Download PDF | ongols, Huns and Vikings: Nomads at War (History of Warfare), By Hugh Kennedy (Author), Cassell, 1899.
231 Pages
THE NOMAD PARADOX
IN THE HISTORY OF WARFARE it has generally been the case that military superiority lies with the wealthiest states and those with the most developed administration. It is, after all, these states who can afford to train and pay the best soldiers and offer them the most advanced weapons and the most regular supplies. At least since the sixteenth century, finance and administrative efficiency have been key factors in military success.
The nomads who ravaged and sometimes dominated the lands of the Middle East, or, in the case of the Huns, central and eastern Europe, were an exception to this rule. Almost by definition, they did not have states and administrative apparatus, they were often dirt poor and entirely unversed in the arts of civilized living. Yet their military prowess was undoubted and groups of nomads often put the armies of settled areas to ignominious flight. In this book I will try to offer some explanations for the 'nomad paradox'. The mobility of the nomads was a major factor. Not only could they surprise an enemy by appearing when they were believed to be far away, or encircling them in battle so that their enemies suddenly realized that they were surrounded, but they could, if necessary, retreat with equal rapidit~ All the groups described here had environments into which they could retire and into which their enemies could not follow: the Huns, Turks and Mongols had the great grasslands of eastern Europe and Asia, where lack of grain supplies and brutal weather put off all who were not accustomed to them; the Arabs had the deserts in which they alone could find their way and survive; while the Vikings had the sea, the element in which their superiority was unchallenged.
With this command of the wilderness went the toughness and resistance to hardship which life in these areas brought. Both men and their horses could survive where the soldiers and animals of better endowed areas could not. This in turn made them highly mobile: not for them the lines of pack animals and creaking wagons which could slow the progress of an army down to a few miles a da)!. Nor did they have to worry about the loss of the supply train, since there was none. All adult male nomads were warriors, or at least potential warriors. The insecurity of the wandering life and the lack of established authority meant that everyone had to be able to take up arms and defend themselves and their kin.
There were no civilians in these societies. By contrast, the Roman Empire, the powers of the Islamic Middle East and, to a lesser extent, the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish kingdoms were all societies in which the military was a small specialized group in society: the vast majority of the population were civilians with neither arms nor the experience to use them. The overall numbers of nomads were usually much smaller than those of the settled peoples, but the percentage of those who were mobilized for military action was vastly greater. Many nomads brought with them distinctive methods of fighting, above all mounted archery, the most effective fighting technique of the pre-gunpowder world.
This was extremely difficult to counter using conventional military tactics. It was also very difficult to learn, since apparently only those born to the horsebased lifestyle could really master it. But there were other groups, the Arabs and Vikings for example, whose military skills and equipment were little different from those of their opponents and who relied on their mobility and hardiness to see them through.
In all nomad societies, leadership was based on skill and wisdom in warfare and hunting. Membership of a leading family or group might be an advantage, but even the highest-born incompetent would soon be found out. Such a meritocracy meant that nomad leaders were usually efficient and effective and enjoyed the respect of those they led. Men of obscure origins, like the Mongol Subedei, could rise to the highest positions. In contrast, settled and bureaucratic societies often entrusted military command to men who, although of high rank,lacked both experience and courage and were far from enjoying the confidence of their followers.
All these factors help to explain the military dominance of the nomads. Yet, with the exception of the Vikings, all the nomad explosions were the result of effective leadership. Most of these populations consumed their military energies by fighting with one another, which left them little or no energy with which to conquer lands other than their own. This internecine strife only ended with the emergence of great leaders such as Attila or Genghis Khan, or when an ideology such as Islam bound the previously warring factions together. Only then were these formidable reserves of military energy unleashed on the outside world.
ATTILA AND THE HUNS
-OF ALL THE NOMAD PEOPLES discussed in this book, the Huns have probably left the most fearsome reputation. In a way they are synonymous with savagery and their vast hordes seem to overwhelm everything before them. To some extent this reputation is undeserved. The Huns appeared (and disappeared) in the course of less than a century and mass Hunnic invasions of the Balkans and western Europe lasted a much shorter time than that. However, these were dramatic and fairly well-documented years. The works of contemporary historians like Olympiadorus and Priscus survived, incorporated in later chronicles, so that subsequent generations could read in fascinated horror about these fierce people.
In the English-speaking world, the theme was picked up again by Edward Gibbon; Attila and the Huns playa dramatic role in his Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire, a very widely read and admired work which shaped all the subsequent accounts of these turbulent years. But the notoriety of the Huns was established forever during the First World War when British propagandists, hoping to cash in on the ancient reputation of these people, began using the term 'Hun' to mean Germans. By this they hoped to evoke those ancient images of brutishness and barbarism to stir up hatred. In historical reality, of course, the epithet was entirely misplaced: the Huns were definitely not a Germanic people and if there is one consistent feature of Hunnic military activity it is their abiding hostility to the Germanic Ostrogoths, Visigoths and Burgundians.
The reputation of the Huns has not been improved by the fact that we have no Hunnic voices to speak to us. Whereas the Arabs have their poetry, the Vikings their sagas and the. Mongols their Secret History to illustrate their society from the inside and according to its own set of values, there is no Hunnic literature. Indeed, apart from proper names, only one word of the Hunnic language seems to have survived. Instead we are dependent on the accounts of outsiders who regarded them with, at best, awestruck dread. Only the Priscus account of his mission to Attila's court, which itself only survives in fragments, is based on extensive first-hand observation. The Huns .have had a bad press through the centuries but this may be in part because they have not been able to put their own point of view.
The origins of the Huns are shrouded in mystery, not just for us but also for contemporary observers, who frankly admitted that they had no idea where these people had appeared from. It was clear that they had come from the east and there was a persistent but improbable story recounted to explain how they were first encouraged to move west. According to this legend, the Huns and the Ostrogoths lived in neighbouring territory separated by the Strait of Kerch, which is the entrance to the Sea of Azov: the Ostrogoths in the Crimea on the western side and the Huns in the steppes to the east. However, neither group knew of the other's existence. One day a cow belonging to a Hun was stung by a gadfly and swam across the strait followed in hot pursuit by her master. He found himself in a rich and inviting land and when he returned to his own people he told them about it and they immediately moved to take it for themselves.
