Huns, Allies and Foes of Rome
In the summer of 375, a despairing King Ermanaric committed suicide as his final act of defiance after leading his people, the Greuthungi Goths, into a disastrous battle with a new foe: the Huns, horsemen who had swept out of the Eurasian steppes.1 The precise location of the battle is unknown, but Goths and Huns clashed somewhere on the south Russian steppes between the lower Volga and Don Rivers. The Huns had suddenly appeared from the east beyond the limits of the world known to Goths and Romans. The newcomers had allied with the Alans, the Iranian-speaking nomads dwelling on the steppes north of the Caucasus Mountains, and together they had attacked the Goths repeatedly. In desperation, the Goths elected a new king, Vithimiris, who also went down in defeat in the next year. Their kinsmen, the Terving Goths, who dwelled to the southwest on the plains between the Dniester and lower Danube Rivers, sent reinforcements under their elected magistrate, Athanaric. He was bushwhacked by the Huns in a night attack on the Gothic camp, and withdrew. Athanaric might have then refortified the dilapidated Roman turf wall between the Prut River and the Greek city Tyras on the shores of the Black Sea as a barrier against the Huns.2 If so, it was to no avail. In the early autumn of 376, Athanaric and his people quit their homes and fled en masse to the Lower Danube. There, they petitioned the Roman emperor Valens for permission to seek refuge within the Roman Empire.3
Two centuries later, the Gothic monk Jordanes, writing his people’s history in Latin, explained away this humiliating defeat by inventing an invincible king of the Huns.4 Jordanes also claimed that Ermanaric did not commit suicide. Instead, the jealous king ordered a grisly death for his beautiful young wife, falsely accused of infidelity. Her two aggrieved half brothers, clad in magical armor, attacked the tyrannical king while he slept. They hacked off the king’s limbs, but the dying king cried out for help. His bodyguards, unable to penetrate the two assailants’ armor, crushed them to death by hurling great stones. The legend lived on. In Norse verse and saga, they were remembered on under the names of King Jörmunrek, Queen Svanhild, and the brothers, Hamdir and Sörli, honored heroes received into Valhalla.5
The sober contemporary Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, however, described these extraordinary events accurately. He reported the newcomers, the Huns, as frightfully ugly. “From the moment of birth they made deep gashes in their children’s cheeks,6 so that when in due course hair appears its growth is checked by the wrinkled scars; as they grow older this gives them the unlovely appearance of beardless eunuchs. They have squat bodies, strong limbs, and thick necks, and are so prodigiously ugly and bent that they might be two-legged animals, or the figures crudely carved from stumps which are seen on the parapets of bridges. Still their shape, however disagreeable, is human...”7 Ammianus Marcellinus was at a loss to account for these invaders who spoke an unintelligible language, but as a Roman officer, he appreciated their martial skills inasmuch as the Huns waged the nomadic way of war violently. In battle, Huns atop sturdy horses rained arrows from afar, and then closed and lassoed foes on foot and horseback. The helpless men were quickly dispatched and their heads severed as trophies. Unbeknownst to Ammianus, the Huns were the first Altaic-speaking nomads from Inner Asia to arrive in Eastern Europe, and they too, like their contemporaries the Rouran and Hephthalites, had long been on the move.8
News of the Hun victory alarmed the Roman imperial courts. The Roman Empire was then informally divided between the emperor Valens, ruling the East from Constantinople, and his nephew, the Western emperor Gratian, at Milan. Since the treaty of 332, the Gothic tribes had patrolled the steppes stretching from the lower Danube to the Don Rivers as dutiful allies of Rome.9 In return, the Goths received subsidies in gold and access to Roman markets on the Danube. The treaty marked the end of three generations of frontier wars between Rome and the Goths, who had the singular distinction of defeating and slaying in battle a Roman emperor, Trajan Decius, in 251.10 The ancestors of the Goths had departed from Sweden in the second century AD, and settled on the Pontic-Caspian steppes.11 There they had learned horsemanship from the Sarmatians, Iranian speakers who had succeeded the Scythians as the dominant nomadic people on the western steppes in the second century BC. The Huns now threatened to disrupt the network of alliances with Germanic tribes defending Rome’s northern frontiers along the Rhine and Danube.
