Attila the Hun (15 page)

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fter Adrianople the empire struggled, and failed, to remake the peace within and without. The Balkans remained in turmoil, with Goth bands raiding freely, until the western emperor, Gratian, and his eastern coruler, Theodosius the Great, made peace with them all individually in 380–2, bribing them with tax exemptions, land grants and employment in the armed forces. It was Theodosius who, at two vital moments, held this tottering enterprise together by sending armies to back Christianity against paganism and his family’s claim to the West against rebels. It was he who managed to buy time by converting the Goths into allies, even if their version of Christianity was heretical. It was he who imposed the Nicene version of Christianity empire-wide before his own death in 395. With him fell a bastion against disorder and the infection of barbarism. His heirs were two feeble sons, Arcadius (aged eighteen, ruler of the East) and Honorius (eleven, of the West).

The empire became a cocktail of cultures, interfused, each dependent on others. Some barbarians settled; others kept on the move, notably the Visigoths. A new chief, Alaric, took them raiding across the Balkans so successfully that he was made a provincial governor, but that was just a stepping stone to a better homeland for his people within the empire. In both parts of the empire, Goths and other barbarians – even individual Huns – became senior officers. In the West, the power behind the throne, Stilicho, a Vandal by descent, was married to a niece of Theodosius. Goths served en masse, as contingents, with the danger that their loyalty
was to their own commanders rather than to the emperor. Barbarians were fast becoming the arbiters of imperial destiny. In 401 Alaric led his Visigoths into Italy, forcing the emperor to move his court to Ravenna, where it stayed for a century.

In 405–7 two barbarian armies – ragbags of Goths, Alans, Vandals, Swabians, Alemanni and Burgundians – swept into Gaul and Italy. Stilicho favoured collaboration, provoking an anti-barbarian backlash in which he was purged and executed, with no impact on the advance of the barbarians. In 410 Alaric seized Rome. It was the first time the Eternal City had seen enemies within its walls for 800 years – an event so shocking to Christians that it inspired the North African bishop Augustine of Hippo to write one of the most influential books of the age,
Concerning the City of God
. Alaric died that year, and his rootless people, still in search of a homeland, drifted back to Gaul, then on into Spain, finally swinging round again to settle north of the Pyrenees in what is now Aquitaine. In 418 their new capital, Toulouse, became the centre of a semiautonomous region, a nation in all but name, supplying troops to the empire in exchange for regular supplies of grain. Barbarian and Roman were intertwined, in geography, arms, society and politics, a process exemplified by the fate of the daughter of Theodosius and sister of Emperor Honorius, the 20-year-old Galla Placidia, who had been dragged off to become the unwilling wife of a barbarian – Alaric’s heir, Athaulf.

But fate allowed Galla Placidia a remarkable comeback. When Athaulf died, she was married (against her
will, again) back into Roman stock, to a husband befitting her status, the patrician and general Constantius, co-emperor for just seven months in 421. It was this marriage that catapulted her into power, which she preserved through many dramatic twists, turning herself into one of the most formidable women of her age. When Constantius died, she was accused of intrigue against her own brother and fled to Constantinople with her baby daughter Honoria and her four-year-old son Valentinian, heir to the western part of the empire. In Constantinople, the ruler in the East was Arcadius’ son, another Theodosius, who in 423 became, briefly, the sole ruler of the entire empire, at the age of 22. Nevertheless, he chose to back Galla Placidia when she demanded the western throne for young Valentinian. As a result, when the same year the court in Ravenna chose to crown a non-family official, John, Theodosius sent an army to crush the usurper, and placed Valentinian, now six, on the throne (thus returning the boy’s mother Placidia to Italy, along with the infant Honoria, who is destined to play a peculiarly dramatic role in our story later).

This, then, was how things stood when Attila was reaching maturity in the 420s: the empire divided, both parts riven by religious and political rivalry, half a dozen barbarian groups as immigrant communities, the northern frontiers in chaos, both armies staffed in part by the very people they opposed. To an ambitious chieftain north of the Danube, it all looked quite promising.

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ow retrace the same 40 years to see what the Huns had been doing during that time.

