Attila the Hun (11 page)

Across the Dnieper lived the Ostrogoths. They were settled farming folk, but their venerable chief, Ermanaric,
⁴
would have been something of a role model for an aspiring Hun leader. He was the central figure of an estate that straggled from the Black Sea to the Baltic, from its core, which Ermanaric ruled directly, out to an ever looser network of vassals, allies, tribute-payers and trade partners. According to one story, Balamber made his move because Ermanaric was
not the man he had been. One of his vassals had turned traitor and fled, leaving his unfortunate wife, Sunilda, to suffer Ermanaric’s revenge. She was tied torso and legs to two horses, which, when whipped to a gallop in opposite directions, tore her in half. Her two brothers tried to assassinate the old king, but managed only to wound him, after which, in Jordanes’ words, ‘enfeebled by the blow, he dragged out a miserable existence in bodily weakness’. Balamber, with his Hun and Alan cavalry, smashed Ermanaric’s army just north of the Black Sea in about 376. The loose federation of tribes collapsed like a burst balloon; the old Ostrogoth committed suicide; and Balamber took a Gothic princess in marriage to seal the takeover.

At the Dniester, the Visigoths of today’s Romania were next in line, as Valens was about to discover. These had become a proud and sophisticated people, now settled in towns, with a respect for law and order administered by their ruler, whom they called a judge. When a Roman envoy referred to the Visigothic ruler as ‘king’, he objected: a king ruled with authority, he said, but a judge ruled with wisdom. Rome, having given up thoughts of direct rule, treated the Visigoths as trade partners, valuing the supply of slaves, grain, cloth, wine and coins. Some of them were Christian. A generation before the Huns arrived, a Greek bishop, Ulfilas, had devised an alphabet for Gothic and translated the Bible. But Christianity never won over the ‘judge’ or the other aristocrats, who were keen to preserve their own beliefs – the very essence of their own sense of identity – in the face of the new cultural imperialism flowing from
Constantinople. After Valens acknowledged Visigothic independence under Athanaric in 369, it seemed both would benefit: their agreement established a mutual trade link, mutual respect, a buffer state for Rome against the barbarian hordes of Inner Asia, freedom for Athanaric to do whatever he wanted without fear of great-power intervention. What he wanted was an end to Christianity. This he achieved by means of a sinister ritual reimposing the old Gothic religion, which (as the historian Tacitus implies) was centred on an earth-mother goddess, Nerthus. Athanaric’s officials wheeled a wooden statue of the goddess to the tents of Christian converts and ordered them to renounce their faith by worshipping the statue, on pain of death. Most chose to live, apparently, except a fanatic named Saba, who was set on martyrdom. When he was declared a fool and thrown out of his village, he taunted his fellow tribesmen until they threw him in a river and drowned him by pressing him down with a piece of wood. He became, as he would have wished, the first Gothic saint.

Rome and Christianity could be resisted, then; but not the advancing Huns. Athanaric tried, setting up a line of defence along the Dniester, but it was easily bypassed when the Huns ignored the Gothic army, crossed the river by night and made a surprise assault on the Goths from the rear. After a hasty retreat across present-day Moldova, the Goths started to build a rampart along the Moldovan border, the River Prut. It was at this point that Gothic morale collapsed, driving them across the Danube into Thrace and starting
the train of events that led to the battle at Adrianople.

Behind them, advancing from the Ukrainian lowlands, came Attila’s immediate forebears, on a 75-kilometre march over the Carpathians, winding uphill along the road that now leads from Kolomyya through the Carpathian National Nature Park. It was the regular route for invaders, one used again almost 1,000 years later by the Mongols. You climb easily to 931 metres (3,072 feet) over the Yablunytsia Pass (good skiing in winter, pretty alpine walks in summer), then drop to the Romanian border, and, leaving the Transylvanian highlands on your left, follow the snaking, narrow road along the River Theiss onto the Hungarian grasslands.

Here, as the wagon-train and herds spread out over the Carpathian basin, old pastoral and fighting skills again came into their own.

¹
Often translated as ‘snowstorm’, a
buran
is rather more than that, which is why it became the name of the Soviet space shuttle.

²
‘New finds . . .’ by Hudiakov and Tseveendorj, see Bibliography.

³
This sweeping generalization is a hypothesis, unproven. I have some evidence, derived from the tribe I worked with in the Ecuadorean rainforest in the early 1980s. The Waorani were then among the simplest of societies known to anthropologists, with no chiefs, shamans or elaborate rituals; with extremely simple music, no clothing but strings of cotton round their waists (into which the men tucked their penises), no art other than body decoration and their few wonderful artefacts (notably 3-metre blowguns and the best hammocks in Amazonia). But they did have stories, and folklore, and a cosmology, with an afterlife – a heaven where people swung in hammocks and hunted for ever, a limbo for those who returned to this world in animal form, and an underworld of the ‘mouthless ones’ – and spirits both good and evil, and a myth of creation, overseen by the creator, Waengongi. A ‘primitive’ tribe who were monotheists! That was a surprise. The idea of one god is supposed to have evolved from polytheism as a higher form of religion. It proved very handy for American missionaries when they arrived with news of what their version of Waengongi had told them. (The ‘primitive’ four lines up is ironic: the Waorani were experts in their way of life, and as bright and as dim, as wary and as curious, as charming and as offensive and as thoroughly human as the rest of us.)