Perhaps as many as one hundred fifty thousand Goths stood on the northern banks of the Danube, imploring the emperor Valens to receive them into the empire.12 Valens hesitated, and then accepted, settling the Goths as federates pledged to military service, in Moesia (today northern Bulgaria), on the Roman side of the lower Danube. Valens sorely needed soldiers, but his corrupt officials drove these desperate Goths, the future Visigoths, into rebellion the next year. The ferry crossing had been chaotic; the refugee camps overcrowded; hunger and disease forced Goths to sell children into slavery. Valens hurried west, and summoned his field armies to concentrate at Constantinople. Meanwhile, more Goths and even a contingent of Huns crossed the Danube to join the rebels. Under a scorching sun, on August 9, 378, the Goths defeated and slew Valens at Adrianople.13 To rescue the Balkans, the emperor Gratian elevated an experienced officer, Theodosius, as Eastern emperor, who negotiated the return of the Goths to Moesia.14 The emperor accepted the fact that the imperial army now depended on federate Germanic tribal armies. The Goths, in turn, learned that rebellion secured land and gold.
The Huns had set off a chain reaction that pushed Germanic tribes to cross and seek new homes in the Roman Empire over the next century, whereby they unwittingly toppled the Western Roman Empire. Ammianus Marcellinus admitted that he did not know from whence came these Huns. Their previous home lay east of the Caspian Sea, on the arid grasslands of Kazakhstan, stretching over five hundred thousand square miles between the Ural and Altai Mountains.15 The Huns dwelled well north of the Jaxartes River, and beyond the western limits of China. Their remote ancestors had likely dwelled much farther east on the Mongolian steppes, where they once had been vassals of the chanyu of the Xiongnu. During the third and fourth centuries AD, the Huns had limited contact with Persian or Chinese civilizations. Other than sharing what had become a generic name designating ferocious nomads, Huns and Xiongnu had no direct connection. Although Huns and Xiongnu each spoke an Altaic language and shared a common way of life, the Huns spoke a Western Turkish dialect that had diverged from any common parent language they shared with the Xiongnu centuries before.16 Nor did the Huns ever adopt writing, in contrast to the Xiongnu. The few Hun decorative arts found in Central Europe exhibit no artistic similarities to those of the Xiongnu.17 In Attila’s day, the Huns were still animists, worshipping ancestral spirits invoked by shamans, and revering the eternal blue sky Tengri.18 They showed no familiarity with Buddhism, Manichaeism, or Christianity, which many nomads engaged in the trade along the Silk Road had embraced. When they arrived in Europe, the Huns, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, comprised tribes who followed a collective leadership. In 395, two elected leaders, Basikh and Koursikh, shared command of the Huns and Alans in the daring raid across the Caucasus to plunder Roman Anatolia and Persian Mesopotamia.19 Therefore, the Huns, when they arrived in Eastern Europe, were hardly the heirs to the imperial organization of the Xiongnu confederacy, but they did prove quick studies and learned much from imperial Rome.20
The ancestors of the Huns would have migrated west from the eastern steppes for several reasons. Initially they might well have been pushed into the central Eurasian steppes due to the fighting between the Rouran khans and rival tribes. Far more pressing were seasonal droughts and hard winters that would have driven them steadily ever west in search of water and green pastures. During twenty years of favorable weather, a population of any clan or tribe could double. Then, a sudden dry winter followed by a drought left nomads the stark choice of starving or leaving to find water. The Huns hardly assembled as a single nation of one hundred fifty thousand and headed west in a planned migration. Instead, far smaller groups, each representing a clan or yurt and comprising hundreds rather than thousands of individuals, set out on their own treks. Others soon followed as they received the news of the success of those who had departed. By 370, the Huns were settled in considerable numbers just north of the Caspian Sea when they learned of richer grasslands pierced by numerous broad rivers to the west occupied by Goths. Even then, the Huns allied with the Alans, inveterate foes of the Goths, to conquer the south Russian steppes.21 After defeating the Goths, again a series of Hun wagon trains quickly migrated over the south Russian steppes. Once they reached the Carpathian Mountains, many Huns crossed into Central Europe, settling on the great Hungarian plain, while others traveled southwest into the grasslands north of the lower Danube valley, which the Visigoths had just vacated. Well before 400, Huns had reached the borders of the Roman Empire along the middle and lower Danube River.22