The first Huns appeared in western Europe in 384, when they and their Alan vassals were invited to strengthen the imperial ranks in the civil war against a would-be usurper, Maximus. They helped keep Maximus out of Italy, and would probably have gone on deeper into the empire if they hadn’t been bribed to behave themselves and go home. Their good behaviour inspired Theodosius to employ them again four years later in a second intervention to quell rebellion in Italy. ‘O memorable thing,’ wrote the fourth-century historian Pacatus, ‘Goths and Huns and Alans answered the roll-call, changed guards and rarely feared to be reprimanded. There was no tumult, no confusion, no looting in the usual barbarian way.’ But this time, after victory, the barbarian contingents refused to go home. John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, described the result: ‘That which has never taken place has now come to pass; the barbarians leaving their own country have overrun an infinite space of our territory, and that many times over, and having set fire to the land, and captured the towns, they are not minded to return home again, but after the manner of men who are keeping holiday rather than making war, they laugh us all to scorn.’ These were not troops under centralized control, but small-fry robber barons leading hit-and-run raids. There was no way to beat them in war. It would be like grasping at a fog. Instead, Constantinople offered a deal: the barbarians concerned – mostly Goths, but including groups of
Huns – would become allies,
foederati
, bribed into quiescence with land south of the Danube. These Hun clans had no unified leadership, being little more than family groups; but now, for the first time, Huns were officially inside the empire.

To the north, the mainstream Huns, now masters of eastern Hungary and Romania, had at least the rudiments of unity, under Balamber’s heirs, named as Basich and Kursich. A cemetery near the present-day village of Csákvár, on the edge of the wooded Vértes Hills between Budapest and Lake Balaton, reveals a culture in mid-change, where former inhabitants, both local tribesmen and Romans, are joined by those who bound their children’s heads, buried horses, and wore gold- and silver-plated headbands and silver and bronze earrings. But it was not much of an estate for nomads. The local economy was in tatters. There were few pastures in the wooded valleys of the Carpathians, and those who lived with their herds on the Hungarian
puszta
were probably discovering that this was not quite the steppeland of their dreams, for the River Tisza meandering across it flooded in spring, cutting their pastures in two. They had slaves, in the form of defeated Goths and Alans from beyond the Carpathians, and Sarmatians who had been masters in Hungary itself, who all knew how to till the soil. But neither local farms nor imported herds produced enough. The Huns needed food. They could seize it locally – or they could buy it from further afield, if only they had the cash. Gold coins would also be a useful raw material for the gold flake with which their top
families decorated their harnesses, weapons and headdresses.

Where to turn for gold? The Balkans were thoroughly ravaged, and Constantinople was too tough. They looked around for an easier target, one that would yield to, and sufficiently reward, their well-honed tactics.

In 395 they turned to the empire’s back door: the eastern provinces, unguarded because the Roman army was bogged down in yet another civil war in Italy. To get there, they had to gallop all the way round the Black Sea, some 1,500 kilometres. But the way there, through the former lands of the Goths and Alans, was now part of their own territory, and it was springtime, with the pastures new-grown. With two or three spare horses each, a nomadic army unencumbered by wagons could cover 160 kilometres a day over the southern Russian steppes, and have the snowy ramparts of the Caucasus in sight within a month. Then another two weeks to wind through the Caucasus, probably through the Darial pass, the main route across the central Caucasus from Chechnya – for the Chechens were there then, and had been for millennia – into Georgia. Christian Armenia, the empire’s eastern border, lay ahead, with the rich towns of the Syrian and Phoenician coast another 1,200 kilometres beyond. That summer, villages in central Turkey went up in flames, and Hun bands seized slaves in Syria – 18,000 of them according to one source.

