Free Attila the Hun by John Man
Authors: John Man
Germany, with another wall, Hadrian’s, marking the frontier against the northern barbarians. A wall also blocked the 80-kilometre corridor between the Danube and the Black Sea. The Rhine–Danube wall, though, was abandoned under the onslaught of 260, and the empire retreated again to the rivers.
In forming their view of Attila’s people, then, the Romans tapped into attitudes inherited from the Greeks. These were the vilest creatures imaginable. They came from the North, and everyone knew that the colder the climate was, the more barbaric the people were. To paraphrase Ammianus Marcellinus, who never saw a Hun himself, they were squat, with thick necks, 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. There was nothing like them for cruelty and ugliness, the one accentuating the other, because they cut their baby boys’ cheeks so that, when they became men, their beards grew in patches, if they grew at all. They knew nothing of metal, had no religion and lived like savages, without fire, eating their food raw, living off roots and meat tenderized by placing it under their horses’ saddles. No buildings, of course, not so much as a reed hut; indeed, they feared the very idea of venturing under a roof. Once they had put their necks into some dingy shirt, they never took it off or changed it until it rotted. Granted, they were wonderful horsemen; but even this was an expression of barbarism, for they practically lived on horseback, eating, drinking and sleeping in the saddle. Their shoes were so shapeless, their legs so bowed that they could hardly walk. Jordanes, the Gothic historian, was no less insulting. These stunted, foul and puny tribesmen, offspring of witches and unclean spirits, ‘had, if I may say so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes’. It was amazing they could see at all, giventhat ‘the light that enters the dome of the skull can hardly reach the receding eyeballs . . . Though they live in the form of men, they have the cruelty of wild beasts.’ These are judgements that have echoed down the ages. Practically everyone is happy to quote everyone else, including Gibbon, in condemning the Huns as smelly, bandy-legged, nasty, brutish and revoltingly short.
Almost all of this was nonsense.
As the Huns emerged from somewhere north of the Caspian to approach the Black Sea in the mid-fourth century, they were, in Roman eyes, at the very limit of the known world. But with spotlights borrowed from anthropologists and archaeologists it is possible to highlight a few of their defining traits. As visitors to the Huns found later, they had beards, grew crops, were perfectly capable of building houses, and included as high a proportion of handsome men and beautiful women as everyone else. Certainly, the men would have commanded respect, because they would have been formidably hardy, weather-beaten, with slab-like shoulders from daily use of their powerful bows. But, as in today’s Mongolians, there was probably enough of an admixture of other races to make some of them extremely appealing. No-one who saw the Huns face to face mentioned any children with facial scars; the men’s beards may have been thin, as Attila’s was, and some adults may have had scarred faces, but that was nothing to do with cruelties inflicted in childhood; they were self-inflicted as part of mourning rituals.
No metal? No cooked food? You would think the evidence of metalworking would have struck homewith the first Hun arrows, followed quickly by the evidence for cooking. Their bulkiest possessions were huge cooking-pots, cumbersome bell-shaped things with hefty handles, up to a metre in height and weighing 16–18 kilos: cauldrons big enough to boil up clan-sized casseroles. Dozens of them have been found, in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova – and Russia, where half a dozen
In forming their view of Attila’s people, then, the Romans tapped into attitudes inherited from the Greeks. These were the vilest creatures imaginable. They came from the North, and everyone knew that the colder the climate was, the more barbaric the people were. To paraphrase Ammianus Marcellinus, who never saw a Hun himself, they were squat, with thick necks, 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. There was nothing like them for cruelty and ugliness, the one accentuating the other, because they cut their baby boys’ cheeks so that, when they became men, their beards grew in patches, if they grew at all. They knew nothing of metal, had no religion and lived like savages, without fire, eating their food raw, living off roots and meat tenderized by placing it under their horses’ saddles. No buildings, of course, not so much as a reed hut; indeed, they feared the very idea of venturing under a roof. Once they had put their necks into some dingy shirt, they never took it off or changed it until it rotted. Granted, they were wonderful horsemen; but even this was an expression of barbarism, for they practically lived on horseback, eating, drinking and sleeping in the saddle. Their shoes were so shapeless, their legs so bowed that they could hardly walk. Jordanes, the Gothic historian, was no less insulting. These stunted, foul and puny tribesmen, offspring of witches and unclean spirits, ‘had, if I may say so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes’. It was amazing they could see at all, giventhat ‘the light that enters the dome of the skull can hardly reach the receding eyeballs . . . Though they live in the form of men, they have the cruelty of wild beasts.’ These are judgements that have echoed down the ages. Practically everyone is happy to quote everyone else, including Gibbon, in condemning the Huns as smelly, bandy-legged, nasty, brutish and revoltingly short.
Almost all of this was nonsense.
As the Huns emerged from somewhere north of the Caspian to approach the Black Sea in the mid-fourth century, they were, in Roman eyes, at the very limit of the known world. But with spotlights borrowed from anthropologists and archaeologists it is possible to highlight a few of their defining traits. As visitors to the Huns found later, they had beards, grew crops, were perfectly capable of building houses, and included as high a proportion of handsome men and beautiful women as everyone else. Certainly, the men would have commanded respect, because they would have been formidably hardy, weather-beaten, with slab-like shoulders from daily use of their powerful bows. But, as in today’s Mongolians, there was probably enough of an admixture of other races to make some of them extremely appealing. No-one who saw the Huns face to face mentioned any children with facial scars; the men’s beards may have been thin, as Attila’s was, and some adults may have had scarred faces, but that was nothing to do with cruelties inflicted in childhood; they were self-inflicted as part of mourning rituals.
No metal? No cooked food? You would think the evidence of metalworking would have struck homewith the first Hun arrows, followed quickly by the evidence for cooking. Their bulkiest possessions were huge cooking-pots, cumbersome bell-shaped things with hefty handles, up to a metre in height and weighing 16–18 kilos: cauldrons big enough to boil up clan-sized casseroles. Dozens of them have been found, in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova – and Russia, where half a dozen