A new study by scientists from the University of Cambridge provides more information about the relationship between the Romans and the Huns. Scientists are looking for an explanation for the very expansive nature of the Huns and associate it with severe weather conditions, specifically drought.
The Huns were nomadic people living in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia between the 1st and 7th centuries CE. It was because of this warlike person that the Great Migration of barbarian peoples to the west occurred and largely led to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE.
The Romans learned about the Huns in 376 CE, when the Goths were forced under pressure of the Huns to migrate west and look for new seats in Roman lands. Thanks to the messages of a Roman historian from the 4th century CE. – Ammianus Marcellinus – we get a very colourful description of the appearance, life and way of fighting off the wild Huns.
In the study mentioned earlier, it was possible to determine what temperatures existed in Europe until the 2nd century BC. As it turns out, in the middle of the 4th century CE, in the years 447, 451, and 452, there were extremely dry years in the Pannonian Basin. As a result of the invasion, conducted in the middle of the 5th century CE, in Moesia and deeper into the Balkans, the Huns controlled these areas for some time and pursued an aggressive policy towards the inhabited population. Researchers associate severe weather conditions with the unusual aggression of the Huns, who thus developed a strategy for dealing with extreme climatic conditions.
The study “The role of drought during the Hunnic incursions into central-east Europe in the 4th and 5th c. CE” was published in the “Journal of Roman Archeology” (2022).
