Chapter IX: Attila’s Home-Coming 145 (1)

MAIN SOURCES

I. AMMIANI MARCELLINI RERUM GESTARUM, LIBER XXXI 153

II. EX HISTORIA BYZANTINA PRISCI RHETORIS ET SOPHISTAE 159

EX HISTORIA GOTHICA PRISCI RHETORIS ET SOPHISTAE 170

III. JORNANDES: DE REBUS GETICIS 207

IV. EX VITA MS. SANCTI ANIANI EPISCOPI AURELIANENSIS 225

I

THE EMPIRE AND THE BARBARIANS

At the opening of the fifth century of our era the Roman Empire had long been not only the civilised world but Christendom. The four centuries which had passed since the birth of Our Lord had seen in fact the foundation of Europe, not as we know it to-day a mosaic of hostile nationalities, but as one perfect whole in which all that is worth having in the world lay like a treasure. There were born and founded that they might always endure, the culture, the civilisation and the Faith which we enjoy and by which we live. There were established for ever the great lines upon which our art was to develop, to change and yet not to die. There was erected the supremacy of the idea that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our polity, that we might always judge everything by it and fear neither revolution, nor defeat nor decay. There we Europeans were established in the secure possession of our own souls; so that we alone in the world develop from within to change but never to die, and to be, alone in the world, Christians.

The outward and visible sign of the Empire, which above everything else distinguished it from the world which surrounded it, as an island is surrounded by an unmapped sea, was the Pax Romana. This was domestic as well as political. It ensured a complete and absolute order, the condition of civilisation, and, established through many generations, it seemed immutable and unbreakable. Along with it went a conception of law and of property more fundamental than anything we are now able to appreciate, while free exchange was assured by a complete system of communication and admirable roads. There is indeed scarcely anything that is really fundamental in our lives and in our politics that was not there created. It was there our religion, the soul of Europe, was born and little by little became the energy and the cause of all that undying but changeful principle of life and freedom which rightly understood is Europe. Our ideas of justice, our ideas of law, our conception of human dignity and the structure of our society were there conceived, and with such force that while we endure they can never die. In truth, the Empire which it had taken more than a millennium to build was the most successful and perhaps the most beneficent experiment in universal government that has ever been made.

The Empire fell. Why?

We cannot answer that question. The causes of such a catastrophe, spiritual and material, are for the most part hidden from us in the darkness that followed the catastrophe, in which civilisation in the West all but perished. All we can do is to note that the administration of this great State became so expensive that when Alaric came over the Alps in 401 it was probably already bankrupt and in consequence the population was declining; and that the military problem before the Empire, the defence of its frontiers against the outer welter of barbarism, was so expensive and so naturally insecure that it was difficult to ensure and impossible with due economy. Finally we ought to be sure that though the Empire decayed and fell, it was not overthrown by the Barbarians. As in this book we are concerned not indeed with the Barbarian invasions as a whole but nevertheless with the most frightful and perhaps the most destructive among them, we shall do well to consider more particularly here for a moment one of the causes of that fall, though not the chief one as we have said; the insecurity of the frontiers, namely, and the problem this proposed which the Empire was, alas, unable to solve.

The Empire was confined on the west by the ocean, on the south by the desert of Africa, on the east by the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, on the north by the Rhine and the Danube, the Black Sea and the Caucasus.

It was that northern frontier which was a fundamental weakness and which at least from the middle of the third century continually occupied the mind of the Roman administration. How to hold it?

Beyond that frontier lay a world largely unknown, a mere wilderness of barbarians, tribes always restless, always at war, always pressing upon the confines of civilisation. Within lay all that is worth having in our lives, the hope of the world. It was this which, then as now, had to be defended and against the same enemy--barbarism. For barbarism does not become less barbarous when it becomes learned, a savage is a savage even in professorial dress. For this cause it is written: change your hearts and not your garments.

The defence, then, of the frontier had been the chief problem of the Empire perhaps from its foundation by Augustus and certainly for two hundred years before Alaric crossed the Alps. Its solution was attempted in various ways, before, in the year 292, Diocletian attempted to deal with it by the revolutionary scheme of dividing the Empire. But the division he made was, and perhaps unavoidably, rather racial than strategic, the two parts of the Empire met at a critical point on the Danube and by force of geography the eastern part was inclined to an Asiatic outlook and to the neglect of the Danube, while the western was by no means strong enough to hold the tremendous line of the two rivers. Nevertheless the West made an heroic attempt to fulfil its too onerous duty. The capital of the vicariate of Italy was removed from Rome to Milan. This tremendous act was purely strategical. It was thought, and rightly, that the frontier would be more readily secured from Milan, which held, as it were, all the passes of the Alps in its hands, than from Rome in the midst of the long peninsula of Italy. It was a change more amazing than the removal of the capital of the British Empire from London to Edinburgh would be; but it was not enough. In 330, seventeen years after Christianity had become the official religion of the Empire, Constantine the Great for the same reasons of defence removed the seat of the Empire to Byzantium, the new Rome on the Bosphorus, which he renamed Constantinople.

