HUNS. - The reports of Western writers about this people are scanty and uncertain, nor is much better to be gathered from the Chinese sources, which had knowledge of them in more ancient times.
That they were of Mongolian stock is assured by the Chinese sources, which call them Hiung-nu, and by the Western ones, which describe their physical characteristics: small, slender bodies, broad faces with very small eyes. They led a nomadic life in Central Asia and attempted to burst into Chinese territory; for defense against them the Great Wall was built in the 3rd century B.C., which joined and unified earlier fortification works. Around the middle of the 4th century A.D. the Huns reached the country inhabited by the Alans and north of the Caspian and the Volga, and shortly afterward arrived at the Don, which they crossed, driving the Ostrogoths back toward the west.
Then, dragging along with them also the populations of the invaded territories and sowing terror with massacres and destructions, they pushed the Visigoths onto the Danube, who asked to be admitted as federates within the borders of the Roman Empire. From the victory of the latter at Adrianople in 378, ruinous for the Empire, the Huns profited in their own way, to continue infiltrating in groups more or less large and solid and organized into the territories made desert before their stormy advance, to the point of fighting for the Empire against their own countrymen, without neglecting to plunder and kill. Toward the end of the 4th century there appears some figure of a leader around whom the greater mass of the Huns gathered.
Their principal seat became Pannonia, from which, however, they continued to spread abroad with their wild raids. Their king Uldin fought against Gainas, a barbarian general in rebellion against the emperor Arcadius, and sent his head to Constantinople, receiving as a reward an annual tribute of 350 pounds of gold. As a Roman ally he was present at Fiesole in the battle against Radagaisus and his Goths.
The power of the Huns continued to grow under the successor Rua, and especially then under the latter's nephew Attila (v.). He gave a firmer structure to his State, concentrated all powers in himself, and conducted a singularly strong and active policy with the Emperor of the East Theodosius II; he succeeded in having the tribute obtained by his predecessors increased, bringing it to 700 pounds, and later having it tripled again; he demanded that all fugitives from his States be handed over to him, even if they were Roman citizens. In the West, all the lands north of the Alps up to the Rhine were under Attila's dominion.
The merit of an almost tranquil coexistence was due in large part to the action of the magister utriusque militiae Aetius, who had for a certain time lived among the Huns as a hostage, and who with shrewd policy favored now one now the other of the barbarian States, aiming to set them in conflict with one another. But the violent and proud nature of Attila could not be content with a tranquil status quo. Defeated on the Catalaunian fields (between Châlons and the Argonne) and having returned to his capital, probably in Pannonia, he fell upon Italy, where the encounter with the spirited Pope Leo the Great, and, no less effective, the diseases and hunger of his wasteful army, dissuaded him from attempting the march on Rome. Having returned to his seats, shortly afterward in one of his customary orgies Attila died (453), and within a few years the power of the Huns disappeared. Later the Avars (v.) were designated by the name of Huns.
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Roberto Paribeni