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IT IS EARLY IN THE 380S ON HUNGARY’S GREAT PLAIN. THE Huns are settling into their new homeland, and finding it less than ideal. For at least a generation they have been on the move, living well off the proceeds of warfare. They are hooked on pillage, not just for luxuries, but for sheer survival. It is all they know. Now, suddenly, they are hemmed in. To the east lie highlands – Transylvania and the Carpathians, through which they came a few years before. There’s nothing back that way for them. To the south and west lies the Danube, the Roman frontier, with its armies and fortress-towns; to the north and west, German tribes who may one day be vassals, but are not exactly rich. It will take a little time to assess which way to turn. For newly arrived nomads, the future is full of complexities and unknowns.
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After Adrianople the empire struggled, and failed, to remake the peace within and without. The Balkans remained in turmoil, with Goth bands raiding freely, until the western emperor, Gratian, and his eastern coruler, Theodosius the Great, made peace with them all individually in 380–2, bribing them with tax exemptions, land grants and employment in the armed forces. It was Theodosius who, at two vital moments, held this tottering enterprise together by sending armies to back Christianity against paganism and his family’s claim to the West against rebels. It was he who managed to buy time by converting the Goths into allies, even if their version of Christianity was heretical. It was he who imposed the Nicene version of Christianity empire-wide before his own death in 395. With him fell a bastion against disorder and the infection of barbarism. His heirs were two feeble sons, Arcadius (aged eighteen, ruler of the East) and Honorius (eleven, of the West).
The empire became a cocktail of cultures, interfused, each dependent on others. Some barbarians settled; others kept on the move, notably the Visigoths. A new chief, Alaric, took them raiding across the Balkans so successfully that he was made a provincial governor, but that was just a stepping stone to a better homeland for his people within the empire. In both parts of the empire, Goths and other barbarians – even individual Huns – became senior officers. In the West, the power behind the throne, Stilicho, a Vandal by descent, was married to a niece of Theodosius. Goths served en masse, as contingents, with the danger that their loyalty was to their own commanders rather than to the emperor. Barbarians were fast becoming the arbiters of imperial destiny. In 401 Alaric led his Visigoths into Italy, forcing the emperor to move his court to Ravenna, where it stayed for a century.
In 405–7 two barbarian armies – ragbags of Goths, Alans, Vandals, Swabians, Alemanni and Burgundians – swept into Gaul and Italy. Stilicho favoured collaboration, provoking an anti-barbarian backlash in which he was purged and executed, with no impact on the advance of the barbarians. In 410 Alaric seized Rome. It was the first time the Eternal City had seen enemies within its walls for 800 years – an event so shocking to Christians that it inspired the North African bishop Augustine of Hippo to write one of the most influential books of the age, Concerning the City of God. Alaric died that year, and his rootless people, still in search of a homeland, drifted back to Gaul, then on into Spain, finally swinging round again to settle north of the Pyrenees in what is now Aquitaine. In 418 their new capital, Toulouse, became the centre of a semiautonomous region, a nation in all but name, supplying troops to the empire in exchange for regular supplies of grain. Barbarian and Roman were intertwined, in geography, arms, society and politics, a process exemplified by the fate of the daughter of Theodosius and sister of Emperor Honorius, the 20-year-old Galla Placidia, who had been dragged off to become the unwilling wife of a barbarian – Alaric’s heir, Athaulf.
But fate allowed Galla Placidia a remarkable comeback. When Athaulf died, she was married (against her will, again) back into Roman stock, to a husband befitting her status, the patrician and general Constantius, co-emperor for just seven months in 421. It was this marriage that catapulted her into power, which she preserved through many dramatic twists, turning herself into one of the most formidable women of her age. When Constantius died, she was accused of intrigue against her own brother and fled to Constantinople with her baby daughter Honoria and her four-year-old son Valentinian, heir to the western part of the empire. In Constantinople, the ruler in the East was Arcadius’ son, another Theodosius, who in 423 became, briefly, the sole ruler of the entire empire, at the age of 22. Nevertheless, he chose to back Galla Placidia when she demanded the western throne for young Valentinian. As a result, when the same year the court in Ravenna chose to crown a non-family official, John, Theodosius sent an army to crush the usurper, and placed Valentinian, now six, on the throne (thus returning the boy’s mother Placidia to Italy, along with the infant Honoria, who is destined to play a peculiarly dramatic role in our story later).
