In his eyewitness account of an embassy to the Huns, the historian Priscus tells how, in Attila’s camp, he was suddenly hailed in Greek by someone who looked like a prosperous Hun ‘with good clothing and his hair clipped all around’. On further inquiry, the man told Priscus his life story:
He was a Greek-speaking Roman merchant from Viminacium, a city on the river Danube . . .
When the city was captured by the barbarians, he was deprived of his prosperity and . . . assigned to Onegesius [one of Attila’s leading henchmen], for after Attila the leading men . . . chose their captives from the well-to-do. Having proven his valour in later battles against the Romans and the Akatziri and having, according to [Hunnic] law, given his booty to his master, he had won his freedom. He had married a barbarian wife and had children, and, as a sharer of the table of Onegesius, he now enjoyed a better life than he had before.
This Roman merchant turned Hunnic warrior provides a textbook illustration of a major trend in current thinking about group identities in Attila’s Empire: they were highly malleable. There is another important individual case history suggesting much the same. Odovacar’s father Edeco (if, as seems likely, the two Edecos are the same man) is first met as another of Attila’s chief henchmen, alongside the Onegesius whose patronage was so important to the ex-Greek merchant. What’s so exciting about Edeco is that he became king of the Sciri after Attila’s death, even though he himself was not one. He probably owed his claim to the throne to having married a high-born Scirian lady, since his children, Odovacar and Onoulphous, are said to have had a Scirian mother. But Edeco himself is dubbed variously a Hun or a Thuringian. What these two case histories suggest, of course, is that Attila’s Empire was a melting-pot for pre-existing group identities, and the argument can be bolstered with more general evidence. Many of Attila’s leading henchmen had in fact Germanic not Hunnic names. Onegesius and Edeco certainly did, while two others, Berichus and Scottas, probably did. The recorded names for Attila and his brother Bleda are also Germanic, which, we know, operated as the lingua franca of Attila’s Empire because so many Germani were included within the numbers of its subjects that they massively outnumbered any Hunnic core.30 All the historical evidence thus suggests that the Middle Danubian world of the Huns was deeply multicultural.
Its archaeological remains tell a similar story. Nearly two generations of work since 1945 have unearthed a vast mass of material dating to the period of Hunnic domination, largely from cemetery excavations on the Great Hungarian Plain. There are some treasure hoards as well. But in this material, ‘proper’ Huns have proved highly elusive. In total – and this includes the Volga steppe north of the Black Sea – archaeologists have identified no more than two hundred burials as plausibly Hunnic. These are distinguished by some combination of bows, a non-standard European mode of dress, some cranial deformation (some Huns bound the heads of babies, before the skull set into shape, to give a distinctive elongated shape to the head), and the presence of a particular type of cauldron. The number of such burials is tiny. Either the Huns generally disposed of their dead in ways that left no archaeological trace, or some other explanation is required for the profound scarcity of Hunnic material. What these fifth-century Middle Danubian cemeteries have produced in abundance, however, are the remains – or what look like the remains – of the Huns’ Germanic subjects. The reasons for labelling the material Germanic are as follows. Its characteristic features all have close antecedents in norms operating among Gothic- and other Germanic-dominated areas in central and eastern Europe in the late Roman period, before the Huns arrived. These fifth-century finds belong to a sequence of dated chronological horizons, which, between them, mark the emergence of what has been christened the ‘Danubian style’ of Germanic burial.31
The funerary pattern was inhumation rather than cremation,32 its characteristic objects being deposited in large quantities in a relatively restricted number of rich burials. Many other individuals were buried with few or no gravegoods. The range of objects included items of personal adornment: particularly large semicircular brooches, plate buckles, earrings with polyhedric pendants, and gold necklaces. Weapons and military equipment are also quite common: saddles with metal appliqués, long straight swords suitable for cavalry use, and arrows. The remains also show up some odd ritual quirks. It became fairly common, for instance, to bury broken metallic mirrors with the dead. The kinds of items found in the graves, the ways in which people were buried and, perhaps above all, the way in which particularly women wore their clothes (gathered with a safety pin – fibula – on each shoulder, and another closing their outer garment in front), all follow on directly from general patterns observable in Germanic remains of the fourth century. These traits were then pooled and developed further in the fifth among the massed ranks of Attila’s subjects. As a result, it is not possible to tell the Huns’ different Germanic subjects apart on the basis of archaeological remains alone.33 Like the personal histories of the merchant and Edeco, the broadly spread, individually indistinguishable material culture of the Germanic component to Attila’s Empire suggests that we are looking at a cultural melting-pot. The melting may even have gone one stage further. Onepossible answer to the lack of Hunnic burials in the fifth century is that they had begun to dress like their Germanic subject peoples, just as they obviously learned their language.