That move, which has been so strongly condemned, would seem in any right apprehension of what followed to have saved what could be saved out of the foreseen and perhaps inevitable _débâcle_. Constantinople remained till 1453 the secure capital of the Eastern Government and of a Roman civilisation; it endured, and in more than one critical period held up the citadel of the West--Italy--in its hands.

It may be that nothing could have secured the West; that the foundation of Constantinople saved the East is certain. Because the West was the weaker and the richer, because the name of Rome was so tremendous, the West, as we know, bore the full brunt of the Barbarian assault. That assault was a much looser and more haphazard affair than we have been wont to believe. The West was rather engulfed than defeated. For a time it was lost in a sea of barbarism; that it emerged, that it rearose, and that we are what we are, we owe to the foundation of Constantinople and to the Catholic Church.

I say that the Empire was rather engulfed than defeated. Let us consider this.

In the year 375 the frontiers were secure; nevertheless before then the defence had failed. Long before then it had become obvious that the vast hordes of Barbarians beyond the Rhine and the Danube could not be held back if anything should occur to drive them on. If they came on they would have to be met, not beyond, or even upon the rivers, but within the Empire itself.

If anything should occur to drive them on.... In the year 375 this befell. Ammianus Marcellinus, the contemporary Roman historian, writing of the incursions of the Barbarians, asserts that all the evils which befell the Empire at that time were due to one people--the Huns. In the year 375 the Huns were finally victorious over the Goths who in 376 in utter despair appealed to the Eastern Emperor Valens for protection. “Suppliant multitudes of that warlike nation,” we read of the Goths, “whose pride was now humbled in the dust, covered a space of many miles along the banks of the Danube. With outstretched arms and pathetic lamentations they loudly deplored their past misfortunes and their present danger; acknowledged that their only hope of safety was in the clemency of the Roman Government; and most solemnly protested that if the gracious liberality of the Emperor would permit them to cultivate the waste lands of Thrace they would ever hold themselves bound by the strongest obligations of duty and gratitude to obey the laws and guard the tenets of the republic.” Their prayers were granted and their service was accepted by the Imperial Government. They were transported over the Danube into the Roman Empire. In some ways this act and its date 376 are among the most momentous in the history of Europe.

Undisciplined and restless this nation of near a million Barbarians suddenly introduced into civilisation was a constant anxiety and danger. Ignorant of the laws they had sworn to keep, as well as of the obligations and privileges of civilisation, the Goths were at the mercy of their masters, who exploited them without scruple, till driven to madness they revolted and began the fatal march through Moesia, entering Thrace at last not as the guests of the Empire but as its victorious enemy. They encamped under the walls of Hadrianople which presently they besieged, laying waste the provinces; and it was not till Theodosius had ascended the Imperial throne that they were successfully dealt with, forced to submit, and settled in Thrace and Asia Minor.

But such a result could not endure. The Barbarians but awaited a leader, and when he appeared, as he did in the person of Alaric, after the death of Theodosius, they turned on Constantinople itself, which they were able to approach but not to blockade. In 396 Alaric marched southward into Greece; from Thermopylae to Sparta he pursued his victorious way, avoiding Athens rather from superstition than from fear of any mortal foe. Early in 396, however, Stilicho, who was later to win such fame in the Italian campaign, set sail from Italy, met Alaric in Arcadia, turned him back and seemed about to compel his surrender in the prison of the Peloponnesus. In this, however, he was not successful. Alaric was able to cut his way out and by rapid marches to reach the Gulf of Corinth and to transport his troops, his captives and his spoil to the opposite shore. There he succeeded in negotiating a treaty with Constantinople whereby he entered its pay and was declared Master General of Eastern Illyricum. This befell in 399.

The intervention of Stilicho, successful though it had been, had proved one thing before all others; the political separation of the East and the West. The sailing of Stilicho and his army was the intervention of the West to save the East, for it was the East that was then in danger. The West was betrayed. The East made terms with the Barbarian and employed him. It behoved the West to look to itself, for it was obvious that the East would save itself at last by sacrificing the West.

The West was ready. A scheme of defence had been prepared which, as we shall see, was the best that could in the circumstances have been devised. With a directness and a clarity worthy of Rome the advisers of Honorius, then in Milan, determined to sacrifice everything if need be to the defence of the European citadel, of Italy that is; and, after all, considering the position of Alaric in Illyricum, it was that which was chiefly threatened. If it fell it was certain that the whole of the West must collapse.

The problem before the advisers of Honorius was not an easy one. To solve it with certainty enormous sacrifices were necessary, but to solve it meant the salvation of the world. It was therefore determined to abandon the Rhine and the Danube, for already Alaric was within those lines. It was determined--and this was the decisive thing--to abandon the Alps, to make, that is to say, Cisalpine Gaul, or as we say the Lombard Plain, the battlefield, and to hold Italy proper along the line of the Apennines. I have examined and explained this strategy at length elsewhere;[2] here it is only necessary to say that its amazing success justified a policy so realistic.