This, then, was how things stood when Attila was reaching maturity in the 420s: the empire divided, both parts riven by religious and political rivalry, half a dozen barbarian groups as immigrant communities, the northern frontiers in chaos, both armies staffed in part by the very people they opposed. To an ambitious chieftain north of the Danube, it all looked quite promising.
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Now retrace the same 40 years to see what the Huns had been doing during that time.
The first Huns appeared in western Europe in 384, when they and their Alan vassals were invited to strengthen the imperial ranks in the civil war against a would-be usurper, Maximus. They helped keep Maximus out of Italy, and would probably have gone on deeper into the empire if they hadn’t been bribed to behave themselves and go home. Their good behaviour inspired Theodosius to employ them again four years later in a second intervention to quell rebellion in Italy. ‘O memorable thing,’ wrote the fourth-century historian Pacatus, ‘Goths and Huns and Alans answered the roll-call, changed guards and rarely feared to be reprimanded. There was no tumult, no confusion, no looting in the usual barbarian way.’ But this time, after victory, the barbarian contingents refused to go home. John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, described the result: ‘That which has never taken place has now come to pass; the barbarians leaving their own country have overrun an infinite space of our territory, and that many times over, and having set fire to the land, and captured the towns, they are not minded to return home again, but after the manner of men who are keeping holiday rather than making war, they laugh us all to scorn.’ These were not troops under centralized control, but small-fry robber barons leading hit-and-run raids. There was no way to beat them in war. It would be like grasping at a fog. Instead, Constantinople offered a deal: the barbarians concerned – mostly Goths, but including groups of Huns – would become allies,foederati, bribed into quiescence with land south of the Danube. These Hun clans had no unified leadership, being little more than family groups; but now, for the first time, Huns were officially inside the empire.
To the north, the mainstream Huns, now masters of eastern Hungary and Romania, had at least the rudiments of unity, under Balamber’s heirs, named as Basich and Kursich. A cemetery near the present-day village of Csákvár, on the edge of the wooded Vértes Hills between Budapest and Lake Balaton, reveals a culture in mid-change, where former inhabitants, both local tribesmen and Romans, are joined by those who bound their children’s heads, buried horses, and wore gold- and silver-plated headbands and silver and bronze earrings. But it was not much of an estate for nomads. The local economy was in tatters. There were few pastures in the wooded valleys of the Carpathians, and those who lived with their herds on the Hungarian puszta were probably discovering that this was not quite the steppeland of their dreams, for the River Tisza meandering across it flooded in spring, cutting their pastures in two. They had slaves, in the form of defeated Goths and Alans from beyond the Carpathians, and Sarmatians who had been masters in Hungary itself, who all knew how to till the soil. But neither local farms nor imported herds produced enough. The Huns needed food. They could seize it locally – or they could buy it from further afield, if only they had the cash. Gold coins would also be a useful raw material for the gold flake with which their top families decorated their harnesses, weapons and headdresses.
Where to turn for gold? The Balkans were thoroughly ravaged, and Constantinople was too tough. They looked around for an easier target, one that would yield to, and sufficiently reward, their well-honed tactics.
In 395 they turned to the empire’s back door: the eastern provinces, unguarded because the Roman army was bogged down in yet another civil war in Italy. To get there, they had to gallop all the way round the Black Sea, some 1,500 kilometres. But the way there, through the former lands of the Goths and Alans, was now part of their own territory, and it was springtime, with the pastures new-grown. With two or three spare horses each, a nomadic army unencumbered by wagons could cover 160 kilometres a day over the southern Russian steppes, and have the snowy ramparts of the Caucasus in sight within a month. Then another two weeks to wind through the Caucasus, probably through the Darial pass, the main route across the central Caucasus from Chechnya – for the Chechens were there then, and had been for millennia – into Georgia. Christian Armenia, the empire’s eastern border, lay ahead, with the rich towns of the Syrian and Phoenician coast another 1,200 kilometres beyond. That summer, villages in central Turkey went up in flames, and Hun bands seized slaves in Syria – 18,000 of them according to one source.
