Attila's War Machine...

[Nakharar]

Hey you guys im mod leader of East of Rome a dark age mod

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=755

and Reign of Attila a submod which focuses on Attila the Hun

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=875

Now weve got researchers and ive read some articles on the internet so i would like some other opinions a wide variety on the topic not just the teams.

Topic Question:

What made Attila the Hun succesful which didnt make any of his succesors or ancestors as succeful?

[Hannibal the destroy]

well imo Attilas leadership, and his aura of fear made him succesful after "The scourge of god"
died then his succesors got greedy and tore his empire apart, also his empire was dependant on loot to sustain itself. and it was not self-sustaining hopefully you got some help from this

[Nakharar]

what was it about Attilas leadership? the horsearchers? Tactics? The Horsearchers you and i can use ingame and conquer the world with are quite straightforwards its not like he reveloutionized the army of the Huns. Was it his propoganda of making himself a feared names

[Hannibal the destroy]

it was more of fear the romans were getting there ass's handed to them and attila had a very evil auro about him like he was a roman boogeyman his tactics were from what i know the same as before but the reason he failed was his logistics he was trying to build an empire from horse's basicaly and its like instead of looting you are conquering and that right there is pretty messed up an army of looters conquering will screw you over in the long run because after a few early succeses he failed at chalon a pivotal battle because he had nothing with which to fight roman infantry the goths had there own calvary which made it a draw attila could never take out rome in real life but he did significantly weaken it. and his army by then was filled with other barbarians which dillutes the hun way of fighting. wow that was long

[Stalins Ghost]

Simple. Attila had the force of personality to unite the various disperate Hun factions. The only real binding force was his sheer personal prestige. Take away that, and the whole system falls apart.

"The bigger they come, they harder they fall" applies as well. During his time, the Hun empire expanded exponentially, drawing in more and more recruits from various subject peoples. When he died, these forces constituted major factions within the confederation as a whole - factions big enough to challenge the Huns as they squabbled to find a new leader.

[Chukada1]

The Huns were nobodies. The only reason they defeated anybody is because they were fighting the Chinese and not the Romanians with thier battlefield tactics and what not.

[Antigenes]

It wasn't that Attila had anything especially different from previous Hunnic war leaders, but that it was a cumulative process that began in the 360s when the Huns impacted the Alans in the Kuban and started the original domino effect that led to Adrianople. As they moved west, they used their extant tactical advantage given by the asymmetric bow (and by inertia too ) to overwhelm other barbarian groups and use them as warriors. This is pretty easily visible in the episode of Uldin, around the end of the reign of Theodosius: he was a Hunnic warlord who claimed suzerainty over the Balkans, but it ended up being mostly bluff and he was defeated handily by an Eastern Roman army, who found out - here's the kicker - that his army was composed mostly of not Huns, but Scirians. Once the Huns were established on the Pannonian plain - something that they were only able to do while the Empire was busy elsewhere, in Hispania - they actually hired themselves out as mercenaries for the Romans, and as such helped Aetius virtually annihilate the Burgundii as an effective force for some decades. This mercenary service helped a lot from an economic point of view. Originally, the Huns as we know them were ruled by a group of kings and sub-kings, none having particular preeminence, much like other tribal confederacies. But the influx of wealth from both raiding Roman borderlands and serving as mercenaries helped fuel a political revolution, concentrating wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer leaders. This reached its apotheosis in Attila, who eliminated his brother Bleda after his extremely successful (and the first large-scale) invasion of the Balkans in the early 440s. Attila was able to fleece the authorities in Constantinople, and thus gained enough money to buy out and/or assassinate his remaining enemies and take sole leadership of the Hunnic Empire.

Of course, this whole system of grabbing new tribes and forcing them into a confederacy, aided by promises of plunder, forced the Huns to keep raiding to maintain the flow of precious metals and wealth into their Empire. Once the Eastern Roman cash cow was pretty much tapped out, Attila went West, to his ultimate downfall. The Hunnic system vastly improved the chances for barbarian military success, by focusing them and giving them good centralized leadership (or at least relatively centralized), but as soon as they hit a wall, they were royally screwed. In 451 and 452 Attila hit a wall, and it was pretty lucky of him to die in the way he did. He had impressive force of personality, and it was partly this that kept the empire together, but he was beginning to get low on monies, and needed a new outlet for his armies.