The theory of the commanders of Honorius was that the Apennines were by nature impregnable save at one place, the narrow pass between them and the Adriatic, which they had long designed Ravenna to hold. Their intention to hold this line was determined not only by this theory, but by this, too, that they were something more than uncertain of the attitude of the Eastern Empire. Their strategy meant the abandonment of the richest province south of the Alps, the richest and the most ancient; but if the military theory which regarded the Apennines as impassable were right it meant the certain and immediate salvation of the soul of the West and the eventual salvation of the whole.

Honorius and his ministers had not long to wait. Having looted the provinces of Europe within the dominion of the Eastern Emperor, Alaric “tempted by the power, the beauty and the wealth of Italy ... secretly aspired to plant the Gothic standard on the walls of Rome, and to enrich his army with the accumulated spoils of an hundred triumphs.”

In November, 401, Alaric entered Venetia by the Julian Alps and passed by Aquileia without taking it, intent on the spoil of the South. As he came on Honorius retired from Milan to Ravenna; the gates of Italy were barred. Then came Stilicho over the Cisalpine Plain, met Alaric, who had crossed the Po, at Pollentia, and defeated him and, following his retreat, broke him at Asta so that he compelled him to recross the Alps. In 403 Alaric again entered Venetia. Stilicho met him at Verona and once more hurled him back. The barred gates of Italy had scarce been questioned.

It was not Alaric, after all, but another Barbarian, Radagaisus, who was first to demand an entrance. In 405 he traversed the same Alpine passes as Alaric had used, passed Aquileia, crossed the Po and shunning the Via Emilia, which led through the pass Ravenna barred, adventured over the Apennines which the Roman generals had conceived as impassable by a Barbarian army. They were right. When Radagaisus saw the South he was starving. Stilicho found him at Fiesole and cut him to pieces. But the remnant of his army escaped as Alaric had done, it was not annihilated; it returned through Cisalpine Gaul and fell upon Gaul proper. Then in 408 Stilicho was murdered in Ravenna by order of the Emperor.

This last disaster was the cause of what immediately followed. When in 408 Alaric invaded Venetia he looted and destroyed as he wished, for there was no one to meet him. He took the great road southward and found the gate open; passed Ravenna without opposition, marched to Rome and after three sieges entered and pillaged it and was on his way southward to enjoy and to loot the South and Sicily, Placidia, the Emperor’s sister, a captive in his train, when he died at Cosenza in 410. His brother-in-law Adolphus, erected as king upon the shields of the Goths--there by the monstrous grave of his predecessor--concluded a peace with Honorius similar to that which years before Alaric had made with Constantinople. He was received into the Imperial service, consented to cross the Alps, and, what was to become a precedent for a yet more outrageous demand, received the hand of Placidia, the Emperor’s sister, in marriage. Thus the retreat of the Barbarian was secured, the peace of Italy restored and a repose obtained which endured for some forty-two years.

It is interesting to observe the extraordinary likeness between Alaric’s attack upon the East and his invasion of the West. Indeed, the only difference between them is the fact that Constantinople was never really in danger, whereas Rome was entered and looted. The intention of both invasions was the same--loot; the result of both was the same--tribute and service in return for the evacuation of the immediate provinces by the Barbarian.

The Imperial failure East and West was a failure in morale and in politics; it was not rightly understood a military failure: Alaric had always been defeated when he was attacked. It was the failure of the West to attack him that gave him Rome at last. The Imperial advisers perhaps thought they had solved the question he had propounded to them, when, after Alaric’s death, they had obtained the retreat of the Barbarian across the Alps--a retreat he was as glad to carry out as they to order, for he was in a sort of trap--and had secured at least his neutrality by admitting him into the service of the Empire. But the peace of more than a generation which followed their act was as illusory as it was contemptible.

The whole Empire had received from Alaric a moral blow from which it was never really to recover. It is true that much which happened in the years that immediately followed the retreat of Adolphus was fortunate. Placidia the spoil and the bride and later the fugitive widow of Alaric’s successor returned in triumph to Ravenna to be the unwilling bride of her deliverer Constantius. Largely through her influence, after the death of Honorius, when she ruled in Ravenna with the title of Augusta as the guardian of her son, the young Cæsar Valentinian, between East and West, a new, if unsubstantial, cordiality appeared. Italy at least was restored to prosperity, while in Aetius she possessed a general as great as the great Stilicho. But if Italy was safe the provinces were in peril and she herself saw Africa betrayed by Boniface and ravaged by and lost to the Vandals under Genseric. Nor was the domestic state of her household and court such as to inspire her with confidence in the future. If her son Valentinian was a foolish and sensual boy, her daughter Honoria was discovered in a low intrigue with a chamberlain of the palace, and when in exile at Constantinople sent, perhaps longing for the romantic fate of her mother, her ring to the new and youthful King of the Huns, soon to be famous as Attila, inviting him to carry her off as Adolphus, the Goth, had carried off Placidia.