In Bethlehem, Jerome, scholar and future saint, heard news of their coming, and trembled. Jerome had been born in northern Italy and educated in Rome, where he became a Christian. Thereafter he had lived for many years in Antioch, attempting to find a way to resolve the bitter dispute over Arianism, the heresy that denied the divinity of Christ. He had travelled to everywhere that mattered: Rome, Greece, the Holy Land, Egypt; finally – as he thought – he had settled in Bethlehem. Now he judged that his only hope of survival lay in flight to the coast. A year later, when it was all over, he wrote of his experience:
Behold the wolves, not of Arabia, but of the North, were let loose upon us last year from the far-off rocks of the Caucasus, and in a little while overran great provinces. How many monasteries were captured, how many streams were reddened with human blood! . . . Not even if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths, and a voice of iron could I recount the name of every catastrophe . . . They filled the whole earth with slaughter and panic as they flitted hither and thither on their swift horses . . . They were at hand everywhere before they were expected: by their speed they outstripped rumour, and they took pity neither upon religion, nor rank nor age nor wailing childhood. Those who had just begun to live were compelled to die and, in ignorance of their plight, would smile amid the drawn swords of the enemy . . . We ourselves were forced to make ships ready, to wait on the shore, to take precautions against the enemy’s arrival, to fear the barbarians more than shipwreck even though the winds were raging.
A Christian priest in Syria, Cyrillonas, found his faith almost shattered by God’s apparent withdrawal, and put his reactions into a moving poem:
Every day unrest, every day new reports of misfortunes, every day new blows, nothing but fights. The East has been carried into captivity, and nobody lives in the destroyed cities . . . Dead are the merchants, widowed the women . . . If the Huns will conquer me, O Lord, why have I taken refuge with the holy martyrs? If their swords kill my sons, why did I embrace Thine exalted cross? If Thou willst render to them my cities, where will be the glory of Thy holy church? . . . Not a year has passed since they came and devastated me and took my children prisoners, and lo, now they are threatening again to humiliate our land.
But the Huns did not quite reach Palestine. Jerome returned to his home in Bethlehem. There was no second assault, for a Hun incursion down the Euphrates and Tigris drew the attention of the Persians. It was a Persian army, not a Roman one, that drove them back northwards, seizing back the stolen goods, releasing the 18,000 prisoners. When the Greek civil servant Priscus heard the story of this raid over 50 years later, he was told that, to avoid pursuit, the Huns took a different route, past ‘the flame that issues from the rock beneath the sea’, which perhaps refers to the oil-rich Caspian shore; Marco Polo refers to the same phenomenon, describing ‘a fountain from which oil springs in great abundance . . . This oil is not good to use with food, but ’tis good to burn.’
So the raid was not a complete success; but it was an astounding achievement nevertheless. The Huns may have returned a little short on booty and slaves, but they had greatly extended their geographical knowledge and their military experience. They had never launched a campaign like this before: unprecedented in its speed and ferocity, it remained unequalled for 800 years, until Genghis Khan’s Mongols, approaching from the other direction, cut up through the Caucasus on their first raid into Russia. It must have given them tremendous confidence. What might they not achieve if they attacked the eastern empire again, this time taking the direct route south through the Balkans, a mere 800 kilometres from the Hungarian plains, one-fifth of the distance they had just covered?
Nine years passed. All remained quiet on the northern front. Perhaps the Goth slaves were more productive, the Tisza better behaved, the plunder from the Caucasus raid adequate. Under a new leader, Uldin, the Huns were even able to ingratiate themselves with Constantinople by dealing with one of the eastern empire’s more troublesome characters, a Gothic chieftain named Gainas who had betrayed his position as an imperial commander. A short, sharp war ended in the death of Gainas, whose head was sent as a gift to the emperor Arcadius.
Such forays aside, the Huns remained at home, biding their time, until the winter of 404–5, when Uldin led an army across the frozen Danube back into Thrace. This was merely a warm-up exercise: nearly four years later, in 408, he returned at the head of a large-scale invasion. It was a good moment to strike, for the Visigoths were on their way to Rome, there had just been a mass migration of Vandals and other groups across the Rhine, and the eastern empire’s army had turned away to strengthen the Persian border. The Hun advance sent shock waves as far as Jerusalem, where Jerome concluded that God’s punishment had descended again on the immoral Roman world in the form of savage tribes ‘who display womanly and deeply cut faces, and who pierce the backs of bearded men as they flee’.
