Xiongnü/History

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NOTE: This article deals mainly with any and all Asian equestrian cultures with some link or the other to the Xiongnü and their Hunnic and Turkic ancestors up to the early Middle Ages, with an eye to supporting three families of mods: the Warbirth series, the New World Empires series, and the Rise of Kings series, and the list of cultures mentioned here is not exhaustive.

For information dealing with the Turks, Mongols and Magyars, please consult Rise of Kings Wiki instead.

Central Asia had long been the home of various nomadic tribes based on the practice of animal herding and horses. Humans had inhabited the region ever since the prehistoric period. In the centuries before Genghis Khan's conquests, various Turkic and Mongol-Tungusic tribes inhabited the steppes, almost living 'in the saddle' by moving their herds and flocks from one place to another on the steppes to graze the animals. They perfected the art of shooting their short, 'composite' bows from horseback, making them formidable warriors. The land lends itself to breed a people who were used to harsh living conditions, mobility and war — elements that make for an ideal military force. These various ethnic groups alternatively ruled each other during this time, one group would gain power and subdue the others until another group formed to topple the previously superior power, so it is no coincidence that some of the most successful conquerors and invaders came from this region of the world.

One of the first politically organized groups to achieve this end was the Xiongnü. In their time, they posed a constant threat to ancient China by founding a mighty federation of tribes living in the steppe and continuously raiding the border regions of China and the city states of the Silk Road. The Chinese at first would seek to keep them out with the construction of the Great Wall, before choosing instead to wage war and diplomatic offensives to wear the Xiongnü down and when these methods proved successful, splinter groups from the Xiongnü nation would eventually arrive at the gates of the Romans in the 4th century to be known to the western world as the Huns, while others would travel to India and Iran, and create vast empires there. And while these nomadic empires would burn out, they would in turn inspire another horde of nomads — the Turkic peoples — to emulate their feats and shake the foundations of the civilised world. Still, such was the effect that the Xiongnü and their Hunnic descendents had on Western history that today, ethnic Turks and Magyars don't just consider them to be cultural heroes, but also see them as their ancestors.

Wayfarers All: Central Asia in Brief[edit | edit source]

Dominated in the main by five regions — Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan — Central Asia is a region in the Asian continent that extends from the mountains of western China to the shores of the Caspian Sea. Pakistan and Iran create the southern border of the region, and Russia’s vast expanse is to the north. This is a vast land with an extremely varied geography, including high mountain passes through vast mountain ranges, such as the Tian Shan, Hindu Kush, and the Pamirs. The region is also home to the vast Kara Kum and Kyzyl Kum deserts, which dominate the interior with extensive spans of sand and desolation. The expansive treeless, grassy steppes surrounding the desert regions are considered an extension of Eastern Europe’s steppes, and for many thousands of years ago have had been the home of various nomadic tribes based on the practice of animal herding and horses — an animal that would soon make the peoples of Central Asia, in particular the Xiongnü and their successors, highly influential across the Old World.

Western Raiders, Northern Warriors: The Steppe Barbarians of Old[edit | edit source]

The story of the Xiongnü and their descendents (other cultures, most notably the Avars, Khazars, Pechenegs and Turkish tribes) begins in the eastern half of Asia, with possible references to them in the Warring States-era Liji (Book of Rites; suspected to be edited by none other than Confucius himself, and possibly relying on older materials that are now lost to us). In it, it is stated,

"Those on the west were called Rong. They had their hair unbound, and wore skins. Some of them did not eat grain-food."

Supplementary Chinese sources speak of the Rong in an antagonistic manner, stating that the Rong peoples were warlike and often raided Chinese lands for booty. On the one hand, they were savage barbarians, yet in other accounts, the Rong were armed with horse and chariot, just like the warriors of Zhou themselves. Other sources of the Zhou period speak of how Rong influence stretched across what is today the western regions of China, and how the state of Qin was founded originally as a military garrison to provide horses for military use against the Rong — who were accused of having assassinated King You of Zhou and razed his capital, purportedly, at the behest of disgruntled in-laws. Yet, on the other hand other sources concede that the Rong peoples were also capable of being friendly enough to interact with the Chinese — the Zhou were said to have had relations with Rong tribes in the decades before they ascended to kingship of China (they originally had their stronghold near Mount Qi, on the border straddling modern Shaanxi to the east and Gansu to the west).

