Thougths on reading about Attila

A few more comments on The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome by Christopher Kelly.

The history we have of the Huns was not written by the Huns themselves but by the Romans. The Romans didn't think much of the Huns because they were not upper class Romans. We are conditioned to appreciate the products of Roman imperialism, but I don't like the idea of linking church and state to use the power of religion to support an emperor in office. Indeed, the display of a coercive state seems quite unattractive to me. I suspect that I would rather have preferred the Huns to the Romans.

I had earlier read The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen and used the Comanche tribal structure to help understand the Huns. Both were horse cultures, based on grasslands. Both were raiding cultures that also left neighboring communities in place for trade. Both, I think, lived in smaller groups but could be brought together for military purposes; a great leader such as Attila could gather a large force, but without such a leader the bands within the tribe would not all unite to wage war.

One of the most interesting things in the book was the suggestion that even a Roman writer who had visited the Huns and observed them closely would write about the experience drawing on the work of earlier authors (who may have been quite wrong), using literary allusions. The Roman approach may have been more like that of the scholastics rather than modern scientists, but I suspect it was still different, with more of an erudite raconteur seeking to show of while entertaining an audience.

Thinking about this, I began to wonder how much we lose in modern scientific reporting in which authors also show their mastery of previous literature and allude to other authors in explaining their own observations. I wonder if some future culture will be bemused by how much of reality we lost in that process.

This map shows that while much of north Africa is desert (red), there is a band of warm, Mediterranean climate (yellow) between the Atlas Mountains and the sea, including parts of what is now Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. There are smaller areas in yellow around what are now Tripoli and Benghazi. Note that they are separated from Egypt's rich Nile Delta by long arid zones even on the coast.

Phoenicians built ports along the North African coast, and their descendants, the Carthaginians centered their nation around what is now Tunis. The Romans occupied this yellow area when they defeated the Carthaginians, and the Vandals took it and occupied the area when they defeated the Romans. Eventually the area was conquered by the Arabs. Apparently Berbers lived in the area at least since Roman times. Arabs and Berbers used this area as the base for the Conquest of much of the Iberian peninsula, as the Vandals had used the Iberian peninsula as the base for the conquest of a large area of north Africa.

The Vandals, originally a Germanic tribe, conquered this area in the fifth century, later invading Sicily and then sacking Rome. They like the Huns and Goths destroyed the Western Roman empire.

Was there a bread basket land corresponding to that colored yellow in the Magreb that played an important role in history? I assume that there were some aspects of cultural continuity that withstood the various invasions, and there was a large element of common Mediterranean culture that developed over many centuries of seafaring Mediterranean peoples.

I also note that while the western Roman empire's government fell in the fifth century, the eastern empire morphed into the Byzantine Empire, lasting another millennium. Moreover, the Latin continued to be the language of religion, higher education and diplomacy in Europe for many centuries even as it was being replaced by the Romance languages of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Rumantsch, etc. The Catholic Church continued as a European heritage of Rome, as did much of the legal structure of the empire.

I note that the government institutions of Germany, Italy and Japan were radically changed after the Axis lost World War II, but we don't talk about the fall of Germany, Italy and France. The people who took over from the Romans still looked pretty much like Romans to me.