The historical reality seems to be that the Huns, a Turkic people from the Central Asian steppes, began to move west around the year 370 and attack the Ostrogothic kingdom in the area of the modern Ukraine. What caused this movement is unclear, but it may have been pressure from other tribes further east. The Ostrogoths were defeated again and again and forced to leave their homes and farms in panic. A vast number of them crossed the Danube into the Balkans, still ruled at this time by the Roman Empire. Here the fugitive Goths, in their desperation, inflicted a massive defeat on the Roman army at Adrianople In 376, when their cavalry ran down the last of the old Roman legions. Now that their horizons were expanded there was no stopping the Huns. They raided the Balkans in the aftermath of the Roman defeat but also attacked the rich provinces of the east, coming through the Caucasus and Anatolia to pillage the rich lands of Syria. St Jerome, the translator of the Bible into Latin, was living as a hermit near Jerusalem at the time and he has left us one of the first contemporary accounts of their cruelty:
Suddenly messengers started arriving In haste and the whole east trembled for swarms of Huns had broken out from (behind the Caucasus). They filled the whole earth with slaughter and panic as they flitted here and there on their swift horses. The Roman army was away at the time and detained in Italy owing to civil wars ... they were at hand everywhere before they were expected: by their speed they outstripped rumour, and they took pity on neither 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 enem~ There was a widespread report that they were heading for Jerusalem and that they were converging on that city because of their extreme greed for gold.
Jerome takes up a number of themes which were to echo through the centuries as people of the settled lands recounted with horror the arrival of nomad warriors: their speed and the fact that they caught unsuspecting people by surprise, their readiness to slaughter entire populations and their blatant and overwhelming greed for gold. Another theme repeatedly taken up by observers of the Huns was their alleged ugliness. Ammianus Marcellinus, the late fourth-century military historian, who is one of our most important sources for the earliest stages of the Hunnic invasions, commented that they were 'so prodigiously ugly that they might be taken for two-legged animals or the figures crudely carved from stumps that one sees on the parapets of bridges', while Jordanes adds that they caused men to panic by 'their terrifying appearance, which inspired fear because of its swarthiness and they had, if I may say so, a sort of shapeless lump rather than a head'. These impressions probably reflect the eastern Asiatic features of the Mongols which made them clearly distinct from their Germanic rivals and neighbours (about whom the Roman sources do not make the same comments). Their physical appearance was not made more attractive to the Romans by their clothes. These seem to have been chiefly made of bits of fur and later of linen, presumably captured or traded because the Huns themselves certainly did not make their own textiles. Along with their ragged clothes and wearing their garments until they disintegrated was their habit of never washing. The effect of these on the fastidious Roman observers who encountered them may easily be envisaged. However critical, their enemies recognized their extreme hardiness for, as Ammianus Marcellinus observed, 'They learn from the cradle to the grave to endure hunger and thirst.' Not for them the heavy, slow-moving supply trains that delayed the movements of Roman armies for they carried all that they needed with them on their swift and sturdy ponies. That the Huns were ferocious and very successful warriors is evident. It is less clear exactly why they were so. Our knowledge of both their tactics in battle and their equipment is very patchy. The main first-hand account, the work of Priscus, describes the Huns at leisure and pleasure but not at war, and the descriptions of battles from other sources are both later and too vague to be of much use. There is no known contemporary representation of a Hunnic warrior of the period. A few swords from the time, which mayor may not be Hunnic, survive but there are no archaeological traces of the famous bows. Ammianus Marcellinus, himself an experienced military officer, wrote of them in 392: When provoked they sometimes fight singly but they enter the battle in tactical formation, while the medley of their voices makes a savage noise. And as they are lightly equipped for swift motion, and unexpected in action, they purposely divide suddenly in scattered bands and attack, rushing around in disorder here and there, dealing terrific slaughter; and because of their extraordinary speed of movement, they cannot easily be seen when they break into a rampart or pillage an enemy's camp. And on this account, you would have no hesitation in calling them the most terrible of all warriors. At first they fight from a distance with arrows with sharp bone heads [instead of metal ones] joined to the shafts with wonderful skill. They then gallop over the intervening spaces and fight hand to hand with swords, regardless of their own lives. Then, while their opponents are guarding against wounds from sword thrusts, they throw strips of cloth plaited into nooses [i.e. lassos] over their opponents and so entangle them and pin their limbs so that they lose the ability to ride or walk.
Although Ammianus' account was derived second-hand from Goths who had fought against the Huns, the picture clearly shows them as nomad warriors in the military tradition which was to be followed by the Turks and Mongols. The emphasis on manoeuvrability, their role as mounted archers and use of lassos all form part of that tradition. As with all steppe nomads, observers were struck by their attachment to their horses. Jerome says that they ate and slept on their horses and were hardly able to walk on the ground. Ammianus Marcellinus noted that they were 'almost glued to their horses which are hardy, it is true, but ugly, and sometimes they sit of the woman-fashion (presumably side-saddle) and so perform their ordinary tasks. When deliberations are called for about weighty matters, they all meet together on horseback'. The Gaulish aristocrat Sidonius Apollinaris (d. 479), who must have seen Hunnic mercenaries on many occasions, notes that their training began very young. 'Scarcely has the infant learned to stand, without its mother's help, when a horse takes him on his back. You would think that the limbs of the man and horse were born together, so firmly does the rider always stick to the horse. Other people are carried on horseback; these people live there.' Being well versed in classical mythology, he goes on to compare them with the mythical centaurs, half man and half horse. Commentators on nomad warriors are almost always impressed by this connection with their horses. No matter how early sedentary people learned to ride, or how well trained they were, they never seem to have acquired the mastery of horses that the nomad peoples had. This mastery always gave them the advantage in endurance and in the art of mounted archery which others could never attain. The late Roman military tactician Vegetius whose book Epitoma rei militaris (Handbook of Military Science) is one of our main sources on the late Roman army, discusses the horses of the Huns and how they differed from the Roman ones. He describes them as having great hooked heads, protruding eyes, narrow nostrils, broad jaws, strong and stiff necks, manes hanging below the knees, overlarge ribs, curved backs, bushy tails, strong cannon bones, small rumps and wide-spreading hooves. They have no fat on them and are long rather than high. He adds that the very thinness of these horses is pleasing and there is beauty even in their ugliness. Apart from their physical appearance, like little ponies compared with the larger and more elegant Roman horses, what impresses Vegetius most is their toughness. He notes their patience and perseverance and their ability to tolerate extremes of cold and hunger. Vegetius was concerned at the decline of veterinary skills among the Romans of his day and complains that people were neglecting their horses and treating them as the Huns treated theirs, leaving them out on pasture all year to fend for themselves. This, he says, is not at all good for the larger and more softly bred Roman horses. There is an important point here: Roman horses needed to be fed and so the army had to carry fodder with it; Hunnic hor~es, by contrast, lived off the land and were used to surviving on what they could find. This gave them an enormous advantage in mobility and the capacity to travel long distances without resting. It was one of the secrets of their military success. The question of whether the Huns used stirrups remains doubtful. We can be certain that stirrups were unknown in classical antiquity. We can also be certain that they were widely known in east and west from the eighth century onwards.
