Did Romans defect to join deadly Huns?
Academic claims they were lured by an easier life – and tastier grub
THE Roman empire began to collapse because of terrifying Huns attacking its eastern frontier – or so the history books say.
But they may have to be rewritten, as the fall of the great power could have actually been due in part to Romans defecting to the ‘barbarian’ horde – attracted by an easier lifestyle and tastier diet.
Roman accounts of the Huns, a nomadic people who lived along the Volga river in eastern Europe, tell largely of terror and destruction, especially under Attila, leader of the Hunnic empire in the 5th century AD.
But archaeologists now believe that many ordinary Roman citizens were prepared to adopt the Huns’ more laid back way of life.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge analysed gravesite remains in the Roman frontier region of Pannonia, now Hungary, dating to the 5th century.
Analysis of teeth and bones show that some Roman citizens left their homesteads to become Hun-like roaming herdsmen – abandoning agriculture, long considered the foundation of Roman civilisation.
Instead they embraced a diet featuring lots of meat and fish. And
‘Drawn to the lifestyle’
some Huns went the other way – settling down and adapting to Roman ways, researchers found.
Dr Susanne Hakenbeck, from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, said the Huns may have brought ways of life that appealed to some farmers in the area.
She said that ‘ while written accounts of the last century of the Roman empire focus on convulsions of violence, our new data appear to show some degree of cooperation and coexistence of people living in the frontier zone.
‘Far from being a clash of cultures, alternating between lifestyles may have been an insurance policy in unstable political times.’
In a study published in the Plos One journal, Dr Hakenbeck and colleagues tested skeletal remains at five 5th-century sites around Pannonia.
They compared this data to sites in central Germany, where typical farmers of the time lived, and locations in Siberia and Mongolia, home to nomadic herders up to the Mongol period and beyond.
Chemical analysis of the bones allow the researchers to identify the patterns in the diets of the Romans and Huns. The diet of Roman farmers was relatively boring, Dr Hakenbeck said, consisting primarily of plants such as wheat, vegetables and pulses, with a small amount of meat and almost no fish.
The herders’ diet on the other hand was high in meat and fish. The Huns also ate lots of millet, a grain which has a distinctive chemical signature that can be identified in human bones.
The nomads grew millet as it grows in a few short weeks.
Dr Hakenbeck said that Romans would not have been impressed at their citizens switching to a Hunnish lifestyle.
She said: ‘Romans had a big problem with the Hun, they weren’t engaging with agriculture, they were constantly moving around.
‘Because agriculture was considered the foundation of Roman civilisation, coming across these people that weren’t doing that was really awful from a Roman perspective.’
This is supported by Roman sources of the time, which show contempt of this lifestyle. Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman official, wrote that Huns ‘care noth- ing for using the ploughshare, but they live upon flesh and an abundance of milk’.
Dr Hakenbeck added: ‘ While Roman authors considered them incomprehensibly uncivilised and barely human, it seems many of citizens at the edge of Rome’s empire were drawn to the Hun lifestyle, just as some nomads took to a more settled way of life.’
She said that as only Romans left accounts, ‘ the Huns have had a bad press. They weren’t literate so we don’t have any accounts from them’.