Bringing the Hun horse archers to life
Introduction
One of the most irritating units to fight against in RTW, and most fun to use, is the Horse archer. Fast, mobile, very difficult to catch it races up to your more ponderous troops, turns them into pincushions and then rides away before you can do anything.
So, is this realistic? Are the horse archers in RTW realistic, underpowered or overpowered? If realistic, why didn’t the Roman empires just destroy the Hun armies under Attila? Why were they so terrifying, basically neutering the Eastern empire, capturing huge swathes of land from the Eastern and Western empires, and wiping out many tribes, driving others into the Roman empires to escape them.
Obviously the Hun’s weren’t easy to destroy; Attila is a legend to this day inspiring hatred and fear or hero worship depending on your perspective. The effect of the Huns on our culture has been too big for them to be mere weaklings:
- the VisiGoth migration into Europe was caused by the Huns, the Goths, under Fritigern, destroying the Eastern empire army at Adrionople in 378 and then went on to roam Europe, sacking Rome itself in 410, marching into Spain briefly before finally settling just North of the Pyrenees
- He has inspired operas (Verdi’s Attila in 1846), awful films, Viking verses (his saga was one of the ones known to have been popular when, in 1018, the Vikings reached America) and, of course, the whole German epic of the Nibelungenlied which inspired Wagner’s Ring Cycle
- The fear and hatred felt for the Huns was so strong, that in 1914 (1600ish years later) it was still strong enough to be used as propaganda against the Germans in WWI.
- And in Hungary Attila is seen as a hero and a legend (in much the same way as Genghis is viewed in Mongolia)
So, this article hopes to bring the horse archers of the Huns to life and demonstrate how effective they really were, and prove that you can be thankful that the horse archers in RTW are most definitely not Huns, but a decidedly lesser breed…..
Who were the Hun’s
The basic answer is that nobody really knows, not even a single word of their language is known today and most of the contemporary writings about them have been lost, what is known is that they came out of the East. However, the current ‘in favour’ theory is that they were descendants of the Xiongnu, a tribe of nomadic horsemen who built an empire on the grass plains of what would become Mongolia. The Xiongnu empire fell (basically the Chinese and some other locals got fed up with them) and the tribe passed into the West and out of the histories of China. 200 years later the Hun’s appeared out of the East and into the West, and the timescales and sightings of them and the Xiongnu are so close that it may be likely that they are one and the same, but there is absolutely no proof (and huge amounts of very fierce academic argument).
The start of the empire
The Huns crossed the Volga in 350 AD and saw the great steppes ahead of them, perfect for their nomadic way of life. The steppes were dominated by the Sarmatians, an Iranian people who were renowned lancers, their warriors were armoured with mail and conical helmets (incidentally, they had many women warriors and may have been a source for the Amazon legends). Feared by everyone, the Sarmatians were destroyed by the Huns within 10 years. Next it was the turn of the Ostrogoths living across the Dnieper, their army being smashed by the Hun leader Balamber in 376 AD. The Huns continued West to the Dniester where the Visigoths lived. The Visigoths were the nation that the Roman empire was not able to conquer (and who went on the tour of Europe mentioned above). Proud and warlike they had withstood the Roman empire but quickly fell to the Huns. Within 40 years of crossing the Volga the Huns had marched over the Carpathian mountains and reached the Hungarian plain and the river Danube.
So why were they so effective?
The Huns had four main things on their side:
- They had a special bow
- They were born to the saddle and were superb horsemen
- They had the tactical ability to put the bow and the horsemanship together and use them to the best advantage
- They had leadership
So, what was so special about the bow?
The Hun bow is unique, the most obvious feature being that it is asymmetrical (the lower limb is shorter than the upper limb). Nobody knows why this is so, it doesn’t effect power, range or even accuracy (contrary to popular belief and Wikepedia!). Maybe the idea is that it makes it easier to pass the bow from right to left hands across a horse's neck, nobody knows (probably not even the Huns, they would have told you that was just how they made bows).
The two crucial differences in a Hun bow were its size and their shape. Hun bows were bigger than other horse archer bows and they had a much more pronounced recurve. Finally, they had a little wing of horn on either end which both provide strengthening and rigidity to the ends, add a crucial few centimetres extra length and act rather like the pulleys on a modern compound bow.
The effects of this are amazing, the Hun bow has a slightly longer range and higher power than other bows capable of punching through shields and armour at ranges unheard of before (current recreations have 500m ranges).
Horsemen
All we know about mounted archers basically comes from a truly amazing Hungarian called Logos Kassai. He has made it his life’s task to revive the art of mounted archery and now makes bows and teaches mounted archery to students from around the world. There is even a sport that he has invented that is catching on (on which more below).
