Attila the Hun (17 page)

¹
Easily said; but, like many a background statement, this one conceals epics. Aetius was up against a certain Bonifatius, or Boniface, once the warlord ruler of North Africa, contender for power in Italy, and thus opponent of the regent Galla Placidia. Back from North Africa, reconciled to Galla Placidia, he had become her champion against Aetius. It was Boniface that Aetius defeated to regain his position – in single combat, according to legend.

²
For those eager for evidence of links between the western Huns and the Xiongnu, the name Mundzuk survives in the small, newly independent state of Tuva, between Mongolia and Siberia. Maxim Munzuk played the hunter in Kurosawa’s award-winning film
Dersu Uzala
(1975).

NESTORIUS, THE EX-BISHOP OF CONSTANTINOPLE, WAS A
bitter and angry man. He had wrestled with the central problem that divided Christianity in its early days – Was Christ god, or man, or a bit of both? – and discovered what he considered – no,
knew
– to be the truth: that, although Christ had been both god and man, he possessed two distinct persons, because quite obviously the
god
part of him could never have been a
human
baby. Therefore Mary could not have been the Mother of God, since that would suggest that a mortal woman could produce a god, which was a contradiction. Therefore, he, Nestorius, was right, and all Christians who disagreed with him – namely, those who accepted the tenets laid down at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and all other, anti-Nicaean, heretics – were wrong.

The world had not appreciated his insight. His great rival, Cyril of Alexandria, had had him condemned and banished to Oasis, in the southern reaches of Egypt. There, as the 430s wore on, he railed against the injustice done to him. He would be revenged upon the lot of them – or, rather, God would on his behalf. Indeed, divine vengeance had already started. How else to explain the rise of the Huns? Once they were divided among themselves, and were no more than robbers. Now, suddenly, they were united, and likely to rival Rome itself. This was surely the Christian world’s punishment for its ‘transgression against the true faith’.

Nestorius might have been shaky on the causes, but he was right in the grand sweep of the problem. The Huns had indeed risen. Petty pillagers no longer, by the late 430s they had become pillagers on a grand scale. In fact, this had nothing to do with God backing Nestorius, and everything to do with the rise of our hero and anti-hero, Attila.

F
or a decade after Ruga’s death in about 435, Attila’s hands were tied by joint rule with his elder brother Bleda. For those ten years the two would work together to consolidate their kingdom, with Attila the junior, and increasingly resentful, partner.

How and why they came to power is a mystery. Of their childhood in the early years of the fifth century nothing is known, and their names, both fairly common in Germanic, are not much help. Bleda is a shortened version of something like Bladardus/Blatgildus. Attila derives from
atta
, ‘father’ in both
Turkish and Gothic, plus a diminutive -
ila
; it means ‘Little Father’. The name even spread across the Channel, into Anglo-Saxon. A Bishop of Dorchester bore it, and so did the local bigwig recalled by the villages of Attleborough and Attlebridge in Norfolk. It may not even have been our Attila’s original name at all, but a term of affection and respect conferred on his accession, a Hun version of the pseudo-cosy
dedyshka
(‘Granddad’) by which Russians once referred to Lenin and Stalin.

At first all seemed set fair for the two princes. They were at peace with western Rome, and settled down to bind in local groups and focus on bleeding the East. Not that all was sweetness. Ruga’s death must have unleashed some nasty squabbling between the brothers, who for the moment divided the kingdom between them, Attila taking the downriver area in today’s Romania, while Bleda governed in Hungary, the forward territory with easier access to the rich west. Both must have demanded commitment from their relatives and subsidiary chiefs, and done so with menaces, because two royal cousins fled south, rejecting their own people to seek refuge among their supposed enemies.

The year of Ruga’s death, Attila and Bleda together completed the peace agreed between their uncle and the empire, riding south to the border fortress of Constantia, opposite Margus, guarding the mouth of the Morava river where it joins the Danube 50 kilo-metres east of Belgrade, just inside today’s Romanian border. Here they were met by Constantinople’s
ambassador, Plintha – a good choice, according to Priscus, for Plintha was himself a ‘Scythian’, a term that was used for any barbarian or, as in this case, ex-barbarian. Plintha and his number two, Epigenes, chosen for his experience and wisdom, no doubt came prepared with a few wagons loaded with tents and scribes and cooks and a lavish banquet, ready to flatter with formality. The Huns, rough and ready and proud of it, were disdainful. As Priscus writes, ‘The barbarians do not think it proper to confer dismounted, so that the Romans [i.e. those from the New Rome, Constantinople], mindful of their own dignity, chose to meet the Scythians [i.e. Huns] in the same fashion.’

There was no doubt who was in control. Attila and Bleda dictated the agenda; Plintha’s scribes took down the terms. All Hun fugitives would be sent back north of the Danube, including the two treacherous princes. All Roman prisoners who had escaped were to be returned, unless each were ransomed for 8
solidi
, one-ninth of a pound of gold (given that a Byzantine pound was slightly less than a modern one, this was about $600 in 2004 gold prices), payable to the captors – a good way of ensuring a direct flow of funds to the top Huns. Trade would be opened, and the annual trade fair held on the Danube made safe for all. The sum due to the Huns to keep the peace was doubled, from 350 to 700 pounds of gold per year (about $4.5 million in current terms), the peace to last as long as the Romans kept up payments.