The evidence for the intervening period is very problematic. There are no representations of horsemen using stirrups from the Hunnic period, nor have any metal stirrups been found in graves. If they had used a new and unfamiliar device like this, it seems most unlikely that Priscus and other classical commentators would have neglected to mention (and copy) this. It is therefore extremely unlikely that they had metal stirrups. It is possible that they may have had fabric or wooden stirrups, both of which are attested for in later periods, but again, the fact that these are not mentioned in sources makes it improbable. Mounted archers such as Scythians and Sarmatians, who preceded the Huns, were able to shoot from the saddle without the stabilizing effect of stirrups, and there is no reason why the Huns should not have done likewise. Indeed, the absence of stirrups for both sides would simply have emphasized the superiority of Hunnic horsemanship. The Huns did not use spurs either but urged their horses on with whips; whip handles have been found in tombs. Gold and silver saddle ornaments discovered in tombs make it certain that some wealthy men rode on wooden saddles with wooden bows at front and rear to support the rider. Common sense suggests, however, that many poorer Huns must have made do with padded cloth or skin saddles or even have ridden bareback. Their most characteristic weapon was the bow. This was the short, but very powerful composite bow, perhaps 5 feet or more in length, made from wood, bone and sinews. The range would have been 200 to 300 yards, the maximum effective range of any medieval bow. In the early days at least, the arrowheads were made of bone, not iron. All the materials could be found on the steppes and the bow was the Hunnic instrument par excellence. Like the Turks and Mongols of later centuries, whom they so much resemble, it was their abilities as mounted archers that made them so formidable in battle. Better equipped Hunnic warriors would also have had swords and it is clear that Attila wore his sword even in the comparative safety of his own compound. Swords and their scabbards, like saddles, could be expensively decorated. Unlike the bows, which were peculiar to the Huns, the swords seem to have followed the standard Roman and Gothic forms, with short hilts and long, straight blades. Confused by their speed, and perhaps hoping to account for their military success, contemporaries often gave very large numbers for armies of Huns: Priscus is said to have claimed that Attila's army in 451 had 500,000 men. If this were true, it would certainly explain their successes in battle but, in reality, these numbers must be a vast exaggeration. As we shall see when considering the Mongols, limitations on grazing for the animals must have placed severe restrictions on the numbers of Huns who could work together as a unit. Even in the vast grasslands of Mongolia, it is unlikely that Mongol gatherings ever numbered much more than 100,000: in the more restricted areas of the Balkans and western Europe numbers must have been much smaller. Before they invaded the Empire, the Huns, like other nomads, probably lived in fairly small tenting groups, perhaps 500-1,000 people, who kept their distance from their fellows so as to exploit the grassland more effectivel~ Only on special occasions or to plan a major expedition would larger numbers come together and even then they could only remain together if they had outside resources. The image of a vast, innumerable swarm of Huns covering the landscape like locusts has to be treated with some scepticism. The late Roman Empire was a society based on walled towns and the Huns soon developed an impressive capability in siege warfare. This was surely not something they brought with them from the steppes. They almost certainly employed engineers who had learned their trade in the Roman armies but now found themselves unemployed and looking for jobs. The Huns were much more successful than previous barbarian invaders had been at reducing cities. This was especially important in the Middle Danube area around modern Serbia, where cities which had successfully held out for many years were reduced to uninhabited ruins. Sometimes, as at Margus, betrayed by its bishop, this was the result of treachery, but on other occasions the Huns were able to mount a successful assault. Priscus gives a full account of the siege of the city of N aissus (modern Nis in Serbia) in 441. While the narrative certainly has echoes of classical historians, especially Thucydides (for Priscus was an educated man and keen to show it), the description probably reflects the realities of siege warfare at the time: Since the citizens did not dare to come out to battles, the [Huns], to make the crossing easy for their forces bridged the river from the southern side at a point where it flowed past the city and brought their machines up to the circuit wall. First they brought up wooden platforms mounted on wheels upon which stood men who shot across at the defenders on the ramparts. At the back of the platform stood men who pushed the wheels with their feet and moved the machines where they were needed, so that [the archers] could shoot successfully through the screens. In order that the men on the platform could fight in safety, they were sheltered by screens woven from willow covered with rawhide and leather to protect them against missiles and flaming darts which might be shot at them. When a large number of machines had been brought up to the wall, the defenders on the battlements gave in because of the crowds of missiles and evacuated their positions. Then the so-called 'rams' were brought up. A ram is a very large machine: a beam is suspended by slack chains from timbers which incline together and it is provided with a sharp metal point. For the safety of those working them, there were screens like those already described. Using short ropes attached to the rear, men swing the beam back from the target of the blow and then release it, so that by its force, part of the wall facing it is smashed away. From the wall the defenders threw down wagon-sized boulders which they had got ready when the machines were first brought up to the circuit. Some of the machines were crushed with the men working them but the defenders could not hold out against the large number of them. Then the attackers brought up scaling ladders so that in some places the walls were breached by the rams and in other places those on the battlements were overcome by the numbers of. the machines. The barbarians entered through the part of the circuit wall broken by the blows of the rams and also by the scaling ladders set up against the parts which were not crumbling and the city was taken.