[Godless Pickle]

Fear factor, tactics, willpower...but thats generalized mongol. Do a good ol' google search Atilla the hun success.

[Lord Rahl]

I refer back to one of the best historical articles we have here by Tacticalwithdrawal,

Bringing the Hun horse archers to life

[Carpathian Wolf]

It was more good publicity. Go in, destroy a village, kill some civilians. The Romans in the west could hardly keep their business internally together let alone against such an enemy. A big mistake people often make is to think that the Huns were all asiatic horse archers when in reality they absorbed anyone else they conquored. Like wise the Huns weren't an empire, just places they went and places where they were. There was no actual Empire.

Even in the end the Romans managed to defeat them on open terrain and later the Huns were vanquished by Gepids and Goths.

[bushbush]

It was more good publicity. Go in, destroy a village, kill some civilians. The Romans in the west could hardly keep their business internally together let alone against such an enemy. A big mistake people often make is to think that the Huns were all asiatic horse archers when in reality they absorbed anyone else they conquored. Like wise the Huns weren't an empire, just places they went and places where they were. There was no actual Empire.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/histori...tila_the.shtml

no empire my ass.

http://www.ask.com/enc?q=Hunnic+Empire&o=0&l=dir&page=1

http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=huns

[Babur]

Hey you guys im mod leader of East of Rome a dark age mod

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=755

and Reign of Attila a submod which focuses on Attila the Hun

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=875

Now weve got researchers and ive read some articles on the internet so i would like some other opinions a wide variety on the topic not just the teams.

Topic Question:

What made Attila the Hun succesful which didnt make any of his succesors or ancestors as succeful?

Nakharar,Attila was Armenian that was why he was so successful

[frontier-auxilia]

Ask yourself... when a bunch of ruthless, murderous, smelly ruffians armed with composite bow that can piece armor in 400 yards come raining arrows on you every seconds, what can a man do?

[kkaana]

As i said before;

"A customary practice in ancient Rome was to hold hostages to ensure treaties were upheld. Part of this practice consisted of the kings exchanging the sons of their enemies as an "insurance policy". In other words, if as part of our treaty, I hold your son as "hostage", you are less likely to attack me and break our treaty. Attila was no stranger to this practice. He was exchanged into the Roman Empire as part of a treaty. While held as a hostage, he was educated and trained within the Roman Empire. It was here that Attila learned intimately the ways of the Romans while understanding their weaknesses."

Nakharar,Attila was Armenian that was why he was so successful

Sure he was Armenian, but we first have to ask Carpathian Wolf if he was romanian or not

[Carpathian Wolf]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/hun_attila_the.shtml

no empire my ass.

http://www.ask.com/enc?q=Hunnic+Empire&o=0&l=dir&page=1

http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=huns

Again it's technically not an Empire, more a confederation of nomad tribes raiding about be they as successful as they were.

Sure he was Armenian, but we first have to ask Carpathian Wolf if he was romanian or not

hur hur hur...so wity

[ThiudareiksGunthigg]

Topic Question:

What made Attila the Hun succesful which didnt make any of his succesors or ancestors as succeful?

As others have said, Attila built on the consolidations of previous Hunnic chieftains to make himself sole ruler of the Huns and their subject peoples and to attract other bands and tribes to his federation ("Empire" is the wrong word). This vast alliance-cum-protection-racket was held together by his charisma (which seems to have been considerable), his wealth (ditto) and by brute force. When one of his subject tribes - the Akatziri - rebelled against him, for example, he responded by crushing them militarily and replacing their king with one of his elder sons.

