Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (26 page)

It is commonly thought that the Huns swept into Europe on horseback and easily defeated the Romans, who were unaccustomed to fighting nomad armies. However, though the Huns did retain control of the Pontic Steppe—one of Attila’s sons ruled over the peoples by the Black Sea
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—within Western Europe there was little pasture for their horses. The relatively limited grassland of the Pannonian Plain could not support the vast herds the nomad pastoralists maintained in Central Eurasia. The Huns were able to keep only enough horses for an auxiliary cavalry force. As a result, they fought the Romans in Gaul and Italy almost entirely as infantry.
¹⁵

On or around June 20, 451, the two armies met in the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields.
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It was a fierce engagement and the losses on both sides were great—estimates in the sources are between 200,000 and 300,000 men killed. Partly through good generalship and firsthand knowledge of Hun tactics gained during his stay as a hostage among the Huns after the death of Stilicho in 408,
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Aetius was the victor, though his main ally Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, was killed in battle. Despite the Romans’ victory, their forces had suffered too, and the Visigoths withdrew, so Aetius did not pursue the Huns. Similarly Attila, though his army was still strong, withdrew to Pannonia.

In 452, rather than attacking Gaul again, the Huns crossed the Alps and descended into Italy. They sacked the cities in the Po Valley and other places in northern Italy, then turned south toward Ravenna, which was at the time the capital of the Western Roman Empire. Emperor Valentinian III fled the city for Rome, much further to the south. A Roman delegation that included Pope Leo I went north to the Po River, where it met Attila and the pope tried to dissuade him from attacking Ravenna.

By that time Attila did not need much persuading. His troops were suffering due to the famine and plague in the region, and an army sent by Emperor Marcian had attacked the Huns’ homeland in Pannonia. Attila withdrew and returned home. Early the following year, on the night of his marriage to a beautiful new bride, Ildico, he died from unknown causes.
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He was buried in traditional steppe style.
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The three sons of Attila fought over the succession, but none managed to establish himself as sole ruler. The Germanic subjects of the Huns rose up in revolt. In 455 the king of the Gepids, Ardaric, defeated the Huns in Pannonia and killed many of them, including Attila’s eldest son, Ellac. A great number of survivors fled southeastward back to the Black Sea region, where Ernac (or Irnikh) took command. The Hun Empire was gone, but the Huns under Ernac’s brother Dengizikh continued to be a power in southeastern Europe until his death in 469, while those under Ernac remained the dominant ethnic group on the Western Steppe for several generations before they finally disappeared as a people.
²⁰

Aetius, who had almost single-handedly saved the Western Roman Empire despite all the obstacles put in his way by the politicians of the day, was murdered in 454 by Emperor Valentinian III himself. The emperor was assassinated the following year by the supporters of Aetius, but the damage had already been done. There was no one left capable of leading the Romans.

By 473, when the Ostrogoths invaded Italy, the Western Roman Empire was little more than a fiction. Orestes, the Pannonian Roman who had been Attila’s right-hand man, deposed the emperor Nepos in 475 and installed his own little son Romulus Augustulus as emperor. The boy was on the throne for little over a year when Odoacer, king of the Sciri people, deposed him in 476 and had himself declared king of Italy. Romulus Augustulus was thus the last Roman emperor of the West. Odoacer remained on his throne until 493, when he was killed by Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who had been sent by the Byzantines to depose him.
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Taking the throne for himself, Theodoric established an Ostrogothic kingdom that eventually included Italy, Sicily, Dalmatia, and territories to the north. He accepted the nominal suzerainty of the Eastern Roman Empire, however, and, unlike Odoacer, he was a relatively cultured man. He brought peace and promoted both Roman and Gothic culture in the territory under his control.

The Early Germanic Kingdoms in Western Europe

Many Germanic peoples migrated into the lands of the Western Roman Empire, both before and after its fall.

In the far northwest, the former Roman colony in Britain had been abandoned militarily by 410, when the emperor Honorius told the beleaguered citizens there to defend themselves.
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From the fourth century into the sixth century, during the Great Wandering of Peoples, Irish peoples crossed over and settled on the west coast of Britain, especially in Scotland, while Germanic peoples, primarily Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, crossed the English Channel and settled in Britain, bringing with them the latest continental version of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex.
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The Germanic peoples soon became the dominant power in Britain.
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The Vandals and others marched south through Gaul and Spain, devastating as they went, until they crossed over into North Africa, where they established a kingdom based in Carthage that survived until the Arab conquest in the mid-seventh century.