The attackers were using siege towers and battering rams but they do not seem to have had any artillery to fire stones at the walls or into the city. Later conquerors, notably the Mongols, were to use such catapults to great effect. In contrast, the Mongols do not seem to have used wheeled siege towers, at least in their Asian campaigns. In addition to the machines, Attila was evidently prepared to sacrifice large numbers of men, probably prisoners or subject peoples, in frontal assault. The results were very impressive and most of the major cities of the Balkans, including Viminacium, Philippopolis, Arcadiopolis and Constantia on the Black Sea coast fell. Attila's campaigns mark the effective end of Roman urban life in much of the area. One feature which marked out the Huns and other nomad warriors from the settled people was the high degree of mobilization among the tribesmen. When Priscus, a civil servant who accompanied the East Roman ambassador to Attila's court, was waiting for an audience with the great man, he was talking to a Greekspeaking Hun who gave him a lecture on the virtues of the Huns and Hunnic life as opposed to the corrupt and decadent ways of the Romans. He explained: After a war the Scythians [i.e. the Huns: Priscus uses the ancient Greek term for steppe nomads] live at ease, each enjoying his own possessions and troubling others or being troubled not at all or very little. But among the Romans, since on account of their tyrants [i.e. the emperors] not all men carry weapons, they place responsibility for their safety in others and they are thus easily destroyed in war. Moreover, those who do use arms are endangered still more by the cowardice of their generals, who are unable to sustain a war.
This passage forms part of a speech which is really a sermon on the virtues of the 'noble savage' lifestyle and Priscus attempted, rather lamely, to counter his views. But the Hun was making an important point about the enduring difference between the nomad society in which all adult males bore arms and a settled population who relied on a professional army. In absolute terms, the Huns may never have been very numerous but because of the high degree of participation in military activity, they could field a large army. They were, in fact, a nation in arms. The story of the Huns may be divided into two distinct phases, the period before Attila and Attila's reign with a brief coda after his death. After their first spectacular raids, men in the Roman world soon began to see the Huns as possible allies or mercenaries. In the fifth century, the Roman Empire in the east, with its capital at Constantinople and what was left of the Roman state in the west (ruled from Ravenna in north-east Italy) were constantly looking for new sources of soldiers. The feeble Western Emperor Honorius (395-423) once gathered a force of 10,000 Huns but had great difficulty in feeding them even for a single campaign and they soon dispersed. They could not simply be incorporated into the Roman armies as other barbarian foederati had been before them: the nomad lifestyle meant that it was like trying to herd cats. They would only follow leaders they respected, rather than obey orders without question. Their role as soldiers in Roman Gaul was connected with the enigmatic personality of Aetius. Aetius has some claims to be considered as the last great Roman general in the West and as a heroic figure, striving against the odds, to preserve something of past glories in a very violent and confusing environment. At the same time he played complex political games to ensure his survival, not just against barbarian invaders but against the imperial court in Ravenna, where hostile politicians often sought to undermine him. From the 430s Aetius saw the Huns as useful potential allies. He had, we are told, been a hostage among the Huns when he was a child and so had the advantage of speaking their language and gaining an intimate knowledge of their ways. Aetius recruited Huns to secure his own position in Gaul. Essentially, he and his lieutenant, the dux Litorius, employed Hun soldiers to defend the Romanized landowners of Gaul against their enemies, the Visigoths of Toulouse and the discontented peasants, known as the Bagaudae, who led guerrilla resistance to the increasing demands of landlords and states. In 437 Aetius famously persuaded the Huns to annihilate the Burgundians, a Germanic people who had a kingdom of sorts in the middle Rhine area. This massacre was remembered in history and myth and seems to have been the historical origin of the legend of the massacre of the Niebelungs which Wagner was later to make famous in opera. The Huns were far from invincible, however, and in 439 the Visigoths of Toulouse showed their power by defeating Litorius' attempt to take the city and killing the dux himself. Throughout this time, the Huns in Gaul acted as mercenary soldiers and, as far as we can tell, they had no territorial or political ambitions in the region. All this changed with Attila's rise to power. It was Attila who gave the Huns a clear identity and made them, briefly, into a major political power. After his death, they disintegrated with remarkable speed. The Huns had had kings before Attila. Around 420 we hear of one Rua and his brother Octar. However, as with many other nomad groups, the power of the king seems to have been very limited and real authority lay with chiefs of much smaller groups who were largely autonomous and did very much what they liked. Perhaps it was only when dealing with outside powers, notably the Eastern and Western Roman Empire, that the kings had a leadership role. In 434 Attila became king, ruling initially with his brother BIeda. His predecessor Rua, seems to have been planning a major attack on the Eastern Empire but this was aborted because of his death. The Eastern Romans, preoccupied with wars against the Vandals (a Germanic tribe) in North Africa and the Persian Empire in the east, were anxious to secure their northern border. In 435 a Roman embassy, led by a Gothic soldier and a Roman diplomat - a typical division of labour at that time - met Attila at Margus (on the Danube just east of modern Belgrade). The negotiations took place on horseback outside the city walls. For the Huns, it was natural to do business without dismounting; the Romans, however, would have much preferred to have got off their horses and relaxed their aching limbs, but to save face they too remained on horseback. Attila's demands were not for territory but for money payments. Eventually it was agreed that the Romans would pay him the vast sum of 700 pounds of gold per year. It was also stipulated that the Romans would not receive or protect anyone fleeing from Attila's anger and that the Huns should have open access to markets. This treaty established the Hunnic monarchy on a new basis. We can have no doubt that these large sums of gold were to be paid to Attila. This completely changed his relationship with the lesser tribal chiefs for he was now the source of patronage and all good things. If they wanted to be rewarded, the chiefs would have to obey Attila's orders. Now, probably for the first time, the Huns had a king with real authority: The provision about not sheltering fugitives from Attila's rule was