There was no stopping the Huns by force; so an unnamed Roman general arranged peace talks to offer cash. Early one summer morning, the two leaders met somewhere on the borders of Thrace. Uldin was not impressed. Pointing to the rising sun, he said he could take every land it lit, if the Romans did not pay enough. Unluckily for him, some of his officers were eager to accept the offer, and seceded, allowing the Romans to mop up Uldin’s loyal forces and cart them off to Constantinople in chains. The major source for this anecdote, Sozomen, a church historian writing in Constantinople in the mid-fifth century, reported seeing many of these men later working on farms near Mount Olympus. Uldin, his authority much undermined, made a hair’s-breadth escape back over the Danube, being kept in his place thereafter by imperial patrol ships hastily sent to reinforce the Danube fleet.
Uldin’s demands are revealing: he was not interested in land, or the right to settle, as the Goths had been 40 years before. New territory colonized by Huns would have scattered his people and diluted his power. He wanted cash, because pastoral nomadism, even when bolstered by slave land-workers, was no longer enough. What he needed to maintain his rule was national unity; and that could be achieved only if he had the money to buy loyalty; and the obvious source of wealth was Rome and Constantinople; and to get his hands on it he needed a powerful army. Authority, unity, control of vassals, leverage over Rome and Constantinople, cash – all to maintain authority and unity: already the Huns were trapped in a cycle of conquest, from which retreat meant failure, ignominy, poverty and collapse.
The Huns had their new homeland more or less to themselves; but Uldin’s authority was weakened by the 408 campaign, and vassals were slipping away. So too were bands of his own people. Ignoring him, small groups of Huns took off on their own, some to join the Goths in their march against Rome, some to join the Roman contingents defending it.
What did Uldin do about all this? Nothing that made any impact on the world beyond the Danube. Instead, he consolidated power locally, in particular over a small group known as Gepids, who lived on the grasslands east of the Tisza, as archaeologists know from about 100 sites, many of which contain examples of the eagle-headed silver buckle that was the defining Gepid decoration. From then on, Gepids became part of the Hun federation. Otherwise, what the Huns were up to in the first two decades of the fifth century is a blank. One historian, Olympiodorus of Thebes in Egypt, wrote a rich and detailed account of his visit to a certain King Charaton of the Huns in about 412. We know this because others mention it. But of the original, or indeed of his whole 22-volumeHistory, there is no trace, and Charaton remains nothing more than a name.
It seems likely that differences arose in the Huns’ relations with the eastern and western empires. Two eastern laws of 419 and 420 cast tiny lights in the gloom, suggesting that Charaton’s ambitions were directed at the east. The first law decrees the death penalty for anyone betraying to the barbarians the art of shipbuilding; the other bans the export by sea of certain goods. These odd details suggest that the Huns, impoverished but still unified, had ambitions to build a seaborne trading empire, and that the eastern Romans stopped them. If so, then perhaps it was imperial opposition that caused the Huns to look once again at ways of earning a living by pillage.
And pillage they did, apparently. That is one conclusion to be drawn from a surviving edict concerning the defences of Constantinople, in particular the new walls, begun in 413 in response to the Hunnish threat. The walls are named after the emperor, Theodosius II, but he was only a child when construction got under way. The work was actually conceived and carried forward by the regent, the praetorian prefect Anthemius, who had already done much to guard the eastern empire. As well as ordering the new naval patrols on the Danube, he had signed a peace treaty with Persia and worked for better relations with Rome. Now there were to be new walls; for on the landward side the city had outgrown Constantine’s old defences, spilling over onto the plain beyond – a clear risk in time of war. The new ramparts would extend for 5 kilometres, running from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn inlet, with nine gates and dozens of towers. The towers were large enough for the authorities to engage in a little private enterprise, allowing the original owners of the land to use the lower floors, freed of the usual restriction that public buildings should be available for the use of troops when necessary. Nine years later, the wall was in place and power in the hands not of the fifteen-year-old Theodosius, but of his ambitious elder sister, Pulcheria. So it was probably her idea to issue a controversial edict to those living in the new towers. From now on, ‘the ground-floor rooms of each tower of the New Wall’ would be made available to soldiers preparing for or returning from war. ‘Landholders shall not be offended’ at this change of use, said whoever drafted the law, knowing well enough what protests it would cause. ‘Even private homeowners customarily furnish one third of their space for this purpose.’
