Attila and his hordes have not had a good press over the years. This book sets out to redress the balance. K., a historian currently working as research fellow in Australia, presents a novel argument: the Huns made a positive contribution to post-Roman Europe. His key argument is that the social and political institutions of early medieval Europe are of ‘Inner Asian’ origin and were transmitted to the west by the Huns. Although his emphasis is on this constructive aspect, he also argues that the Western Roman Empire was brought down directly (not just indirectly) by the military power of the Huns.
These key arguments are stated right at the beginning (in the introduction), and are repeated throughout, together with complaints (repeated ad nauseam) about the neglect of the steppe civilisation by ignorant European and Chinese historians who focus almost exclusively on the history of their own ‘peripheral’ civilisations. What little development there is of these key points is limited to some good, but brief observations on the relationship between nomads and sedentary populations (Chapter 4), and about the geographical and cultural concept of ‘Europe’ (in the conclusions).
The structure of the book is clear enough although the chapter titles are not always a reliable guide to their contents. The central argument of Chapter 2, ‘Rome's Inner Asian Enemies before the Huns’, is that Western European feudalism originated in the ‘quasi-feudal’ system of Inner Asian ‘pastoral feudalism’ which, having been brought west by the Huns, led to the centralised ‘proto-feudalism’ of the European Early Middle Ages before degenerating into the fragmented ‘manorial feudalism’ of the later Middle Ages. The next chapter, ‘The Huns in Central Asia’, argues that the Huns had a sophisticated state organisation in the tradition of earlier and later steppe empires, from the Scythians to the Mongols. Unfortunately, part of this chapter is close to unreadable because it consists of a blizzard of names, dates, locations, titles, etc. – as if K. reproduced his own crib of who was where, and when.
Chapter 4, ‘The Huns in Europe’, the longest chapter, claims that the ‘military machine’ (p. 69) of the Huns broke the power of the Western Roman Empire, and that the Battle of Châlons in a.d. 451 was a Hunnic victory, whatever Jordanes writes. When the Huns withdrew to their winter camps in Hungary, they left behind a subjugated Gaul under their own, or vassal, governors of whom the Frankish king Childeric was one. The Germanic tribes, with their ‘haphazard’ (p. 56) military and political organisation, could never have beaten the Huns, nor could they have endangered the Western Roman Empire in the absence of the Hunnic threat. The resulting Eurasian empire of the Huns ‘presented a real, viable alternative to Roman hegemony for the peoples of Europe’ (p. 59). Well, it is not as if they were given a choice.
Chapter 5, while ostensibly dealing with ‘The End of the Hunnic Empire in the West’, is almost entirely devoted to outing supposedly Germanic kings as Huns (or Hunno-Alanic-Germans): the Gepid Ardaric, the Scirian Odoacer, the Ostrogroth Valamer (making Theoderic the Great the nephew of a Hun). The arguments required for these identifications turn Chapter 5 into a confused and confusing story, involving the rewriting of histories, genealogies and chronologies. Concerning the dissolution of the Hunnic empire, this was brought about by ‘civil war among Hunnic lords’, not by a ‘national uprising’ (p. 133) of Germanic tribes. And even after dissolution, the Huns do not disappear: after an internal shift of dominance to another tribe, they reappear in history as Bulgars.
The second half of Chapter 6, ‘The Later Huns and the Birth of Europe’, puts flesh on the bones of the key argument of the book by tracing the origins of European early medieval socio-political organisation and culture back to the steppes: absolute royal power, itinerant kingship, a ruling clan, divisions of territory among sons or relatives of the king, stratified ranking system for sub-kings, centralised feudalism, tributes instead of tax, a military nobility, reliance on cavalry, hunting on horseback, preference for meat-eating, the polychrome art style, elite burial practices, and artificial skull deformation – an impressive list of indicators some of which are uncontroversial while other will surely raise eyebrows and provoke discussion.
Perhaps this should be seen as the main benefit of the book: provoking discussion. There can be no doubt that the subject of the Hunnic Empire and its impact on Late Roman and post-Roman Europe could do with a re-assessment, and a reversal of perspective as attempted by K. can be a very healthy exercise. As such, the volume should be welcomed, and personally, I do like the key arguments. But there are a number of self-defeating features, the worst of which surely is the politically correct ‘Conclusions’ which, in the last paragraph of the text, invite us to imitate in our modern world the ‘cosmopolitan nature’ of the Hunnic and Roman Empires where ‘ethnicity or race was not a barrier’ (p. 158). This is a pick-and-choose approach to lessons of history. It is arguable that the virtual irrelevance of racial origins and ethnic affiliations in steppe empires was a corollary of their structure and internal workings: strictly centralised power, direct fiefs from the ruling individual, personal and group identification by relationship to the ruling clan, and complete absence of participatory models of society and polity below the highest level. This is exactly like Central Asian states operate again today, a modus operandi which, in the ‘European’ system of values, we call despotic and corrupt.
There are other counterproductive features, such as the strident tone when dealing with opposing arguments (‘anyone who can read a map’, p. 142; ‘only the blind’, p. 69), and his obsessive criticism of the British historian Peter Heather throughout the book. Another obsession is that he begins to see Huns everywhere, and just to make sure that the readers also do, he adds the word ‘Hun’ regularly to other tribal names (Bulgars, Alans, Goths, etc.) and adjectives (Hunno-Germanic). His belief in the existence of pre-Hunnic Turks (pp. 33–4), and west of the Volga (p. 60) at that, will make specialists in this field bristle. Archaeologists would have preferred a more frequent, more consistent and more cautious use of the archaeological evidence, and some of them will shake their heads over the attribution of Hunnic metal mirrors to steppe origins (p. 274 n. 238) – they are a Chinese type. Russian scholars will deplore the lack of essential Russian publications (apart from Nikolaj Kradin's works, many of which have been published in English) in the otherwise impressive and polyglot bibliography.
Endnotes and bibliography take up almost exactly half of the book; there are no fewer than 1,339 endnotes (with user-unfriendly numbering by chapters) for 158 pages of text. Long sentences and sometimes convoluted syntax make for difficult reading; the text most certainly does not flow. The problem is exacerbated by strange and clumsy conflations (e.g. ‘Achaemenid-Parthian-Sassanian quasi-feudal practices’, p. 6) and unexplained terminology (e.g. ‘imperial confederacy’, p. 29, similar p. 32). Even the (non-standard) term ‘Inner Asia’ used throughout is nowhere defined.
While this is not an archaeological or art-historical text, let alone a popular book, one would have welcomed more illustrations than the three Eurasian outline maps provided. The only colour illustration is on the cover (from Rochegrosse's tableau Pillage of a Roman Villa by the Huns), and that appears to contradict the main, ‘constructive’ message of the book. It is not a snappy book title either. May I suggest a second edition, with a pastoral scene on the cover, entitled Empire of the Hun?