Such was the condition of things in the royal household of the West. In Constantinople things were not more promising. Theodosius, the young Emperor, called the Calligrapher, was a dilettante of the fine arts, not a statesman. Those who surrounded him were mediocrities intent rather on theological controversies than on the safety of the State, or sunk in a cynical corruption in which everything noble was lost. No one East or West seemed able to grasp or to realise that there was any danger. Had the Imperial Governments failed altogether to understand the fundamental cause of the Gothic advance, the Vandal attack, indeed of all their embarrassments? Had they failed to remember what was there beyond the Rhine and the Danube? Had they forgotten the Huns?

FOOTNOTES:

[2] See my “Ravenna” (Dent, 1913), pp. 1-10.

II

THE HUNS AND ATTILA

The people called the Huns, “scarcely mentioned in other records,” are fully described by that Ammianus Marcellinus[3] whom I have already quoted. He lived at the end of the fourth century, was a Roman historian born of Greek parents at Antioch, and after fighting in Gaul, in Germany and the East, settled in Rome and devoted himself to history. He describes the Huns as “living beyond the Sea of Azov on the borders of the Frozen Ocean.” And adds that they were a people “savage beyond all parallel.” He then gives us the following careful description of them:--

“In their earliest infancy deep incisions are made in the cheeks of their boys[4] so that when the time comes for the beard to grow the sprouting hairs may be kept back by the furrowed scars, and therefore they grow to old age as beardless as eunuchs. At the same time all have strong and well-built limbs and strong necks; they are indeed of great size, but so short-legged that you might fancy them to be two-legged beasts, or the figures which are hewn out in a rude manner with an axe on the posts at the end of bridges.[5]

“They do, however, just bear the likeness of men (horribly ugly though they be), but they are so little advanced in civilisation that they make no use of fire, nor of seasoned food, but live on roots which they find in the fields, or on the half raw flesh of any animal which they merely warm a little by placing it between their own thighs and the backs of their horses.

“They do not live under roofed houses but look upon them as tombs and will only enter them of necessity. Nor is there to be found among them so much as a cabin thatched with reed; but they wander about over the mountains and through the woods training themselves to bear from their infancy the extremes of frost and hunger and thirst.

“They wear linen clothes or else the skins of field mice sewn together, and this both at home and abroad. When once such a tunic is put on, it is never changed till from long decay it falls to pieces. Their heads are covered with round caps and their hairy legs with goat skins and their shoes which are ignorant of any last are so clumsy as to hinder them in walking.

“For this cause they are not well suited for infantry; but, on the other hand, they are almost one with their horses, which are poorly shaped but hardy; often they sit them like women. In truth they can remain on horseback night and day; on horseback they buy and sell, they eat and drink, and bowed on the narrow neck of their steeds they even sleep and dream. On horseback too they discuss and deliberate. They are not, however, under the authority of a king, but are content with the loose government of their chiefs.

“When attacked they sometimes engage in regular battle formed in a solid body and uttering all kinds of terrific yells. More often, however, they fight irregularly, suddenly dispersing, then reuniting and after inflicting huge loss upon their enemy will scatter over the plains hither and thither, avoiding a fortified place or an entrenchment. It must be confessed that they are very formidable warriors....

“None of them ploughs or even touches a plough-handle; for they have no settled abode, but are alike homeless and lawless, continually wandering with their waggons which indeed are their homes. They seem to be ever in flight.... Nor if he is asked can any one tell you where he was born; for he was conceived in one place, born in another far away, and bred in another still more remote.

“They are treacherous and inconstant and like brute beasts are utterly ignorant of the distinction between right and wrong. They only express themselves with difficulty and ambiguously, have no respect for any religion or superstition, are immoderately covetous of gold, and are so fickle and cantankerous that many times in a day they will quarrel with their comrades without cause and be reconciled without satisfaction.”[6]

Such were the people who according to Ammianus were “the original cause of all the destruction and manifold calamities” which descended upon the Roman Empire, in the fifth century of our era.

Fifty-six years before they began directly to menace civilisation and the Roman Empire, they had, as we have seen, in 376 A.D., driven the Goths before them to the first of those famous assaults upon the frontiers of the Roman world. They themselves, utter barbarians as they were, attempted then no direct attack upon our civilisation, though in 396 they crossed the Caucasus, raided Armenia and as Claudius notes, “laid waste the pleasant fields of Syria.” In 409, however, Alaric being then intent on Italy, they crossed the Danube and pushed on into Bulgaria, Uldis, their chief, boasting in true Barbarian fashion, “All that the sun shines upon I can conquer if I will.” It was the first claim of the Barbarian, vocal and explicit, to “a place in the sun”--someone else’s place. Uldis’ boast, however, had been but the prelude to his flight and fall. Amid the welter of Barbarians less barbarous than he, Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi, Alani, the Hun in fact was unable to do much more than drive them on. When they had passed into the Empire, into Gaul and Spain and Africa, he, worse than them all, was free at last to threaten Christendom and its capitals, Constantinople and Rome.