Qin, bordering the easternmost Rong lands, sought to expand during the Spring and Autumn period in Zhou China, and one of its first victims prior to the rest of China was a Rong kingdom to its west called Yiqu. Yiqu and Qin had a complicated relationship that was fraught with conflict but it appears that by the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, the people of Yiqu had been successfully assimilated by the Qin through some means or the other. Still, the experiences of the later kingdom of Zhao (whose foundation began the Warring States Period of China) with the Rong (and their alleged affiliates, the Xunzhou and Xianyun) were classically and unequivocally unpleasant.

Roundel scythoi.png Xianyu.png

If there were ever links between the mysterious Xianyun, Xunzhou and the classical Xiongnü, they have not proven to be any clearer than the ones between the latter and the Xionites, viz, the Huns who later sacked Rome, Persia and India. Some older western scholars believed the Xiongnu migrated to the west and reappeared in Eastern Europe as the Huns in the 4th century CE. One piece of evidence, however, does seem to suggest that there was indeed a link between the Xiongnü confederacy and the Black and White Huns who terrorised the lands west of China in later centuries. In 1907CE, letters written in Sogdian were found in the ruins of a watchtower west of the city of Dunhuang in Gansu (a region known to have had an ethnic Sogdian community) which talks of the 311CE destruction of Luoyang (then the capital of the Western Jin dynasty) at the hands of the Xiongnü masters of the then kingdom of Zhao (as attested by the Tang-era Jin Shu, "Book of Jin"). One of these letters stated that Luoyang had been sacked and destroyed by a people called the "Xwn" or "Hoon" in Sogdian — a word that would not have been too dissimilar later to the name the Romans gave to the Huns of Attila ("hunni"; "khunnoi") or the term "Hunas" which was used to refer to the Hephtalites and the Alchons who settled in Bactria and devastated the lands of the Sasanians and Guptas.

But if they were indeed linked, then it would not be surprising — from the Warring States era onward until its eventual annexation by Qin, Zhao was frequently threatened by the Xianyun — Sima Qian's Records record a rash of barbarian incursions against Zhao in the 260s BCE. Whatever the relations between these groups (if they truly did exist), the Xiongnü as we know them began to make their presence felt shortly before Qin unified all of China.

Union on the Steppe: The Xiongnü Confederacy[edit | edit source]

As mentioned before, the nomad tribes of the Xiongnu began coalescing into a single polity, expanding their power and influence at the end of the Warring States period when the Chinese states were occupied by intensive wars against each other. While they did not seem dangerous at first, however, when the Qin fell, this state of affairs would soon change.

At the beginning of the 2nd century BCE, a nomad chieftain named Modu (or possibly Bordur) made himself ruler (chanyu/shanyu; a term similar to the Turco-Mongol title khan - but some scholars opine that the actual title used by Modu's successors was darkhan/tarkhan/daroga and also used by Mongols even today) over the Xiongnü tribes. The territory that was inhabited or roamed by the Xiongnu tribes stretched from the Ili Basin in the far west of modern China to the pastures of modern Mongolia. When the Xiongnu subjugated neighbouring tribes, these were incorporated into the Xiongnu federation and took over the name of the Xiongnü although they might be of a very different ethnicity. This custom was followed by all subsequent mighty steppe peoples that should dominate the Mongolian grasslands (and is one of the theories linking the peoples known as Xionites, Huns or Hunas in Western Asia and Rome to the Asian Xiongnü).