There is no doubt, then, that within Attila’s Empire individuals, probably in large numbers, were busy renegotiating their identities as part of their attempt to navigate their way to prosperity, as political conditions and opportunities changed around them. For some scholars, indeed, the historical and archaeological evidence has suggested that group identities within this multicultural Empire were infinitely malleable. Essentially, everyone drawn into the Hunnic orbit in the late fourth and early fifth centuries became fully fledged Huns. The original nomad core and the largely Germanic-speaking contingents who bulked out the manpower of Attila’s Empire all came to share fully in the same Hunnic group identity and then, after Attila’s death, they renegotiated their identities a second time to form the various groups who emerged to independence in the 450s and 460s.34 I have no doubt that this model works in the case of some individuals and groups, but it completely ignores a substantial body of historical evidence showing that the structures of the Hunnic Empire imposed distinct limits on the extent to which individuals could adopt the group identity of their choice, which might have given them the greatest material prosperity available to them.
To start with, it’s worth thinking a bit more about Priscus’ Greek merchant. His route to success came through serving his new master successfully in battle, using the booty he won to buy his freedom. And although plenty of booty was certainly being won during Attila’s successful campaigns of the 440s, you do have to wonder how many Roman prisoners are likely to have done so well. The answer surely has to be not that many. Unless Onegesius kept a truly enormous table, there cannot have been room at it for many favoured ex-prisoners, and how many martially inexperienced Roman prisoners are likely to have been skilful and lucky enough to thrive in battle? Much less quoted is another of Priscus’ anecdotes. This concerns the fate of two other prisoners, likewise drafted into military service under the Huns, who took the opportunity of the chaos of battle to settle some old scores by killing their master. They were gibbeted.35 I suspect this less harmonious state of affairs is more likely to have prevailed among the majority of master–slave relationships than the happy outcome enjoyed by Priscus’ merchant.
All these anecdotes, moreover, concern Romans taken as individual prisoners. Most of Attila’s non-Hunnic contingents were incorporated into the Empire in rather larger population blocks. A large body of historical evidence indicates that, for these, the prevailing pattern of relations was much less conducive to easy, large-scale changes of identity. First, the Hunnic Empire was not something that people joined voluntarily. Evidence for this is plentiful and consistent. Non-Huns became part of the Empire through conquest and intimidation. This was certainly true of the Akatziri, for instance, who became the Huns’ latest victims in the time of Attila. There was some diplomatic manoeuvring, but the bottom line was unequivocal: ‘Attila without delay sent a large force, destroyed some, and forced the rest to submit.’ It was to avoid a similar fate, of course, that the Tervingi and Greuthungi had come to the Danube in the summer of 376. Indeed, all of our evidence indicates that the ranks of Attila’s subjects were filled not with volunteers, but with those who had failed to get out of the way in time.36 This immediately suggests that relations between the Huns and their subjects are unlikely to have been that harmonious. The point is confirmed by the broader run of evidence.
Crucial to any understanding of the Hunnic Empire is the fact that it was inherently unstable. This tends to receive little scholarly attention because most of our descriptive source material is provided by Priscus, writing about its apogee under Attila in the 440s. If you cast your net a little wider, however, the evidence for instability mounts quickly. Because so many of the Huns’ subjects were unwilling participants in the Hunnic Empire, the Romans were able consistently to reduce its power by detaching subject peoples from it, many of whom were more than ready to take the opportunity to escape. By losing some of his subjects, of course, was precisely how Uldin had been defeated in 408/9, but in that case we don’t know whether it was the fault-line between Hunnic masters and non-Hunnic subjects that was being exploited.
