Attila the Hun (34 page)

B
ack in Italy, a dozen towns had suffered the Hun assault, or later claimed they had. Nothing, apparently, was as bad as the fate of Aquileia. Jordanes’ words echo down the centuries, rewritten by Gibbon: ‘The succeeding generation could scarcely discover the ruins of Aquileia.’ Other writers, without looking too closely, claimed that the city suffered total and everlasting destruction.

Well, not exactly. It is possible to make a guess at the truth, because something is known of Aquileia post-Attila.

Six years later the town, supposedly so flattened that its ruins were hardly visible, was reviving well. It had a good flock of Christians, and a bishop. His name was Nicetas, and in March 458 he wrote to Leo, whose reply survives in a collection of his letters. Nicetas was coping with a crisis caused not simply by the destruction but by the business of recovery. It had all been terrible: families had been broken up, the men taken prisoner, the women forsaken; but now, with God’s help, things had improved. At least some of the
men had returned. So Attila had indeed released prisoners, presumably because Pope Leo had ransomed them. How many did not survive to be ransomed? What happened to those who survived, but were not ransomed? Enslaved, for sure, and by now either dead or working for some Hun chief in Hungary.

Nicetas had two problems. The first was this: some of the women had remarried, thinking their husbands dead. What was the status of their marriages now? It was a terrible question to answer, for a ruling either way would throw hundreds of families into turmoil. Leo, however, was not a pope much given to doubt: he replied that second marriages should be annulled, and the first husbands reinstated. No mention, by the way, of the
women
taken by the Huns; they were lost for ever, and posed no theological problem.

The second matter concerned the status of the returnees as Christians. Some had, while prisoners, apparently been forced to adopt the ways of heresy, taking heretical communion, or (if they were children) being baptized by heretics. To describe Huns as heretics sounds odd indeed. In fact, the problem is evidence that Attila’s army was still a very mixed bag, and included Goths, who had been converted to Arianism a century before. Nicetas might not know a Goth from a Hun, but heresy was a red rag to a papal bull. Leo ruled that enforced conversion was no conversion: they would be welcomed back, forgiven and reinstated.

Eventually, the domestic dramas played themselves out, and the reviving town was soon rich enough for its Christian community to build its basilica over the ruins
of the synagogue. The Jews, it seems, had already left. True, the place went downhill. A century later, another barbarian attack, by Lombards this time, underscored its decline, and many of its inhabitants chose to drift west to a new settlement in the unpromising but safer lagoons and islands of the Laguna Veneta.

This connection became for many a simple statement that Aquileia’s surviving inhabitants fled from the Huns to found Venice, which was supposedly a secure haven because the Huns dared not ride their horses into the surrounding mud. Perhaps the Jews of Aquileia had led the way, but for the Christian majority it was all much more stretched out than that. Not until 569, after another barbarian invasion, did Aquileia’s bishop, Paulus, take his relics and regalia to the port of Grado, 10 kilometres south of Aquileia, and about as far out into the Adriatic as you can get without drowning. From there, after another century of rivalry, authority finally jumped to Venice. It was not until the ninth century that Venice proper began to turn channels into canals and link islands with bridges, and create something new and grand that would inspire later writers to turn the inconvenient, extended mess of historical fact into short, sharp folk tales.

Venice still retains a link with its Aquileian roots and traditions, to the benefit of its tourist industry. On the nearby islands of Murano and Burano, they still make glass, thanks in part to the slave Sentia and her co-workers in Aquileia before Attila turned their world upside down.

¹
Samuel Kurinsky, ‘The Jews of Aquileia: A Judaic Community Lost to History’, Hebrew History Federation (
www.hebrewhistory.org/factpapers/aquileia28.html
).

SELDOM HAS A GIRL BECOME SO FAMOUS FOR DOING
nothing. In Greek and Latin, she was Ildico, which historians equate with the German name Hildegunde. She could have been a Germanic princess, sent by some distant vassal to secure Attila’s blessing. Attila already had numerous wives, not so much because he was a man of huge sexual energy, but because the presentation of high-born women was a form of tribute, and their seizure a way of asserting dominance over distant and unreliable vassals. Jordanes, quoting a lost passage of Priscus, says that Ildico was a very beautiful girl. No-one else mentions her. Anyway, she was Attila’s latest wife, picked up or delivered in the spring of 453.

What happened on the night of Attila’s wedding to Ildico was told by Priscus, who had been with Attila
himself four years before and would have taken a passionate interest in these events. For the past three years he had been with his old chief Maximinus up the Nile, sorting out another sub-chapter in the long-running dispute about the balance of divinity and humanity in Christ. This fuss had been re-ignited in 448, when an elderly priest named Eutyches claimed that Christ was of a single nature, all divine, not human at all. Disputes had been vicious, with the authority of Rome and Constantinople again in dispute. The Fourth Ecumenical Council in Chalcedon in 451 tried to draw a line under the argument, stating that Christ was one
person
with two
natures
, allowing him by a sleight of baffling terminology to be both God and man. But the council also in effect proclaimed equality with Rome for Constantinople, which would henceforth have authority over the Balkans and all points east. Rome was furious, and so were the monophysites of Egypt – those who stuck to the idea that Christ had just one nature. Priscus and Maximinus were negotiating peace with two wayward Egyptian groups when Maximinus died. In early 453, then, Priscus had just returned to Constantinople, to find the place still in a chaos of religious dispute. He may even have advised the city’s military governor on the best measures to control the riots. Apparently, there were still good links between the Greeks and the Huns, perhaps through some multilingual Gothic intermediary, who brought the shocking news from Hungary.