After the downfall of Qin and the subsequent turbulent years of the Chu-Han civil war in China, the time for Modu came to make his move. The Xiongnü quickly moved to subjugated their neighbours like the Yuezhi (who were allied to the Chinese) and the Dingling, another nomadic confederacy. As a result of Xiongnü activity, the regions of Shaanxi, Shanxi and Hebei were despoiled. The efforts of emperor Han Gaozu (r 206-195 BCE), founder of the Han dynasty, to repel the barbarians were without positive results and lead to a policy of "peacful approachment" (heqin 和親) that was in fact nothing else than the delivery of tributes by the Chinese to appease the "plundering instinct" of the nomads. The provision of silk and other items of a highly sophisticated culture eventually contributed to the "degeneration" of the barbarian character of the Xiongnü. For added effect, (alleged) princesses were given to the Xiongnü rulers.

While heqin meant that Xiongnü were able to expand their territory into modern Xinjiang and thereby controlled the region of the later Silk Road, it however allowed the Chinese to buy time to stabilise internal politics. By the time of the reign of Wudi (141-87BCE), China was now ready to repudiate the heqin treaties with the Xiongnü: the Chinese generals Wei Qing and Huo Qubing conquered the region of modern Gansu and opened the way to Central Asia. This was not an easy task, however: the many wars that the Han fought with the Xiongnü often ebbed and flowed one way or the other but by 25BCE, the Xiongnü Empire finally collapsed following a civil war into northern and southern factions: while the the southern Xiongnu became sedentate and settled down in the area of modern Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, side by side with Chinese inhabitants, the northern faction tribes were defeated in 89CE by the Han generals Dou Xian and Geng Bing.

From then onward, the Xiongnu ceased to represent a military challenge for the Chinese for almost three centuries. And although they would make a brief political resurgence after the fifteen-year "War of the Eight Princes" — this time the Xiongnü reorganised themselves as Han Zhao, ie "the Han kingdom of Zhao", they would have to compete with various other kingdoms founded by other nomadic tribes resettled in China a century before. By 388CE, the Xiongnü were for all purposes displaced in the main, both in China and in the north, by a new people — the Xianbei, who would hold sway over northern China for the better part of the next three centuries.

The Scourge of God in the West: The Huns[edit | edit source]

While China was mired in the chaos of the Sixteen Kingdoms, the western world wasn't faring any better — centuries of prolonged and protracted warfare, as well as two pandemics had left the civilisations of India, Europe and the Middle East open to incursions from the north, east and west, sparking off the beginning of what is now known as the "Migration Period" of the Germanic tribes, or the Völkerwanderung. But of these, the Huns - also known as the Xionites in the Classical West, and Hunas in India, possibly linked to the old Xiongnü confederacy subjugated by the Han - were by far the most destructive.

The Roman soldier Ammianus Marcellinus, who had the ill luck to fight them, left the following unflatteringly candid observation:

They have a sort of shapeless lump, if I may say so, not a face, and pinholes rather than eyes.

The Romans considered the Huns to be the most barbaric of all barbarians, and found their appearance repulsive (this was in part Roman opinion of ‘oriental’ features, but also many Steppe nomads used to bind the heads of their children to distort the shape of the skull as they grew up, and would sometimes slash their own faces to leave deliberate scars). Even the Goths thought that the Huns were descended from ‘witches and evil spirits’ from the East. The most notorious leader of the Huns was Attila (406-453CE), the "Scourge of God", who having put the Balkans (to the very walls of Constantinople), France, and northern Italy, to fire and the sword, and then extracted tribute from the Romans to not ravage them any more.

The first known encounter with the Huns in Europe took place in the late 4th century CE, when the Huns first emerged in the regions where Ukraine now lies. This pushed the resident Ostrogoths and Visigoths (who lived west of the Ostrogoths, around the Carpathians/in Transylvania) into Roman territory and is regarded as a significant step towards the so-called 'Dark Ages'. Leveraging the weakness of Rome and her conflicts with the Germans, the Huns would eventually rally around a chieftain called Attila, who then formed a loose confederacy of different peoples - Huns, Germans, Alans, and sometimes, a few Roman defectors. United thus, the Attila's hordes would not just seize control the great prairie region of Pannoia for his capital, but would also ravage northern Europe, reaching even northern Italy by 452CE. Nevertheless, Attila's empire in the west did not last long after his death. Within the span of a century, civil war set in and the Huns were soon scattered when the Ostrogoths rose up against them.