Other evidence is much clearer. In the 420s, for instance, the east Romans stripped away a large body of Goths from Hunnic control when they expelled the Huns from parts of Pannonia. The Goths were transferred to Thrace and seem to have served loyally thereafter in the east Roman military.37 On other occasions, the subjects took the initiative themselves:
When Rua was king of the Huns, the Amilzuri, Itimari, Tounsoures, Boisci and other tribes who were living near to the Danube were fleeing to fight on the side of the Romans.38
These events date to the later 430s, after Rua, Attila’s uncle, had already achieved considerable success, but even that success and their shares in all the booty that followed in its wake were insufficient inducement to guarantee the subjects’ quiescence. As might anyway be expected, the beginning of a new reign was a moment of particular stress:
When [at the start of their reign c.440] they had made peace with the Romans, Attila, Bleda and their forces marched through Scythia subduing the tribes there and also made war on the Sorogsi.39
Reasserting your overlordship over subject groups, once you had established yourself as number one Hun, was probably a basic necessity for any new ruler. So much so, in fact, that, when they could, Hunnic leaders tried to ensure that no Romans would be able to stir up trouble for them. In the first treaty they made with Constantinople, Attila and Bleda forced the east Romans to agree that ‘[they] should make no alliance with a barbarian people against the Huns when the latter were preparing for war against them’.40
The massive internal conflicts let loose after Attila’s death between the Huns and their subject peoples were not a one-off exception, therefore, but illustrative of a much deeper structural problem within the Hunnic Empire. The picture of internal peace and quiet you get from Priscus’ embassy to Attila is deeply misleading. The Empire was created by conquest, maintained by intimidation, and the only way to leave it, as the narrative of events after Attila’s death makes clear, was to fight your way out.
Much of the explanation of why there should have been this enduring hostility between rulers and ruled emerges from a further fragment of Priscus’ History dealing with Dengizich’s last attack on the east Roman Empire in 467/8, almost twenty years after the historian visited the court of Attila. This records how the separate contingents in a mixed force of Goths and Huns was brought to blows by a Roman agent provocateur. He did so by reminding the Gothic contingent of exactly how the Huns generally behaved towards them:
These men have no concern for agriculture, but, like wolves, attack and steal the Goths’ food supplies, with the result that the latter remain in the position of slaves and themselves suffer food shortages.41
Taking their food supplies was, of course, only part of the story. The subject peoples were also used to fight the Huns’ wars. While Priscus’ merchant-turned-Hun certainly prospered, his is likely to have been a minority story. As noted already, few civilian Roman prisoners are likely to have been much use when it came to fighting, and their casualties when they were used for Hunnic campaigns are likely to have been frightful. For most people, the reality of becoming part of the Hunnic Empire was a nasty experience of military conquest followed by economic exploitation, spiced up from time to time by being marched out to fight Attila’s wars.
Equally to the point – and this is where it differed so markedly from the Roman Empire – the Hunnic Empire lacked the governmental capacity to run the affairs of its subject peoples at all closely. Famously, the Hunnic bureaucracy consisted of one Roman secretary supplied by Aetius, the de facto ruler of the western Empire, and a Roman prisoner who could write letters in Latin and Greek. What this meant in practice is that, once conquered, subject groups still had to be left largely to run their own day-to-day affairs themselves. This does not mean that everything carried on absolutely as before. For instance, after conquering the Akatziri, Attila appointed one of his own sons to oversee their surviving chiefs, having eliminated several who resisted him. Likewise, while the Goths who provided part of Dengizich’s invasion force in 467/8 – referred to in the fragment quoted above – still had their own chiefs; they possessed no overall ruler. Given that all the independent Gothic groups we know of between the third and the fifth centuries had a pre-eminent ruler, even where power was shared between, for instance, brothers (as with, initially, the Amal-led Goths), this strongly suggests that Hunnic supervision often involved preventing the emergence of overall rulers among the larger concentrations of their defeated subjects.42 The point of such a stratagem would have been exactly the same for the Huns as it had earlier been for the Romans, when they operated it against the Alamanni outside the Empire, or in the 382 treaty against the Goths within. If you suppress an overall leader, you stimulate political competition within a group, and lessen the possibility of it mounting effective resistance.