In Bethlehem, Jerome, scholar and future saint, heard news of their coming, and trembled. Jerome had been born in northern Italy and educated in Rome, where he
became a Christian. Thereafter he had lived for many years in Antioch, attempting to find a way to resolve the bitter dispute over Arianism, the heresy that denied the divinity of Christ. He had travelled to everywhere that mattered: Rome, Greece, the Holy Land, Egypt; finally – as he thought – he had settled in Bethlehem. Now he judged that his only hope of survival lay in flight to the coast. A year later, when it was all over, he wrote of his experience:

Behold the wolves, not of Arabia, but of the North, were let loose upon us last year from the far-off rocks of the Caucasus, and in a little while overran great provinces. How many monasteries were captured, how many streams were reddened with human blood! . . . Not even if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths, and a voice of iron could I recount the name of every catastrophe . . . They filled the whole earth with slaughter and panic as they flitted hither and thither on their swift horses . . . They were at hand everywhere before they were expected: by their speed they outstripped rumour, and they took pity neither upon religion, nor rank nor age nor wailing childhood. Those who had just begun to live were compelled to die and, in ignorance of their plight, would smile amid the drawn swords of the enemy . . . We ourselves were forced to make ships ready, to wait on the shore, to take precautions against the enemy’s arrival, to fear the barbarians more than shipwreck even though the winds were raging.

A Christian priest in Syria, Cyrillonas, found his faith almost shattered by God’s apparent withdrawal, and put his reactions into a moving poem:

Every day unrest, every day new reports of misfortunes, every day new blows, nothing but fights. The East has been carried into captivity, and nobody lives in the destroyed cities . . . Dead are the merchants, widowed the women . . . If the Huns will conquer me, O Lord, why have I taken refuge with the holy martyrs? If their swords kill my sons, why did I embrace Thine exalted cross? If Thou willst render to them my cities, where will be the glory of Thy holy church? . . . Not a year has passed since they came and devastated me and took my children prisoners, and lo, now they are threatening again to humiliate our land.

But the Huns did not quite reach Palestine. Jerome returned to his home in Bethlehem. There was no second assault, for a Hun incursion down the Euphrates and Tigris drew the attention of the Persians. It was a Persian army, not a Roman one, that drove them back northwards, seizing back the stolen goods, releasing the 18,000 prisoners. When the Greek civil servant Priscus heard the story of this raid over 50 years later, he was told that, to avoid pursuit, the Huns took a different route, past ‘the flame that issues from the rock beneath the sea’, which perhaps refers to the oil-rich Caspian shore; Marco Polo refers to the same phenomenon, describing ‘a fountain from which oil springs in great abundance . . . This oil
is not good to use with food, but ’tis good to burn.’

So the raid was not a complete success; but it was an astounding achievement nevertheless. The Huns may have returned a little short on booty and slaves, but they had greatly extended their geographical knowledge and their military experience. They had never launched a campaign like this before: unprecedented in its speed and ferocity, it remained unequalled for 800 years, until Genghis Khan’s Mongols, approaching from the other direction, cut up through the Caucasus on their first raid into Russia. It must have given them tremendous confidence. What might they not achieve if they attacked the eastern empire again, this time taking the direct route south through the Balkans, a mere 800 kilometres from the Hungarian plains, one-fifth of the distance they had just covered?

N
ine years passed. All remained quiet on the northern front. Perhaps the Goth slaves were more productive, the Tisza better behaved, the plunder from the Caucasus raid adequate. Under a new leader, Uldin, the Huns were even able to ingratiate themselves with Constantinople by dealing with one of the eastern empire’s more troublesome characters, a Gothic chieftain named Gainas who had betrayed his position as an imperial commander. A short, sharp war ended in the death of Gainas, whose head was sent as a gift to the emperor Arcadius.

Such forays aside, the Huns remained at home, biding their time, until the winter of 404–5, when Uldin led an army across the frozen Danube back into
Thrace. This was merely a warm-up exercise: nearly four years later, in 408, he returned at the head of a large-scale invasion. It was a good moment to strike, for the Visigoths were on their way to Rome, there had just been a mass migration of Vandals and other groups across the Rhine, and the eastern empire’s army had turned away to strengthen the Persian border. The Hun advance sent shock waves as far as Jerusalem, where Jerome concluded that God’s punishment had descended again on the immoral Roman world in the form of savage tribes ‘who display womanly and deeply cut faces, and who pierce the backs of bearded men as they flee’.