It was not till the two brothers Attila and Bleda ascended the Hunnish throne, if throne it can be called, in the year 423, that the Huns really became immediately and directly dangerous to civilisation.

That civilisation already half bankrupt and in transition had, as we have seen, been bewildered and wounded by the actual incursion of Barbarian armies south of the Danube and the Rhine, nay within the heart of the Empire, within reach of Constantinople, within the very walls of Rome. It was now to be assaulted by a savage horde, wholly heathen, intent on murder and rape, loot and destruction.

The contrast between the two attacks, the attack of Alaric and that of Attila, is very striking. To admire Alaric, even to defend him, is obviously not impossible, since so many historians have been found ready to do both. No voice unless it be Kaiser Wilhelm’s has ever been raised in behalf of Attila. Here was the Empire, Christendom; he fell upon it like a wild beast. At least the Goths were Christian--though Arian--the Huns were pagan heathen. At least Alaric had revered the Roman name and sought to assume it; Attila despised and hated it and would have destroyed it utterly. But if there is this moral contrast between the Gothic and the Hunnish attacks upon the Empire, militarily they are alike in this above all that both were directed first upon the East and were only turned upon the West after a sort of failure. Happily for us the attacks of Attila, while infinitely more damaging, were not nearly so dangerous as those of Alaric. The Empire was assaulted by an assassin; it was delivered.

The Roman system with regard to the Barbarians had long been established when Theodosius II ascended the Eastern throne. It consisted not only in employing Barbarians as auxiliaries--thus Uldis and his Huns had fought under Stilicho against Radagaisus at the battle of Fiesole; but in setting the different Barbarian tribes and races one against another. The Huns especially had been favoured by the Empire in this way, Stilicho knew them well and Aetius who was at last to defeat them upon the Catalaunian plains owed them perhaps his life in the crisis that followed the death of his rival Boniface in 433. But that policy, always dangerous, and the more so if it were inevitable, was already bankrupt. The dispersal through the provinces of the Goths, the Vandals, the Alani, Suevi and other tribes left the Empire face to face upon its northern frontier with the real force which had driven them on. In 432 we find Roua, King of the Huns, in receipt of an annual subsidy, scarcely to be distinguished from a tribute, of 350 pounds’ weight of gold. He it was who perhaps first broke the old Roman policy. When the Empire, according to its custom, made alliances with certain Barbarian tribes his neighbours, he claimed them as his subjects and immediately swore that he would denounce all his treaties with the Empire unless the Emperor broke off these alliances. Moreover, he demanded that all those of his subjects then within the Empire should be restored to him; for many had entered the Roman service to escape his harsh rule. These demands could not be ignored or refused. In 433 Theodosius was on the point of sending an embassy to treat with Roua, when he heard that he was dead and that his two nephews, still young men, Attila and Bleda, had succeeded him. It was they who received the Imperial ambassadors.

The conference met on the right bank of the Danube within the Empire, that is near the Roman town of Margus or Margum, a city of Moesia, where the Danube and the Morava meet. The place was known as the _Margum planum_ on account of the character of the country, and was famous as the spot where Diocletian had defeated Carinus.[7]

The Byzantine historian Priscus has left us an account of this strange meeting. The Huns it seems came on horseback and as they refused to dismount the Roman ambassadors also remained on their horses. It was thus they heard the arrogant demands of the Hunnish kings: the denunciation by Theodosius of his alliance with the Barbarians of the Danube, the expulsion of all the Huns serving in the Imperial armies or settled within the Empire, an undertaking not to assist any Barbarian people at war with the Huns, and the payment by the Empire as tribute, _tributi nomine_, of seven hundred pounds’ weight of gold instead of the three hundred and fifty given hitherto. To all these demands the ambassadors were forced to agree as Attila insisted either upon their acceptance or upon war, and Theodosius preferred any humiliation to war. The famous conference of Margus was thus a complete victory for the Huns, a victory Attila never forgot.

That Theodosius was ready to accept any terms which Attila might insist upon is proved by the fact that he immediately delivered up to him his two guests, young princes of the Huns, and made no protest when Attila crucified them before the eyes of his ambassadors.

