Kingdom of the Huns

  General Description  
“The historical reality seems to be that the Huns, a Turkic people from the Central Asian steppes, began to move west around the year 370 and attack the Ostrogothic kingdom in the area of the modern Ukraine. What caused this movement is unclear, but it may have been pressure from other tribes further east. The Ostrogoths were defeated again and again and forced to leave their homes and farms in panic. A vast number of them crossed the Danube into the Balkans, still ruled at this time by the Roman Empire. Here the fugitive Goths, in their desperation, inflicted a massive defeat on the Roman army at Adrianople In 376, when their cavalry ran down the last of the old Roman legions. Now that their horizons were expanded there was no stopping the Huns. They raided the Balkans in the aftermath of the Roman defeat but also attacked the rich provinces of the east, coming through the Caucasus and Anatolia to pillage the rich lands of Syria.” ^[1]
“The Huns were far from invincible, however, and in 439 the Visigoths of Toulouse showed their power by defeating Litorius’ attempt to take the city and killing the dux himself. Throughout this time, the Huns in Gaul acted as mercenary soldiers and, as far as we can tell, they had no territorial or political ambitions in the region. All this changed with Attila’s rise to power. It was Attila who gave the Huns a clear identity and made them, briefly, into a major political power. After his death, they disintegrated with remarkable speed.” ^[2]
“After Attila’s death his sons divided up the subject nations equally among themselves, so that, as a shocked Goth puts it, ‘warlike kings with their peoples should be divided among them like a family estate’. We do not know how many sons there were: we only have Jordanes’ statement that ‘through the boundlessness of [Attila’s] lust, they were almost a people in themselves’. At any rate, this was the only occasion in Hun history, so far as we know, when a father’s kingdom was thus shared out by his sons… It was not many months after their father’s death that they began to quarrel. As to the cause of their quarrel, it would seem that one or more tried to dispossess the others from their share of the inheritance, and that several great battles were fought between them as a result.” ^[3]

[1]: (Kennedy 2002: 25-26) Kennedy, Hugh. 2002. Mongols, Huns and Vikings: Nomads at War. London: Cassell. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/ZN9N624X

[2]: (Kennedy 2002: 37) Kennedy, Hugh. 2002. Mongols, Huns and Vikings: Nomads at War. London: Cassell. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/ZN9N624X

[3]: (Thompson 2004: 167-168) Thompson, E.A. 1996. The Huns. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/49W8PAAS