White Huns: Rise and Decline

[Music] in one of our past videos we outlined the origins of the Hunnic tribes which famously invaded the Roman Empire and their relationship with the ancient Xiong nu whom they probably considered glorious conquering ancestors that was not the end of the story however and today we'll expand on the Huns with a story of their lesser-known branch while a tiller and his horde were menacing the Roman Empire the white Huns bore down on the great Sassanid Empire and India in the east but where did these enigmatic horse Lords come from and how did they impact life in the east much like their cousins the white Huns were almost definitely a political grouping which emerged from the old Xiong nu Empire or over they also used the designation of Han to associate themselves with centuries-old glories and victory those triumphs long ago gave way to a weakened Xiong nu remnant which was forced ignominiously back into the Altai mountains during the first and second centuries ad suffering attacks and deprivation at the hands of more powerful neighbors on all sides however by the fourth century this situation had all changed with the weakening of external enemies in the south and west and the strengthening of a new roar incarnate in the east these are people's were not helped by climate degradation in the Altai region during the mid fourth century leading to the hanok population movements noted in greco-roman sources as the European Huns embarked on their westward expansion another branch of Huns suddenly pushed south into Central Asia in the 350s ad these white Huns from the Altai mountains emerged in the region of sogdia and quickly destroyed what was left of the kangju state which had existed for centuries now the white hunt started attacking the sassanid empire from the northeast moreover these new hanok invaders played a major role in toppling be.we and remnants of the Kushan Empire in southern Central Asia and India which was unable to resist effectively by 360 ad the ruling white Hun tribe the kid rights possessed the prosperous Silk Road nexus of Bactria and its axis and jack city's rivers the ethnicity of these ruling kid rights has been a heated debate among historians for decades with no definitive conclusion however the main versions are that they were proto mongolic Turkic or anak this was influenced by the account of Byzantine historian procopius during the 6th century he mistakenly thought that white was used to distinguish them from what he considered the Huns with more of an Asian appearance however we know that the color white signified a westerly direction for the Huns while black meant north blue east and red south of the four blue and black were almost always considered superior in step Society this meant that nomadic groups existing in the north and east hypothetical black Huns and blue Huns would have possessed seniority over their Western counterparts the origins of such tradition can be speculated to have begun during the revered Xiong nu Empire which was in the East kiddo right usage of earlier symbolism of the cushions in their coinage led some historians to designate an Iranian identity to them but it's becoming evident that instead they were hanok invaders who occupied eastern iran becoming iran eyes after the conquest we know that in some prototype dialects the word ki dirty meant the West according to the Chinese sauce base she a killer right king called ki dhaara conquered territory north and south of the hindu kush and before 410 had subjected the entire guitarra region to Hannukah domination even with their now formidable indian domains the kid rights weren't content and now came up against a truly formidable imperial power the GUP to Empire with its capital at the old Mauryan heartland of pataliputra during the four decade-long reign of the Gupta King chimera Gupta the first mounted hordes of white Hun Warriors launched an assault into the Punjab and an inscription from a pillar created later tells of how the attacks of these Hana almost destroyed the Empire the Indians did manage to hold on desperately and in the year 455 the beleaguered kumara Gupta abdicated the throne and control of his defeated army to a more Marshall II inclined son skander Gupta however even this new leader had troubles with the hun menace further inscriptions describe how Skanda Gupta had to re-establish his lineage which had been made to totter by the invasions during particularly bad times the Gupta ruler even had to spend a night sleeping on the bare earth while boasting by the king claims that he vanquished the hun threat and conquered the whole world this is a fantasy after this devastating series of raids and invasions the Kido rights controlled most of the Punjab and the Guptas permanently lost their western lands the driving force behind these relentless conquests doesn't seem to have just been desire for plunder however necessity probably had something to do with it over the course of the later 5th and early 6th centuries the kid rights came under attack from another new dynasty of nomadic warriors the half the lights who had begun to push the kid right south into the industry j'en the Sassanid Empire to the west led by yes Ducote ii halted payments to the weakening kiddie rides by 442 after being subject to Hunnic raids for a century by the air 450 Persian forces were even launching attacks into Bactria the Kido rights were now surrounded from the west and north and smelling blood in the water yes the Girt demanded tribute from them the kiddie rights refused and the subsequent military engagement between the two powers was a decisive Persian defeat reversing all of the Empire's gains over the last cade even at their weakest point these Huns were capable of trancing the armies of a settled