In the course of these migrations in the last quarter of the fourth century, the Huns allied with, subjected, or assimilated many other peoples, foremost Alans and the East Germanic tribes of Ostrogoths, Gepidae, and Herulians.23 In Attila’s day, many Huns bore Germanic or Iranian names, and within Attila’s empire, perhaps only one in five could claim largely East Asian descent. When the Huns settled on the grasslands of Central Europe, they shared with imperial Rome a frontier of over one thousand miles along the Danube River from its great turn south near Budapest to its mouths emptying into the Black Sea. The Huns settled in considerable numbers on rich grasslands of Transylvania between the middle Danube and the western slopes of the Carpathian Mountains (today divided between Hungary and Romania). This area totaled but a fraction of the south Russian steppes. They also subjected many agriculturalists of diverse origin and language who lived in the rich river valleys. In Central Europe, Uldin, the first Hun king known by name, organized a loose Hun confederation comprising new and old nomadic groups, as well as many villages and towns in the former Roman province of Dacia (today Romania).24 It is unknown what political ties linked Uldin and his western Huns with their kinsmen dwelling on the south Russian steppes, but clans of Huns continuously moved between the two regions.
The Huns forged a confederacy without any challenge from Rome, because the professional legions of the Principate no longer defended northern frontiers. Since 378, emperors recruited into their field armies ever more tribal regiments of German federates who served under their own commanders rather than veteran Roman officers.25 Personal loyalty to the emperor turned German barbarians into imperial soldiers, because the mission of the imperial army had changed from defending the empire to defending the emperor against all enemies, domestic and foreign. The emperor Theodosius I, who came to terms with the Goths after the disaster at Adrianople, inspired loyalty among his Germanic officers and soldiers. But upon the death of Theodosius on January 17, 395, the Roman Empire was divided between his two young sons.26 The retiring, weak-willed seventeen-year-old Arcadius succeeded in the East, while in the West reigned the gentle, pious eleven-year-old Honorius, who mistook his outbursts of obstinacy as courage. The two imperial courts, at Constantinople and Milan, not only were hostile to each other but also each perceived the Huns quite differently. The Eastern court dominated by the emperor’s wife Eudocia and her professional civilian bureaucrats soon came to see the Huns as an existential threat.27 In contrast, the Western court dominated by the magister militum Stilicho, who commanded the best Roman field armies, considered the Huns allies of convenience who would check barbarian federates, foremost the Visigoths resettled in Moesia by Theodosius.28
Stilicho also alienated both courts because he claimed that Theodosius on his deathbed had entrusted him with the guardianship of both young emperors.29 Few at either court believed him. Stilicho, himself of Vandal origin and so barred from the imperial throne, later linked himself to the imperial family by marrying his young son to a daughter of Honorius, who distrusted and hated his general. In early 395, Alaric, a veteran officer of Theodosius, clamored for a Roman high command, and new lands for his people. When the Eastern court refused, Alaric assumed his second-best option as king of the Visigoths, and rampaged across the Balkans during the next three years.30 He and his people had set out on a fifteen-year trek that took them to the gates of Rome. In 397, Stilicho intervened, and