Attila the Hun (18 page)

A
lready, Attila and Bleda needed more, if not from other barbarians, then from the eastern empire. They had their pretexts ready. Tribute had not been paid. Refugees who had fled across the Danube had not been returned. And, to cap it all, the Bishop of Margus had sent men across the river to plunder royal tombs. (Priscus says they were Hun graves, but the Huns made no burial mounds; they must have been ancient
kurgans
, which had always been ransacked as if they were little mountains to be mined at will.) The bishop should at once be surrendered, came the order, or there would be war.

No bishop was handed over, and Attila and Bleda made their move. Some time around 440, at the trade fair in Constantia, Huns suddenly turned on the Roman merchants and troops, and killed a number. Then, crossing the Danube, a Hun army attacked Viminacium, Margus’ immediate neighbour to the east, subjecting the town to an appalling fate. No-one recorded why it was so vulnerable, but the townspeople seemed to know what was in store, because its officials had time to bury the contents of their treasury, over 100,000 coins which were found by archaeologists in the 1930s. The survivors were led away into captivity, among them an unnamed businessman whom we shall
meet again in rather different and much improved circumstances. The city was then flattened, and not rebuilt for a century. It is now the village of Kostolac.

Then the Huns turned on Margus itself. The grave-robbing bishop, terrified that he would be handed over by his own people to ensure their safety, slipped out of the city, crossed the Danube, and told the Huns that he would arrange for the gates of his town to be opened for them if they promised to treat him well. Promises were made, hands shaken. The Huns gathered by night on the far bank of the Danube, while somehow the bishop persuaded those on watch to open the gates for him. Right behind were the Huns, and Margus too fell, and burned. It was never rebuilt.

What happened then is unclear. Sources and interpretations vary so dramatically that no-one is certain whether there was one war or two, or how long it, or they, lasted, estimates varying from two to five years. Two or three seems to fit best. It was all mixed up with the Vandals invading Sicily and the eastern army being sent to help the West. There was much destruction in the Belgrade region. In any event, the Huns were now in possession of Margus and its sister town, Constantia, on the Danube’s northern bank, and could dominate the Morava valley, along which ran the main road into Thrace. Two other cities fell, Singidunum (Belgrade) and Sirmium (now the village of Sremska Mitrovica, 60 kilometres west of Belgrade up the River Sava), where the bishop handed over some golden bowls that would, a few years later, become the cause of a nasty dispute.

Then something seems to have stopped the Huns in
their tracks – trouble at home, perhaps, or a rapid offer of gold from Theodosius. Attila and Bleda pulled their troops out, leaving the borderland of Pannonia and Moesia in smoking ruins. There was another peace treaty, agreed by Anatolius, commander-in-chief of the eastern empire’s army and friend of the emperor.

It was perhaps as part of this renewed peace that the Huns picked up another item of booty: a black dwarf from Libya who adds a bizarre element to our story. Zercon was already a living legend. He owed his presence in Hun lands to one of the greatest of Roman generals, Aspar, who was in command of the Danube frontier for a few years until 431, when he was sent to North Africa in a vain attempt to quell the Vandals. It was Aspar who captured Zercon and took him back to Thrace. Here he was either seized by the Huns or perhaps handed over by Aspar. Zercon was not a prepossessing sight. He hobbled on deformed feet, had a nose so flat it looked as if it wasn’t there at all, just two holes where a nose should be, and he stuttered and lisped. He had had the sense to turn these deficiencies into assets, and became a great court jester, specializing in parodies of Latin and Hunnish. Attila couldn’t stand him, so he became his brother’s property. Bleda thought Zercon was hilarious – The way he moved! His lisp! His stutter! – and treated him like a pet monster, providing him with a suit of armour and taking him along on campaigns. Zercon, however, did not fully appreciate Bleda’s sadistic sense of humour, and escaped with some Roman prisoners. Bleda was so furious that he ordered those sent in pursuit to ignore
all the fugitives but Zercon and to bring him back in chains. So it was. At the sight of him, Bleda asked why he had fled from such a kindly master. Zercon, speaking in his appalling mixture of Latin and newly learned Hunnish, apologized profusely, but protested that his master should understand there was a good reason for his flight: he had not been given a wife. At this, Bleda became helpless with laughter, and allocated him a poor girl who had once been an attendant on his own senior wife. Zercon will reappear, and his story continue, later.