empire what made matters even more grave was a dynastic civil war in sassanid lands which erupted shortly after Yazdi Gerdes death in 457 an elder child [ __ ] midst ascended to the throne but he was opposed by perros a younger sibling who had the support of a few Persian nobles the latter managed to gain victory primarily because he had an army of heft alight mercenaries at his disposal indicating the first of many times that this new ruling caste of white Huns intervened in Persia as we might expect this assistance wasn't free of charge and in return perils the first was forced to relinquish the eastern most assassinated possessions in Central Asia despite suffering increasing attacks by their heft alight kin the kid rights were not totally extinct just yet sensing Persian weakness they began attacking once again and in 464 the desperate sharp arrows was even forced to ask the Byzantines for financial assistance against them when the Romans declined this request perils instead attempted to placate the nomads by offering his sister in marriage to the Kitteridge King Conchas steppe warlords often gained prestige by marrying princesses of large empires however perils unsuccessfully tried to deceive Conchas by sending a lowborn woman instead when this was discovered 300 Persian officials were invited to be kid right realm and were subsequently executed or mutilated to humiliate the sharp perils wasn't going to take the murder of his people quietly and war was quickly resumed the balance of power between the kiddy rides and sassanids was initially relatively even but was tipped in Persia's favour when the now mighty heft alights intervened again the Allied armies crushed a killer I'd force and then wrenched bulk from their control after which they never recovered any remaining Kitteridge forces retreated south into their gontar and lands where they were later crushed by the heft alights the victorious alliance between the sassanids and half the lights predictably broke apart as after the coup de Rights had been crushed their heft the light cousins seized all of their territory that the Persians wanted for themselves and essentially assumed command of the white hand state when the Sassanid Shah tried to take these prosperous eastern lands back from his erstwhile nomadic allies the Persians were trance by a heft the light army led by a hanok king known as Krishna Vaz at Gorgon in 469 while perils managed to escape the first time he was captured by the Huns on to later occasions but managed to escape execution both times by paying a massive tribute in 471 insulted by Krishna Vance's letters perros supported by his o barian and Albanian vassals attacks the heft delights again but was defeated somewhere in modern Turkmenistan and was forced to send his Air Cav ad to the F the light Court as a hostage this doesn't appear to have made perils think twice about attacking the Huns again and according to procopius the Shah was finally killed in a catastrophic battle at Herat in 484 in which almost the entire Persian army was annihilated by the fearsome white Huns what ensued was a two-year chaotic interlude during which the landholding Persian Nobles elected Paris's brother Bala to the throne the half the lights intervened after this and instead stated covant the first on the throne marrying him to be daughter of their reigning king after around a decade of his rule Chabad was forced to seek sanctuary with his hanok backers due to a noble revolt against him the details of which will probably go into in a future video after this however he managed to convince the hef the lights to supply him 30,000 troops to take back his kingdom though he managed to regain the Sassanid Empire the price was massive gavage was forced to give away more lands in the east to the Huns and burdened the Treasury by agreeing to pay an increase tribute coins from the sassanid empire during this period we're even count him out with a half the light symbol indicating the dominance of the nomads worse was the literal dominance white hand Kings claimed over the entirety of Iran they proclaimed legitimate rule over the lands of Iran while the sassanids were mayor vassals this subjugation would continue for almost a century until the eventual reign of kasra the first with Persia now under their Dominion the hef the lights turned East just as the kiddy rides had but on a larger scale in the last decade of the fifth century the valuable Teheran Basin cities of kashgar and cotton which had centuries before been under Chinese rule were taken by the Huns between 497 and 509 the city of Kara Shah and the region of a room Chi was seized Chinese historical records such as the yang Shu lists among the heft alights domains Persia Kashmir kara Shah Cucho kashgar and Kota nearly all of the lands of western and eastern Turkestan were now under Hunnic rule in India as we mentioned before the half the lights finally managed to root out the Kitteridge remnant in Gant ara and the rest of Northwest India during the late 5th century a development which turned out to be incredibly destructive to the Guptas with its now relatively weak Kida right buffer wiped out the Indians began to suffer have the light attacks during the reign of their king Buddha Gupta who's realm was in terminal decline by the turn of the 6th century as the 500s began and the white hand state reached the very zenith of its power the heft alights appointed a sub king known as Tora mana to their domains in India such sub kings were common in step societies ruling almost autonomous regions under the overall overlordship of a higher ruler the Indians knew - Ramana rather grandiosely as the boundlessly famed ruler of the earth who conquered Western and Central India as far east as modern boo pal and subjected those