Priscus’ original does not survive, but it was copied by Jordanes. Here is Jordanes’ account of what
happened after the wedding, when Attila retired with his new young bride:

He had given himself up to excessive merry-making and he threw himself down on his back heavy with wine and sleep. He suffered a haemorrhage, and the blood, which would ordinarily have drained through his nose, was unable to pass through the usual passages and flowed in its deadly course down his throat, killing him. Thus drunkenness brought a shameful end to a king who had won glory in war. On the morrow, when most of the day had passed, the king’s attendants, suspecting something was amiss, first shouted loudly then broke open the doors. They found Attila without any wounds but dead from an effusion of blood and the girl weeping with downcast face beneath her head-scarf.

The details are convincing – a young girl, a good deal of drink, no hint of ill health, a night of lusty consummation, the body, the weeping girl, the concealing
velamen
. What could have gone wrong? Later, imaginations worked overtime on the subject of Ildico – a wronged princess set upon vengeance, a hidden dagger, poison, who knows what skull duggery? Similar tales arose after the death of Genghis Khan, claiming that he was the victim of a revenge attack by his latest wife. Lesser mortals do not like their kings simply to die; there should be comets and portents and high drama. But there was no hint of that at the time, and Ildico’s shocked state is against it. More likely Attila,
now in his mid-fifties, suffered a catastrophic collapse of some kind.

But what? I think the question can be answered, with recourse to some medical detail.

The report spoke of blood, flowing out through nose and mouth. So much for one dramatic suggestion – that the king died while in the full flow, as it were, of his creative energy, i.e. of a heart attack or stroke brought on by sex. Neither strokes nor heart attacks cause external bleeding. The blood could only have come from some organ with a connection to the mouth – lungs, stomach or oesophagus. Lungs do not suffer sudden haemorrhage (only slow bleeding after years of debilitating disease, like TB). This leaves stomach and throat.

Take the stomach first. He could simply have choked on his own vomit. But there is no mention of vomit; it was the blood that seized the attention of his attendants. One possibility is that the blood could have come from a peptic ulcer, which could have been developing for some time, without necessarily causing any symptoms (ulcers are not always painful). One component in the growth of an ulcer is stress, and of that Attila had borne more than most. The effect of years of tough campaigning might now have been compounded by the painful awareness that he had done all he could, that there never would be a Great Hunnic Empire encompassing Gaul and the Hun homelands, let alone all the eastern and western realms of Constantinople and Rome. If he ever had believed he was destined – by the Blue Heaven or the God of War or whatever deity his shamans worshipped – to rule the
world, he now knew for sure he would have to settle for less. It was, actually, the end. So perhaps what happened was that an ulcer broke, causing him to vomit, which would normally have woken him, except that he lay unconscious from drink and exhaustion.

There is another and, I think, slightly more convincing possibility. The Huns were great drinkers, not only of their own barley-beer but of the wine that they imported from Rome. It was wine that Priscus mentioned at his supper with Attila. For 20 years Attila had been consuming alcohol, perhaps in large amounts (remember the Hun habit of draining the cup after each toast). There is a condition caused by alcoholism known as
portal hypertension
, which produces
oesophageal varices
, which in plain language means varicose veins in the gullet. These swollen, weakened veins can burst without warning, producing a sudden rush of blood, which would, for a man lying on his back in a drunken stupor, run straight into his lungs. If he had been awake, or sober, he would have sat up, bled, and probably recovered. Drink, hypertension and weakened veins in his throat – that was probably the combination that killed him. He drowned in his own blood.

Poor, innocent Ildico awoke next to a corpse, and could only weep, too shocked and apprehensive to go for help, or even open the door when attendants concerned at the strange silence knocked and shouted.

Jordanes takes up the account. The word spread. Distraught attendants called others. People trooped in aghast. As the terrible truth struck them, they began their ritual mourning, which all cultures express in their
own way. In this case, they drew knives and sliced off chunks of hair – a habit which may have survived for three centuries from the days of the Xiongnu, in whose royal graves archaeologists have found plaited hair cut off at the roots. The men also cut their cheeks, an act that explains the scarring to which several authors referred in their descriptions of the Huns. As Jordanes writes, they ‘disfigured their already hideous faces with deep wounds to mourn the famous warrior not with womanly tears and wailings, but with male blood’. This ritual was common to many tribes from the Balkans across Central Asia, and was already well known in the West. Sidonius recalls it to praise the courage of his hero Avitus: ‘In the bearing of wounds, you surpass the one to whom wailing means self-wounding and furrowing the cheeks with iron and gouging red traces of scars on menacing features.’

The body was placed out on the grassland, lying in state in a silken tent in full view of his mourning people. Around the tent circled horsemen, ‘after the manner of circus games’, while one of Attila’s senior aides delivered a funeral dirge, which seems to have been repeated to Priscus word for word, though of course translated from Hunnish into Gothic and then Greek, from which Jordanes produced a Latin version, from which at last this version comes:

Chief of the Huns, King Attila, born of his father Mundzuk, lord of the bravest tribes, who with unprecedented power alone possessed the kingdoms of Scythia and Germany, and having captured their cities
terrorized both Roman empires and, that they might save their remnants from plunder, was appeased by their prayers and took an annual tribute. And when he had by good fortune accomplished all this, he fell neither by an enemy’s blow nor by treachery, but safe among his own people, happy, rejoicing, without any pain. Who therefore can think of this as death, seeing that no-one thinks it calls for vengeance?