The Visigoths, following the Vandals, migrated into Aquitaine in Gaul and took control of the Iberian Peninsula. Gradually pushed to the southwest out of Gaul by the Franks, the Visigoths built a strong kingdom in Spain that lasted until the Arabs conquered them in the early eighth century.

Others, such as the Burgundians and the Langobards or Lombards, established kingdoms that survived long enough to leave their mark on the landscape but were eventually absorbed by larger states.

The most important of all the Germanic peoples in Western Europe were eventually to be the Franks, who are believed to have come from the territory immediately to the east of the Rhine River, but who are recorded as having believed that they had come from Pannonia or further east.
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Under the dynamic early Merovingian king Childeric I (d. 481), and especially his son Clovis (r. 481–511), the Franks gradually spread their control over Gaul. During the Early Middle Ages they built the first agrarian-urban empire ever based in Europe north of the Mediterranean.
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Their conquests, and those of the Goths, Anglo-Saxons, and other Germanic peoples, firmly reestablished the Central Eurasian Culture Complex in the former Roman domains in Europe north of the Mediterranean. But the Romans and other Romanized peoples stayed, and were very influential. The resulting cultural blending of the Central Eurasian Germanic peoples and their Romanized subjects laid the foundations of what eventually became a distinctive new European civilization.

Growth of the Eastern Roman and Sasanid Persian Empires

Although the Western Roman Empire declined very rapidly after the third century, and collapsed utterly in the fifth, it is a curious fact that the core of the Eastern Roman Empire did not decline economically and politically, but maintained itself rather successfully. The Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire became increasingly Greek in language, Near Eastern in its cultural orientation, and fixated on Persia in its foreign policy.

In 224 Ardaxśêr (Ardashîr I, r. 224–ca. 240) overthrew the Parthian ruler Ardawân (Artabanus V) and established the Sasanid Dynasty. He quickly took control of the traditional Persian territories—the Iranian Plateau and eastern Mesopotamia. But the Persians came into conflict with the Eastern Roman Empire, which had long contested the rule of Mesopotamia with the Parthians. The Sasanids were determined to reestablish the realm once ruled by the Achaemenids centuries before, including western Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and much of the rest of the Near East. They fought many wars with the Romans. The boundary between the two empires, usually somewhere in Mesopotamia, shifted back and forth several times.

The Sasanids also marched into the east. They attacked the Kushans, took Bactria and Transoxiana, and subjugated the remnants of the Kushan Empire.

In the fifth century the Hephthalites or ‘White Huns’ attacked the Central Asian territories of the Sasanid Empire, defeating the Persians in 483 and exacting tribute. The Hephthalites settled in the area of Bactria and Transoxiana and remained independent for about a century. They extended their power eastward as far as Turfan in the Tarim Basin and sent ambassadors to the Wei Dynasty in North China.
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The height of the Persian Empire under the Sasanids was reached under Khosraw I (Anushirvan the Just, r. 531–579), whose reign was largely peaceful after the successful conclusion of a protracted war with the Eastern Roman Empire in 561.
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Fall of the Chinese Empire and Hsien-pei Migration into North China

The Later or Eastern Han Dynasty (
AD
25–220), which was the restored and reinvigorated continuation of the Former or Western Han Dynasty (202
BC
-
AD
9), finally collapsed from the usual internal dynastic causes. The territory of the empire was divided among several short-lived kingdoms that engaged in civil war for half a century, ending with the formation of the Chin Dynasty (265–419). The Chin was in virtually every respect a continuation of the Later Han, though weaker militarily.

As the Chin declined, the long-delayed reaction of the northern peoples to the aggressive, expansionistic policies of the former united Chinese Empire fell upon the dynasty. A branch of the Mongolic Hsien-pei people in southern Manchuria who had long been at war on and off with China expanded southward into Chin. They took the name *Taghbač (T’o-pa) ‘Lords of the Earth’,
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and founded a new Chinese-style dynasty, the Northern Wei (386–ca. 550), which dominated North China for nearly two centuries.

During the period of the flourishing of the northern dynasties, the southern part of what had been Han China—essentially the region south of the Yangtze River—was divided among several states with ethnically Chinese dynasties. For two centuries the Chinese cultural area of East Asia remained divided into a number of kingdoms, with dynasties largely of foreign origin ruling over mostly ethnic Chinese in the north and ethnically Chinese dynasties ruling over Chinese and non-Chinese in the south.

The Avars and the Coming of the Turks