Our sources go into most detail about his later campaigns - especially his incursions into Gaul and Italy in AD 451 and 452. Since both those campaigns ended in him retreating, this has given some the idea that Attila was all bluff and not much of a threat at all. This is wrong, however. One of the ways Attila gained the following he did was through the immense wealth he gained from vast tribute payments made to him by the Eastern Roman Empire. And these regular payments of literally thousands of pounds of gold we made because of his devastating scorched earth campaigns over the Danube and into Thrace and beyond.

We don't know as much about these campaigns because of the fragmentary nature of our sources, but we do know that they devastated the Eastern Empire's territory south of the border and left whole regions depopulated. Attila's army had mastered siege tactics and used them to take whole towns and strongholds and Priscus' account of his journey to Attila's camp describes passing huge mounds of human bones; evidence of just how destructive a Hunnic punitive campaign could be.

Most of the posts above mention the Huns themselves and seem to be under the impression that they were an army of horse archers. There are two problems here: (i) Attila's army was made up of many peoples, of whom the Huns were a minority and most of them were Germanic peoples (mainly infantry) and Indo-Iranians (mainly lancers and infantry), (ii) there is some debate as to whether the Huns were still mainly horse archers in the Fifth Century, since the Hungarian Basin can't sustain the numbers of horses required for a true steppe army.

Here is an extract from a longer article I'm writing about the Battle of Chalons (451 AD) which, if I can get it to sufficient length, I might try to get published as an Osprey book:

"Attila’s Army

Suddenly the barbarian world, rent by a mighty upheaval, poured the whole north into Gaul. After the warlike Rugian comes the fierce Gepid, with the Gelonian close by; the Burgundian urges on the Scirian; forward rush the Hun, the Bellonotian, the Neurian, the Bastarnian, the Thuringian, the Bructeran and the Frank!
(Sidonius Apollinaris, Poem, 7.319ff)

Writing a little later in the century, the Gallo-Roman aristocrat, senator and bishop Sidonius was indulging in a bit of drama and a lot of dusty erudition when he described Attila’s multi-ethnic army above. He also need to make the metre of his verse work, so several of the peoples he mentioned could never have accompanied Attila in reality. As E.A. Thompson noted, “Bastarnae, Bructeri, Geloni and Neuri had disappeared hundreds of years before the time of the Huns, while the Bellonoti had never existed at all”. That aside, Sidonius does give an accurate impression of how things must have seemed to his fellow educated and civilised aristocrats as Attila’s collection of tribes and peoples approached Gaul.

Some of the tribes he mentions definitely were marching under the Hunnic standards. The Rugians and Thuringians were amongst the westernmost subject people’s in Attila’s area of domination, occupying the upper Danube and upper Rhine regions respectively. Both were Germanic peoples – the Rugians being East Germanic speakers like the Goths who traced their ancestry to people from ancient Scandinavia, while the Thuringians seem to have been a West Germanic people. Both would have fielded largely infantry armies armed with spears and shields with a few spatha-style swords and a scattering of Roman helmets and other equipment.

The Franks, at this stage, were not united under one ruler as yet. Priscus says that a dispute between the princes of the Salian Franks after the death of their father was one of Attila’s motives for invasion, since “the elder … decided to bring in Attila as his ally, while the younger [allied with the Western Roman Magister Militum Aetius”. Some at least of the Franks, therefore, would have joined Attila at some point on his march, though probably not until he had reached the Rhine or even until he was already in Gaul. Again, the Franks fought mainly in foot, though they were distinctive in their use of the barbed angon javelin and their curved-bladed throwing axe, the francisca. The Sixth Century writer Agathias later described the way they went into battle sporting long moustaches, with the backs of their heads shaved.

The Scirians or Skirii were another East Germanic people – a smaller tribe related to the Goths. They seem to have adopted the steppe-style cavalry of the Sarmatians and Alans and, like their tribal cousins the Goths and Gepids, a large part of their army fought on horseback with shield and thrusting spear or weidling the two-handed kontos lance of the steppe peoples.