settled the Visigoths on Roman territory for a third time, in Epirus (northwestern Greece today).31 Stilicho also placed in Constantinople a strong Gothic garrison under a loyal officer, Gainas, so that the generalissimo could dominate the Eastern court as well as the Western one. Stilicho had compromised the empire, while Gainas soon overplayed his hand. On July 12, 400, an ugly incident exploded into a general riot against the insolent Gothic soldiery.32 At one of the city gates, a Gothic soldier took offense to the prayer of an elderly beggar woman, lamenting the presence of so many Arian barbarians in the capital. The Goth assaulted her, but a Roman came to the rescue and slew the Goth. The brawl quickly escalated in a rising of the city’s population and the enraged citizens of Constantinople massacred Stilicho’s Goths. Gainas fled north across the Danube and fell into the hands of Uldin, king of the Huns. Uldin severed and returned Gainas’s head as a favor to Arcadius and a demonstration of Hun strength. The Eastern court got the message. Uldin was hailed a friend of Rome, and granted a treaty and subsidy in gold.33
Meanwhile, in Epirus, Alaric rearmed his warriors with Roman equipment and horses. In 402, the Visigoths marched west through the Balkans toward Italy, almost certainly to the relief of Arcadius’s court. A terrified Honorius hastily relocated his court from Milan to Ravenna, a sleepy port on the Adriatic Sea and surrounded by malarial marshes.34 For the next four years. Stilicho was hard-pressed to prevent Alaric from crossing the Alps, and so he transferred Roman field armies from Gaul to Italy.35 Even now, Stilicho hoped to negotiate with Alaric rather than destroy the Visigoths. In 406, unexpectedly, another Gothic host, under Radagaisus, quit their home on the Hungarian grasslands, crossed the Alps, and advanced toward Rome. Uldin now rescued the Western court, and lent Stilicho a Hun army that intercepted and destroyed Radagaisus’s army just north of Florence.36 Stilicho also appreciated the Huns, for he retained a bodyguard of Huns after Uldin’s warriors returned home. Stilicho also tacitly accepted Uldin’s occupation of the province of Pannonia (today western Hungary), the fertile rolling plains west of the great bend in the River Danube. In late December 406, the Rhine froze. For months, endless wagon trains of Alans and Germanic tribes—Saxons, Franks, Burgundians, Sueves, and Vandals—crossed over the ice in a mass exodus into Roman Gaul.37 By the spring of 407, barbarian tribes overran and settled in Gaul and Spain. In Britain, the Roman army mutinied and declared their commander Constantine emperor. Three years later, in 410, Constantine crossed the Channel, and he and his army were annihilated by forces loyal to Honorius.38 Picts north of Hadrian’s Wall, and Saxons, Angles, and Jutes from across the North Sea then descended on the undefended island province. Honorius rightly blamed Stilicho for these disasters, and he ordered his general arrested and executed in 408.39 Stilicho’s veterans promptly deserted to Alaric, whereupon the Visigoths entered Italy, besieged Rome three times, and captured the Eternal City on August 24, 410.40 Even though Alaric, a Roman citizen and an Arian Christian, respected churches, and conducted organized blackmail rather than a sack, Christians and pagans alike took the event as a sign of divine punishment heralding the end of days. The next year, Honorius convinced Alaric’s successor, Athaulf, who held captive the emperor’s half sister Galla Placidia, to recross the Alps and restore order in Gaul and Spain.41 In return, Athaulf’s Visigoths received land and the rights to collect taxes in the Aquitaine as an act of hospitality (hospitium) at the expense of distraught Roman landowners. Athaulf made Toulouse his capital, and founded the first independent Germanic kingdom on Roman soil. By the death of Honorius on August 15, 423, the Western Roman Empire was fatally compromised and destined to fall. German barbarians, far better organized and armed than their forefathers, carved out their own kingdoms within the empire. To be sure, the imperial army and administration had failed, but so had Honorius and Stilicho, neither of whom had been up to the task of defending the empire. But foremost, the barbarians who invaded the Roman Empire did so to escape the fury of the advancing Huns.