areas in the West to total domination his son known by the name mahir Akula expanded Lee hefter light sub Kingdom in India even more and eventually came to rule over the entire north with his capital at sakala unfortunately for the natives of the land it is said that their Hanover Lord was an incredibly cruel and brutal man destroying Buddhist holy sites and temples mercilessly killing monks and putting monasteries to the torch eventually the Indians revolted against mahir Akula captured and then replaced him with a brother this Indian step domain was only hold for around two decades before it was retaken by a Gupta reconquest nevertheless by the middle of the 6th century the white hun Empire ruled by the heft alights was almost definitely the most territorially extensive and influential in the entire world it extended from the eastern tearin basin in the east and the steppe of Kazakhstan in the north to the prosperous lands of India in the south and the borders of Byzantium in the west through its persian vassals from the very peak of their power the half the lights would soon suffer the fate of their kid right predecessors as a new extremely powerful nomadic groups rose in the East the gurke Turks who had conquered the old roar incarnate by the middle of the 5th century half a century later they sought to expand their realm by subjugating the hedge delights as well sensing an opportunity to rid his empire of the hated Hunnic yoke formally tribute bearing sassanids shark crossroad the first formed an alliance with the gurke turks against his hun overlords the turkish Kurgan reacted quickly to this request and crossed the border capturing the half the light occupied city of Tashkent in the Western Terra basin and then advancing to Baqarah outside the city a titanic eight-day long conflict took place between the western coggan is Tammy and F the light King get far in this bitter clash of steppe warlords the gurke Turks were victorious and the white Huns were utterly crushed their military might severely diminished the victors pushed south almost unimpeded and occupies transoxiana though the defeated honey commies fled south as the Kid rights had before them they were trapped between their rising nomadic conquerors and the resurgent Persians it was the end for the half the light dynasty and its last great ruler surrendered to char khusro sometime between 560 and 563 though they are mostly forgotten in popular imagination when compared to the European hands of Attila the impact of the white Huns in Persia and India was just as profound as that of Attila in the West for centuries the great sassanid dynasty had asserted its legitimacy over Iran by emphasizing their victories against a traditional enemy which had unleashed terrible destruction in Persian lands for centuries the Romans however military defeat and humiliation at the hands of the F delight hun warlords rendered this obsolete meaning vast new claims to the throne had to be found what eventually took its place was an almost nationalistic history of the sassanids constructed around the great deeds of an almost certainly pathologized precursor to the ruling dynasty the canyons of Zoroastrian legend these quasi infallible ancient monarchs had undergone similar hardships against a conquering enemy and had eventually triumphed a parallel which helped to excuse the devastating hun inflicted defeats of Sassanid Persia this strengthening of Persian identity inflamed by Hunnic domination during the fifth and sixth centuries possibly saved native Iranian culture in the end when the sassanid dynasty fell and the Islamic caliphate swallowed the ancient lands of Cyrus and Darius Persia's enduring traditions would defy total assimilation and remain a distinct entity in the Islamic world proud of its ancient past in the lands of India invasions of the so-called Hanna led to the creation of an entirely new political order fragmented mysterious and possibly hung LED states of Northwestern India such as the Turks Shahi dynasty and the Sindh based Gujarati Hara dynasty effectively served as a bulwark shielding the subcontinent from Muslim attack for centuries in the process of stopping Islamic military expansion in this way they guarded India's polytheistic Hindu religion and culture from islamization though the Muslims eventually broke through beginning in the 10th century martial conversions were mostly a thing of the past by this point allowing traditionally Indian ways of life to continue into the future some of the militaristic Huns may have been instrumental in the future creation of the Rajputs a people who would become known for their own warlike traditions feats of bravery and valor and especially their skills as cavalry men we will continue talking about steppe civilizations so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button we would like to express our gratitude to our patreon supporters aunts channel members who make the creation of our videos possible now you can also support us by buying our merchandise by the link in the description this is the kings and Generals channel and we will catch you on the next one

Channel: Kings and Generals

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Keywords: Hun, Huns, attila, china, han, rome, roman empire, catalaunian plains, aetius, mobei, eastern roman empire, roman history, western roman empire, fall of rome, attila the hun, fall of the roman empire, atilla the hun, the huns, genghis khan, sack of rome, hunnic empire, ancient rome, byzantine empire, history channel, ottoman empire, kings and generals, julius caesar, tengri, mongols, genghis, ancient history, crash course, seljuks, ottoman, white huns, Hephthalites, king and general

Id: JJWddbCUZLQ

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 10 2019