Battle of The Catalaunian Plains - Forces

Forces

Both armies consisted of combatants from many peoples. Besides the Roman troops, Jordanes lists Aëtius' allies as including (besides the Visigoths) both the Salic and Ripuarian Franks, Sarmatians, Armoricans, Liticians, Burgundians, Saxons, librones (whom he describes as "once Roman soldiers and now the flower of the allied forces"), and other Celtic or German tribes.

Jordanes' list for Attila's allies includes the Gepids under their king Ardaric, as well as an Ostrogothic army led by the brothers Valamir, Theodemir (the father of the later Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great) and Widimer, scions of the Amali. Sidonius offers a more extensive list of allies: Rugians, Gepids, Gelonians, Burgundians, Sciri, Bellonotians, Neurians, Bastarnae, Thuringians, Bructeri, and Franks living along the Neckar River E.A. Thompson expresses his suspicions that some of these names are drawn from literary traditions rather than from the event itself:

On the other hand, Thompson believes that the presence of Burgundians on the Hunnic side is credible, noting that a group is documented as remaining east of the Rhine; likewise, he believes that the other peoples Sidonius alone mentions—the Rugians, Scirans and Thuringians—were likely participants in this battle.

However, the number of participants for either side—or in total—is entirely speculative. Jordanes reports the number of dead from this battle as 165,000, excluding the casualties of the Franko-Gepid skirmish previous to the main battle. Hydatius, a historian who lived at the time of Attila's invasion, reports the number of 300,000 dead. No primary source offers an estimate for the number of participants.

The figures of both Jordanes and Hydatius are implausibly high. Thompson remarks in a footnote, "I doubt that Attila could have fed an army of even 30,000 men." As a reference, in the early 3rd century, the Roman Empire maintained thirty three legions with just under 5,200 actual men each minimum of 171,600; if we follow the general assumption that the number of auxiliaries matched the number of legionaries, then add the Praetorian Guard as 15,000 strong, and six Urban Cohorts which totaled 9,000, we find that the Empire at its height fielded a grand total of 395,000 soldiers across its territories. However in the early 3rd century the number of auxiliaries was larger than legionaries by 50,000 and the figures given by Thompson do not include men in the navy. Harl in Coinage in the Roman Economy gives the estimates on page 231 as 481.000. There are many estimates of the size of the armed forced under Diocletian that range between 389,000 to 645,000 (Agathias). The point is that the regular Roman army in 450 A.D. in the West was run down to half its size 50 years previously.

A better sense of the size of the forces may be found in the study of the Notitia Dignitatum by A.H.M. Jones. This document is a list of officials and military units that was last updated in the first decades of the 5th century. Notitia Dignitatum lists 58 various regular units, and 33 limitanei serving either in the Gallic provinces or on the frontiers nearby; the total of these units, based on Jones analysis, is 34,000 for the regular units and 11,500 for the limitanei, or just under 46,000 all told. However, this figure is the estimate for the year 425 A.D. The regular Roman field army present at the battle would have been 15,000, if that. The rest, 30,000, were federates. While the Roman forces in Gaul had become much smaller by this time, if we accept this number as the total of all of the forces fighting with Theodoric and Aëtius, we should not be too far off. Assuming that the Hunnic forces were roughly the same size as the Romano-Gothic, the number involved in battle is just under 100,000 combatants in total. This excludes the inevitable servants and camp followers who usually escape mention.