In the Middle East and India, though, it was another story. While Attila's Pannonian kingdom was but a flash in the pan, Hunnic rule and influence across southwestern Asia was to last for many centuries, and the havoc they wreaked on Iran and India would pave the way to a new regional order where eastern nomadic tribes would stamp their mark on the Middle East and northern India for almost a millennium. In 379CE, a Hunnic horde struck Bactria in 388CE, seizing control of the strategic city of Kabul from the Persian Sasanian empire. Next, they invaded the Persia heartland in 395CE, taking advantage of a weakened Roman garrison in Anatolia to ride down into the northern Middle East to attack Ctestiphon (then the capital of the Sasanians). Although this invasion was repulsed, it caused much damage — Roman sources writing decades after stated the main reason the Huns invaded Persia was due to a famine; the Huns were seeking plunder in order to survive.

But while the Sasanians could rebuff this attack against their core heartlands, they were not so lucky during their next encounter with the Huns: this time, the Sasanians were now on the brink of civil war. A Sasanian prince, named Peroz, called to the Huns for help in his struggle against his brother and while Peroz prevailed and became emperor, he left Persia open to a Hunnic horde to the northeast - the Hephtalites. Persia was sacked in again 474CE and Peroz himself was captured by the Hephtalite Huns. Peroz's daughter Perodokht was taken as a hostage and royal concubine, while the empire itself went into vassalage for almost 80 years. During this time, the Hephtalites repeatedly sacked the eastern reaches of the empire, and bled it dry — in the process, Bactria and Sogdiana would be lost to the Sasanians forever.

This then led to another domino in Western Asia falling: India. By the time the Huns had ensconced themselves in Bactria and Sogdiana, the Sasanians and the Kushans of northern India had been fighting several wars, and the Kushans were on the back foot. Seizing the chance, the Huns


the wars of the Hephtalites or "White Huns" in India laid pressure on the Guptas until the latter's empire dissolved by the 550s CE.

Even so, Hunnic domination of northern India - comprising the lands from the Bactrian mountains all the way to the dry expanses in the northwest of the present-day Republic - would not last. Following the Battle of Sondani in the 530s CE, the White Huns were finally contained to the lands west and north of the Indus. By the 660s CE, the last vestiges of Hunnic rule in India were effaced by a new dynasty of Turkic provenance, the Shahis, but their legacy of cavalry tactics, as well as the worship of the Hindu god Shiva, and the sun, would continue for centuries more in India proper. Modern day Afghanistan and Pakistan aside, the peoples of present-day Rajasthan and Gujarat are said to be the last descendents of the Huns in India. Of these, the formerly nomadic equestrian Jat peoples are said to be direct descendents of the Huns in modern day India.

Nevertheless, the Persians tenaciously held out and in 531CE, the Persian king-emperor Khosrau reached out to a new group of nomadic newcomers - the Turks. Together, the Turco-Persian alliance went after the Hephtalites: by 557CE, the Hephtalite empire ceased to exist, and this time the Huns were themselves forced to pay tribute to the Sasanians.

In the 7th century they allied with the Persians to fight the Saracen invasion. However, in the battle of Badghis in 654 the Persians and the Huns were finally defeated by the Saracens.

The Avars[edit | edit source]

Arriving in Europe from the Central Asian steppes in the mid-sixth century CE, the Avars subsequently dominated much of Central and Eastern Europe for almost 250 years. They constructed a fast-expanding steppe empire in the middle of Europe, with its core in modern Hungary, and challenged Byzantium with repeated raids into the Balkan provinces. In 626CE, they were the first barbarian power to besiege Constantinople, in an alliance with the Persians. After the failure of the siege, their expansive phase was over, but they managed to maintain their rule for almost another two centuries. Only in the late eighth century did their empire fall, under the pressure of the Frankish armies of Charlemagne. Soon, they disappeared as a distinct political and ethnic unit, the last few remaining survivors being assimilated into the Magyar Confederacy when the latter arrived decades later.

