Attila the Hun (28 page)

Perhaps Marcian was a paper tiger, who would crumple at the first firm touch? Far from it. A Hun
embassy requesting aid received short shrift. As one account put it, Marcian replied that gold was for his friends, iron for his enemies. The most Attila could expect were ‘gifts’ if he kept the peace. And if he threatened war, he could rest assured that he would meet a force more than equal to his own. Hope flickered back to life when, in late 450, Marcian sent his own ambassador, Apollonius; but, on learning that he was not bringing tribute money, Attila furiously refused to see him, sending a message that he could leave whatever gifts he had and go, or be put to death. Apollonius, a general and one of the most senior envoys Marcian could have chosen, was not a man to be intimidated. It was not right, he replied, for Attila to make such a demand. He had the power to steal and kill, of course; and that’s just what he would have to do, if he wanted the Romans’ gifts without negotiation. Or he could act the diplomat, and have the gifts. A bold response, and well judged. Attila still refused to negotiate, but let Apollonius go, taking his goodwill gifts with him.

There was one chance that Attila could get what he wanted with hardly a battle – a remote chance, but still worth exploring. He had in his hand Honoria’s ring, and her words as reported by Hyacinthus. Thus did the crazy act of a woman wild with grief and frustration inspire an equally crazy response. The emperor’s own sister had begged for rescue, had surely – with her ring – offered herself to him in marriage; and just as surely a wife came with a dowry – in this case, a dowry limited only by Attila’s dreams. There were just two
problems: first, she had to be freed; then she had to achieve what she had always wanted, which was to be co-ruler with Valentinian. As her betrothed, he assumed the right to make all this happen.

Priscus takes up the tale: ‘He sent envoys to declare that Honoria should not be wronged at all, and that if she did not receive the sceptre of sovereignty, he would avenge her . . . The Romans replied that Honoria could not come to him in marriage since she had been given to another and that she had no right to the sceptre since the rule of the Roman state belonged not to females but to males.’

It was mad. Attila must have seemed to Valentinian’s officials as removed from reality as did Idi Amin, Uganda’s buffoon-dictator in the 1970s, to Whitehall when he proclaimed himself Conqueror of the British Empire. When the inevitable reply came, Attila’s mind was made up. Westward it would be, as fast as possible to forestall action from Marcian in Constantinople. He would forget the Visigoths, and go for Gaul right away. With victory there, all northern Europe would be under his control, and even a united empire would quail.

F
irst, though, there was the matter of getting there. This demanded a campaign such as Attila had never previously attempted. He was about to cross mountains and rivers and forests, which he had done when advancing into the Balkans, but never when simultaneously tackling such a great distance – indeed, he had never faced so great a distance at all. And speed was of the essence. What was needed was an equivalent
of a
Blitzkrieg
: a fast thrust up the Moselle, then a cross-country dash that would outwit and out-manoeuvre the opposition and establish a bridgehead on the Atlantic. For this he needed his cavalry, with the infantry mopping up behind him. Better to do without the mangonels and trebuchets and siege towers with which he had taken Naissus. Such things could grind along at only 15 kilometres a day, and needed firm going. He would have to cover the entire width of France – over 700 kilometres – in a month.

But this could not be. He was trapped in paradox. He needed the speed; but there were towns that had to be neutralized. Fast-moving mounted archers were good in open country against infantry and the slower, heavily armed Roman cavalry, but it was no use galloping right past fortress-towns like Trier and Metz, leaving their battalions untouched to retaliate at their leisure. He had to have some siege gear after all, which meant wagons. There would be some wagons anyway, of course, to keep the archers supplied with arrows; but the heavy machinery required solid ones, which meant teams of oxen, and fodder, and outriders, who would also need feeding. It was possible to combine mounted archers and siege warfare near home, but not if you were moving steadily away from it.

