Battle of Utus

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Battle of Utus
date 447
place near the river Wit in what is now Bulgaria
output Eastern Roman defeat
Parties to the conflict

Simple Labarum2.svg Eastern Roman Empire

Huns

Commander

General Arnegisclus

Atilla

losses

heavy

heavy

The Battle of Utus was fought in 447 between the Eastern Romans and the Huns under the leadership of Attila on the bank of what is now the Wit River in what is now Bulgaria . It was the last major battle between the two opponents.

The details of Atilla's campaign that led to the Battle of Utus and the events that followed are unclear. Several sources report on the battle ( Jordanes ' Romana , the Chronicle of Marcellinus Comes and the Easter Chronicle ). However, the unclear sources do not allow an exact reconstruction of the course of events.

battle

For the first time in 443, after the Eastern Roman Empire had stopped paying tribute to the Huns, Attila's armies plundered the Eastern Roman Balkan provinces, again in 447. A strong Roman army under Arnegisclus , the magister utriusque militiae , "master of both troops" (infantry and cavalry) of Thrace, marched from their quarters in Marcianopolis westwards and met the Hunn army on the river Utus. Arnegisclus was one of the commanders whom Attila had defeated in the 443 campaign .

The Roman army was a multi-part force and included the armies of the Illyricum , Thrace , and the emperor's troops. The Romans were defeated, but it appears that the losses on both sides have been high. Arnegisclu's horse was killed, he continued fighting on foot until he was killed.

consequences

Marcianopolis fell in direct consequence to the Huns, who destroyed it; the city was then orphaned until Emperor Justinian restored it a hundred years later. Constantinople , the capital of the Eastern Empire, came under direct pressure from the Huns, as its walls had been badly damaged by an earthquake in 447 and its population suffered from an outbreak of the plague. However, the Praetorian Prefect of the East Constantinus was able to restore the walls in just two months, as he involved the entire working population of the city as well as the circus parties in the work. This hasty work as well as the hasty relocation of a unit of Isaurians to the city, and finally also the high losses that the Romans had inflicted on the Huns on Utus, persuaded Attila not to attempt a siege of Constantinople.

Instead, Attila marched south and devastated the now defenseless Balkan provinces (i.e. the Illyricum , Thrace , Moesia , Scythia Minor and the Roman Dacia) until he turned back at Thermopylae . Callinicus von Rufinianae wrote in his life of Saint Hypatius , who was living in Thrace at the time: more than a hundred cities were conquered, Constantinople was in danger and almost all of the inhabitants fled the city , although this is probably an exaggeration. Peace was only restored by a treaty between Atilla and the Eastern Roman Empire in 448. In this contract Theodosius II committed himself to a high annual tribute to Attila. In addition, a no man's land was created in what is actually Roman territory; it stretched a five-day trip south of the Danube and functioned as a buffer zone .

Remarks

  1. ^ Williams (1999), p. 250.
  2. ^ John Martindale, John Morris: The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire . Volume 2. Cambridge 1980, p. 151.
  3. ↑ a b c Williams (1999) p. 79.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Thompson (1996), pp. 101-102.
  5. ↑ Thompson (1996), pp. 99-100.
  6. ↑ (Blue and Green, the notorious circus parties in the hippodrome of Constantinople ) Cf. Thompson (1996), p. 100
  7. ↑ Williams (1999), p. 80.

literature

  • Edward Arthur Thompson : The Huns . Blackwell, Oxford et al. a. 1996 (ND from 1948 with a new afterword, several subsequent new editions), ISBN 0-631-21443-7
  • Stephen Williams, Gerard Friell: The Rome that Did Not Fall: The Survival of the East in the Fifth Century . Routledge, London a. a. 1999, ISBN 978-0-415-15403-1