For a couple of years the Danube front remained quiet, Attila having discovered the benefits of diplomatic exchanges. As Priscus tells it, Attila sends letters to Theodosius – letters which must have been in Greek or Latin; the illiterate Attila must already have had at least one scribe and translator, if not a small secretariat. He demands the fugitives who have not been delivered and the tribute which has not been paid. He puts a diplomatic gloss on what is little more than a gangster’s threat. He is a patient man. He is willing to receive envoys to discuss terms. He also portrays himself as a man with a problem, namely his impatient chiefs. If there is a hint of a delay or any sign that Constantinople is preparing for war, he will not be able to hold back his hordes.

It seems that Attila did indeed have a problem with some of his own people. Since peace was cheaper than war, and ambassadors cheaper than armies, Theodosius sent an envoy, an ex-consul named Senator. The land route was apparently too dangerous, for Thrace was
still a prey to freebooting Huns who had not yet been brought under Attila’s control, the ‘fugitives’ he wanted returned by the terms of the Treaty of Margus. So Senator opted to make the first part of his journey by ship, sailing up the coast of the Black Sea to Varna, where a Roman contingent was able to provide him with an escort inland. Senator duly arrived, impressing Attila, who would later cite him as a model envoy, but nothing else seems to have been achieved.

Perhaps something was promised, for Attila rather took to the idea of exchanging envoys. His reason for sending embassies had nothing to do with diplomacy and fugitives. This was a gravy train for his top people, and a way to win time. It was not the issue that was the issue, but the generous reception his ambassadors received, which was something along these lines: My dear chaps, how wonderful to see you! Fugitives? Tribute? All in good time. We’ll talk after supper. Let us show you to your rooms. Yes, the carpets and the silks are nice, aren’t they – nothing but the best. A glass of wine, perhaps? You like the glass? It’s yours. Oh, and after supper, there are the dancing girls. You’ve had a long journey. These girls are chosen specially to restore the spirits of great warriors such as your good selves. Priscus noted all this in rather staider terms: ‘The barbarian [Attila] seeing clearly the Romans’ liberality, which they exercised through caution lest the treaty be broken, sent to them those of his retinue he wished to benefit.’ Four times in the mid-440s this happened, and each time a retinue returned happy, with trinkets and cash as diplomatic gifts.

Neither side believed in the peace. Constantinople was nervous – or so scholars surmise on the scanty evidence of two laws rushed into effect in the summer and autumn of 444. Landowners had long been required to supply recruits from their tenantry, or pay cash in lieu. But senior officials, most of them also landowners, were exempt; that was a perk of their high office. Now, by one of the new laws, they too had to provide troops, or pay a fine. The second law was a 4 per cent tax on all sales. Clearly, the city needed more men in arms and the money to pay them. And, according to one of Theodosius’ edicts, the Danube fleet was being reinforced and the bases along the river being rebuilt.

The emperor was in fact quite right to expect trouble, because he was about to give the Huns cause for complaint. He had no intention of losing more money to the barbarians. In the succinct words of Otto Maenchen-Helfen, one of the greatest of experts on the Huns, ‘To get rid of the savages, Theodosius paid them off. Once they were back, he tore up the peace treaty,’ and simply cut the payments dead.

