leave the group or to accept more junior, non-royal positions. In the case of the Huns, the source of that new wealth was the profits that flowed from the new relationships they were able to develop with the Roman Empire. Putting yourself by hook or by crook in charge of distributing the combined profits flowing from a potent mixture of raiding, mercenary service and diplomatic subsidy was the shortest path to political triumph. Although this was surely not one of its envisaged aims, Hunnic migration to the Middle Danube naturally brought political revolution in its wake.
In the qualitative sense used in migration studies, therefore, there is not the slightest doubt that the Huns’ intrusion into Europe in the later fourth and early fifth centuries must be considered mass migration. It was a flow of gradually increasing momentum, not a sudden, single migratory pulse, but the political shocks the Huns inflicted north of the Black Sea, and then in central Europe, could not be more obvious. Just as powerful, indeed, was the shock that eventually swept away their own political structures. Further analysis is limited by our inability to identify the precise trigger that set the Huns in motion. Roman sources highlight random chance, telling a charming story of wandering hunters who blundered though marshes, then to emerge into a land of plenty, but this is only a story and one based – again, like most of Ammianus’ digressions – on classical antecedent.20 In the absence of any other information, though, it may well be correct in suggesting that it was the wealth of the Roman Empire’s periphery that first sucked in the Hunnic raiders, and that migration momentum built up slowly from that point. New information on climate change or on political developments may transform this view in due course, making us redistribute the emphases we presently place on the various factors involved, but for the moment, the attractions of the wealthy imperial periphery seem the best option.
Hunnic-era migration affected not just the Huns themselves, however, but also the many and varied peoples who made up Attila’s Empire. Everything suggests that the migratory motivations and processes that brought so many others to the Middle Danube in the period of Hunnic domination were very different from those of the Huns themselves.