This act seems to symbolise at the outset the character of Attila and his reign. He was then, we may suppose, between thirty and forty years old, and although the younger always the master of his brother Bleda, whom he was soon to murder. Of the place of his birth we know nothing,[8] but he grew up on the Danube and there learned the use of arms, perhaps in the company of the young Aetius, who had been a Roman hostage of Roua and who was one day to conquer Attila. If we look for a portrait of him we shall unhappily not find it in any contemporary writer; but Jornandes, probably repeating a lost passage of some earlier writer, perhaps Priscus himself, tells us that he was short, with a mighty chest, a large head, eyes little and deep-set, a scant beard, flat nose and dark complexion. He thrust his head forward as he went and darted his glances all about, going proudly withal, like one destined to terrify the nations and shake the earth. Hasty and quarrelsome, his words, like his acts, were sudden and brutal, but though in war he only destroyed, and left the dead unburied in their thousands for a warning; to those who submitted to him he was merciful, or at least he spared them. He dressed simply and cleanly, ate as simply as he dressed, his food being served on wooden dishes; indeed his personal temperance contrasted with the barbaric extravagance he had about him. Nevertheless he was a Barbarian with the instincts of a savage. Constantly drunk he devoured women with a ferocious passion, every day having its victim, and his bastards formed indeed a people. He knew no religion but surrounded himself with sorcerers, for he was intensely superstitious.[9] As a general he was seldom in the field, he commanded rather than led and ever preferred diplomacy to battle.[10] His greatest weapon was prevarication. He would debate a matter for years and the continual embassies of Theodosius amused without exhausting him and his patience. He played with his victims as a cat does with a mouse and would always rather buy a victory than win it. He found his threat more potent than his deed, and in fact played with the Empire which had so much to lose, very much as Bismarck played with Europe. Like Bismarck too his business was the creation of an Empire. His idea, an idea that perhaps even Roua had not failed to understand, was the creation of an Empire of the North, a Hunnish Empire, in counterpoise against the Roman Empire of the South, to the south that is of the Rhine and the Danube. For this cause he wished to unite the various Barbarian tribes and nations under his sceptre, as Bismarck wished to unite the tribes of the Germans under the Prussian sword. He was to be the Emperor of the North as the Roman Emperors were Emperors of the South. Had he lived in our day he would have understood that famous telegram of the Kaiser to the Tsar of Russia--“the Admiral of the Atlantic....”

It was the business of Theodosius to prevent the realisation of this scheme, nor did he hesitate to break the treaty of Margus to achieve this. His emissaries attempted to attach to the Empire the Acatziri, a Hunnish tribe that had replaced the Alani on the Don. Their chief, however, fearing for his independence, or stupidly handled, sent word to Attila of the Roman plot. The Hun came down at the head of a great army, and though he spared the Acatziri, for their chief was both wily and a flatterer, he brought all the Barbarians of that part within his suzerainty and, returning, soon found himself master of an Empire which stretched from the North Sea to the Caucasus, and from the Baltic to the Danube and the Rhine, an Empire certainly in extent comparable with that of Rome.

It was in achieving this truly mighty purpose that Attila exhibits two of his chief characteristics, his superstition and his cruelty.

It seems that the ancient Scythians on the plain to the east of the Carpathians had for idol and perhaps for God a naked sword, its hilt buried in the earth, its blade pointed skyward. To this relic the Romans had given the name of the sword of Mars. In the course of ages the thing had been utterly forgotten, till a Hunnish peasant seeing his mule go lame, and finding it wounded in the foot, on seeking for the cause, guided by the blood, found this sword amid the undergrowth and brought it to Attila who recovered it joyfully as a gift from heaven and a sign of his destined sovereignty over all the peoples of the earth. So at least Jornandes relates.[11]

The other episode exhibits his cruelty. In founding his empire Attila had certainly made many enemies and aroused the jealousy of those of his own house. At any rate he could not remember without impatience that he shared his royalty with Bleda. To one of his subtlety such impatience was never without a remedy. Bleda was accused of treason, perhaps of plotting with Theodosius, and Attila slew his brother or had him assassinated; and alone turned to enjoy his Barbary and to face Rome.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] In the thirty-first book of his History of Rome: see Appendix I.

[4] The Prussian student is even to-day famous for the scars on his face inflicted in the duels at the Universities.

[5] Cf. the physique of the ordinary Prussian at its most characteristic in Von Hindenberg, who really seems to have been hewn out of wood.

[6] It was a modern and famous German who not long since declared that the Prussians were such quarrelsome and disagreeable brutes that it was only their propensity to drink beer and that continually that mollified them sufficiently to be regarded as human beings.

[7] It is curious to remember that this first encounter of Attila with the Imperial power took place in what is now Servia only fifty miles further down the Danube than Belgrade.

[8] It has been suggested that his name Attila is that of the Volga in the fifth century and that therefore he was born upon its banks; but as well might one say that Roua was born there because one of the ancient names of that river was Rha.

[9] For all this see Appendix: Jornandes, _R. Get._, 35 and especially for his dress and food, Priscus, _infra_.

[10] Cf. Jorn., _R. Get._, 36: “Homo subtilis antequam arma gereret, arte pugnabat....”

[11] See Appendix, Jornandes, _R. Get._, 35.

