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02-18-2001, 07:29 PM

HI, I'm new to the board, but this looked like a good place to find information. I'm gathering resarch on Atilla the Hun for a writer. I already have the basic historic facts, I was wondering if anyone knows any obscure details about Attila or the Romans of the time. Military tactics are a definite plus.

02-19-2001, 07:47 AM

Salve, 
 
It is important to read this article on the Huns to get rid of some myths surrounding them: 
 
Lindner, P., 'Nomadism, horses and Huns' in: Past and Present 92 (1981) 3-19. 
 
Actual evidence for Huns using steppe nomad tactics in their campaigns in the fifth century is largely absent. 
 
Regards, 
 
Sander van Dorst

02-22-2001, 03:53 AM

It was interesting article, but it's very hard to prove a negative. I wouldn't say the article discounts the possibility of Huns using nomad tactics. The evidence is not as sound as the author would like you to believe. 
 
1) The sources need to be looked at more carefully. Mainly because they are Roman sources, and were (despite best intentions) biased. Romans at the time may not have mentioned the Huns prowess at riding horses, because they were not as frightened by the horses as they were before. They may have developed better techniques at combating the Huns nomadic tactics. Or, since history can be used as propaganda, the Romans may have down played the Huns nomadic tactics. These are only possibilities, but something to think about. Historic records can be interpreted in varying ways, according to one's own bias. 
 
2) Archaeology can be a tricky feild. I am currently studying to be an archaeologist. And one thing you have to keep in mind about archaeology is that just because something isn't in the archaeological record doesn't mean it isn't there. 
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp a) I'm sure the entire region was not excavated. Most likely the area was divided into quadrants, and a few quadrants were picked randomly to be excavated. How many quadrants were excavated depends on the budget. Sometimes all that is found can misrepresent what actually happened. 
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp b) The fact that horse bones were not found in the graves of the rich, does not surprise me. Horses were a valuble commodity to nomads and were often times treated as people. Horses were not something you would kill to bury with it's owner. 
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp c) Interesting thing about bones is that they biodegrade. Especially after they reach a certain age. In humans once you reach 40 or so, your bones begin to degenerate. People who die after the age 50 or so, their bones biodegrade faster and often times can not be found in the archaeological record. This may have happened to the horses bones if the Huns were like many other nomads, who kept their horses into old age. 
 
 
I'm not saying that the thesis of the article is wrong, it might be true, but the author failed to totally convince me. And I would urge everyone to read all articles with a certain degree of subjectiveness.

02-24-2001, 05:26 PM

Salve, 
 
Just the simple fact of providing a reference does not by itself entail endorsement of all its views. In my view however the author raises some good points by pointing out the difference between the available evidence for the Huns and the manner in which they tend to be portrayed in modern studies (a lot is loaned from later nomadic societies). It also hints at the difficulties surrounding supply of a true horse nomad army of any size in Europe. Large cavalry armies cannot be concentrated for prolonged periods of time and problems of pasture would necessarily see a horse nomad army either fragmented in small troops or having to start using their mounts as self propelled rations. Having some securely datable equine bone finds would help in establishing the nourishement requirements and calculating logistical burdens and possible marching routes. 
 
However the article's statement that the Hungarian plain could not support more than roughly 150.000 horses and that the Huns could thus deploy no more than 15.000 cavalrymen does not take into account that another option was open to steppe nomads adapting to European conditions, that is to make do without remounts. This appears surprising as the author himself later quotes this in connection with later Magyar horsemen. This would however affect their tactics by limiting the time they could keep up their fighting as horse archers. 
 
Regards, 
 
Sander van Dorst

10-14-2002, 09:17 PM

Arthur Ferrill - everyone's going to get very bored with me and Ferrill, but he's very good and hardheaded in his analysis - has this to say about Huns and horses, or lack thereof by the time they were a trouble to Rome in the mid 440s. 
 
'Several decades of life in the Great Hungarian Plain led [them]...to abandon their earlier cavalry tactics in favour of infantry, and their infantry was probably very little different from that of the Germanic barbarians. 
 
...nomadic horse nations require enormous stretches of suitable territory for the support of their horses. ...nomads needed many remounts for every cavalryman. Marco Polo noted that on the Asisn steppes, eighteen horses might be used in a string by a single horesmen....If one assumes that the Huns used ten horses per cavalryman for large scale horse campaigns, and that the Great Hungarian Plain with some 42,400 sqyaure kilometers of pasture could have supported only about 150,000 grazing horses, then there were enough for approximately 15,000 cavalry. Roman cavalry resources, based on stable-fed horses, were actually greater..." 
 
The other point, alluded to less directly by Ferrill, is that not only do you have to feed them in peacetime, you have to feed them on campaign. Without a Roman logistical system, that's almost impossible to do in Western Europe. A nomadic army has to keep moving through the steppe or it runs out of 'gas', and that is a very likely explanation of why later nomadic campaigns like Ghenghiz Khan's tended to fade out in Mitteleuropa - there's just not enough concentrated grazing space farther west. They would have had to split up into bands smaller than was safe, and campagn in (even in 1200) very settled and broken up territory. The Roman cavalry didn't have this problem thanks to superior logistics. The Roman and Byzantine cavalry also very sensibly never tried serious campaigning on the steppes where the nomads were at home and a supply train would have been vulnerable. 
 
