562 Walter Pohl
are concerned. With some Inner Asian Hunnic peoples, their self-identification can be
attested through coinage and inscriptions; in Europe, we have only the testimonies of
their literate neighbors. Recently, the debate has been reopened by Etienne de la Vais-
sière (2005), who has again argued for a direct link between the Xiong-nu, the Hunnic
populations in the steppes north of Iran, and the European Huns. Migrations can be
attested in many cases, and the core of the European Huns surely came from Inner Asia.
However, it is equally clear that each such migration changed the composition of the
migrating group, and that the logic of name-giving would tend to follow political lines
rather than purely ethnic ones.
Migrations
Many issues of Gothic and Hunnic identity may still be debatable, but what seems hardly
feasible on the basis of the evidence is any return to an old-style biological view of ethnic-
ity. In this respect, the migration age provides very instructive test cases. Although the evi-
dence (especially for self-identification) may be limited, it is on the whole more substantial
than for many other historical migrations. It allows reconstructing thelongue duréeof
accelerated ethnic processes: not only the successive emergence of several Gothic and
Hunnic groups, but also—a phenomenon that has so far received much less interest—the
disintegration and disappearance of ethnic groups. Traditional research has assumed the
near-annihilation of peoples that disappeared from the historical record. However, some
of them turned up on a more modest level long after their disappearance (Heather 1998).
Groups of Goths are occasionally attested centuries after the fall of their kingdoms, for
instance, as living under Visigothic law in ninth-century southern Gaul. The most strik-
ing case are the Crimean Goths described by the sixteenth-century diplomat Ghislain de
Busbecq. However, the normal development seems to have been the gradual assimila-
tion into the majority population, for instance, of the surviving Goths in Italy and Spain
(where, under Islamic rule, Ibn al-Qutiyya still referred to his Gothic origins in his name; ̄
see Christys 2002). The empire of Attila dissolved into several Hunnic groups, some of
which remained associated with one of his sons for a while. It is less clear how these were
related to the smaller “Hunnic” peoples north of the Black Sea in the sixth century, such
as Utigurs and Cutrigurs. These, in turn, were submerged by the expansion of Avars,
Bulgars, and Turks (Pohl 2002b). All these peoples could still be called Huns or even
Scythians by outsiders, but that was an old ethnographic habit that seems to have had
little to do with their self-designation.
Migrations, then, must be conceived as periods of accelerated ethnic transformation.
Gothic armies on the march (often accompanied by women and households) never con-
sisted only of Goths, and not even exclusively of Germanic speakers (Wolfram 2011).
When Theoderic invaded Italy, he was accompanied, among others, by Rugians, Bul-
gars, Alans, and probably also by fugitive Roman slaves and many other groups. We
know that the Rugians remained aloof in Ostrogothic Italy because they banned exogamy
(Procopius 1979, VII, 2, 1–3, p. 167), but other groups may have aspired to acceding
to the more prestigious Gothic identity. Attila’s armies were even more multi-ethnic,
including Goths, Gepids, Heruls, Sarmatians, and many others, mostly under their own
leaders. Admittedly most of these re-emerged as independent units after the fall of the