With them would have been the Herules and Lombards – again East Germanics with folk memories of an ancient Scandinavian origin. There were two other East Germanic peoples in Attila’s army, both of which were to play major parts in future events. One was the Goths, especially the “Amaling Goths” under the three brother princes Valamir, Vidimer and Theodimer. Valamir was the older brother and ruler of his large group of Goths, but Theodimer’s son was to become King Theodoric the Great and the Amalings were to form the core of the people now known as the Ostrogoths. The Amaling Goths were not the only Gothic war bands in Attila’s army, though all would have fielded a mix of Germanic-style infantry and steppe-style mounted lancers, both heavy and light.

The other significant East Germanic group were the Gepids, whose king Ardaric, according to Jordanes, Attila “prized him above all the other chieftains”. Apart from being a large and powerful group within the Hunnic federation the Gepids were to be significant because they brought about the end of the Hun Kingdom. After Attila’s death Ardaric turned on his sons and led a rebellion by the subject tribes that resulted in his victory at the Battle of the Nedao River in 454 and the end of the Huns as a major force.

Various other groups also joined Attila’s army: the Suevi who had not joined the Vandals in their trek to Spain and Africa early in the century now marched with the Huns. Various Indo-Iranian tribes, including many Alans and the Sarmatians from around Aquincum on the Danube, also provided more mounted lancers to the Hun king. And a variety of Turkic nomad bands, great and small, some of them Hunnic, some of them calling themselves Hunnic and some of them riding under their own names. The Akatziri were one of the larger non-Hun nomad tribes subject to Attila. They lived on the north-western shores of the Black Sea, at the eastern extreme of Attila’s dominace and had been troublesome subjects to the Hunnic king. After a rebellion by them a few years before Attila had been forced to replace their ruler with his own eldest son, Ellac.

Then there were the Huns themselves. To think of the Huns as a cohesive ethnic group with a strong shared identity and a continuous, clear line of ancestry back to Turco-Mongolian nomads who had entered Europe the century before would be a mistake. Ethnic identity was (and is) a fluid thing among Eurasian nomads and a “Hun” was pretty much whoever decided that he was a “Hun”. The core of Attila’s kingdom would have been a noble elite made up largely of Turkic-speaking descendants of central Asian nomads, but their names are an indication of their ancestors inter-marriage with other groups and the fact that a “Hun” did not have to have any central Asian ancestry at all. Attila’s elite and entourage had names that were Turkic, Persian, Germanic, Indo-Iranian and even combinations of these. Attila’s own name (which may have been a nickname) was Gothic. Part of the reason that “the Hun Empire” vanished so rapidly after Attila’s death was not that the Huns were wholly destroyed (Hunnic bands remained in the region for centuries) but that people who had previously called themselves “Huns” simply began calling themselves something else.

Hun Warfare – Ideals, Myths and Reality

When provoked they sometimes fight singly, but they enter the battle in tactical formation, while their medley of voices makes a savage noise. And as they are lightly equipped for swift motion, and unexpected in action, they purposely divide suddenly in scattered bands and attack, rushing about in disorder here and there, dealing terrific slaughter. And because of their terrific rapidity of movement, they cannot be discerned when they break into a rampart or pillage an enemy’s camp …. they fight from a distance with sharp missiles, having bone, instead of their usual points, fitted to the shaft with great skill. Then they gallop over the intervening spaces and fight hand to hand with swords regardless of their own lives …. [T]hey throw strips of cloth plaited into nooses over their opponents and so entangle them …
(Ammianus Marcellinus)

Writing in 392, with the sudden arrival of the Huns on the doorstep of the Roman Empire still fairly fresh in his memory, Ammianus describes the typical tactics of the steppe horse nomad – rapid movement, fluid formations, missile fire from recurved bows and an ability to close with the enemy and fight hand to hand when it was advantageous. Whether the majority of the Huns still fought in this way in 451 AD, however, remains open to debate.

Steppe nomad warfare requires horses and lots of them – about ten remounts per warrior. That number of horses is sustainable on the vast plains of Eurasia, but by Attila’s time the Huns had been settled on the Hungarian Plain for several generations. Theoretically, this area could provide grazing for around 320,000 horses: i.e. enough to support a very large army of Hunnic horse archers, but if we factor in areas of forest, grazing for other animals etc we end up with about 150,000 horses. That’s enough for 15,000-20,000 warriors in the traditional central Asian style.