also important because it meant that his enemies among the Huns - and there must have been some - had no safe hiding place, even if they fled to the enem~ The returned fugitives were usually executed immediately, often by impaling. The clause about markets was also important: if the Huns had all this / money, they needed to have somewhere to spend it. It is usually assumed that all the Roman material goods and luxuries which Priscus saw when he visited \ Attila's camp were the results of raiding and pillaging. In fact, they may have been purchased quite openly - the product of extortion rather than looting. Fortified by this regular income, Attila established himself as sole ruler of the Huns. As long as the East Romans kept paying, he was content to be a comparatively peaceful neighbour. However, there were times when the tribute was not delivered, either because the imperial government did not have the money, or because it believed that it was strong enough to defy him. When this happened, Attila's wrath was vented on the unhappy cities of the Balkans. In 440 Viminacium was sacked and depopulated to the extent that it was still a ruin a hundred years later. In 443 negotiations broke down again and Naissus was taken. This was a bitter blow for the prestige of the Roman Empire for Naissus had been the birthplace of the great emperor Constantine and he had endowed the city with many beautiful buildings. When Priscus and his companions passed that way five years later, they found the city depopulated, the great buildings in ruins and the country outside the walls still littered with the bones of the unfortunate inhabitants. Clearly Attila used terror and massacre with the same ruthlessness that Genghis Khan was to display some eight hundred years later. Nor did he stop there: he led his armies along the main road to Philippopolis (Plovdiv) where, in a classic nomad manoeuvre, he surrounded and largely destroyed the Roman arm~ Like many conquerors after him, however, he knew he did not have the skills or resources to attack the great walls of Constantinople. When peace was eventually renegotiated, the price, already high, had gone up threefold: the Romans were now required to pay a huge 2,100 pounds of gold per year. When this was not paid in 447, Greece was invaded and 'ground to dust'. It was in response to this that Priscus' mission set out to treat with Attila. This embassy is of great importance because Priscus, who was essentially a civil servant sent along to assist Maximinus, leader of the delegation, left a first-hand account of the trip. In fact the mission was dogged by duplicity from the start. Maximinus and Priscus went in good faith to negotiate peace with Attila. They were accompanied, however, by an important Hun called Edeco who had come to Constantinople to open discussions. The eunuch Chrysaphius believed that he . ha"d persuaded Edeco, while in the capital, to murder his master in exchange for the promise of a luxurious life in Constantinople. In fact, Chrysaphius was too clever by half. On his return Edeco had privately decided to reveal all to Attila. Priscus and Maximinus continued on their journey, unaware that their mission had already been sabotaged in this wa~ And it is as well for us that they did, for Priscus' account is the only detailed first-hand description we have of the Hunnic court. After passing through the ruin of Naissus, they reached the border on the Danube. Here they had a first glimpse of the new environment they were entering. They were ferried across the great river in dugout canoes made of a single tree trunk: it was already a different world from the Mediterranean where great merchant ships carried tons of grain from Egypt to Constantinople and cargoes of silk from Syria to the south of France. They were now in the vicinity of Attila's camp but he - not surprisingly given the intrigue he knew was afoot - did not welcome them at all warmly: Priscus and Maximinus, unaware of the plot, were very disconcerted by this. When they were eventually allowed to greet the great man, he was furious with them. The ostensible cause of his rage was the fact that the Romans had not handed over some Hunnic fugitives. Attila was convinced that some of his own people were among the Romans and perhaps plotting his downfall very seriously: he would not, he said, 'allow his own servants to go to war against himself, even though they were unable to help those who had entrusted to them the guarding of their own land. For what city or fortress', he went on, 'had ever been saved by them.
after he had set out to capture it?' It was, in fact, an insult to his dignity, rather than a military threat, that any Huns should serve the Romans and mercenaries against him. P After this unsatisfactory meeting, the Romans trailed after Attila as he moved north. The Huns were travelling with many of their possessions in wagons and rafts, as well as the dugout canoes which had to be assembled at the river crossings. The going was tough and one night the envoys lost much of their baggage in a terrible storm. They were saved by the kindness of the local people and observed the first signs of the surprisingly important role that women played in Hunnic society. Among the horse-nomads of the steppes, be they Huns, Turks or Mongols, women enjoyed much more freedom than they did among the settled peoples of the Roman world, let alone the world of Islam. After the storm they came to a village which was ruled by a woman who helped them retrieve their baggage and dry out. They were also offered beautiful young women with whom to enjoy themselves. The pious Priscus says that they entertained the ladies but did not take advantage of their favours. Sexual hospitality is a tradition not infrequently encountered in travellers' tales from the steppe regions. It may well have become an exaggerated myth and, of course, the writers always claim to have made their excuses. When the Romans left the village, they presented gifts that were available in the Mediterranean region but which were unobtainable in this part of the world, including dates and pepper from India. As they continued north into the wilds, they met some ambassadors from the Western Roman Empire, who were also attempting to secure a firm and lasting peace from the great man. No doubt they found they had a lot in common, and much to talk about, but at the same time, there must have been some uneasy rivalry: if Attila made peace with the Eastern Romans, then the West would suffer next, and vice versa. Finally they reached Attila's base, which Priscus describes as a 'very large village'. The Huns must originally have lived in tents, probably round felt ones similar to the yurts and gers of modern Central Asia; but for his permanent base, Attila had abandoned these and both his own palace and those of his leading nobles were constructed in wood. Nor were they simple log cabins, for the wood was planed smooth, and the wooden wall which surrounded them was built with an eye 'not to security but to elegance', though it was also embellished with towers. The only stone building was a bath-house, constructed on the orders of one of Attila's leading supporters, Onegesius. He had had the stone imported from the Roman province of Pannonia across the Danube. It