Battle of the Utus

Battle of the Utus
Date 447 Location near Vit river, Bulgaria Result Roman defeat
Belligerents
Eastern Roman Empire	Huns
Commanders and leaders
General Arnegisclus	Attila the Hun
Strength
unknown	unknown
Casualties and losses
heavy	heavy

The Battle of the Utus was fought in 447 between the army of Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, and the Huns led by Attila at what is today the Vit river in Bulgaria. It was the last of the bloody pitched battles between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Huns, as the former attempted to stave off the Hunnic invasion.

The details about Attila's campaign which culminated in the battle of Utus, as well as the events afterwards, are obscure. Only a few short passages from the extant Byzantine sources (Jordanes' Romana, Marcellinus Comes chronicle and Paschal Chronicle) are available. Therefore, as with the whole activity of Attila's Huns in the Balkans, the fragmentary evidence does not permit an undisputed reconstruction of the events.

Battle

In the previous years the Huns had invaded the Balkan regions of the Eastern Empire, as punishment for refusing to continue tributes to Attila. In 447, Attila's army invaded the Balkan provinces again. A strong Roman force under general Arnegisclus, magister utriusquae militiae, "master of both forces" (both foot and horse) of Thrace, moved out of its base at Marcianople westwards and engaged the Hunnic army at Utus in the roman province of Dacia Ripensis. It must be noted that Arnegisclus was one of the defeated Roman commanders during Attila's campaign of 443.

The Roman army was most likely a combined force, including the field armies of Illyricum, Thrace, and the Army in Emperor's Presence. Next to no details of the battle are known, with the exception that general Arnegisclus, fought bravely on foot until being cut down after his horse was killed. The Romans were defeated, but it seems that losses were severe for both sides.

Aftermath

An immediate result of the Roman defeat was the fall of Marcianople; after the battle, the city laid desolate until the Emperor Justinian restored it one hundred years later. Even worse, Constantinople, the capital of the eastern half of the Roman empire, was under the grave threat of the Huns, as its walls had been ruined during an earthquake in January 447 and its population suffered from the ensued plague. However, the Praetorian prefect Flavius Constantinus managed to repair the walls in just two months by mobilizing the city's manpower, with the help of the Circus factions. These hasty repairs combined with the urgent transfer of a body of Isaurian soldiers into the city and the heavy losses incurred by the Huns' army in the Battle of Utus forced Attila to abandon any thought of besieging the capital.

Instead, Attila marched south and laid waste the now-defenseless Balkan provinces (including Illyricum, Thrace, Moesia, Scythia and both provinces of Roman Dacia) until he was turned back at Thermopylae. Monk Callinicus of Rufinianae wrote in his Life of Saint Hypatius, who was still living in Thrace at the time, that "more than a hundred cities were captured, Constantinople almost came into danger and most men fled from it", although this was probably exaggerated. Peace was only restored when a treaty was signed a year later in 448; under the terms of this treaty, the Eastern Emperor Theodosius II agreed to pay Attila a large annual tribute. Under the same treaty, a vast no man's land in the Roman territory was created; this extended to a distance of a five days' journey south of the Danube and functioned as a buffer zone.

Sources

• Martindale, J. R. (ed.). The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1980, vol.2, ISBN 0-521-20159-4
• Thompson, E. A.; Heather, Peter. The Huns, Blackwell, 1999. ISBN 0-631-21443-7
• Williams, Stephen; Friell, Gerard. The Rome that Did Not Fall: The Survival of the East in the Fifth Century, Routledge, 1999. ISBN 978-0415154031