P
erhaps it was this crisis that inspired Attila to make his move for absolute power. He would by now have had his own power base, in the form of an elite referred to by Greek writers as
logades
(we will meet half a dozen of them in person later, in the company of the Greek diplomat Priscus), and the inner circle would already have been in place, or Attila would not have been able to grab supreme power. Among them were his deputy, Onegesius; Onegesius’ brother Scottas;
some relatives (we know of two uncles, Aybars and Laudaric); and Edika, the leader of a tribe immediately to the north, the Skirians, now in alliance with Attila’s Huns, whose foot soldiers would henceforth form the heart of the Hun infantry. They were all bound to Attila by something more than fear of his brutality, for they must have equalled him in that. This was the man who would best serve their interests, and those of the Huns as a whole. They were a substantial group, these
logades
. Historians have debated whether they are best seen as local governors, policemen, tribute collectors, priests, wise men, shamans, military commanders, clan leaders, nobles or diplomats. Probably, each played several roles. The implication is there in Liddell and Scott’s
Greek–English Lexicon
:
logades
is the plural of
logas
, ‘picked, chosen’.
Logades
means ‘picked men’: the elite. As Maenchen-Helfen concludes: ‘There is no evidence that these prominent people of the Huns had anything in common but prominence’ – something like Hunnish SS officers, if you regard Attila as a Hitler figure.

And the rest of the Huns? All that can be said is that there was a tribe or people, subdivided into clans, across which cut a hierarchy consisting, at the very least, of slaves at the bottom, then common people made up of herders and householders, then an aristocracy, which may have been both of birth and of merit, and at the head a supreme leader, who was now ready for a coup.

It would have been sudden, brief, and bloody. Bleda vanished from history. Attila assumed power over the
whole estate, from the Black Sea to Budapest, a kingdom 800 kilometres across and 400 deep. The
putsch
must have been over almost as soon as begun, because no word of civil war reached the outside world, and Attila had the confidence to spare at least one, presumably the most senior, of Bleda’s wives: we shall come across her again later, apparently in good heart, living not far from the headquarters the victor now snatched from his brother’s dead hands.

We can infer something of the flow of goods and the brief panic unleashed by Attila’s fratricide thanks to some Hungarian turkeys. This story is set just outside a little town 18 kilometres north-east of Szeged. I hesitate to tell you the name of the town, because it obeys the First Law of Hungarian Linguistics, which states that the smaller the town, the more impossible it is for outsiders to pronounce. It’s Hódm
závárhely, which for Hungarians is no problem at all: it means ‘beaver-field-market-place’, this whole low-lying area having once been frequently flooded by the nearby Tisza, with little lakes where beavers thrived (in fact there is still a ‘Channel-of-the-Beaver-Lake’ near the village). The land, now drained, runs flat to a straight horizon. In 1963 a middle-aged farmer’s wife named Józó Erzsébet – Elizabeth Józó – was tending her turkeys when she saw that they had scratched up something glittery from the subsoil. She stooped down, scratched a little more, and found a mass of gold coins: 1,440 to be exact, together weighing 64 kilos. Her son cannily took one of them to the National Museum in Budapest and offered to sell it. They gave him 1,500
forints
, the equivalent of
about two months’ wages. Next day, he turned up again with another two coins. At this point the museum curators realized that Mrs Józó’s turkeys needed expert attention. The treasure was whisked off to the museum, pictures were taken of Mrs Józó in her headscarf and the shallow pit – the picture is still there in the Szeged museum – and the family was left richer by 70,000
forints
, enough to buy two houses.

The coins are Byzantine, minted by Theodosius II, and a good proportion of them are dated 443, right when Attila and Bleda started sending their ambassadors on their gravy-train missions to Constantinople. Finds like this are an invitation to imagine. Why would someone bury coins like this in a field, with no other goods? Here is a possible scenario. Attila has just made his move. Bleda is dead. He too had his
logades
. Most of them are also dead now, but one has escaped. Like the unfortunate royal cousins whose skeletons for years graced the sharpened stakes downriver, he thinks his chances will be better if he flees across the Danube. He gathers his share of the latest payment to arrive from Constantinople and heads south. But then, all of a sudden, he sees horsemen ahead of him, and behind. He’s surrounded. He doesn’t give much for his chances if he’s caught with the cash on him. Hastily, he buries it. He will take shelter with peasants, and hope to fade into the landscape until things calm down, when he will retrieve his loot and build himself a better life somewhere else. Does he survive? I doubt it, because he never returns, and the hoard lies hidden for 1,500 years, until scratched up by Mrs Józó’s turkeys.