But evidence of what happened when the nomadic Magyars settled in the same region is instructive. Within a few generations the Magyars went from being nomads to adopting a largely sedentary farming lifestyle. Only the nobles maintained the old way of living and also maintained the old way of fighting. It is very likely that the Huns followed the same pattern.

Clearly, despite this relative restriction of grazing land, many Hunnic warriors continued to fight as horse archers in the old nomadic mode. Both the Eastern and Western Empires made use of Hunnic foederati and other Huns mercenary bands before, during and long after Attila’s era. They influenced the Eastern Army to the extent that horse archer units – Sagittarii - became part of the regular force in the Sixth Century. Finds of bone bow stiffeners and various types of arrows in Hunnic grave sites indicate that some level of horse archer tactics was maintained strongly in Attila’s time. Ammianus says they used bone arrow heads, but none of these have ever been found. The iron Hunnic arrow heads we have range from very broad-bladed, almost square heads with a pronounced spine to very narrow, needle-like points to complex heads with three lobes and several cutting edges.

Roman authors were in agreement that the Huns were superb horsemen, and this seems to be based more on fact than purely on literary conventions about “Scythian” barbarians following ancient Greek topoi. Sidonius turned his flowery eloquence to the subject of the Hun’s aptitude for horsemanship:

Scarce had the infant leaned to stand without his mother’s aid when a horse takes him upon his back. You would think the limbs of the man and horse were born together, so firmly does the rider always stick to his mount. Any other folk is carried by the horse – this folk lives there.
(Sidonius Apollinaris, “Panegyric on Anthemius”, 262-266)

Despite some conjecture and a few highly unreliable online statements to the contrary, there is absolutely zero evidence that the Huns used stirrups. Those that fancy the Huns may have used leather or wooden stirrups which have left no trace in the archaeological record cannot explain why no Roman writers mentioned this innovation (particularly Priscus, who spent time amongst the Huns and gives many details on things about them that struck him as unusual), why neither the Romans nor the Huns’ subjects adopted them and why they do not appear in any depiction of cavalry until the Seventh Century. The most logical interpretation of the evidence is that the stirrup, while known to tribes further East in Attila’s time, had not reached the Huns before they entered Europe and did not reach Europe until the arrival of the Avars several centuries later.

Hunnic saddles, however, do seem to have represented some innovations. They seem to have been wooden-framed saddles of sophisticated design, made of padded leather or felt and often decorated with elaborate metal appliqué decorations. These saddles clearly influenced the war saddles of their Germanic subjects, with wooden-framed saddles with high bows and croppers appearing in Germanic graves such as the one Blucina or the rich Gepidic grave at Aphida.

While the Huns remained renowned for their horse archers, there is evidence of several other Hunnic troop types which may support the idea that the Huns, like the Magyars, diversified their fighting styles once they settled in Hungary. Sozomen describes a Hunnic warrior talking to Bishop Theotimus of Tomis standing and leaning casually on his tall shield “as was his custom when parlaying with his enemies" (Sozomen, VII, 6, 8). This was clearly not a cavalryman’s shield and may be similar to the tall shields used by the Turkic Toba or Wei people who troubled western China in this same period. No Hunnic sites include any shield bosses, so it seems that all Hun shields – infantry or cavalry – were flat and probably made of leather or felt covered wickerwork edged with rawhide or metal.

Another reference to Huns fighting on foot – a description of Hunnic archers running across the battlefield, shooting as they went – adds to the impression that the Huns diversified in their fighting styles once they left the steppes.

There is certainly good reason to believe that some Hunnic cavalry were lancers, often heavily armoured lancers in the Alanic or Sarmatian style – rather than horse archers. It is most likely that these warriors were the Hunnic nobility and their immediate clan followers and retinues and that, as in later Eurasian armies, they formed a heavy cavalry core to the warband as a whole.

