Attila the Hun (10 page)

Actually, there is a heart beating on the far side of Eurasia. It is China, the history of which is a series of dynastic heartbeats that has continued, with each beat lasting anything from decades to centuries, for over 2,000 years. The emergence and collapse of dynasties over such a period is unique in some four millennia, and many historians have spent their lives trying to spot an underlying pattern in this remarkable sequence. If there is one, it seems to have something to do with the idea of unified rule, in pursuit of which dynasties have followed each other, their life-histories driven by complex interactions involving – among other elements – agriculture, rivers, canals, walls, peasant uprisings, the raising of armies, barbarian incursions, taxation, civil service, power politics,
corruption, revolution, collapse and the emergence of some new challenger from outside the established order. For us right now, the point is that sometimes nomad rulers entered the Chinese heart and sometimes the Chinese core took over the barbarian frontier. Every pulse would shake up the borderlands, and send another tribe or two westwards, usually out of time, out of history. As it happened, the fourth and early fifth centuries in north China were chaotic, a time labelled by some historians the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians, the chaos diminishing somewhat when a Turkish group, the T’o-pa, established a kingdom known as Northern Wei in 396. Did the chaos, much of it unrecorded, send shock waves of refugees westward, forcing the Huns to move? No-one has a clue.

I’m not even sure it matters. A cold snap in central Asia or an invasion by this or that group of nomadic refugees cannot explain why the Huns were inspired to conquer, and the others weren’t. Why the difference? Their success owes nothing to climate or the historical process, and everything to their fighting skills, which are examined in the next chapter.

Let’s speculate about their reasons for moving on the basis of what they lacked and what they had:

• They lacked luxuries.

• They had the power to rob.

Pastoral nomads produce more than enough for the necessities of life, but
always
lack luxuries, if you adopt the standards of the upper echelons of settled societies. Their very survival demands it. Herds must be led to
new pastures, tents put down and up, pack animals and wagons loaded. Possessions threaten mobility, and thus survival. Life on these terms is a life without trimmings. It is wonderful for building character. You can see the results in Mongolia today, out in the countryside no more than two or three hours from the capital. At best, these are proudly independent people: men tough as their horses, wielding their pole lassos like circus riders, red-cheeked children and sturdy women, all with strong hearts and fine teeth, tributes to a sugar-free diet. But a quick visit in summer makes for a romantic view of the pastoral nomad. Tourists easily buy into this latter-day version of the noble savage, who drives his herds between known pastures, living in an age-old seasonal rhythm. But strip away the wind-powered generator, the motorbike and the TV; set aside the school in the nearest town, where children can stay; return in winter, go back in your imagination a century or two, imagine a life without fresh fruit or vegetables (a problem even today in remote areas), and you will see how nasty and brutish this life can be. Winters are lethal. An ice storm that seals up the grass kills horses and sheep by the thousand. Not long ago, such a catastrophe would leave families starving, without milk, meat or dung-fuel. At one level, suffering and its corollaries – fortitude, strength, sturdy independence – were a source of pride; at another, of envy. No wonder pastoral nomads looked outwards.

In fact, looking outwards was built into the way of life. Pastoral nomads were self-sufficient for a few months, a year perhaps, but not in the long term. The evidence is there today in Mongolia, as it was in the
thirteenth century, as it had been in the rise and fall of every nomad kingdom since before the Xiongnu. To survive on the steppe, you need a tent, and to support a tent you need wooden lattice walls and wooden roof supports. Wood comes from trees, and trees come from forests and hills, not rolling grasslands. In addition, if you could afford one, a two-wheeled wagon came in handy to carry the young and the old, the tents and cauldrons and other possessions. Wagons, too, were made of wood. For both tents and wagons, steppe herdsmen needed forests. To get wood you need axes, which means iron, either made by local blacksmiths or acquired by trade. Already, we are looking at a society more varied and adaptable than that of ‘pure’ pastoral nomadism. And that is just for survival. In addition, nomads, being as human as the rest of us, want refinements unavailable on the grasslands, like tea, rice, sugar, soft and varied fabrics, especially silk: in brief, the goods produced by farmers and more complex, urban societies.