III

ATTILA AND THE EASTERN EMPIRE

When Attila had achieved the hegemony of the North he turned his attention upon the Empire; and it is curious for us at this moment to note the coincidence that this first attack upon civilisation was delivered at the very spot upon the Danube where the Germanic powers in August, 1914, began their offensive. Attila directed his armies upon the frontiers of modern Servia at the point where the Save joins the Danube, where the city of Singidunum rose then and where to-day Belgrade stands.

The pretext for this assault was almost as artificial and manufactured as that which Austria put forward for her attack upon Servia. Attila asserted that the Bishop of that same frontier town of Margus, on the Morava, where he had made treaty with the Empire, had crossed the Danube, and having secretly obtained access to the sepulchre of the Hunnish kings had stolen away its treasures. The Bishop, of course, eagerly denied this strange accusation, and it seemed indeed so unlikely that he was guilty that Theodosius was exceedingly reluctant to sacrifice him. The people of Moesia clamoured for a decision; if the Bishop were guilty then he must be delivered to Attila, but if not Theodosius must protect both him and them. For Attila had waited for nothing; he had crossed the Danube before making his accusation and had occupied Viminacium, one of the greater towns upon the frontier.

Meanwhile the Bishop, seeing the hesitation of Theodosius and expecting to be sacrificed, made his way to the camp of the Huns and promised in return for his life to deliver Margus to them, and this he did upon the following night. Then, dividing his forces into two armies, Attila began his real attack upon the Empire.

The first of these armies was directed upon Singidunum, the modern Belgrade, which was taken and ruined, and when that was achieved it proceeded up the Save to Sirmium, the ancient capital of Pannonia, which soon fell into its hands. The second crossed the Danube further eastward and besieged Ratiaria, a considerable town, the head-quarters of a Roman Legion and the station of the fleet of the Danube.

Having thus, with this second army, secured the flank, Attila marched his first army from Singidunum up the Morava to Naissus (Nisch), precisely as the Austrians tried to do but yesterday. They failed, but he succeeded and Naissus fell. Thence he passed on to Sardica where he was met by his second army which had taken Ratiaria. Sardica was pillaged and burnt.

Attila thus possessed himself in the year 441 of the gateways of the Balkans, almost without a protest from Theodosius. Five years later, in 446, he was ready to advance again. In that year and the next he destroyed two Roman armies, took and pillaged some seventy towns, and pushed south as far as Thermopylae, and eastward even to Gallipoli; only the walls of Constantinople saved the capital. Theodosius was forced to buy a disgraceful peace at the price of an immediate payment of 6000 pounds’ weight of gold, an annual tribute, no longer even disguised, of 2000 pounds, and an undertaking that the Empire would never employ or give refuge to any of those whom Attila claimed as his subjects.

It was easier to agree to such terms than to fulfil them. The provinces were ruined, the whole fiscal system of the East in confusion, and even what wealth remained was, as Priscus tells us, “spent not in national purposes, but on absurd shows and gaudy pageants, and all the pleasures and excesses of a licentious society such as would not have been permitted in any properly governed State, even in the midst of the greatest prosperity.” Attila, who marked the decay and the embarrassment of the Imperial Government, forewent nothing of his advantage. He became more and more rapacious. When he did not obtain all he desired he sent an embassy to Constantinople to intimidate the government, and this became a regular means of blackmail with him, a means more humiliating than war and not less successful.

The first of these embassies arrived in Constantinople immediately after the terms of peace had been agreed upon. It made further demands, and was treated with the most extravagant hospitality. Three times within a single year other embassies arrived; they were a means of blackmail and were assured of an ever-increasing success.

The most famous and the most important of these embassies was that which arrived in Constantinople in 449. The ambassadors then employed by Attila are worthy of notice, for in them we see not only the condition of things at that time, but also the naive cunning of the Hun. The two chief legates whom Attila dispatched to Constantinople upon this occasion were Edecon and Orestes. Edecon was a Scythian or Hun by birth, a heathen of course, and a Barbarian, the commander of the guard of Attila, and the father of Odoacer, later to be so famous. Orestes, on the other hand, who was one of Attila’s chief ministers, was a Roman provincial of Pannonia, born at Petavium (probably Pettau on the Drave), who had made a fortunate marriage as a young man when he allied himself with Romulus, a considerable Roman personage of that province. He had, however, deserted the Imperial service, certainly open to him, for that of the Barbarians, and had made his fortune. Nor was his part in history to be played out in the service of Attila, for his son Romulus was to be the last of the Western Emperors, contemptuously known to history as Romulus Augustulus.

Orestes was then an adventurer pure and simple, but in sending him with the Barbarian Edecon, we see the system of Attila in his blackmail of the Empire. The employment of a Roman provincial was a check upon the Barbarian envoy. A bitter jealousy subsisted between them, each spied on the other, and thus Attila was well served. The fact that the Hun was able to command the services of such as Orestes is a sufficient comment upon the condition of the frontier provinces.