Similar conclusions are also suggested by the political history of the Amal-led Goths. Stories preserved by Jordanes suggest that Valamer did not inherit his pre-eminence over them, but had positively to create it by suppressing rival warband leaders, and attaching, where possible, the followings of those whom he had defeated to his own power base. The stories are undated, but it seems more likely that this happened after Attila’s death than before it, since it created precisely the problem that Hunnic management strategies seem designed to avoid: a Gothic group powerful enough to act with independence. It was only after such a unification that these Goths had sufficient power either to invade the Middle Danube region or ask Constantinople to recognize their independence.43 And if what was true of the Goths was the case more generally among the Huns’ subjects, this would also explain why the Sciri had to find themselves a king from among Attila’s leading henchmen as Hunnic power collapsed.
Looking past the image of Attila in all his pomp, then, we can begin to understand the inherent instability of his Empire. Unlike that of Rome, which spent centuries turning subjects – or at least their landowning elites – into fully fledged Roman citizens, dissipating thereby the original tensions of conquest, the Huns lacked the bureaucratic capacity to run their subjects directly. I suspect, in fact, that the actual extent of Hunnic dominion and interference varied substantially between groups. The Gepids seem already to have had an overall leader at the time of Attila’s death, for instance, which probably explains why they were the first to assert independence. Other groups, like the Amal-led Goths, had to throw up an overall leader in the mid-to late 450s before they could begin to challenge Hunnic hegemony; and still others, like the Goths still dominated by Dengizich in 468, never managed to do so.44
If the sources were better, the narrative progression would probably show the Hunnic Empire peeling apart like an onion after 453, with different layers of subject groups asserting their independence at different moments, in an inverse relationship to the level of domination the Huns had previously been exercising over their lives. Two key variables – and they may well have been related – were probably, first, the extent to which the subjects’ political structure had been left intact, and, second, the distance separating them from the heartland of the Empire, where Attila maintained the camps at which he was visited by Priscus’ embassy. Some groups, settled in close proximity to the camps, were kept under tight rein, with any propensity to unified leadership among them strongly suppressed. Others, settled at a greater distance, preserved more of their own political structures and were much less closely controlled. By the time of Attila, Franks and Akatziri defined the geographical extremes. We hear of Attila attempting to interfere in one Frankish succession dispute, so that even the northern Rhine was not completely beyond his compass, and the Akatziri were established somewhere north of the Black Sea. In between, various groups of Thuringians, Goths, Gepids, Suevi, Sciri, Heruli, Sarmatians and Alans were all, if to differing degrees, dancing to Attila’s tune.45
One other possible complicating factor is worth raising. We have no detailed information for the Empire of Attila, but a trustworthy Byzantine source gives us interesting information about some of the gradations of status that operated in the analogous Empire of the nomadic Avars, two centuries later. This tells the story of a group of east Roman prisoners who were originally dragged north from their homes and resettled as Avar slaves around the old Roman city of Sirmium. Over time, they were raised to free, but still subordinate, status within the Empire and granted their own political leadership.46 It is important not to narrow unduly the range of allowed possibility just because we lack sources of similar quality. Attila’s Empire may have been articulated in a similar way, with intermediate statuses between fully fledged Hun and Hunnic slave. It should be emphasized, however, that even their subsequent promotion did not give the captives and their descendants enough of a stake in the Avar enterprise to want to remain part of it unconditionally. When the opportunity to break away from Avar control arose, they took it.
All of this has strong implications for the operation of group identities within the Hunnic Empire. They were not unchanging. Priscus’ former Greek merchant shows that it was possible for particularly successful individual slaves to rise to full free status among the Huns – that is, to pass across pre-existing divides in status and identity. But the original Hunnic core was itself at this time experiencing substantial changes in group identity. I mentioned earlier that as far as we can tell, its original identity was based on immediate loyalty to a series of ranked kings, whose association created the larger group, but these lower-level identities were swept away by the political restructuring that came with the rise of the dynasty of Rua and Attila. This kind of process affected other, better-documented nomad groups as they too worked their way to the western edge of the Eurasian steppe and beyond. The so-called Seljuk Turks of the eleventh century, for instance, were not a long-standing political entity, but a large body of nomadic Turkic-speakers united – temporarily – behind the astonishingly successful Seljuk leadership clan, who eclipsed potential rivals while conquering much of the Near East.47 But while dramatic, such a political process has a strong tendency to generate winners and losers even within its core supporters, which perhaps explains why we have indications that some Hunnic groups preferred, as the Empire began to collapse, to throw in their lot with leaders other than the sons of Attila.
Even more dramatic was the restructuring experienced by at least some of the Huns’ subjects. Their new overlords interfered pretty consistently at the top end of the political spectrum, suppressing the overall leadership structures of some of their more tightly governed subjects. Attila seems to have recruited aides from a variety of backgrounds, part of whose job may well have been to supervise the subject groups – whose status, as we have seen, is likely to have varied, although we lack detailed evidence from the time of the Huns themselves. This sort of approach was only sensible. Running an empire composed largely of more or less autonomous subjects, Attila needed loyal subordinates to run their affairs or to supervise those doing the running. The same kind of strategy is suggested by finds of gold in the archaeological horizons associated with the Empire at its height. Gold has been found in relatively vast quantities, but even this probably represents only a fraction of what was originally deposited. How much has been found and recycled over the centuries by intervening occupants of the Hungarian Plain is impossible to know. Gold, it should be stressed, is a rare find in Germanic archaeological remains before the Hunnic period, so the amount of new wealth that became available as Attila ransacked the Roman world can hardly be overstressed. Alongside military domination, then, he clearly also used the distribution of booty captured in his campaigns against the Romans to give subject leaders a further incentive to consent to his rule, just as the Romans granted annual gifts even to barbarian leaders they had just defeated or otherwise subdued.48
But while the dense concentrations of military manpower gathered there from all corners of the barbarian, especially the Germanic-speaking, world turned the Great Hungarian Plain into a cultural crucible, it also put barriers in the way of a total dissolution of larger-scale group identities. The whole point for the Huns in conquering Goths, Gepids, Heruli and others was to turn them into subjects whose military and economic potential could be harnessed and exploited. If they were all allowed to become fully fledged free Huns like the former Roman merchant, then the treatment meted out to them, as they acquired such privileges, would have had to change for the better, just as his did. And as it did so, the overall benefit to the Huns from their initial conquests would have been lost. The Hunnic Empire was certainly multicultural, but, as is often the case in multicultural societies, this did not mean that group identities within it were either infinitely malleable or easily eroded. Because being a Hun meant higher status, the Empire’s multicultural character effectively erected barriers around Hunnic identity. The Huns’ lack of bureaucratic capacity left their subjects with at least their intermediate leaderships intact, thereby perpetuating the structures around which their existing sense of group identity might survive. At the same time, the exploitation they had to endure gave them the incentive to maintain these identities, since they were the only vehicle through which they might be able to overthrow Hunnic domination, either by escaping into the Roman Empire or at some point regaining their political independence by force. Neither of these options would be possible for a group that fragmented and lost all capacity for group action. There is every reason, then, why old identities should not have slipped easily away under Hunnic rule.