was built by a Roman prisoner of war who had hoped to secure his release after the job was done. Unhappily for him, he had made himself indispensable and was kept on to manage the bath-house. The exact location of Attila's village unfortunately remains a mystery and no traces of it have been found; but it probably lay a short distance east of the Danube, in northern Serbia or southern Hungar~ The envoys were entertained in a series of dinner parties. The first of these was with Attila's senior wife, Hereka. Her house was of finely carved wood set on stone bases (to keep them from rotting). There were felt and woollen carpets on the floor and Priscus found his hostess reclining on a couch while her handmaids worked at embroidery and other domestic tasks. It is interesting to note that the 'queen' has her separate household and entertains foreign ambassadors without her husband or, as far as we know, any other men being present. When the Spanish ambassador, Clavijo, reached the court of Tamerlane at Samarkand, a thousand years later in 1405, he too was entertained by Tamerlane's wife and other women in the same wa~ Priscus saw the great man around the compound and noted the awe in which he was held, but the setting was very informal, Attila moving freely among the people and listening to petitions. When Priscus arrived in the village, the young women came out to greet him and processed in front of him. His first meal was taken on horseback. It was all very different from the seclusion and hierarchy of the court back home in Constantinople. The climax of the visit was a dinner party with Attila himself. The feast was stage-managed to accentuate the king's power but also his simpliciy Chairs were arranged in lines around the edge of the room with little tables in front of them, the guests seated according to their ranks. Attila sat on a couch with Onegesius on one side and two of his own sons, silent and respectful on the other (this seems to have been an all-male occasion). Behind his couch, concealed by rich linen curtains was the bed on which he slept. Priscus did not find the king physically impressive; but although short and squat with a large head and widely spaced eyes (unlike the nineteenth-century images of the mighty warrior), he had an undeniable air of authority. Toasts were drunk, each of the guests having their cups refilled by their own waiters. The platters of food were brought round and placed on the small tables. Attila distinguished himself from the rest of the company by his simplicity of dress and manner. 'Neither the sword which hung by his side, nor the fastenings of his barbarian boots nor his horse's bridle was decorated, unlike those of the other Huns, with gold or precious stones or anything of value.' He ate off a wooden platter and drank from a wooden cup while the guests used gold and silver; they ate bread and other prepared dishes, he contented himself with plain meat. His clothing was plain and just like that of everyone else except, as Priscus sniffily observes, 'his was clean'. His behaviour was as dignified as his appearance: while his court laughed uproariously at the antics of a buffoon, he maintained an aloof silence. The banquet continued late into the night, with much drinking and singing of old battle songs, though the envoys took their leave long before it was over. The images are very striking. The barbarian chief impresses not by any nouveau-riche display of wealth but by his simplicit~ Nor does he attempt to overawe the envoys with a display of military strength or by parading his arm~ At the same time, no one was left in any doubt where power lay or of the riches at Attila's disposal. More days of dinner parties followed before the envoys were allowed to leave. Attila seems to have accepted that Maximinus and Priscus were innocent of the conspiracy against him which had cast a shadow over the arrival of the embass~ Priscus' mission paved the way for another, led by Anatolius in 450 when peace was finally secured and the Eastern Empire saved for ever, as it turned out, from Attila's wrath. In 451 Attila decided on a complete change of direction. For reasons that we do not completely understand, he chose to leave the Eastern Empire alone and turn his attention to the West. The change demonstrates that Attila was more than a successful barbarian warrior: he, or his advisers (we know he employed Roman secretaries) had a firm grasp of the political rivalries and intrigues in both Eastern and Western Empires in this turbulent period. From his headquarters in the Middle Danube area, he was ideally placed to strike east or west, depending on where he could see opportunities. Attila's old friend and mentor, Aetius, was now, briefly, in control of the Western Empire, based at Ravenna under the titular control of Valentinian III (425-55) who, although vain, spiteful and debauched, was still the successor of Augustus. Aetius now represented imperial authority, rather than being the freelance military leader in Gaul, and as far as Attila was concerned, he became the enemy: As part of the complex diplomacy of the previous years, Attila had been granted the formal title of magister militum (master of the soldiers) or chief of the Western Roman army: This may seem bizarre, given Attila's reputation as the great destroyer of the Empire, but it reflects again the complicated interaction between Romans and barbarians which characterized the period: while barbarians had close links with the Empire and employed Roman civil servants to write Latin letters, many of the 'Roman' soldiers were themselves of Gothic origin and may have spoken no Latin at all. It may be that Attila now wanted to convert his appointment into reality and set himself up in Aetius' place, as chief military supporter of the Empire. It must all have been very confusing to the unfortunate peasants and citizens who were forced to pay for, and provide food for, all these rival armies. As well as these realpolitik considerations, there was a curious tale of intrigue. To add to the unexpected image of Attila as the consummate politician, we also have Attila as the great lover (at least in the imagination of one lonely Roman princess). The emperor's sister Honoria, who had her own palace at Ravenna, had been rash enough to have an affair with her steward Eugenius. When this was discovered, there was a great scandal, the gossip reaching as far as Constantinople. The unfortunate steward was executed and Honoria forcibly betrothed to an elderly and entirely respectable senator called Herculanus. Honoria, who was clearly a woman of spirit, was not at all pleased with this arrangement. She despatched one of her eunuchs, Hyacinth by name, to Attila with her ring, begging him to come and rescue her from her dreary fate. She may well have imagined herself ruling the Empire as Attila's consort, which raises the intriguing possibility of Attila as Roman emperor. However, being one of Honoria's trusted servants was not a recipe for a long life: Hyacinth was arrested, tortured and made to reveal the plot before he was beheaded. Honoria was handed over to the custody of her doughty mother, Galla Placidia, and is never heard of again. Needless to say, Attila could now assert that he was invading to claim his rightful bride.