Eric

10-15-2002, 01:57 PM

Hello, 
I was wondering if anyone knows whether Ferrill and Lindner take into account the smaller size of the steppe ponies and their smaller feed requirements. 
thanks, 
Jeff

10-15-2002, 02:41 PM

Salve, 
 
Lindner (used by Ferrill) deals with theoretical maxima, not with figures provided in the sources. It is hard to make a guesstimation of Hun cavalry numbers when so many required variables such as the percentage of available pasture actually used or the average number of horses per warrior are simply unknown to any degree of reliability. 
 
Regards, 
 
Sander van Dorst

Thiudareiks Flavius · 10-15-2002, 10:40 PM

I'd say THE book to get on the Huns is Otto Maenchen-Helfen's The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture. It was, unfortunately, unfinished when the author died, but even in its fragmentary form it's a masterpiece - drawing information from obscure Sovient and pre-Soviet Russian digs, Turkish linguistics and Roman sources. 
 
Peter Heather's revised (though not very) edition of E.A. Thomson's fifty year old work on the Huns is also worthwhile, but in classic old fashioned Oxbridge style Thomson pretty much ignored archaeology or anything else other than the Classical sources. 
 
There are other works around on the Huns, some of which are fairly weak popular histories like Patrick Howarth's Attila King of the Huns: Man and Myth. The Osprey volume by David Nicolle, Attila and the Nomad Hordes: Warfare on the Eurasian Steppes 4Th-12th Centuries covers the Huns, but is more about Eurasian nomads and is as brief and relatively superficial as many Osprey books. 
 
I feel Lindner makes some good points but ignores several factors. Firstly, Attila's hegemony was based in Hungary, but extended much further east. We know he drew on warriors from the Ukrainian steppes including various sub-tribes of the Huns as well as Alans and Akatziri. There was more than enough grass out there to sustain several large nomad horse armies. Secondly, all of Attila's campaigns were extremely short - more like summer raids than anything. He invaded the West in 451, returned in 452 and was planning to return again in 453 when he died. By doing without strings of remounts, by dividing his army on the march and bringing it together when confronting opposition and by keeping his campaigns short and carefully directed, it would have been possible for him to maintain reasonably large numbers of horse warriors. 
 
This is not to say the whole Hunnic army was mounted. The majority of his army was made up of Germanic and Alanic allies/subjects anyway and Maenchen-Helfen cites at least one Greek historians who describes Hunnic archers running on foot across a battlefield. That said, the Eastern Empire made extensive use of Hunnic horse archers in their armies, so these tribes must have retained at least some of their nomad horse army traditions. 
 
I'd also hesitate at endorsing Ferrill. I find his book a useful reference, but his conclusions on the "military explaination" of the fall of the Empire are hopelessly flawed and extremely weak, IMO. 
Cheers, 
Tim O'Neill / Thiudareiks Flavius
 

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10-16-2002, 12:54 AM

Where particularly do you consider Ferrill's explanations to be flawed? 
 
Eric

10-23-2002, 10:14 AM

There is an old saying that talks about Attilla: "where Attilla's horse pass, the grass never grows back". It rings true, I think. 
There was definitely a strong cavalry element in Attilla's armies. There was also a lot of infantry, and engineers from the Roman world. Several cities in Gaul were taken with the battering ram. 
As for the damage to the land such an army can do, Procopius' descriptions of northern Italy during the later wars of Justinian against the Goths can give us an idea. 
Not only the pastures disappeared but Attilla, having the detestable habit of slaughtering populations wholesale, the fields and those who tilled them disappeared as well. After one season, two at most, there was litteraly nothing left to eat for anyone, man or beast.

10-23-2002, 07:32 PM

Oh, you don't have to go as far afield even as Procopius to see what devastation the Huns were capable of. Priscus of Panium took an East Roman embassy to Attila north of the Danube in the nid-440s and reported graphically on the devastation around the city of Naissus (Nish, in former Yugoslavia). 
 
'When we arrived at Naissus,we found the city deserted, as though it had been sacked; only a few sick people lay in the churches. We halted at a short distance from the river in an open space, for all the ground adjacent to the bank was full of the bones of men slain in war.' 
 
We can only hope that that that last phrase, ghastly as it is, was not an euphemism for 'rotting corpses'. Note that he does not say that the city was destroyed, 'merely' deserted, but that means that everyone not too sick to move had refugeed out of what had been a substantial city in the region. As to Atilla being given to slaughtering whole populations - we know he blotted out Aquileia. We know he is said to have massacred Milan (which however was fully populated not many years later - possibly a refugee scenario like Naissus?). But for real Scourge of God stuff, he just wasn't in the same league as Genghiz, or Batu, or Timur 800 or so years later. 
 
The 'old saying' about Attila's horse has to be weighed against other folklore like the Niebelungenlied, or the Tale of Macsen Wledig, in which the bards managed to get absolutely everything wrong. Anyway, it doesn't say anything for cavalry or lack thereof - Attila, he boss man, no walkies for him! 
 
I don't think we have to imagine that the Huns in this period had no cavalry at all. Given their traditions, they probably did and it was probably perfectly decent cavalry. But they were no longer a nomadic horsed army such as Ammianus and Claudian described them fifty years before. 
 
I remember 50 years ago, when Canada had an Army...o tempora o austeritas...it really doesn't take long at all. 
 
Eric etc... 
bloody XI Claudia 
bloody Durostorum

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