As proof of their good faith, the eastern Romans later handed over the two royal refugees, Mamas and
Atakam (‘Father Shaman’). The manner of their reception suggests both the vicious rivalry seething beneath the surface of Attila’s co-operation with his brother and the brutality of the times. The princes were delivered on the lower Danube, at a place called Carsium (today the Romanian town of Hâr
ova in the Danube delta), straight into Attila’s hands. There was no hope, apparently, of winning their loyalty. To punish and make an example of them, he had them killed in the manner made infamous 1,000 years later by Vlad the Impaler, the original Dracula, who was ruler of the same region.

This was a peculiarly terrible death.
¹
First, the executioners cut a wooden stake about 3 metres long, quite thin at one end, this end being finely sharpened and well greased with lard. The other end was thicker, to act as a secure base. The legs of the victim were spread-eagled by men hauling on ropes, the clothing cut, and the stake hammered into the anus with exquisite care and frequent pauses to avoid damaging the internal organs. The advancing stake pushed aside the intestines, colon, stomach, liver and lungs, until it reached the shoulder, emerging with the help of a knife through the skin of the upper back, to one side of the spine. The victim was skewered, ‘as a lamb on the spit’ – except that the heart and lungs were still working. Then the legs were bound to the stake at the ankles to prevent slippage in what was to follow. The stake with
its burden was raised upright, and set very gently, in order not to jolt the body, into a firm holder of stones or wood, where it was held in place with struts. If everything had been done in the correct manner, the public agony that followed would last a couple of days. The Romans watching from the far bank, and any Huns who might have considered siding with Bleda, would have heard the slow, steady hammer blows and the screams, learned that Attila commanded some people well practised in the arts of ruthlessness – for impaling was a skill that demanded experience and a clinical hand – and taken note.

It is clear from the terms imposed by the Huns what they were after. Though they liked to melt down gold coins for jewellery, they were also developing a cash economy based on Roman currency, and there was no easier way to get the cash than by extortion. They could offer horses, furs and slaves at the trade fair on the Danube, but that would not bring real wealth – not enough to acquire the silks and wines that would make life pleasant, or to pay for foreign artisans who could construct the heavy-duty weapons upon which their long-term security would depend. Besides, it was only by matching Roman wealth that they could avoid being ripped off. According to St Ambrose, it was perfectly OK for Christians to bleed barbarians dry with loans: ‘On him whom you cannot easily conquer in war, you can quickly take vengeance with the hundredth [i.e. a percentage]. Where there is the right of war, there is also the right of usury.’ When Attila and Bleda returned to their own domains, they had what they wanted in
the short term – some gold, some breathing-space; but peace did not serve their long-term interests. They needed war, and events elsewhere soon gave them opportunity.

During this decade, disaster loomed on several fronts for both parts of the empire. Aetius was fire-fighting in Gaul, quelling the Franks in 432, then the Bagaudae (435–7), an obscure and disorderly band who fought a guerrilla war from their forest bases, and finally the Goths, who almost took Narbonne in 437. In 439 Carthage itself, the old capital of Rome’s North African estates, fell to the Vandal chief Gaiseric. After 40 years of wandering – over the Rhine, across France and Spain, over the Straits of Gibraltar – the Vandals had seized present-day Libya only fourteen years previously. Carthage, with its aqueduct, temples and theatres (one of which, named the Odeon, served as a venue for concerts), was vandalized, in every sense. The invaders found their new homeland, though fertile enough, rather a tight fit between the Sahara and the Mediterranean, and quickly learned a new skill: shipbuilding. Carthage was wonderfully located to dominate the 200-kilometre channel dividing Africa from Sicily, and became a base for piracy, and then for a navy. In 440 Gaiseric prepared an invasion fleet, landed in Sicily, did some vandalizing, and crossed to the Italian mainland, intending no-one knew what. From the East, Theodosius II sent an army to help repel the invaders, but he was too late: the Vandals had headed home with their spoils before the easterners arrived.

Attila and Bleda took advantage of these desperate times. In the West they had a wonderful opportunity for pillage, thanks to their alliance with Aetius, who needed them to bolster his campaign against those unruly barbarians inside Gaul. There were Huns helping to fight the Franks, and the Bagaudae, and most memorably the Burgundians/Nibelungs. This was the tribe that had crossed the Rhine almost en masse 30 years before, leaving behind a remnant that successfully resisted the Hun attack. They had settled, with Rome’s unwilling agreement, on the Roman side of the middle Rhine, taking over several towns, with Worms as their capital. Under their king, Gundahar, better known to history and folklore as Gunther, they remained a restless bunch, trying to take more land. An invasion westwards through the Ardennes in 435 drew the attention of Aetius and his mercenary Huns, who had a score of their own to settle after their defeat a few years previously. The results were devastating, though no details of the assault survive. Thousands of Burgundians died (though probably not the 20,000 mentioned in one source), Gunther among them, in a slaughter that would be transformed into folklore, notably in the great medieval epic the
Nibelungenlied
and in more recent times by Wagner in his Ring cycle. Along the way, folk memory made the assumption that Attila himself was behind the destruction of the Burgundians. That doesn’t fit. He had his hands full back home. But there is an underlying truth to the legend, for there could have been no slaughter without an understanding between Aetius and the Huns. Now
they had their reward: vengeance, and booty. The few surviving Burgundians were chased on west and south, their name clinging to the area around Lyon and its vineyards long after the tribe itself and the later kingdom had vanished.