Armed with these excuses, Attila begal) his most famous expeditions. In the spring of 451 he led his troops west across the Rhine and into Gaul: Metz fell on 7 April and his forces were set to cut a fearsome swathe through northern France. In this emergency, Aetius managed to persuade the Visigothic king of Toulouse, Theodoric, who had long been his enemy, to co-operate in the defence of Gaul. When Attila approached Orleans, the allies advanced north to relieve the city. They arrived just in time to prevent it falling to the enemy and Attila was obliged to retreat. He now seems to have lost momentum and been concerned that he might be trapped in Gaul, an unfamiliar country whose agricultural landscapes were unsuitable for the nomad style of warfare. As he retreated east, Aetius and his men pursued the Huns until they caught up with them in the open country around Chalons-sur-Marne. This open land, the so-called Catalaunian Plains, was the setting for a major battle. On about 20 June the two armies met at a site which cannot now be identified with any precision. From the viewpoint of the military historian the battle is important as it is the only major encounter involving the Huns when led by Attila of which we have any detailed account. Unfortunately our main source, Jordanes, was writing at a later date and does not give a clear outline of events. Attila's army, which probably numbered about 30,000, were not all Huns. There were subject tribesmen, Gepids and Ostrogoths, whose loyalty and expertise could hardly be entirely relied upon. The 'Roman' army too, included many Visigoths and Alans (another nomad tribe) whose commitment to the cause was equally doubtful. According to Jordanes, 'There was a unyielding and long-drawn-out battle', but that does not tell us very much. Attila fought in the centre of his own line, rather than standing back from the conflict as some later nomad rulers did. It began badly for the Huns when Thorismond, the son of the Gothic king, was able to seize a hill which lay in the middle of the battlefield. What is cl.ear, however, is that Aetius and his Gothic allies fought the Huns to a standstill. By nightfall Attila was forced to take defensive measures and surrounded his camp with wagons to await the next day's assault. It is said that he piled up a heap of saddles, intending to set fire to them and jump into the flames if he was in danger of being taken prisoner. The attack never came. The Visigothic king, Theodoric, had been killed in the conflict and his son, advised by Aetius, left the camp to secure his position in his capital, Toulouse. The probability is that Aetius, who had long been a friend and ally of the Huns, had no wish to see them exterminated and find himself at the mercy of the victorious Visigoths: a balance of power among the barbarians was his main objective. Attila had saved the bulk of his forces but apparently his experience on the Catalaunian Plains had convinced him that the invasion of Gaul was too risky a project to be worth trying again. Instead, the next year he decided to invade Italy Taking both Aetius and the Roman forces off their guard, he marched from his base on the Danube over the Julian Alps to north-eastern Ital~ Here he began to besiege the city of Aquileia, then the most important city of the area. The assault did not prove to be an easy undertaking. Aquileia held out against him and he was on the verge of abandoning the siege as he had done at Orleans the previous year. According to one of those stories which historians feel obliged to repeat because there are no reliable details to recount, Attila saw a stork leaving the city with its young and, knowing how attached these birds were to their homes, he concluded that the situation inside must be desperate and renewed the assault, this time with success. The city was given over to a relentless sack from which it never fully recovered. It was in the aftermath of this and other calamities that the surviving inhabitants sought refuge in the islands of the lagoon that were to develop into the city of Venice. It is a curious thought that without Attila, the Venetian republic might never have been born. As usual the sack of one city persuaded others to open their doors with alacrit~ The cities of northern Italy, including Milan, surrendered and were, in the main, able to escape the horrors of a major sack. It was natural that Attila should now turn his attention to Rome. He never made it. Pope Leo I led a delegation to appease him and the embassy persuaded him to retreat north and lead his army back to his homelands. This was not, however, just a triumph of papal diplomac~ The years 451 and 452 were marked by widespread famine: the Huns may have been frugal, but the army had to eat something. More sinister for Attila were the first outbreaks of plague. For centuries, plague did more to protect Italy from northern invasions than any of her armies and Attila was one of the first to suffer. He fully understood that the safety of the Hunnic army was the key to his survival. After the losses of the Catalaunian Plains, he could not risk any further losses. Defeated not by battle but by bacteria, he returned to Hungary, no doubt to decide in which direction to launch an attack the next year. It was never to be. Attila's death was natural rather than the result of assassination or warfare, but it was in keeping with his flamboyant lifestyle. Attila had many wives, for the custom of the Huns seems to have put no limit on this, but he still wanted new partners. According to the generally accepted story, he married a girl called Ildico who was, as girls always are in these stories, extremely beautiful. On his wedding night he feasted, eating and drinking lavishly before retiring with his new bride. In the morning, his guards were, naturally, reluctant to disturb him. It was not until later in the day that they became concerned about his absence. Eventually they summoned up the courage to break down the door and found the unfortunate Ildico weeping by the body of her blood-covered husband. Apparently he had bled through the nose during his sleep and, being well gone in wine, had suffocated in his own blood.
His funeral was spectacular. Horsemen galloped around the body and the Huns commemorated their dead leader with a mixture of wild merriment, desperate grief and copious amounts of alcohol. He was interred in a great barrow, accompanied by a vast quantity of treasure and weapons. Like Genghis Khan's tomb, his resting place has never been found. There survives, in a Latin version, a garbled translation of the Hunnic song of lament which was composed for the occasion and which shows something of how his people regarded their great chief.
It is said that on the very night in which Attila died, the new emperor in Constantinople, Marcian, had a dream in which he saw Attila's bow being broken. Such a dream would certainly have been prophetic. The aftermath of Attila's death clearly demonstrated to what extent the importance of the Huns during this period was of his own creation. It is not clear that Attila was a great general. The one battle we know anything about, the Catalaunian Plains, shows him forced on to the defensive and, in the end, lucky to escape wi~h any of his army intact. If he showed any military talent, it was in knowing when to retreat. He excelled rather as a politician, seeing and seizing the opportunities presented by the weaknesses of the two empires. He offered his men rich new grazing lands, pillage and the gifts of luxury items purchased with the tribute extorted from the settled peoples. Without this sort of leadership, the Huns were unable to keep together. Within a generation of his death, divisions among his successors, and the end of tribute, had scattered and demoralized them. They disappear from the historical record almost entirely, except as a terrible warning of the dangers that these rude nomads could inflict on a sedentary and prosperous society:
THE ARABS
