the first Gothic saint.
Rome and Christianity could be resisted, then; but not the advancing Huns. Athanaric tried, setting up a line of defence along the Dniester, but it was easily bypassed when the Huns ignored the Gothic army, crossed the river by night and made a surprise assault on the Goths from the rear. After a hasty retreat across present-day Moldova, the Goths started to build a rampart along the Moldovan border, the River Prut. It was at this point that Gothic morale collapsed, driving them across the Danube into Thrace and startingthe train of events that led to the battle at Adrianople.
Behind them, advancing from the Ukrainian lowlands, came Attila’s immediate forebears, on a 75-kilometre march over the Carpathians, winding uphill along the road that now leads from Kolomyya through the Carpathian National Nature Park. It was the regular route for invaders, one used again almost 1,000 years later by the Mongols. You climb easily to 931 metres (3,072 feet) over the Yablunytsia Pass (good skiing in winter, pretty alpine walks in summer), then drop to the Romanian border, and, leaving the Transylvanian highlands on your left, follow the snaking, narrow road along the River Theiss onto the Hungarian grasslands.
Here, as the wagon-train and herds spread out over the Carpathian basin, old pastoral and fighting skills again came into their own.
1 Often translated as ‘snowstorm’, a buran is rather more than that, which is why it became the name of the Soviet space shuttle.
2 ‘New finds . . .’ by Hudiakov and Tseveendorj, see Bibliography.
3 This sweeping generalization is a hypothesis, unproven. I have some evidence, derived from the tribe I worked with in the Ecuadorean rainforest in the early 1980s. The Waorani were then among the simplest of societies known to anthropologists, with no chiefs, shamans or elaborate rituals; with extremely simple music, no clothing but strings of cotton round their waists (into which the men tucked their penises), no art other than body decoration and their few wonderful artefacts (notably 3-metre blowguns and the best hammocks in Amazonia). But they did have stories, and folklore, and a cosmology, with an afterlife – a heaven where people swung in hammocks and hunted for ever, a limbo for those who returned to this world in animal form, and an underworld of the ‘mouthless ones’ – and spirits both good and evil, and a myth of creation, overseen by the creator, Waengongi. A ‘primitive’ tribe who were monotheists! That was a surprise. The idea of one god is supposed to have evolved from polytheism as a higher form of religion. It proved very handy for American missionaries when they arrived with news of what their version of Waengongi had told them. (The ‘primitive’ four lines up is ironic: the Waorani were experts in their way of life, and as bright and as dim, as wary and as curious, as charming and as offensive and as thoroughly human as the rest of us.)
4 Ermanaric’s name probably derives from Hermann-Rex, King Hermann, the Gothic having adopted the Latin word and turned it into reiks , which, when retransliterated, became ric . It was a common ending for the names of Gothic aristocrats.
3
THE RETURN OF THE
MOUNTED ARCHER
‘A VILE, UGLY AND DEGENERATE PEOPLE’: THESE ARE THE words of Ammianus, writing from within the Roman empire, the epitome of civilization in his own eyes and those of his readers. No wonder he was prejudiced; he was describing the most effective enemy ever to assault the empire. We, with the privilege of hindsight and security, should set prejudice aside, show some respect, and seek to understand why Attila’s people had such an impact.
Their power lay in four elements:
• an ancient skill, mounted archery;
• a new version of an ancient weapon, the recurved bow;
• a new tactical technique;
• leadership.
The man himself is the subject of later chapters. What we are interested in right now is his raw
Rome and Christianity could be resisted, then; but not the advancing Huns. Athanaric tried, setting up a line of defence along the Dniester, but it was easily bypassed when the Huns ignored the Gothic army, crossed the river by night and made a surprise assault on the Goths from the rear. After a hasty retreat across present-day Moldova, the Goths started to build a rampart along the Moldovan border, the River Prut. It was at this point that Gothic morale collapsed, driving them across the Danube into Thrace and startingthe train of events that led to the battle at Adrianople.
Behind them, advancing from the Ukrainian lowlands, came Attila’s immediate forebears, on a 75-kilometre march over the Carpathians, winding uphill along the road that now leads from Kolomyya through the Carpathian National Nature Park. It was the regular route for invaders, one used again almost 1,000 years later by the Mongols. You climb easily to 931 metres (3,072 feet) over the Yablunytsia Pass (good skiing in winter, pretty alpine walks in summer), then drop to the Romanian border, and, leaving the Transylvanian highlands on your left, follow the snaking, narrow road along the River Theiss onto the Hungarian grasslands.
Here, as the wagon-train and herds spread out over the Carpathian basin, old pastoral and fighting skills again came into their own.
1 Often translated as ‘snowstorm’, a buran is rather more than that, which is why it became the name of the Soviet space shuttle.
2 ‘New finds . . .’ by Hudiakov and Tseveendorj, see Bibliography.
3 This sweeping generalization is a hypothesis, unproven. I have some evidence, derived from the tribe I worked with in the Ecuadorean rainforest in the early 1980s. The Waorani were then among the simplest of societies known to anthropologists, with no chiefs, shamans or elaborate rituals; with extremely simple music, no clothing but strings of cotton round their waists (into which the men tucked their penises), no art other than body decoration and their few wonderful artefacts (notably 3-metre blowguns and the best hammocks in Amazonia). But they did have stories, and folklore, and a cosmology, with an afterlife – a heaven where people swung in hammocks and hunted for ever, a limbo for those who returned to this world in animal form, and an underworld of the ‘mouthless ones’ – and spirits both good and evil, and a myth of creation, overseen by the creator, Waengongi. A ‘primitive’ tribe who were monotheists! That was a surprise. The idea of one god is supposed to have evolved from polytheism as a higher form of religion. It proved very handy for American missionaries when they arrived with news of what their version of Waengongi had told them. (The ‘primitive’ four lines up is ironic: the Waorani were experts in their way of life, and as bright and as dim, as wary and as curious, as charming and as offensive and as thoroughly human as the rest of us.)
4 Ermanaric’s name probably derives from Hermann-Rex, King Hermann, the Gothic having adopted the Latin word and turned it into reiks , which, when retransliterated, became ric . It was a common ending for the names of Gothic aristocrats.
3
THE RETURN OF THE
MOUNTED ARCHER
‘A VILE, UGLY AND DEGENERATE PEOPLE’: THESE ARE THE words of Ammianus, writing from within the Roman empire, the epitome of civilization in his own eyes and those of his readers. No wonder he was prejudiced; he was describing the most effective enemy ever to assault the empire. We, with the privilege of hindsight and security, should set prejudice aside, show some respect, and seek to understand why Attila’s people had such an impact.
Their power lay in four elements:
• an ancient skill, mounted archery;
• a new version of an ancient weapon, the recurved bow;
• a new tactical technique;
• leadership.
The man himself is the subject of later chapters. What we are interested in right now is his raw
Similar Books