It was a fearful risk. He would have liked, if possible, to avoid a conflict that was bound to be a tough one. He returned once again to the matter of Honoria. By now – with his army right on the imperial frontier, as committed to war as the German army in 1914 – he seems to have convinced himself that he actually had a
strong case. Back went the envoys, with yet higher demands. Honoria was his by rights – they had the ring with them as proof – and so was everything that was hers, because she had received it from her father and been deprived of it only by her brother’s greed.

And what was it exactly that was hers, and which was now his? Priscus states Attila’s case: ‘Valentinian should resign to him
half of his empire
.’

It was an outrageous claim: all Gaul. Again came the inevitable rejection. Back went a final, uncompromising demand from Attila, who must by now have been on his way westward through the German forests to the Rhine. His ambassador told Valentinian: ‘Attila my master and your master has ordered you, through me, to prepare your palace for him.’

At last Rome got the message. No more self-deception about the target being Visigoths, no more reliance on the old friendship between Attila and Aetius, no more buying time with hopeful diplomatic exchanges. If he wasn’t stopped, he would go on until Rome itself fell.

¹
Letter II, ii, to a friend, Domitius, an academic who (he writes elsewhere) was so severe that ‘even the man who, they say, laughed only once in his life was not as critical as he’. Perhaps the description of Avitacum was intended to lighten his friend’s grim temper.

LOOKING BACK AFTERWARDS, WHEN PEOPLE KNEW WHAT A
close call it had been for all Europe, they realized there had been signs, warnings, prodigies and portents of the coming threat: an earthquake in Spain, an eclipse of the moon, the Northern Lights casting their unearthly glow too far south, like spectres armed with flaming lances battling clear of polar regions. In June 451 a comet appeared vivid in the dawn sky – Halley’s Comet, as we now call it, its glowing head and streaming tail as menacing as a flaming missile from a heavenly catapult. The threat that had been steadily building for 50 years – the Visigoths grabbing Aquitaine, Alans, Vandals and Suevians scattering across northern Gaul, Burgundians in Savoy, Franks
edging along the Meuse, North Africa lost, Britain cut off, Brittany a law unto itself, Bagaudian brigands roaming wild – seemed on the verge of climax.

In undertaking the invasion of the West, the Huns faced a problem similar to that which faced the Germans as they prepared to invade France in 1914, and again in 1939. Approached from the Rhine, France has fine natural defences in the form of the Vosges mountains, giving way to the Eifel and Ardennes in the north. Practically the only way through is up the Moselle, through what is now Luxembourg, and then out onto the plains of Champagne. But it was no good making a thrust through the mountains into the heart of France (or Gaul) if the army could be threatened from the north – from Belgium or, in this case, the region occupied by the Franks.

Attila had a problem with the Franks. The Frankish king had died, and his two sons were disputing the succession. The elder one had approached Attila for help; the younger one, aged no more than fifteen or sixteen, sought Roman backing, and found it in Aetius. Priscus saw this young man in Rome in late 450, and was struck by his looks: ‘His first beard had not yet begun to grow, and his flaxen hair was so long that it poured over his shoulders.’ Aetius adopted him as a son – a common device to ensure a firm alliance – and the youth went away laden with gifts and promises. Obviously, he was about to receive the help he needed to secure the throne, and thus tumble into the arms of Rome. It would not do to have a Roman vassal on the right wing, any more than Germany in 1914 could
afford to let neutral Belgium fall into the Allied camp. To invade France successfully, Germany had to take out ‘poor little Belgium’. To invade Gaul, Attila first had to neutralize the poor little Franks.

Early in 451 Attila’s main army advanced up the Danube along frontier tracks, spreading out on either side, crossing tributaries over fords or pontoons of logs cut from the surrounding forests. One wing seems to have swung south and then up the Rhine, via Basel, Strasbourg, Speyer, Worms, Frankfurt and Mainz, then meeting the main force, which followed the old frontier from the Danube to the Rhine. The Huns probably crossed near Koblenz, cutting trees along the bank to make rafts and pontoon bridges for their wagons.