Meanwhile, Uldin at least twice launched major attacks across the Danube River, devastating the provinces of Moesia and Thrace in search of booty, livestock, and captives.42 The army of the Eastern Roman Empire could neither prevent nor punish these raids. During the second attack, in 408, the Praetorian Prefect Anthemius, regent for the boy emperor Theodosius II, resorted to massive bribery of Uldin’s vassals to desert so that Uldin had to cut short his campaign. Yet the feckless Eastern emperors Arcadius and Theodosius II enjoyed crucial strategic advantages to weather the barbarian invasions triggered by the Huns.43 A resolute empress advised each: Eudocia, the wife of Arcadius and the daughter of a leading Frankish general, and Aelia Pulcheria, the piously virtuous elder sister of Theodosius.44 Just as important, each emperor was served by loyal, professional ministers and bureaucrats, who controlled policy and checked ambitious generalissimos who might scheme to dominate the court.45 These same officials ensured the collection of taxes from the far wealthier eastern provinces, whereas after 406, Honorius was starved of manpower and money. Simultaneously, they faced no threat from the Persian shah, who was preoccupied defending his northeastern frontiers against the Hephthalites.46 Therefore, while Uldin and his Huns ravaged the Balkan provinces with impunity, they lacked a fleet so that they could not invade the Asian provinces in concert with the Persians. But the greatest obstacle the Huns faced was the four miles of land walls of Constantinople, which turned the imperial capital into the strategic citadel blocking them from crossing the Bosporus.
The Praetorian Prefect Anthemius directed most of the nine-year construction of the Theodosian Walls, which were completed in 413.47 The population of Constantinople, dedicated as the New Rome by Constantine in 330, grew tenfold within seventy-five years, from a city of thirty-five thousand to three hundred fifty thousand. The massive new walls enclosed a vast, densely settled area one and one-half miles beyond the original city walls.48 The city was built on a triangular peninsula, with the Sea of Marmara along its southern arm, and its northern arm along the southern shores of the estuary of the Golden Horn that emptied into the Bosporus. Walls rising to between fifteen and twenty feet on the edge of the shores protected these two sides. In addition, treacherous shoals and currents hindered any naval assault. It was the city’s land side, the western base of the triangle stretching between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, that had no natural defense. Two points along the land side were particularly vulnerable: the northeastern corner, where the ground dropped sharply to the shore of the Golden Horn, and the so-called Middle Wall (Mesoteichion) between the Gate of Charisius (today Edirne Kapı) and the Gate of Saint Romanus (today Top Kapı). There a natural valley fell nearly one hundred feet, forming the two slopes of the bed of the river Lycus, which had been enclosed and channeled as the source of the city’s numerous cisterns.
The Theodosian Walls comprised a succession of three defensive lines constructed of white limestone reinforced at regular intervals with layers of bricks and concrete which enclosed a dense interior of bricks, stone, and concrete rubble.49 The outermost obstacle was a fossa excavated from the bedrock to a depth of twenty feet and a width of sixty feet.50 This fossa was faced on either side with masonry and brick walls, and above the eastern side rose a six-foot wall two to six feet thick. Between this first line and the Outer Walls stretched an open space of over sixty feet, the Parateichion, where attackers were exposed to murderous missile fire from the defenders on the Outer Walls. The Outer Walls, the second line of defense, rose twenty-five feet high, and were two to six feet thick.51 At regular intervals, the wall was strengthened by projecting towers of thirty feet that were designed to accommodate artillery. Behind the Outer Walls stretched another open zone, the Periobolos, fifty to sixty-five feet wide.52 On its eastern side rose the awesome Inner Walls, forty feet high and thirteen to fifteen feet thick, with towers at regular intervals soaring to sixty feet.53 Ten main gates, along with several smaller postern gates of the Outer Walls, were massively fortified. All three walls rested on deep masonry foundation so that they could not be undermined by mining operations. To this day, the Theodosian Walls stand as the most ambitious feat of military engineering ever built to defend a city against nomadic foes.
