New Study: Drought Might Have Forced Attila the Hun to Invade Rome
The Huns at the Battle of Chalons
The Huns’ invasion of Europe began in the 370s AD, when nomadic tribes attacked the Goths, marking the start of a new period in history – the Great Migration. Historians find it difficult to pinpoint the exact set of causes that gave rise to this phenomenon. However, a new study has introduced a theory to explain this process.Cambridge historians Susanne Hakenbeck from the Department of Archaeology and Ulf Büntgen from the Department of Geography conducted a study and found that the Hunnic invasion of the Western Roman Empire may have been caused by drought. They reconstructed the climate over the last 2,000 years by analyzing tree rings.
“Tree ring data gives us an amazing opportunity to link climatic conditions to human activity on a year-by-year basis. We found that periods of drought recorded in biochemical signals in tree-rings coincided with an intensification of raiding activity in the region.”
Ulf BüntgenProfessor at the Geography Department of Cambridge UniversityIt turned out that there were many droughts in the area of modern Hungary in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. In particular, the period 420-450 AD was a dry one and significantly reduced harvests and the availability of fodder for livestock outside the Danube and Tisza floodplains. The driest years immediately preceded the invasion of the west and the subsequent campaign against the Eastern Roman Empire in 447.
“If resource scarcity became too extreme, settled populations may have been forced to move, diversify their subsistence practices and switch between farming and mobile animal herding. These could have been important insurance strategies during a climatic downturn,” said Associate Professor Hakenbeck.
During this period, the Huns were living along the Danube. This is also consistent with a recent analysis of skeletons, according to which many Huns began to consume more livestock products at this time, shifting to mobile animal grazing.
“Climate alters what environments can provide and this can lead people to make decisions that affect their economy, and their social and political organization," Hakenbeck said. "Such decisions are not straightforwardly rational, nor are their consequences necessarily successful in the long term. This example from history shows that people respond to climate stress in complex and unpredictable ways, and that short-term solutions can have negative consequences in the long term.”
The authors of the study also suggest that the Huns may have been interested in food rather than gold, but this hypothesis is yet to be proven. This would be consistent with one of Attila’s demands from the Roman Empire – to provide him with an area along the Danube “five days journey wide.” It is likely that there were rich pastures there that would allow them to survive the drought.
