At first sight this volume resembles the professionally-produced and lavishly-illustrated books of tabletop wargaming rules such as have recently been produced by Osprey publishing and others, and indeed it might best be aimed at the same readership (though they will be disappointed by the quality of the cover art). In fact, however, it aims to present a new historical-archaeological reading of what is usually referred to as the battle of the Catalaunian Fields, or the Battle of Châlons (once Châlons-sur-Marne but since 1998 Châlons-en-Champagne) in 451. Frequently listed among the so-called Decisive Battles of the Western World, this engagement saw Attila’s Hunnic army turned back by a confederate army led by the Roman general Aëtius. The scale of the battle made an impression on some contemporaries and it went on to take its place in the traditions and mythohistory of several of the groups that had taken over the rulership of various regions of the western Empire by the sixth century; its significance has been debated ever since. The problem for understanding the battle itself, its course, the tactics used, and so on--in short, the subject of the volume under review--is that we have not a single contemporary account of it that does more than record its occurrence, its ferocity and the supposedly enormous casualties lost by the two sides. The only detailed narrative was composed by Jordanes in mid-sixth-century Constantinople, nearly a century after the battle. All accounts of the battle have to rely upon this narrative but as decades of increasingly subtle and sophisticated scholarship have shown, Jordanes’ story is anything but straightforward, mired in layer upon layer of classical allusion, rhetorical device and hotly-debated political messages. It is, on any sober or realistic account, impossible to see through all of that to recover with any degree of plausibility what “actually happened” somewhere between Châlons and Troyes in summer 451. We may wish it were otherwise but sadly it is not.
Pen and Sword is probably best known for myriad finely-detailed nuts and bolts studies of (usually) the British and Commonwealth experience at the battles of the two world wars. Its record outside that core area is mixed and, in the periods that might interest readers of this review, questionable, although there are welcome signs that issues of quality control are beginning to be taken more seriously. Readers familiar with their late antique/early medieval history catalogue will know that it largely comprises works by wargamers masquerading as historians, confident in their opinions but poorly-informed (see the various volumes on “Germanic” peoples by Simon MacDowall or that on Mercia by Chris Peers); the work under review is in some regards an improvement on those. Schultheis has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and one in history with a minor in medieval studies. His interest in the Catalaunian Fields goes back, we are informed, to 2013 and he is a member of a re-enactment group that specialises in this period. As far as the actual campaign and its immediate historical context are concerned, the bibliography--easily the most useful part of his book--is commendably thorough and shows a very good knowledge, especially, of studies of the artefacts of the period. To publish a book on the topic at such an early stage reveals considerable ambition. It is clearly a labour of love and I had hoped to be able to be more positive about the final product.
Unfortunately his publisher’s evidently “hands-off” approach to both content and presentation has served Schultheis badly and the problems are only exacerbated by Schultheis’ lack of academic training. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book reads like an undergraduate dissertation. [1] The writing is poor with many commonly-encountered faults: the subjects of sentences change from one clause to the next; pronouns do not clearly refer to the subject of the sentence; vocabulary is incorrectly used, and so on. Historical figures are introduced into the narrative without explanation; similarly, archaeological technicalities (artefact types, chronological units such as “Period D2”) are brought in without explanation and will be opaque to anyone unfamiliar with the typologies of weaponry, belt-sets and armour, or the archaeological periodisation of the Roman Iron Age. The method of argument will also be familiar. Schultheis’ reading is wide and in more than one language, which is excellent to see, but he essentially piles up the views of secondary authors without martialling them into a coherent argument, discussing them in a critically-informed or consistent manner, or explaining the selection of authors chosen for the discussion of particular points. Some sort of proper editing could have spared the author from much of this.
The author has little idea of how to use the written sources of the period. Modern scholars’ views on the complexity of the works of, for example, Jordanes (some of which, naturally, sit with difficulty alongside each other) are listed but after that the sources’ accounts are ultimately treated as factually more or less accurate records. But, as noted, unless one ignores modern criticism, the book’s entire project is rendered impossible. Much is made of the anonymous Life of Bishop Annianus of Orléans on the basis of Sam Barnish’s 1992 suggestion that it might contain elements of the history of the Attilan War which Sidonius Apollinaris was asked to write. This is an unlikely conjecture. We know nothing of what, if anything, Sidonius ever wrote on the topic; we do know that, as usual, he found an excuse for not producing the work. That the Vita Anniani’s details can be taken as a more or less unproblematic record is rendered highly implausible by the fact that it dates the war against Attila to the wrong imperial reign, for a start, and makes other errors that have much in common with late Merovingian sources like the Liber Historiae Francorum. When the Life shares features with Gregory of Tours’ Histories, this is not Gregory “corroborating” the Life, but simply the Life copying Gregory. Schultheis seems in any case not to have read the Vita, relying on Barnish’s paraphrase. The Notitia Dignitatum (of which the western army lists are reproduced in a sixty-page appendix) is employed entirely literally and uncritically. The estimates given for the strength of the two armies, each of over 70,000 men, defy credibility in the logistical context of the mid-fifth century. Similarly, although he is impressively familiar with the details of some of the relevant archaeological finds, Schultheis deploys the archaeological data in unsophisticated and often naïve fashion. Many of the historical and archaeological readings offered are outdated and there is a smattering of factual mistakes (an otherwise unknown Emperor Julian II appears on page 28). The list of problems could be greatly extended but to little end. There is an interesting and valuable rebuttal of the idea of the Hunnic “super-bow” (45-46) and, if they can get a copy, many will find the twelve-page secondary bibliography highly useful. That apart, though, the experienced academic student of the fifth-century West will find little of interest here, and beginners should be warned against relying on this book.
That, however, covers only one possible audience for this book. Serious academic historians of the period have long learned to accept that some things--such as what happened on the Catalaunian Fields--are ultimately unknowable. The sources are so poor and problematic that any attempt to provide a reconstruction can be no more than--in scholarly terms--an interesting parlour game. That conclusion costs the serious historian or archaeologist nothing. However, while the academic response to the question of what the tactical narrative of the Battle of Châlons was must begin and end with “we don’t know,” other consumers of history cannot be content with such a response. Tabletop wargamers and battle re-enactors cannot make much use of a series of “we don’t knows.” Consequently these groups tend to be somewhat unreceptive and even hostile to modern source critical method. [2] You cannot make a reconstruction (tabletop, computer game or re-enactment) of the battle of Châlons out of “we don’t (and can’t) know.” The gamer/re-enactor has to take a step that the academic cannot and place more trust in dubious sources, working with the hypothesis that there might be something in them, however unlikely specialists may think that is. This audience will find much information and food for thought and speculation in Schultheis’ book.
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Notes
1. For what it’s worth, in a UK university context, I’d have marked it at 62%.
2. http://soa.org.uk/sm/index.php?topic=1130.140;wap2 (accessed August 18, 2021) is an excellent example, with specific reference to the Battle of Châlons, of what passes for source criticism in such communities and the hostility to the rejection of primary source accounts on the grounds that if we do so, “we are [allegedly] left with very little of history.”