The circuit of Constantinople’s walls, nearly thirteen miles, is comparable to that of the walls of Rome constructed by the emperor Aurelian in 271–275 in response to a Vandal invasion of Italy.54 Rome’s walls, however, stand on no naturally defensible terrain, and they straddle the Tiber so that they required triple the number of defenders. Rome’s single ring of walls was far less formidable. The walls, originally sixteen feet high, were doubled in height and strengthened with towers during the civil wars of the early fourth century. Furthermore, Rome had to be supplied from its port of Ostia, twenty miles away at the mouth of the Tiber, and the water system fed by eleven aqueducts could be easily cut. Twice, in 410 and 455, the imperial capital fell to barbarian attackers: Alaric and his Visigoths and Gaiseric and his Vandals, respectively. In the sixth century, Rome endured three sieges and exchanged hands five times during the war waged by the emperor Justinian to reconquer Italy from the Ostrogoths.55
The Theodosian Walls have sometimes been dismissed as a fancy prestige project to settle the nerves of the citizens and to awe the Huns, who are sometimes wrongly demoted to a nuisance rather than a threat. Instead, the walls stand as a testimony to the magnitude of the threat posed by the Huns in the fifth century. For the next millennium, time and again, the walls thwarted every attacker save on two occasions. On April 13–15, 1204, the Venetians and members of the Fourth Crusade stormed the walls in reckless assaults against defenders who were too few and too demoralized.56 On May 29, 1453, the Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmet II numbering one hundred thousand overwhelmed the seven thousand heroic defenders under the last emperor of the Roman East, Constantine XI, in three successive final assaults after a siege of six weeks.57 State-of-the-art Ottoman artillery had pounded large sections of the ancient walls to ruins, and even then the final attack nearly failed.
The court of Theodosius II did not depend on the walls alone. The prefect Anthemius directed an expansion of the river flotilla patrolling the lower Danube, and repairs to the fortified cities along the frontiers or at strategic points on the imperial highways. Diplomacy was just as important. In 412, a brief notice of one such embassy survives, headed by the historian Olympiodorus of Thebes, who set sail from Constantinople to Aquileia, from whence he crossed the Alps and made his way overland to the court of Charaton, who had succeeded Uldin as high king of the Huns.58 Olympiodorus, accompanied by his prop, a talking parrot, and an ostentatiously large retinue, complained incessantly about the uncomfortable journey. He must have reached the main Hun encampment on the east bank of the Middle Danube, perhaps opposite Budapest. The purpose and outcome of his mission are unclear, because his detailed account is largely lost. Still the embassy underscores how the imperial government in Constantinople regularly dispatched embassies bearing letters of polite nothings about mutual interests and tribute euphemistically bestowed as gifts, to appease the Huns. At the same time, envoys from the court at Ravenna too crossed the Alps and arrived to beg for contingents of Hun warriors.59
In 420, the two brothers Rugila (whose name was also rendered as Rua or Ruga) and Octar succeeded jointly as high kings of the Hun Confederacy of the tribes dwelling on the steppes between the Rivers Danube and Volga.60 They and their predecessors forged this confederacy by capitalizing on the exodus of so many Alans and Germanic tribes into the Roman Empire. The precise arrangements between the brothers are unknown, but each surely maintained his own retinue and vassal tribes. Rugila, the elder, resided at the main settlement east of Budapest. But the brothers cooperated to exact tribute and access to Roman markets from a reluctant imperial court at Constantinople, and to hire out Hun contingents to the Western court at Ravenna. In 422, Rugila personally led a massive raid into the Roman Balkans, captured and sacked cities, and brushed aside Roman resistance.61 The Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius, who had recently attained his majority, had to treat for terms. He preferred to spend hours studying the mysteries of the Trinity and perfecting his calligraphy, so that he often deferred to his shrewd elder sister Aelia Pulcheria, his ministers, and his veteran general Aspar on foreign and military policies. Rugila secured a treaty with an annual subsidy of 350 pounds of gold.62 Seven years later, Rugila was acclaimed by the leading princes as universal lord of the Huns after the death of his brother Octar. In 432, Rugila died without adult male heirs, and his nephews, Bleda and Attila, succeeded. Few at the time could have realized that the younger of the two would shake the Roman world to its very foundations.