Why was this necessary? One terse comment by a sixth-century chronicler, Marcellinus Comes, tells us: ‘The Huns devastate Thrace.’ He gives no further details. For the moment, this was thunder too distant for comment.
Relations with the western empire took a rather different course. In that direction, all seemed set fair. Some Hun groups were signed up as foederati, being offered land around the eastern end of Lake Balaton; Huns formed contingents in the regular army; and locally Huns and Romans seem to have lived cheek by jowl in mutual tolerance, even under the gaze of Roman soldiers, who continued to man the great fortress of Valcum, guarding the roads that led round the western end of Lake Balaton through the area known to Romans as Valeria. From its ruins by the present-day village of Fenékpuszta, this huge quadrangle – 350 × 350 metres square, with 44 towers and 4 gates, one facing each compass-point – was as much town as fortress, with a command centre, civil offices, a church and a 100-metre-long building that may have been a trade hall. A surviving plough and other farm tools show that the town relied on its surrounding countryside for supplies. An 82-kilo anvil suggests industrial capabilities. Valcum had its blacksmiths, masons, potters, leather-workers, weavers and goldsmiths (who, judging from the remains found in the workshop, did not produce their own gold, but only refashioned and repaired existing items). Hundreds must have lived there, thousands looked to it for trade – even, it seems, the local Huns.
It was in these propitious circumstances, probably towards 410, that a Roman teenager, Flavius Aetius, came for a time as a hostage to the Huns: a small event that would have momentous consequences for all of Europe. ‘Hostage’ is the word usually used, but it is not quite right. The young man would have been sent officially for two reasons: as proof of honourable intent – in exchange, of course, for an equally eminent Hun – and as a sort of youthful ambassador, an equivalent of a VSO or Peace Corps volunteer, whose job would have been to ensure good relations and a flow of information. Like any ambassador, he would have been in effect a spy by another name. He had already played the same role among Alaric’s Goths, remaining with them for three years. His experiences made Aetius uniquely qualified both to broker peace and, if necessary, to act as military adviser. He spoke Gothic, Hunnish, Latin and Greek. He had friends everywhere. He would use his knowledge and contacts to preserve peace with the Huns for the next 30 years, an achievement that helped him rise to become the empire’s greatest general.
Aetius’ experience was soon put to good use. In 423 the empire was torn by war between Rome and Constantinople – civil war, to those who still saw the empire as one – when the usurper John (Johannes), a mere civil servant, was made emperor in Ravenna and an eastern army set out to depose him. John needed help, and Aetius, now in his twenties, could be relied upon to provide it in the form of his Hun friends. In 425 Aetius went back to the Huns, carrying chests of gold. This, of course, would have been merely a down payment, with more to follow once the easterners were vanquished. A huge army of Huns – later reports spoke of 60,000, but scholars accept that almost all reports were wildly exaggerated, perhaps tenfold – rode towards Italy and attacked the eastern army from the rear just after they reached Ravenna. They were too late: three days earlier, John had been executed. The Huns fought anyway, until Aetius saw there was no point, and made peace – in exchange, of course, for additional gold for his avaricious army. There was no ideology or loyalty involved. These Huns would fight for whoever paid them, and would have been happy to stay on serving the empire. But the new rulers in Ravenna were keen for a wider peace. Aetius, now a comes (count), was sent to sort out the unruly northern frontier in Gaul, where he remained for the next seven years, and the Huns returned home, to Pannonia and Valeria, where, in gratitude for their help, they were apparently allowed to take over estates and fortresses with no sign of opposition.
It was thanks to Aetius and the western empire, therefore, that the Huns were able to consolidate their hold on what is now Hungary, a firm base for leaders with wider ambitions. (It was not the last time that westerners would back barbarians in the hope of peace, only to see their protégés turn nasty.) The leaders in question were two brothers, Octar and Ruga. Where they came from no-one knows. Perhaps they were descendants of Balamber, Basich, Kursich, Uldin and/or the shadowy Charaton; or perhaps they were scions of some new, upstart clan. They have inspired all sorts of academic argument about the nature of ‘dual kingship’, and the reasons for it. Probably there was no great mystery, because it had happened before among the Huns and it happened again later, twice. Most likely the two simply ruled different bits of territory, Ruga in the east, Octar in the west. What can be said is that dual kingships were unstable (witness what happened between Rome and Constantinople). To reach such heights, both men had to be ambitious and ruthless. Rivalry was virtually inevitable.