What he is capable of is truly astounding, and remember, he had to teach himself and didn’t start until his 20’s, Huns would be taught by experts and would start riding before they could walk. From his lifework we know the following:
- Hun archers (or at least the experts) shot with either hand, allowing them to shoot to the left or right with no difficulty
- They were also experts at the backward shot, so in effect an Hun archer had no problems with shooting anywhere in a full circle around him and his horse.
- They are expected to be able to fire 3 shots every 6 seconds with pinpoint accuracy, and to be able to do this for hours on end while riding a horse at full gallop. In comparison, a normal modern unmounted archer fires one arrow every 30 seconds or so, a time comparable with what we know of ancient archers.
Taking these elements Kassai has developed a sport (which they are trying to get into the Olympics) and what you have to do gives an idea of what a Hun archer was capable of:
The course is 90 metres long with three 90 centimetre targets in it. You enter the course at a full gallop and have one shot at each target (one on the left, one on the right and one behind you). You cannot take more than 16 seconds to complete the 90 meters (so you are going at a minimum of 20 kph). The good riders take 8 seconds to complete the course, hitting every target.
Kassai himself does frequent demonstrations which are even more spectacular…..
He starts with 3 men standing in the arena carrying a pole with a 90cm target on the end. As he gallops into the arena the men start to run holding the target about a metre above their heads. Hassai takes three passes, each of 6 seconds and each time firing 3 arrows, 18 seconds later it is over with 3 arrows in each target. For the finale the same three men have two unattached targets, as Hassai gallops past they throw the targets into the air, all are hit.
He himself got into the Guinness Book of records, galloping 286 ‘laps’ of the course in 12 hours and firing over 1,000 arrows in that time. One of his pupils, Celestino Tolelti, holds the record for the most arrows shot in a 24 hour period. This was 13,100 arrows, fired on one day in 1997 from a standard Hun bow.
The Tactics
The third part of the Hun war machine was their tactics. They had a superior bow and the men (and women) who could use it, now they tied all that all together.
The Hun army would approach their enemy and halt about 500 metres away. Each warrior (male and female) would wear little armour but would carry a bow, around 60 arrows, a sword and a lasso. Behind them would be the supply wagons carrying spare bows and thousands upon thousands of spare arrows.
The Huns would break into two groups of around 2,000 each, and start circling (the Cantabrian circle), each group going in a different direction. Then a trumpet would sound and the attack was on. The individual riders would draw around 9 arrows from their quivers and hold them in the hand that was holding the bow. The circles (about 200 metres across) pick up speed, warriors peel off from the outer edge and head towards the enemy at a full gallop. Within 30 seconds the regiments are at full speed (about 30-40kph), at 150 meters the leading Huns release their first arrows, each group aiming at a 100 meter section of the enemy. 50 metres later they have reloaded and fired again, then wheel to gallop parallel to the enemy for 90 meters firing three arrows sideways into the enemy. Finally, the leaders turn and head away from the enemy, firing a couple more arrows back over their shoulders, and return to the start.
Snatching another 9 arrows they turn back towards the enemy and start the whole process again and again and again, usually for about 10 laps (grabbing re-supplies from the wagons on the way).
If you were facing this then your 100 metre section could be the happy recipient of 1,000 arrows every 5 seconds that’s equivalent to 12,000 arrows per minute, a rate of fire not achieved again until the machinegun. And this whirlwind would go on for about 10 ‘laps’ during which time the 100 metre front would receive somewhat over 50,000 arrows, all shot from a bow with the penetrative power of a bullet.
And the other Hun unit was doing the same to the adjacent 100 metre front.
No wonder their enemies melted before them.
Conclusion
So, just be thankful that the Mounted Archers in RTW are not Huns but a lesser breed.
However, the same factors that defeated the Huns will also defeat the RTW mounted archer.
- Hide behind walls. Mounted archers are not good at taking walls (they bring along allied infantry for that)
- Fight them in woods (a small group of Ostragoths wiped out a Hun army in the woods of Germany)
- Restrict their freedom of movement – Attila was beaten in Gaul because the Roman and Visigoth alliance pinned his army against a river and didn’t let it use the mobility of the archers (interestingly, the Romans chose to let Attila escape rather than annihilate him (which would have been easily accomplished) as they wanted to keep him around as a balance to the Visigoths).
- Finally, the tactic of riding the mounted archers down with lancers, while a valid one in RTW, would often have been a disaster in real life as the Hun archers were usually supported by Alan lancers, remnants of the feared Sarmatians.
Sources
John Man – ‘Attila the Hun’. ISBN 0-553-81658-6
http://www.horsebows.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attila_the_Hun
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/attila1.html - Medieval Sourcebook: Pricus on Attila the Hun 448
http://historicaltextarchive.com/sec...ticle&artid=61 - Attila the Hun and the Battle of Chalons
International Horse Archery Festival
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