NOMAD WARRIORS HAVE HAD a dramatic impact on world history on numerous occasions, as we shall see in the rest of this book. On the whole, however, their impact has been destructive and short-lived. The Huns may have precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, but the successor states which emerged were Romano-Germanic: the Hunnic state disappeared into oblivion and the Hunnic religion never became a force in the spiritual life of western Europe. Similarly, neither Iran nor Russia are today Mongol-speaking countries and, apart perhaps from some scattered remnants along the Volga and in the mountains of northern Afghanistan, there are no populations which seem to have their origins among the Mongol conquerors. Very different, however, are the consequences of the Arab conquests, from 632 onwards to the Middle East and North Africa. Alone among the nomad warriors, they brought with them a dominant, proselytizing religion, Islam, and this in its train contributed a written language of high culture and, later, of administration: Arabic became not just the language of religion and government, but the spoken vernacular of almost the entire population from the Zagros Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. There can be few events which have affected world history so profoundly as the battles and expeditions of the decades between 632 and 720. For better or for worse, we are all living with the consequences at the present da): The armies of the early Islamic conquests were recruited almost entirely from the Arab populations of the Arabian peninsula and the d~serts of Syria and Iraq. In the pre-Islamic period, these populations were linked by language and a certain common culture. Since there was no political organization, the language was a major unifying factor. There were obviously different dialects and the relics of these can be found in the vast numbers of synonyms and alternative meanings that survive in classical Arabic. At the same time, it appears that these differences were no real barrier to communication and that Arabs from the tribes of the Yemen and the Hadramawt in deepest southern Arabia could understand Arabs who tended sheep along the Euphrates Valley and owed allegiance to the Byzantine or Sasanian emperors. Furthermore, in the century or so before the coming of Islam, the Arabs had developed a written form of their language and a common oral culture. The written culture is associated above all with the ancient city of Hira, on the desert frontier of Iraq. Here, on the fringes of the Persian Empire, a semi-independent kingdom had emerged, a sort of buffer state between the settled lands and the true desert, ruled by the Arab Lakhmid dynasty. Their court became a magnet for poets and story-tellers from all over the Arabicspeaking areas, serving to spread a common culture. Without these bonds of language and culture, it would have been impossible for the tribes of the Arabian peninsula to work together in the great project of the conquests in the way that they did. They were also united by a common lifestyle. Most Arabs lived as nomad or semi-nomad tribesmen, in tents, dependent for their subsistence on their animals - either camels, in the inner desert, or sheep, along the margins of the settled lands where both water and markets could be found. They were divided into tribes, each claiming descent from a common ancestor; but apart from this loose framework, they lived in a condition of true anarchy, that is to say, they had no government. Security of life and limb, the most basic service provided by any government, was instead dependent on kin. Only the threat of vengeance from outraged relatives could secure a man's life and the sanctity of his women and children. In this world, there was no distinction between civilians and the army. As with other nomad societies, every man had to be a potential warrior and avenger. Tribal identities were important for placing individuals in society, but the large tribe was not the focus for everyday loyalties and protection. Tribes such as the Tamim in north-east Arabia, or the Kinda in the south and centre, had thousands of members scattered in many geographical ~reas: the tribe seldom, if ever, met as a unit. Instead, most B'edouin lived their lives in much smaller tenting groups, extended families of perhaps a hundred souls, and they often cooperated with people from other tribes. Even among these smaller groups, organization was informal. Authority was concentrated in the hands of leaders, called sharifs in early Arabic, but later known as shaykhs. These figures owed their prestige to their descent; a shaykh had to be from a shaykhly lineage, but within that lineage, it was not the eldest or favourite son who succeeded but the man who could command respect, as leader in war, as finder of grazing and dispenser of hospitalit~ The shaykh had no coercive power: a shaykh who demonstrated that he could not deliver would soon find his followers drifting away or choosing another chief. By the same token, a shaykh who proved his skill and intelligence could attract followers from far and wide. This natural selection meant that there was a high standard of competence among military leaders; neither favouritism nor bribery could secure a man loyalty, which could only be based on respect. Within the smaller tribe, the main movers were the individual Bedouin and their immediate kin. The poetry with which they expressed their values and their culture glorified the individual, the lone horseman, acting on his own initiative, riding through the desert on the camel which might be his only companion, in search of glory, of lost love and the respect of his fellows. No amount of wealth and status could secure the prestige of the warrior or his position in battle. Here for example, is the pre-Islamic poet Antara in the late sixth century celebrating his military prowess in a piece of shameless boasting.
It is the classic image of the loner, with his horse and his arms, his affinity with the wild animals and the desert places, fighting for the honour of his tribe. The spirit of individual heroism and the glorification of the solitary warrior was quite alien to the spirit of steppe nomads such as the Huns and the Mongols, for whom discipline was everything. Of the nomad warriors in this book, only the Vikings celebrated individual prowess in battle in the same wa~ And battle was a more or less constant feature of the Bedouin life. There were feuds, caused by murder and vengeance, feuds which could rumble on for ge~erations with sporadic outbursts of violence. These sometimes developed into major military confrontations between large groups, such as the famous war of Basus which divided the tribes around Medina in the last years of the sixth century before the coming of Muhammad. But even if there was no feud, there were constant raids or threats of raids, to round up and drive away the camels or sheep of other tribes. If there were no civilians in this society, neither was there any peace. The equipment with which these wars were fought was simple but not primitive. The most important item was the sword, a long straight blade with a short-handled hilt. Of course the Bedouin did not manufacture these themselves but bought them from the settled communities or had them made by wandering smiths. The steel blades of India and the Yemen were the most highly esteemed, but most warriors must have made do with locally manufactured swords. The spear, too, was an important item. The long, wooden-shafted spear carried a point which was used for piercing but it also had sharpened edges to the point so that it could be used as well for slashing from side to side. Then, too, there was the bow. Unlike the medieval West, where archers normally belonged to inferior social groups compared with the knights, archery enjoyed a high prestige in this early Arab military hierarch~ Great men from famous lineages were pleased to boast of their prowess with the bow in battle. We hear both of Arab bows and Persian bows, but it is not clear what the difference was except that Persian bows may have been longer and heavier. It is evident that these were not the composite bows used by Turkish and Mongol warriors, but rather simple, wooden bows made from the tough, flexible wood of the nab' tree which could be found on the desert margins. Arrows were metal-pointed and feathered. There is no evidence of crossbows. In addition to these formal weapo~s, the Arabs made use of sticks, stones and anything that came to hand, including tent-poles, which could prove very useful when a camp was being attacked. The Arabs also made use of defensive armour, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that some of them did, since the vast majority of tribesmen would have been unable to afford sophisticated body protection. The most common form of armour was chain mail. Development of the use of chain mail, as opposed to lamellar armour (metal plates sewn on to a leather or fabric coat) seems to have occurred in the Roman armies of late antiquity and it must have been from them, or from the Sasanians, that the Arabs acquired it. There are no surviving suits of mail from an Arab context before the twelfth century, but from descriptions in the sources they seem to have covered the body, not the leg, often being worn under a linen outer garment. One form of head protection was the metal helmet known in Arabic as a bayda, i.e. an egg from its rounded shape, generally without a nose-piece. It is not clear how common these helmets were and many men must have fought in turbans or other sorts of fabric headdresses. More characteristic was the mighfar. This was essentially an aventail- a piece of mail to protect the back of the neck. The Arab mighfar also covered the top of the head and could be worn over a helmet or as a head-covering on its own. Armour, like metal weapons was expensive. It was privately owned and would be passed down from generation to generation in the same family.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق