The Huns Arrive: Gothic World Shattered
The Huns appeared north of the Black Sea around 370 and set off the migrations that destroyed the western Roman Empire. Nobody in the Mediterranean world knew who they were. Ammianus Marcellinus, the best-informed Roman writer on them, says they were scarcely known even to old records, places them beyond the Sea of Azov, and describes them as living on horseback, eating half-raw meat warmed under the thigh, wearing clothes until they rotted off, and having no houses, agriculture or kings. Much of that is the standard Roman vocabulary for nomads, and some of it is accurate: they were a steppe confederation whose military advantage was the composite recurved bow shot from the saddle, and whose political structure was loose enough that the Romans could rarely find anyone to negotiate with. Their origin is disputed. The identification with the Xiongnu of the Chinese sources, pushed west centuries earlier, is old, attractive and unproven. The effect was a chain reaction. They destroyed the Alans, then the Greuthungi Goths, and the Tervingi Goths asked the emperor Valens for asylum inside the empire in 376. Some 200,000 were admitted across the Danube, mismanaged by officials who sold them dog meat for their children, and revolted. At Adrianople in August 378 they destroyed an eastern Roman field army and killed Valens — the worst Roman defeat since Cannae. The Huns themselves were serving as Roman auxiliaries within a generation, and reached their height under Attila seventy years later. Their confederation dissolved within twenty years of his death, and the peoples they had driven west outlasted them everywhere.
- Year: 370 CE
- Category: Military