When Bleda and Attila succeeded, the Huns had profoundly changed from their ancestors described by Ammianus Marcellinus two generations earlier. Ammianus, with a condescending disapproval, noted how Huns roamed over the steppes, and avoided entering buildings that would block out the view of the eternal blue sky. They lived virtually atop their horses rather than in cities. Yet for all of his prejudices, Ammianus wrote of a nomadic people who could endure the harsh life on the Eurasian steppes. In 432, the Huns now headed a great confederation in diversity and complexity that matched that of the Xiongnu. The high king of the Huns, perhaps called a khan, could summon thousands of horse archers from across the steppes, and field numerous warriors of many subject tribes. Few of the burials excavated in Hungary, Romania, or Ukraine have been conclusively identified as those of Huns, but several important ones included male skeletal remains with the ritual cranial deformity of the steppes.63 Most of the graves have been classified as East Germanic based on jewelry and weapons comparable in workmanship to those found in contemporary Scandinavian graves of the Vendel period (400–600). All graves included Roman gold coins, plate, jewelry, glassware, or weapons. Whatever the precise ethnic ancestry of the deceased, they were members of the elite class within the Hun confederation who obtained many costly, exotic objects in war or trade.
The historian Priscus, who visited the settlement of Attila in 449, reports that, once he crossed the border, he passed settlement after settlement comprising tents and timbered structures.64 He found lodging and hospitality in one such village ruled by the widow of Attila’s brother Bleda. He was greeted by a leading Hun prince, Onegesius, whose settlement included a timbered bathhouse, comparable to those at Roman army posts. The architect, a Roman captive, had designed it, but instead of emancipation, the hapless man remained a slave and the bath’s attendant, because Onegesius considered him too valuable to free. The Huns had found along both sides of the River Danube a martial frontier society, the product of a fusion of Roman soldiers, indigenous peoples, and barbarian newcomers since the second century AD.65 One in four Roman provincials counted at least one immediate ancestor of barbarian origin. The general Stilicho was the son of a loyal Vandal officer; the Eastern commander Aspar was an Alan in origin. On the imperial frontier, men trained in the use of arms could just as easily serve under either a khan of the Huns or a Roman supreme commander (magister militum).
Priscus reports an exchange between himself and a wealthy Roman citizen of Viminacium (near modern Kostolac, Serbia) at Attila’s settlement.66 The incident reveals how readily the Huns assimilated captives, exiles, renegades, and voluntary immigrants from the Roman world. Priscus was surprised that the man was well-dressed in Scythian garb, and spoke perfect Greek. He had been taken prisoner in a raid, but his skill in arms and riding won him his freedom, a Hun wife, and admission into the ranks of Attila’s trusted warriors. Priscus implored him not to forget his former life as a citizen living under the just laws of Rome. With tears in his eyes, the man admitted the achievement of Roman law in principle, but he deplored the application of the law in practice. He bemoaned the onerous taxes and arbitrary justice meted out by the emperor’s officials and soldiers, whereas he had gained higher status and wealth in the service of Attila. Punishment by the Huns was swift and cruel, but at least it was impartially applied, and obedience and loyalty were well rewarded. The conversation captures well why so many Roman provincials felt no loyalty to rise to the defense of the emperor against the barbarians of the fifth century.
Therefore, Bleda and Attila inherited a powerful barbarian confederacy that could rival imperial Rome. All Romans ranked the Huns as the fiercest of barbarian warriors. What they could not anticipate was what these warriors could achieve under a charismatic conqueror soon to be known as the Scourge of God.