Pastoral nomads do not live in constant, random wanderings. Many herding families may lead remarkably stable lives for years, decades, even generations, because flocks depend on knowing where and when to find pastures; and the need to guarantee them, year after year, demands co-operation and unwritten laws. But, in the long term, change is inevitable. Seasons vary, disease takes its toll, clans breed, and grow, and split, and dispute pastures. Throughout history, the steppeland has heaved with changes of its own, let alone the changes imposed on it by settled societies round its edge.

Apply all this to the area from which the Huns came, the Pontic and Caspian steppes. It was a cauldron, a slow-motion seething of intermixed and successive peoples. Imagine, then, our small group of Huns, buffeted from established pastures by a few bad years or the ambitions of long-forgotten neighbours. They move into new pastures, unwelcome as gypsies, despised, a threat to and threatened by new and suspicious neighbours, lacking both a homeland and the soft textiles, the carpets, the exotic drinking cups and the jewellery that ease and enliven nomadic life. Strip away the hospitality that acts as a security blanket for nomadic travellers and the reassuring knowledge of local pastures. Wouldn’t you, in these circumstances, yearn for all that you lack?

The Huns were refugees wanting a base, a regular source of food, a renewed sense of identity and pride in themselves. These were lacks that could be satisfied in only three ways: by finding unoccupied land (no chance); or by some new arrangement with established groups (tricky, with little to offer in return); or by force. The future life they faced would be very different from that of the traditional pastoral nomad, for once on the move, with no pastures to call their own, trying to muscle in on the territories and trading arrangements of others, with force as the only means of doing so, they were seated on a juggernaut that would never find rest. For now, with every kilometre westward, they would find pasturage increasingly reduced by settled communities. They would, inevitably, become dependent on the possessions of others. These might have been
acquired by trade; but the Huns were less sophisticated than their new neighbours. With little to offer other than wool, felt and domestic animals, their only remaining option would have been theft. They would turn from pastoral nomads into a robber band, for whom violence would be as much a way of life as it became for wandering Vikings.

The Huns were on the move westward, away from the grasslands of Kazakhstan and the plains north of the Aral Sea, wanderers who faced a choice between sinking into oblivion or climbing to new heights by conquest. Conquest demanded unity and direction, and for that we come at last to the final element in their rise to fame and fortune: leadership. It was leadership that had been lacking before; leadership that eventually released the Huns’ pent-up power. Some time in the fourth century the Huns acquired their first named leader, the first to bring himself and his people to the attention of the outside world. His name was something like Balamber or Balamur, and hardly anything at all is known about him except his name. It was he who inspired his people, focused their fighting potential to attack tribe after tribe, each of whom had their own strengths, and each some weakness. For the first time, a great leader released the tactical skills and established a tradition of leadership that would, in the end, produce Attila.

I
n
AD
350 the Huns crossed the Volga. A few small, violent bunches of mounted archers led their wagons and winding columns of horses and cattle into the
grassland country which survived little changed until Anton Chekhov saw it as a boy in the 1870s, an experience he described in one of his first great works,
The Steppe
. The view that stretched out before the Huns, the 800-kilometre sweep of grassland from the Volga to the Crimea, was recorded by the young Chekhov (in Ronald Hingley’s translation) before the plough claimed it. This is a new day, as seen through the eyes of Chekhov’s young hero, Yegorushka:

Now a plain – broad, boundless, girdled by a chain of hills – lay stretched before the travellers’ eyes. Huddling together and glancing out from behind one another, the hills merged into rising ground extending to the very horizon on the right of the road, and disappearing into the lilac-hued distance. On and on you travel, but where it all begins and where it ends you just cannot make out. First, far ahead where the sky met the earth – near some ancient burial mounds and a windmill resembling from afar a tiny man waving his arms – a broad, bright yellow band crept over the ground . . . until suddenly the whole wide prairie flung off the penumbra of dawn, smiled and sparkled with dew . . . Arctic petrels swooped over the road with happy cries, gophers called to each other in the grass, and from somewhere far to the left came the plaint of lapwings . . . Grasshoppers, cicadas, field crickets and mole crickets fiddled their squeaking monotonous tunes in the grass.