Nor, it must be stressed, is the view of the Hunnic Empire which emerges from the historical evidence – one riven with internal tension between ruler and ruled – remotely contradicted by the archaeological evidence, even if you do take the view that the Huns’ invisibility stems from their having started to bury their dead in ways previously associated with their Germanic subjects. When it comes to archaeological evidence, in fact, a degree of methodological confusion sometimes prevails. Everyone is now clear, in an intellectual world that has moved on from culture history, that individual groups cannot be assumed to have each had their own distinctive material cultures. But it is sometimes assumed that if a regionally distributed material culture does not show up any very clear differences, then there can’t have been any clear distinctions of identity within it. This, however, is just an inverse application of the old mistaken assumption behind culture history: that distinct groups should have distinct material cultures. If you can’t use differences within a regional pattern of material culture necessarily to talk about separate political identities, then equally you cannot use the lack of them to deny the possible existence of political distinctions. Identity is about mental and political structures – claims made by individuals and the willingness of groups to recognize those claims – not material cultural structures. This seriously limits the capacity of archaeological evidence to speak to identity debates, except in unusual circumstances, often when there is other information available about particular material items endowed with special significance. The fact that everyone within Hunnic Europe used broadly the same material culture does not mean that there were no crucial status divides or group identities operating within it.49
Collapsing Identities
The narrative of the Hunnic Empire’s collapse – complimenting the evidence for its creation and maintenance – confirms just how important these internal identities were, even if further reconfigurations were again part of the process. The Empire was destroyed from within, when its various subject peoples reasserted their independence militarily after Attila’s death. If they had all been subsumed voluntarily into an equal Hunnic identity, why should this have happened? Acting collectively, they had been able to extract from the Roman Empire the huge sums of gold that show up in the Middle Danubian burials. This was a level of predation which, separately, they were quite unable to match, as is underlined both by the general absence of gold in earlier Germanic remains and the capacity of the east Roman Empire to rebuild its control of the Balkans in the later fifth century after Hun-inspired unity had collapsed.50 Indeed, the energy the non-Huns put into escaping from Hunnic rule demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the lower status and the scope for exploitation inherent in their position meant that the costs for them of being part of the Empire were not generally compensated for by the gains flowing to some of them because of the greater predatory capacity generated by its existence.When the chance presented itself on Attila’s death, a scramble for independence quickly followed.
Like their initial incorporation, the process of breaking away from Hunnic control involved further renegotiation of group identities. If all, or even many, of the denser concentrations of subjects had had their overall leaderships suppressed as part of their incorporation into the Hunnic Empire, then a rush for position and power of the kind that brought Edeco and the Sciri together would have ensued right across Attila’s domain. And certainly, Valamer, as we have seen, had to unite what became the Amal-led Goths by defeating other dynasts, and may well have been recruiting non-Gothic manpower in addition. Aside from the large named population units that emerge as successor states to the Hunnic Empire in the later 450s and early 460s, many smaller groupings also figure fleetingly in our sources, like the Sorosgsi, Amilzuri, Itimari, Tounsoures and Boisci mentioned in different fragments of Priscus’ history. Several of these found their way on to Roman soil as the Hunnic Empire collapsed, and something of the chaotic nature of the action as they were resettled by the Roman state is reflected in their subsequent line-up, as reported by Jordanes:
The Sarmatians and the Cemandri and certain of the Huns dwelt in Castra Martis . . . The Sciri together with the Sadagarii and certain of the Alani . . . received Scythia Minor and Lower Moesia . . . The Rugi, however, and some other races asked that they might inhabit Bizye and Arcadiopolis. Hernac, the younger son of Attila, with his followers, chose a home in the farthest reaches of Scythia Minor. Emnetzur and Ultzindur, kinsmen of his, won Oescus, Utus and Almus in Dacia.51
These groups were each assigned to just one or to a few Byzantine military bases in the northern Balkans, so none of them can have been particularly large. Similar groups, presumably, were also being subsumed into the bigger kingships which began to emerge from Hunnic imperial collapse. Among the descendants of Theoderic the Amal’s following in Italy in the late 540s, for instance, were Bittigure Huns. These had previously been commandeered by the sons of Attila in the 460s to fight Theoderic’s uncle Valamer, and must have renegotiated their political allegiance at some point in the meantime.52 This could have happened on any number of occasions, of course, but the reshuffling of the Hunnic imperial pack in the aftermath of Attila’s death is an obvious possibility.
In the slightly longer term and larger scale, this was very much the fate of the Rugi. They formed one of the initial successor kingdoms to the Hunnic Empire, but then threw in their lot with Theoderic after Odovacar had destroyed their independence. The Gepids and Lombards carried on this tradition of gathering fragments under their wing. Defeated Heruli joined the former (although, at first at least, they didn’t like the terms they were offered), and by the time the Lombards left for Italy in the late 560s they took with them, according to Paul the Deacon, Sueves, Heruli, Gepids, Bavarians, Bulgars, Avars, Saxons, Goths and Thuringians. The first three names on this list, at least, represent human flotsam and jetsam from the post-Hunnic Middle Danube.53 The adjustments in political identity involved in creating the successor kingdoms after Attila’s death should not be underestimated. Some, perhaps all of them, were not culturally homogeneous groupings, closed to outsiders and replicating themselves over time through in-marriage, but new kingships stitched together out of a variety of remnants who shared a basic interest in breaking away from Hunnic control. Even the Gepids, who were seemingly less under the Hunnic cosh in Attila’s lifetime and already had their own king, may have been picking up new recruits as the Empire collapsed. But this was all the more true of groups like the Sciri and Amal-led Goths, who found – or refound – their unity at this point, and it is entirely likely that others about whom we have no information – such as the Rugi, Sueves and Heruli – had equally messy origins.
