Empires and Barbarians (41 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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