Riders of the Apocalypse: A brief look at the Hunnic Empire

With more news of Disney’s live-action Mulan coming out over the last few months, I think it’d be a great time to go over the original animated film’s principle antagonists; the Huns.

A Legacy of Annihilation

The word “Hun” conjures up a very few specific images. A fearsome warrior, a destroyer of anything in their path. Burning, sacking, looting, nothing short of a harbinger of the end times. During the Boxer Rebellion in 1901, the German forces deployed to China called themselves Huns to emulate that terrifying image from long ago, and the nickname stuck along afterwards. This visage put up by the Huns themselves, in turn, provides a new problem in writing about them, their history and their culture; we genuinely don’t know very much about them, beyond their destructive reputation.

All information historians have about the Huns was recorded by their enemies and those they annihilated. There are no records of a written language that we’re aware of, few oral histories, no official documentation of any kind. As nomads, the Huns would likely have had no use for written language or documents. All we truly know about the Huns and their way of life is that they appeared suddenly in northern China in the 3rd century CE. Historians generally agree that the Huns would have likely originated somewhere on the Mongolian steppe, however some aspects of their observed culture indicate origins closer to Russia, possibly Kazakhstan, but much of it is inconclusive. What we do know is the Huns were nomads, and very efficient ones at that. A Hunnic child could ride a horse before they could walk, making Hun cavalry some of the most fearsome in the world. So brutally effective were the Hunnic cavalry, the earliest accounts of them by Qin Chinese soldiers described them as half-horse monsters, like centaurs. Their modus operandi of taking what they required from defeated foes meant they were constantly on the move, making their attacks unpredictable. In response, Qin emperor Qin Shihuang ordered the construction of his grand defensive wall; the 10,000 Li Wall, more colloquially known as the Great Wall of China.

With their hunting grounds now gone, the Huns turned to the west and south. The “White Hun” splinter group moved on the Indian subcontinent, while the rest of the people moved onto more enticing targets in Europe.

Not Built in a Day, but Burned in One

By the time the Huns reached Europe, they had slowly meandered across the steppe, destroying and absorbing smaller tribes into their mass as vassals. They made their first appearance in the Balkans in the 4th century AD, on the easternmost border of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Roman Empire had fallen far from its position as the dominant superpower of the era. Having grown so large and unwieldy, Emperor Theodosius I divided the empire between his two sons upon his death in 395 CE. Using the Danube River as a marker, it was split between east and west. The Western Roman Empire was gifted to Theodosius’ son Honorius, its eastern counterpart given to Honorius’ brother Arcadius. Both teenagers at the time, the future of Rome appeared bleak.

And then the Huns arrived.

The Huns cut a swathe across eastern Europe, sacking undefended towns and villages for valuable resources needed to keep their mobile way of life moving. During this time, they added many small Germanic tribes to their long list of fearful vassals, bolstering their power even further. Rome’s stretched-thin armies couldn’t compete with Hunnic mounted warriors, and their terrifying reputation begun again anew within the Christian society of the twin empires.

In the winter of 400 CE, a boy was born to the Hunnic royal line. A boy that would forever change the world, who would burn down the world to be immortalized in the traumatized nightmares of the west.

This boy’s name was Attila. In later life, he would be known as “The Hun” or to his Christian enemies, “The Scourge of God.”

Divine Retribution?

In later life, Attila would take his peoples’ love of psychological warfare to heart, and amplify it to a level not seen before. Cities sacked by them saw all but a few members of the population killed, marched ahead of the army specifically to spread fear. Attila wanted people to know he was coming, he wanted them to live in abject terror of his horde.

Massacres were routine by the Huns, especially the hunting of peasants. Between Attila’s ascension to the position of khan in 420 CE and his death in 450 CE, he ordered the total annihilation of over 100 cities across Europe. The populace wiped out, anything of value taken, food added to their stock, everything else put to the torch. Even the animals in the fields were killed and left to rot, as was Attila’s intention.

He played on the fears of Christian Rome, claiming he was sent as part of divine punishment from God himself. He was seen as a demon sent from Hell, and his actions during his lifetime were designed to build up that image of a destroyer. Terror was as much a weapon to the Huns as any sword, spear or bow.

Conclusion

I mentioned at the top of this article that Disney was rebooting Mulan in live action, and therein lies yet another skeptical thought in my head. In order to make the movie actually marketable, the Huns will need to be toned down to fit Disney’s family-friendly image. My fear is they’ll be turned from the opportunistic master propagandists, creating a myth of invincibility around themselves through cruelty, and just become… the default bad guys.

The Huns were more than just that. They weren’t misunderstood, or working towards any humanitarian goal. They weren’t just bad guys, they were the bad guys. The ultimate villains, the self-appointed harbingers of the End Times.

They were representative of a massive shift in social paradigm in the 4th and 5th centuries. Their violent campaigns across Europe, especially under Attila, proved to be the end of the Western Roman Empire. Ending not just it, but its policies of infrastructure and social order, plunging western Europe into a thousand years of cultural quagmire and stagnation.

So, in a way, they did end the world, but just the one the Romans knew.