Nor were these kingships ‘peoples’ in a second important sense of the term as it has traditionally been used. As we have seen, three hundred years of growing economic complexity had created, or greatly reinforced, social inequalities in the Germanic world. For the Amal-led Goths among Attila’s former subjects, we have explicit evidence that this meant that their populations contained warriors of two unequal statuses, probably to be equated with freemen and freedmen. The same is true of the Lombards who intruded themselves into the Middle Danubian region in force only after Attila’s sons had given up the struggle. When it comes to understanding group identity, this adds an important extra dimension. Only higher-status warriors benefited fully from the existence of the group to which they belonged, via the rights and privileges it conferred upon them, and only they can be supposed to have been completely committed to that group’s identity. The significance of this shows up in the historical narratives. At one point, in the course of the Byzantine conquest of Ostrogothic Italy, all the higher-status warriors in a Gothic force in Dalmatia were killed. The remaining, lower-status, warriors immediately surrendered. And throughout Procopius’ narrative of that war, losses among the higher-status group were a particular cause of alarm and despondency among the Goths.54
At least the bigger entities to emerge from the Hunnic Empire, then, were not ‘peoples’ in the traditional sense of the word. Neither culturally nor hierarchically homogeneous, they were a complex of political alliances and statuses that, as well as the two strands of militarized manpower, probably incorporated unarmed slaves. That said, it would not be right to go from one simplistic extreme to another: from the old view of these entities as entirely closed population groups, to the opposite – that they were mere flags of convenience with no internal structure or stability. This is not the place for a full discussion, but two important observations are worth making. First, group identities were not dependent on royal families, which, in one line of research, have been seen as providing social cement for highly disparate improvised groupings in the form of a mere pretence of ethnic belonging. The Lombards took kings from a variety of dynastic lines, not from one uniquely royal one, and even managed to continue to exist as Lombards without any kings at all in certain periods. This is a well-known point, but it has sometimes not been recognized that the Gothic evidence is much more similar than it initially appears to be. In the 520s, when he was seeking to secure the Italian throne for his minor grandson against a series of rivals – some from within the dynasty, some from without – Theoderic the Amal, Valamer’s long-lived nephew, issued a huge amount of propaganda stressing that his was a uniquely royal line, the only one fitted to rule these Goths. Cassiodorus also helped him ‘prove’ the point from Gothic history, by producing a genealogy which showed that the grandson was the seventeenth generation of kingship within the family. But kings are always saying this kind of thing, and should not be believed, especially when, in this case, Theoderic’s claims about the past do not hold up when compared with what can be learned from more contemporary sources. Cassiodorus’ Amal genealogy, likewise, was cobbled together from a mixture of Gothic oral history and Roman written history, with touches of biblical inspiration thrown in. Amal domination had in fact been built up over these Goths in stages from as recently as c.450. Hence it ceases to surprise that, when Theoderic’s line failed to produce a suitable male heir, it was simply axed: almost literally, when his nephew Theodahad was murdered for his leadership failings in 536, just a decade after the great king’s death.55
Second, for all the messiness of the post-Attilan political process from which they emerged, some of these larger group identities were not so easy to destroy. Despite becoming part of Theoderic’s following in 487/8, for instance, the Rugi maintained their independence over two further generations down to c.540, when they were still a recognizable entity in the Italian landscape. For all their travails and splits, likewise, the Heruli retained a significant sense of their group identity for another forty-odd years after their defeat at the hands of the Lombards in 508. Without it, they would never have sought a leader of the traditional ruling house from among those of their number who had moved north to Scandinavia.56 To judge by their histories, both the Rugi and Heruli were ‘medium-sized’ entities. They were clearly not as militarily powerful, say, as the Gothic, Lombard or Gepid confederations which generated much longer-lived political entities, and into which elements of the Rugi and Heruli were eventually absorbed. In both cases, the evidence has been questioned. The mission of the Heruli to Scandinavia has been labelled a ‘fairy story’, and the resurfacing of the Rugi in 540 no more than an invention of the historian Procopius, who had – it is claimed – such a strong tendency to view any barbarian grouping as a ‘people’ that he ought not to believed. Both are stories recounted in detail in only the one source, and where that is the case, it is always possible to deny their validity. But is there any real substance to these arguments?