But time passed, the dew evaporated, the air grew still and the disillusioned steppe assumed its jaded July
aspect. The grass drooped, the life went out of everything. The sunburnt hills, brown-green and – in the distance – mauvish, with their calm pastel shades, the plain, the misty horizon, the sky arching overhead and appearing so awesomely deep and transparent here in the steppe, where there are no woods or high hills – it all seemed boundless, now, and numb with misery.

In the mid-fourth century this grassland was dominated by the Sarmatians, a loose confederation of Iranian people who had taken it over from the Scythians more than 500 years before. Much is known about the Sarmatians, because some of their art treasures were found in western Siberia and handed over to Peter the Great of Russia. They liked to make plaques of coloured enamels set in metal showing fighting animals – griffins or tigers against horses or yaks: a style that spread westward to the Goths and other Germanic tribes. The Sarmatians specialized in fighting with lances, their warriors protected by conical caps and mailed coats; no match for the Hun tornado.

One group of Sarmatians were the Alans, a wide-ranging sub-federation known as As to the Persians. (It is from their name, by the way, that ‘Aryan’ is derived,
l
shifting to
r
in some Iranian languages; thus the tribe so admired by Hitler turns out not to be Germanic at all.) Now we are getting into a region and a tribe that became known to the Romans. Seneca, Lucan and Martial mention them in the first century
AD
. Martial, a sharp-tongued master of epigrams, skewered a certain Caelia and her wide-ranging sexual habits by asking how a Roman girl could give herself to Parthians,
Germans, Dacians, Cilicians, Cappadocians, Pharians, Indians from the Red Sea, the circumcised members of the Jewish race and ‘the Alan with his Sarmatian mount’, yet cannot ‘find pleasure in the members of the Roman race’. The Alans raided south into Cappadocia (today in north-eastern Turkey), where the Greek historian and general Arrian fought them in the second century, noting the Alan cavalry’s favourite tactic of the feigned retreat (to be perfected later by Hun archers). Ammianus says they were cattle-herding nomads who lived in wagons roofed with bark and worshipped a sword stuck in the ground, a belief which Attila himself would adopt. They were terrific riders on their tough little horses. The Alans, more European than Asian, with full beards and blue eyes, were lovers of war, experts with the sword and the lasso, issuing terrifying yells in battle, reviling old men because they had not died fighting. They were said to flay their slain enemies and turn their skins into horse-trappings. Theirs was an extensive culture – their tombs have been found by the hundred in southern Russia, many of them commemorating women warriors (hence, perhaps, the Greek legends of Amazons). It was also a flexible one, happy to assimilate captives and to be assimilated. Indeed, perhaps adaptability was their main problem in the mid-fourth century: for they lacked the unity to counter the Hun style of mounted archery.

The Huns blew them apart, clan by clan. The Alans would soon form fragments of the explosion of peoples which usually goes by its German name, the
Völkerwanderung
, the Migration of the Tribes.
However, while good assimilators, they also had a talent for retaining their own identity. In the slurry of wandering peoples, the Alans were like grit, widely mixed, but always abrasive. Within a couple of generations, different clans would become useful recruits for the Huns, and also allies of Rome. Their remnants in the Caucasus would transmute into the Ossetians of southern Russia and Georgia: the first two syllables of this name recall their Persian appellation, As, with a Mongol-style plural -
ut
(so the current name of the little Russian enclave known as North Ossetia–Alania doubly emphasizes their roots). At the other end of the empire, they would join both the Goths on their march into Spain – some derive the name Catalonia from a combination of Goth and Alan – and the Vandals, who swept them up on their flight to North Africa in about 420. We shall be hearing from the Alans again later in this story.