The Avars are interesting not least because of their seeming contradictions: a nomad people that soon became settled in Central Europe; ruthless warriors but always ready for negotiations and treaties; firmly rooted in Europe but looking out to the far east until the end; one of the great powers in early medieval Europe but one that thus far has received little attention from researchers, in particular in the English-speaking world. In fact, the origins of the name of the modern nation of Hungary today may well lie with the Avars - sources in their time speak of Avars referring themselves as "Ungar" or "Ongur" (in contrast, the Hungarian name for modern Hungary is Magyarország).

Unlike the Mongols, however, the origins of the Avars, like those of the Magyars, still remain unclear. For centuries, the Central Asian background of the Avars remained quite blurred, but it made the Avars stand out in a particular light. To some extent, the sixth century was a period of early globalization, in which we get surprising information about far-reaching contacts along the silk road. To find allies against Avars and Persians, Byzantine envoys travelled as far as the Tienshan mountains. Based upon the works of the Byzantine chronicler Theophypact Simokatta (and other sources) popular thought had the European Avars being a combination of a Uyghur people (Hund) and Mongolian people (Var) who united around Balkh in present-day Afghanistan sometime between 410-470CE because of the archaeological evidence as well as etymology on Avar khagan names like Bayan (meaining "prosperous" in Mongol). Forming a confederation in present Central Eurasia, they tried to survive in the competition with other Turkic tribes (most notably the Rouran of north and central China), by which they were eventually expelled. The survivors of this group of Turkic/Mongol people migrated toward East Europe where they established the Avars Khaganate 502-530CE, starting an era of conquest.

In previous decades, another theory arose arguing that the Avars were thought to have been related to the Rouran (also known as the Juan-Juan) in western China (if not equated to the same), yet this equation was also considered to be a gross generalisation since the Rouran continued to exist after being overthrown by the Asena until 557 while Sarosios was already well established as Khagan of the Avars in Europe by that time. There is, however, evidence that an element of the European Avars may have been, at least for a little while, a small part of the Rouran confederacy.

To this day, there are three points of origin suggested for the Avar peoples - one is in the Caucasus as a branch of the Iberi, another is in the Hindu Kush around present-day Kabul, and another is around lake Balkash in north-east Kazakhstan (Transiaxartea). To resolve the controversy, a genetic test of human remains excavated in 66 separate Avar graves dating from the early Middle Ages in the Carpathian Mountains of central Europe was undertaken in 2022 by a joint team of academics drawn from Hungary, the United States and Germany. The lead researcher of the team, Guido Gnecchi-Ruscone, stated:

“Besides their clear affinity to Northeast Asia and their likely origin due to the fall of the Rouran Empire, we also see that the 7th-century Avar period elites show 20 to 30 percent of additional non-local ancestry, likely associated with the North Caucasus and the Western Asian Steppe, which could suggest further migration from the Steppe after their arrival in the 6th century.”

Perhaps a suitable synthesis of these ideas may be that they were originally inhabitants of Khwarezmia and had thus influence in all three areas.

Challenges to Avar rule[edit | edit source]

  • Samo of Moravia
  • The Bulgars

Turks[edit | edit source]

The Western Turkic Khaganate, or the Onogur "Ten Tribes" confederacy as it was known, was said to be an extensive tribal confederation that controlled the territories we now today identify as the Central Asian republics, ranging from the Caspian Sea eastwards towards the Pamirs, and was a thorn in the flesh of the Chinese, who identified this polity by the name of Xitujue ie "West Turks.

Thanks to their raids in the Tarim Basin in the early 7th century CE, the Chinese, now reunited and consolidated under the Tang regime, decided that enough was enough: Chinese punitive expeditions escorted by friendly Uyghur allies were despatched to subdue the Turks and punish their Sogdian and Kuchan allies throughout the 650s CE. The expeditions met with success, and the Khaganate collapsed. Survivors of the disaster regrouped, and while some eventually would form the Magyar confederacy in the Urals (the future ancestors of the Hungarian state in eastern Europe), others would eventually settle in the plateaus and plains of the Caucasus region, just due west of the Caspian Sea.

References[edit | edit source]

Xiongnü & Huns:

Avars:

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