In my view, there isn’t. In the case of the Heruli, the Scandinavian mission is told in great circumstantial detail in the middle of what adds up to a full account of their fortunes after their defeat by the Lombards. Other parts of this story are confirmed in other sources, and what Procopius describes, in total, is the effective destruction of Herulic identity. When two contingents of Heruli end up fighting each other, as they did in 549 when one was fighting for the Gepids and the other (via the east Roman Empire) for the Lombards, then you have to conclude that the Herule label had ceased to mean much as a determinant of human behaviour. The account is entirely plausible, there are no inconsistencies or obvious errors. There are of course other things one would like to know, but the narrative satisfies all the normal criteria for basic credibility that ancient and medieval historians usually employ. In the case of the Rugi, likewise, different sources record the extent to which they played an independent hand during Theoderic’s conquest of Italy in the early 490s. They swapped sides twice in fact, first to join Odovacar and then going back to the Goths. So we should not wonder at finding them – or some of them – with their identity preserved for a further generation or so after the conquest of Italy.
The only reason to doubt either of these stories is that they fail to fit in with the preconceptions about identity held by the modern scholars doing the doubting. Heavily influenced by the ideas of Barth, both are proponents of the idea that Germanic groups of the mid-first millennium could not have had strong group identities. But Barth, as we have seen, represents only one strand in modern research into identity, which lends no overwhelming support to the preconception that group identities ought always to be highly malleable. According to circumstances – the precise nature of any individual situational construct – group identity can be weaker or stronger, and, in the case of the Rugi, Procopius even offers a mechanism as to how identity was maintained: namely, by a voluntary ban on marriage outside the group.57 Given its coherence and detail, I am happy to accept what the evidence is telling us. The Heruli and Rugi probably were not ‘peoples’ in the classic nineteenth-century sense of the term. There is no evidence that either possessed within them strong cultural commonalities (though none either, to be fair, that they didn’t), and they may have incorporated outsiders through various alliance systems as Attila’s Empire broke up. They surely also, like all the other Germanic groups known from the period, incorporated strong status divides. But nonetheless they were bound by group identities capable of exercising a strong hold over significant numbers of their constituent populations.
And although you can more easily conceive of this being true among such smaller and less diverse groupings, it seems to have been true even of some of the larger group identities as well. When the Byzantines decided to conquer the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy in 536, their arrival sparked a sequence of defections from subgroups who preferred to make their peace with the invaders rather than continue with their independent Gothic allegiance. One surviving papyrus beautifully illustrates the plight of a Gothic estate owner called Gundilas, who twisted and turned, swapping sides repeatedly in a desperate attempt to hold on to his land, as the fortunes of war fluctuated around him over the next twenty years. But neither the defectors nor Gundilas can have reflected the majority response to Byzantine invasion among Theoderic’s supporters and their descendants. If they had, those twenty years of warfare would not have followed in which the Goths attempted to maintain their political independence, especially since the Byzantines offered them a peace deal that would have allowed them to keep their lands in return for political submission. What really emerges from both Procopius’ narrative and a wider range of evidence is that a core body of higher-status warriors who had the most invested in Gothic group identity was slowly destroyed in the war years as more and more of them fell in battle.58 These were the men who had most to gain from maintaining the group identity that gave them their high social status, and these were the men most willing to fight for its continuance. My best guess is that such higher-status warriors, both among the Goths and among other Germanic groups of this era, were the real building blocks of group identity, and that the relative robustness – or otherwise – of any particular group depended upon their allegiances and attitudes. That does not mean, of course, that even among these higher-status individuals all felt the same degree of group allegiance. This doesn’t happen in the modern world, and it’s hard to see why it should have been any different in the ancient.