⁴
Ermanaric’s name probably derives from Hermann-Rex, King Hermann, the Gothic having adopted the Latin word and turned it into
reiks
, which, when retransliterated, became
ric
. It was a common ending for the names of Gothic aristocrats.

‘A VILE, UGLY AND DEGENERATE PEOPLE’: THESE ARE THE
words of Ammianus, writing from within the Roman empire, the epitome of civilization in his own eyes and those of his readers. No wonder he was prejudiced; he was describing the most effective enemy ever to assault the empire. We, with the privilege of hindsight and security, should set prejudice aside, show some respect, and seek to understand why Attila’s people had such an impact.

Their power lay in four elements:

• an ancient skill, mounted archery;

• a new version of an ancient weapon, the recurved bow;

• a new tactical technique;

• leadership.

The man himself is the subject of later chapters. What we are interested in right now is his raw materials: the skills and ambitions of mounted pastoral nomads armed with bows. Mounted archery was the military technique that could hold to ransom urbanized cultures across all Eurasia for the best part of 2,000 years, until gunpowder blew the horseback archer from history as utterly as it blew the Japanese samurai and the Swiss pike-man. Within a very short time, the skills that had defined nomadic warriors from Manchuria to the Russian steppes had fallen from use and almost from memory, enduring only in the accounts of those who had been on the receiving end of nomad arrows and in the minds of armchair strategists. The mounted archers themselves left no manuals. No-one after they vanished had a clue about how actually to do mounted archery – how to slide arrows from quivers, load them and fire them, time after time, while sitting on a galloping horse, let alone doing so in formation. No-one tried it.

Until now. Mounted archery is back, bringing a new understanding of how these warriors gained their supremacy – and there is more to it than that skill alone. Almost all Eurasian pastoral nomads were master-horsemen and master-bowmen, and none matched the Huns in their destructive ability. Nor was leadership enough on its own to explain Hun success. Attila had something extra to underpin his victories, something particular to the Huns. Only with the revival of mounted archery has it become possible to say what that magical element was.

* * *

T
he revival of the old skill is entirely due to one man: Lajos Kassai, who is, I suspect, the first true mounted archer in Europe since the departure of the Mongols in 1242. The Mongols left from Hungary; it was in Hungary that Attila had his base; so it is fitting that Kassai is a Hungarian – and particularly fitting that he is based a day’s gallop both from the Mongol line of advance and from Attila’s fifth-century headquarters. What follows is the story of his life’s work: as you read, track the tight interlocking of skill, toughness, dedication and self-assurance. This is what mounted archery gives now, and what it once gave the Huns. Kassai jokes about being Attila reincarnate – ‘I feel I was born in the twentieth century by some administrative error’ – but it’s not entirely a joke, if it’s young Attila under consideration, rather than King Attila.

I heard of Kassai because anyone who knows anything about Huns and mounted archery mentions him. If I had been in the world of horses and bows, I would have heard of him in Colorado or Berlin. As it was, I first heard the name from museum people in Vienna and in the northern Hungarian town of Gy
r, and again from a lover of Andalusian horses in northern Hungary who knew Kassai was shortly to demonstrate his skills at a sporting festival in Budapest. Kassai Lajos – if you put the given name second, in the Hungarian style – comes out as Cosh-eye Lah-yosh: the rhythm and the soft
sh
sounds turned the name into poetry. By now he was becoming an obsession with me.

I and my interpreter Andrea Szegedi found him at the fair on Margaret Island in the Danube. He was dressed in a simple wrap-around costume, nomad-style, a Hun reborn, with three assistants selling his own brands of bow. Could we have a word? A nod, that was all, not even a smile. In a refreshment tent, he fixed me with intense, steady blue eyes in a face blank of expression. I was unsure of myself, not knowing anything about mounted archery, or how long we had, or whether I would see him again. He might have tried to put me at my ease with some polite phrases. Not a bit. It was unsettling – and became more so when I tried for some soundbite responses.

Where, for instance, did his interest in mounted archery come from?

‘Something inside me.’ He replied in halting English, nailing me with a fierce gaze. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, just, why the interest?’

He switched his gaze to Andi, and went on in Hungarian, just as abruptly. ‘It was from the inside. I have to do it. That’s all.’

‘I understand interest from others is growing?’

‘They come from everywhere, from the US, from Canada, to learn.’

‘Why do people love it?’

‘If I can’t tell you why I do it, I can’t tell you why they love it.’

I saw why he had no patience with me. I was an outsider, the questions were dumb, and he was fiercely concentrated, not on me, but on what he was about to do, on its brutal physical and emotional demands. It
was like approaching a top tennis player just before a Wimbledon final and expecting deep answers about the inner game of tennis. Besides, there was much more going on, which I was too busy with camera and tape-recorder to notice. Andi was a medical student: short-cropped hair, good on a horse, tall, lithe as a thoroughbred herself, and thoroughly, impregnably professional – or so I thought, until she talked later about the impression he made.