Sidonius gives us some indication that these nobles and their men were armoured lancers. He describes a duel between Avitus (later to be Western Roman Emperor, very briefly) and a Hunnic mercenary in the army of the usurper Litorius:

When the first bout, the second, the third have been fought, lo! The upraised spear comes and pierces the man of blood. His breast was transfixed and his corselet twice split, giving way even where it covered his back [ post et confinia dorsi cedit transfosso ruptus bis pectore thorax ] and as the blood came throbbing through the two gaps, the separate wounds took away the life that each of them might have claimed.
(Sidonius Apollinaris, “Panegyric on Avitus”, 289-292)

The thorax the poet mentions here is most like a lamellar cuirass of small, rectangular metal plates, laced together into a flexible armoured harness, of the kind used by the Huns’ Alan and Sarmatian subjects and which remained common amongst the Germanic Goths and Lombards for the next few centuries.

This and other evidence indicates that the richer Huns, like the Goths and other Germanics, adopted the heavy lancer tactics of the Sarmatians and Alans. This means some of them probably also adopted the long, two-handed kontos lance. Others would have wielded one-handed lances with a shield or cast spears from horseback Goth-style.

This mix of troop types – horse archers, heavy lancers, mounted spearmen and javelineers, infantry and foot archers – would have made the Huns a formidable force in their own right. Add to this the variety and numbers provided by their many allies and subject tribes and their skill at siege warfare learned during Attila’s early campaigns and the Western Empire had good reason to be panicked as Attila’s army headed westward in 451."

[bushbush]

Again it's technically not an Empire, more a confederation of nomad tribes raiding about be they as successful as they were.

"technically"? Empire = several ethnic groups being ruled by one authority. I guess he had more than one group of people under his control. How was it not an empire?

[Carpathian Wolf]

"technically"? Empire = several ethnic groups being ruled by one authority. I guess he had more than one group of people under his control. How was it not an empire?

And where was his capital? And his administration? And what provinces did he preside over? And how did he collect taxes? And what laws were put inplace?

Atilla's..."realm" is far too primitive to be considered an Empire.

[bushbush]

And where was his capital? And his administration? And what provinces did he preside over? And how did he collect taxes? And what laws were put inplace?

Atilla's..."realm" is far too primitive to be considered an Empire.

a pretty good article
http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=huns


The Hun Society
According to Romans, the Huns lived, ate, and sleep on horseback, and that they would become dizzy when setting foot on the ground. While this may be a bit of an exaggeration, we can see that compared to western Europeans of the time, the horse was a highly important part of their society. In the steppes, horses were a necessity for travel, hunting, wealth, survival, and of course, warfare. In short, it was their way of life. It is no surprise how these points are emphasize by western accounts.

Because of the great interest Attila had in gold and plunder, we can infer that the wealth and power were greatly interdependent. After a successful campaign, the higher-ranking officers received almost all the spoils, and the spoils were important in securing high positions. The empire was run by a group of officers either selected by Attila or was inherited through lineage. These officers served as administrators or as commanders who had direct control over a small "personal" army. Because skilled administrators were hard to fine, kings of conquered territories were often re-employed as administrators. For the most part, these subject kings were loyal to the Hun central authority.

-------------

they are definitely not as advanced as the Romans in terms of developing a bureaucracy. But they have a basic set of administrative system to rule the land and people they have conquered.

but the key for a regime to become an empire is that it's multi-ethnic. Hunnic empire certainly has achieved that.

[ThiudareiksGunthigg]

a pretty good article
http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=huns

Not really. It's riddled with errors and outdated information. It says "Like other steppe people, Hun warriors fought exclusively as cavalry". But as I detailed in my post above, it's now debated if they were still truly "steppe people" and even if they were, there is clear evidence of Hunnic infantry and of Hunnic archers attacking on foot. And its picture with the caption "An artist's depiction of the Huns" is under a Frank Franzetta Conan-style fantasy painting of a skeleton-warrior in a fantasy winged helmet! WTF?!

A pretty crap article, actually.