Their first campaign did not turn out well. Fenced in by the empire on land and sea, they rounded on the only available victims: the German peoples along the Rhine, to the north-west. Among them were the remnants of a tribe known as the Burgundians or Nibelungs (after a former chief, Niflung), most of whose relatives had crossed the Rhine some fifteen years before. Those Burgundians who remained were no threat to anyone. They were the dregs left behind by the Völkerwanderung, the Migration of the Tribes, and were happy to live in peace, working mainly as carpenters in the valley of the Main. Their tale is told by an ecclesiastical historian, Socrates, writing a few years later. Now, suddenly, come the Huns, and devastation. Distraught, the Burgundians decide to seek help from Rome, and do so by sending a delegation across the Rhine and asking for a bishop to make them Christians. It works. Conversion leads to a revival of spirit. When the Huns come again, 3,000 Burgundians kill 10,000 Huns – among them the co-ruler Octar – and this small branch of the tribe is saved. The figures are exaggerated, no doubt, but there is probably some truth in the story, because the Burgundians’ conversion is also mentioned in a world history by a fifth-century Spanish writer, Orosius. However many the Huns lost, it must have taught them about the difficulties of operating in the forests of southern Germany.
In 432, then, with Octar’s death, Ruga emerged as sole leader; and it was he who was responsible for strengthening the link with the Huns’ old friend Aetius, who had become the victim of some vicious infighting in Rome. Having been fired by the regent, Galla Placidia, he fled across the Adriatic to Dalmatia, then north across the no-man’s-land where Romans, Germans, Goths, Sarmatians and Huns lived in interfused confusion, across the Danube into the Hun heartland. Here Ruga provided his old ally Aetius with a band of mercenaries, who gave him the military clout he needed to return home and regain his position from the regent-empress Placidia.1 The same year, he was made consul (the first of his three consulships), appointed commander-in-chief of the army of the West, and sent off once again to secure the Rhine frontier against the Franks.
Ruga was the man who, it seems, gave the Hun kingdom a firm foundation. He had an army formidable enough to launch successful raids against the eastern Romans, and envoys smart enough to negotiate an annual tribute of 350 pounds of gold from them, along with yet another promise to return Hun refugees. Not a huge victory, not a huge sum; but a good start on both counts. The cash was paid to him directly, which means he had the authority to distribute it and thus preserve the loyalty of his chiefs. If some objected – and some did, several whole clans – they fled, seeking refuge over the border as illegal immigrants. Ruga could not tolerate this if he was to maintain and extend his authority. He would clamp down on his less willing clans and demand the return of the outlaws from Rome.
At which point, in the mid-430s, Ruga died – unless we are to believe the melodramatic account of the church historian Socrates, who said that God rewarded the emperor Theodosius for his meekness and devoutness by striking Ruga dead with a thunderbolt, following up with plague and heavenly fire that decimated Ruga’s subordinates. Socrates did not explain, however, why God missed Ruga’s two remaining brothers, named Mundzuk and Aybars (Oebarsius in its Latin form).2 Mundzuk, the elder, had two sons, and this pair now move to centre stage, in another double kingship, with the task of keeping their unruly subjects united and ensuring a flow of funds and goods from the Romans, both eastern and western. One was called Bleda; his brother, Attila.
1 Easily said; but, like many a background statement, this one conceals epics. Aetius was up against a certain Bonifatius, or Boniface, once the warlord ruler of North Africa, contender for power in Italy, and thus opponent of the regent Galla Placidia. Back from North Africa, reconciled to Galla Placidia, he had become her champion against Aetius. It was Boniface that Aetius defeated to regain his position – in single combat, according to legend.
2 For those eager for evidence of links between the western Huns and the Xiongnu, the name Mundzuk survives in the small, newly independent state of Tuva, between Mongolia and Siberia. Maxim Munzuk played the hunter in Kurosawa’s award-winning film Dersu Uzala (1975).