From there, in March 451, Attila could have sent a small force to sweep up those Franks not already fighting for the Romans. Evidence in favour of this is that Childeric, the elder son who had approached Attila, later emerged among the Franks as a king of some stature. Certainly, Franks soon formed a contingent in Attila’s army as well as in Rome’s; and this would hardly have been possible if they were still wholly allied to Rome, ready and waiting to stab Attila from his rear.

The accounts of this campaign are all Christian, since it was Christianity that kept the flickering torch of civilization burning: all of them were written later, and most of them are hagiographies of martyred bishops, owing as much to spin and imagination as to historical truth. But it is possible, even so, to map Attila’s progress. There was, perhaps, a secondary crossing
near Strasbourg, and some opposition from the Burgundians. But the main assault came near the junction of the Rhine and Moselle at Koblenz. That spring, the Huns and their motley allies headed up both sides of the Moselle, two single files on the winding roads, linking up at the nine-arched stone bridge of Trier.

Really, they should have got no further. Trier had been the capital of Rome north of the Alps until the provincial government moved to Arles 50 years before, and it had been a fortress for three centuries. Its 7-metre-high walls linked four colossal gateways, of which one is still there, saved by a Greek monk who walled himself up in it in the eleventh century, protecting it with an aura of sanctity. When the Huns came by, this north gate was a shining soft yellow, but over the centuries it acquired the dark patina that affects all ageing sandstone, and became the Porta Nigra, the Black Gate. Nothing in Gaul, then or now, could better state Rome’s power than this Schwarzenegger-ish guardhouse, 30 metres high, 36 long and 22 deep. Its stone blocks, some bearing names and dates inscribed by proud masons, weighed up to 6 tonnes each. Cut by bronze saws powered by water from the Moselle, they were bound not with cement but with iron clamps into three storeys of 144 arched windows and two squat towers. Two arches, gated and portcullised, led through it into the old city and its 80,000 inhabitants. This was Rome in miniature. Its marbled palace, built on Constantine’s orders in 300–10, was made with 1.5 million tiles brought from the Pyrenees and Africa. The
city’s bathhouse was the empire’s largest, except for those of Diocletian and Caracalla in Rome itself, complete with exercise-room, hot, cold and tepid rooms, coal-fired furnace and two-storey cellars. In the stadium, 20,000 people could see gladiators fighting, criminals fed to lions, and plays on a stage cranked up from the floor (all there in today’s ruins).

So Trier should have stopped the Huns dead in their tracks. But they passed it with hardly a pause. We have no idea what happened. The lack of an account suggests that its garrison, depleted since Arles became Gaul’s capital, just shut themselves up and let the barbarians flow around them. The Huns moved on, no doubt leaving a rearguard to block the valley upriver in case Trier’s soldiers regained their nerve.

In any event, the only information we have concerns the next town on their line of march, Metz. According to one account, the Huns hammered in vain at the walls of Metz with a battering-ram, and advanced on to a fortress upriver, where, just before Easter, news reached them that a portion of Metz’s weakened walls had collapsed. A quick night-time gallop back downriver brought them straight into the breach, and the town fell on 8 April. A priest was taken hostage, others had their throats cut, and many died in their burning houses.

On then, down the gentle limestone slopes of the Ardennes foothills, and out on to the flat expanses of the
campi
, the open savannahs that give their name to Campania, Champagne as it became. The region was known then as the Catalaunian Plains or Fields, after the Latin name for a local tribe, still recalled in the
name of the present-day town of Châlons. There was, it seems, a small diversion north of Châlons, to Reims, the central city of Gaul, where all major roads met. The ancient town, with its triumphal arch built by Augustus and its forum, was almost empty, its inhabitants having taken to the woods, but there remained a small crowd hoping for the best, along with its archbishop and some priests. According to legend, the prelate, Nicasius, was singing Psalm 119 when the Huns reached him. Perhaps he hoped that this longest of psalms, with its 176 verses, would provide some special protection. It didn’t. He had just reached verse 25 – ‘My soul cleaveth unto the dust: Quicken thou me according to thy word’ – when a Hun sword struck off his head. He was later beatified as St Nicaise.