Granted if you’re in charge, when Attila and the Huns show up, it could get real ugly. But if you were a peasant digging in the dirt and kicking up taxes etc., would it be more a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”? Presuming of course the old boss didn’t make you suit up and serve as arrow fodder.
I don’t know much about Attila, and I don’t think historians know much about him as his was an illiterate culture, but for an invading army it never made much sense to kill off all peasants because you’d have no harvest and thus no provisions for your army for the next campaign.
It depends on who you were and how you reacted to the change. If you were part of the former leadership, upper class, or were a soldier fighting back, you would have been slaughtered. If you owned anything of value or had a wife or daughter roughly the right age, they would be gone. If you were a peasant with almost nothing and was able-bodied and could work, they would likely leave you alone or draft you into their army.
arent the Huns considered proto-Mongols by historians these days?
“Sounds good, boss, you fellows ride on ahead and I’ll be right behind you as soon as I put my marching sandals on!”
There seems to be a theory that it was the other way around:
wow talk about a lot of debate and study and it’s still maybe they are or at least the various versions mixed together at some point
Maybe one will post in with the answer. But the Huns were pastoralists who rode out to smash & grab, then went back home. The Mongols were territorial expansionists who at one time considered butchering the population of northern China so as to return the farmland to grazing. Something no civilized Western European society would do (cough - Highland clearances - cough)
Guess if I had to pick between being invaded by Huns and Mongols, I’d take the Huns. If they just took stuff and took off but didn’t kill you it wouldn’t be all hun-ky-dory, but you’d at least be alive.
Well, after they took all your food, raped everyone in your family they took a fancy too, and tortured you to make sure you didn’t have a little money stashed away you hadn’t told them about. And maybe if the soldiers were drunk and/or bored, crucified you to your hut before setting it on fire.
This is the common notion of the “barbarian hordes,” but my question is, how accurate is it? As dolphin boy noted, it’s a little short-sighted to destroy the economy and work force you need to maintain your lifestyle. As for the Mongols, “Pax Mongolica” was a thing and it depended on trade, meaning the Mongols didn’t simply loot and torch everything in their path. Thus the original question: how much of this was, for peasants, a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?
From a purey logical view ‘kill them all’ makes no sense for another reason. If the locals know you’re going to kill them all, they fight back with all they have got because they have nothing to lose. If the locals know ‘if we offer no resistance, we will not be hurt’ they surrender and things are much easier for you.
As was previously mentioned, they still needed someone to work the fields and grow the food the voracious army depended on…
Only if the army was staying. If this was simply a raid for loot/slaves, why bother holding the troops in check?
Not that I’m a historian, or even particularly up on the Hunnish Empire, but from what I gather, it was very decentralized than other contemporary empires.
So generally as I understand it, once the Huns would have defeated your rulers, they’d basically integrate your nation/tribe/whatever into their empire, and you’d pay tribute, but otherwise you’d go on about your business and be ruled by whoever ruled you before. Not even “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, more like “same boss as before”.
There wasn’t a Hunnic bureaucracy, or anything of the sort- that’s why the Huns are so hard to get a historical handle on. In fact, we only know something like 4 words of the Hunnic language.
I don’t know about the Huns, but IIRC that was the basic strategy of the Mongols under Genghis Khan. Every community in their path had two alternatives, to surrender, give away much of their goods and maybe some people into slavery, but spare their lives and basic means, or else be totally annihilated, looted, all males killed and the females enslaved.
Well, if you’re literally just passing through, you must bring all your food and supplies with you. If you stay a while, you can consume/destroy most of the town’s supplies and take anything left with you. I assume they stuck around long enough to loot whatever they needed/wanted and then eventually moved on to the next town (lather, rinse, repeat).
Because the Huns and Mongols needed long-term supplies, engaged in trade across long distances, and followed seasons for grazing their horses, cows, and sheep, I’m guessing?
The Huns appeared first time crossing the Volga in 374, beating and incorporating the Ostrogoths and Alains. Their advance toward west pushed other nomadic tribes in the Roman empire (Wisigoths, some Alains, Gépides). The Huns settled in the plains of Hungary and raided the Roman empire, with tribute and hostages. when Attila was beaten in 451, he tried to attack Italy but was repulsed. After his death, the Hunnic confederation dissolved.
So they only occupied a small portion of Europe permanently and were raiding their neighbors. They were hunters, cattle raisers and artisans with rich jewelry. The conquered tribes keep their own leaders and rules, but had to pay tribute and bring troops to war. In the Catalaunics fields against Aetius, the Huns were a third of the Army, the rest being Germans under their own kings.
So if you weren’t in the direct concussion, life same as always.
Poking around at my new, passing interest in Attila the Hun, I see that Christopher I. Beckwith in Empires of the Silk Road refutes some common assumptions about the Huns, notably
- The annual tribute Rome paid the Huns to stay away is usually considered to be onerous but in fact, at its highest, was about half the annual income of a wealthy, but not the wealthiest, Roman senator.
- The Huns did not fight the Romans in Gaul and Italy on horseback, largely because there was not enough grasslands to support the horses. They fought there as infantry.
- This is no surprise, but the Romans were duplicitous, grasping, and often stupid in their dealings with Attila, and in a very real sense, given the realpolitik of the day, had it coming.
This is fun!
Also, Beckwith is a professor of history at Indiana U and is a bit of a crank, based on his introduction to this book.