It was these two jealous envoys that, in the early months of 449, appeared in Constantinople bringing, of course, new demands. Their mission, indeed, was the most insolent that Attila had so far dared to send. It demanded three main things; first, that all the country to the south of the Danube as far as Naissus should be regarded as a part of the Hunnish Empire; second, that in future Theodosius should send to the Hunnish court only the most illustrious ambassadors, but if this were done Attila for his part would consent to meet them on the frontier at Sardica; third, that the refugees should be delivered up. This last demand was a repetition of many that had gone before it. As before Attila threatened if his requests were not granted he would make war.

The ambassadors Edecon and Orestes came to Constantinople where a “Roman” named Vigilas acted as their guide and interpreter, an indiscreet and vulgar fellow of whom we shall hear more presently. Received in audience by Theodosius in the famous palace on the Bosphorus, the ambassadors with the interpreter later visited the chief minister, the eunuch Chrysaphius. On their way they passed through the noble halls of Constantine decorated with gold and built of marble, the whole a vast palace, perhaps as great as the Vatican. Edecon, the Hun, was stupefied by so much splendour, he could not forbear to express his amazement; Vigilas was not slow to mark this naive astonishment nor to describe it to Chrysaphius, who presently proposed to put it to good use. Taking Edecon apart from Orestes as he talked he suggested to him that he also might enjoy such splendour if he would leave the Huns and enter the service of the Emperor. After all it was not more than Orestes had done. But Edecon answered that it would be despicable to leave one’s master without his consent. Chrysaphius then asked what position he held at the court of Attila, and if he was so much in the confidence of his master as to have access freely to him. To which Edecon answered that he approached him when he would, that he was indeed the chief of his captains and kept watch over his person by night. And when Chrysaphius heard this he was content and told Edecon that if he were capable of discretion he would show him a way to grow rich without trouble, but that he must speak with him more at leisure, which he would do presently if he would come and sup with him that evening alone without Orestes or any following. Already in the mind of the eunuch a plan was forming by which he hoped to rid the Empire once for all of the formidable Hun.

Edecon accepted the invitation. Awaiting him he found Vigilas with Chrysaphius, and after supper heard apparently without astonishment the following amazing proposal. After swearing him to secrecy, Chrysaphius explained that he proposed to him the assassination of Attila. “If you but succeed in this and gain our frontiers,” said he, “there will be no limit to our gratitude, you shall be loaded with honours and riches.”

The Hun was ready in appearance at least to agree, but he insisted that he would need money for bribery, not much, but at least fifty pounds’ weight of gold. This he explained he could not carry back with him as Attila was wont upon the return of his ambassadors to exact a most strict account of the presents they had received, and so great a weight of gold could not escape the notice of his own companion and servants. He suggested then that Vigilas should accompany him home under the pretext of returning the fugitives and that at the right moment he should find the money necessary for the project. Needless to say, Chrysaphius readily agreed to all that Edecon proposed. He does not seem either to have been ashamed to make so Hunnish a proposal or to have suspected for a moment that Edecon was deceiving him. He laid all before Theodosius, won his consent and the approval of Martial his minister.

Together they decided to send an embassy to Attila, to which the better to mask their intentions Vigilas should be attached as interpreter. This embassy they proposed to make as imposing as possible, and to this end they appointed as its chief a man of a high, but not of consular rank, and of the best reputation. In this they showed a certain ability, for as it seemed to them if their plot failed they could escape suspicion by means of the reputation of their ambassador. The man they chose was called Maximin, and he fortunately chose as his secretary Priscus, the Sophist, to whose pen we are indebted for an account of all these things. He asserts, and probably with truth, that neither Maximin nor he himself was aware of the plot of assassination. They conceived themselves to be engaged in a serious mission and were the more impressed by its importance in that its terms were far less subservient to the Hun than had been the custom in recent times. Attila was told that henceforth he must not evade the obligations of his treaties nor invade at all the Imperial territories. And with regard to the fugitives he was informed that beside those already surrendered seventeen were now sent but that there were no more. So ran the letter. But Maximin was also to say that the Hun must look for no ambassador of higher rank than himself since it was not the Imperial custom towards the Barbarians; on the contrary, Rome was used to send to the North any soldier or messenger who happened to be available. And since he had now destroyed Sardica his proposal to meet there any ambassador of consular rank was merely insolent. If indeed the Hun wished to remove the differences between Theodosius and himself he should send Onegesius as ambassador. Onegesius was the chief minister of Attila.

Such were the two missions, the one official, the other secret, which set out together from Constantinople.

The great journey seems to have been almost wholly uneventful as far as Sardica, 350 miles from Constantinople, which was reached after a fortnight of travel. They found that town terribly pillaged but not destroyed, and the Imperial embassy bought sheep and oxen, and having prepared dinner invited Edecon and his colleagues to share it with them, for they were still officially within the Empire. But within those ruins, even among the ambassadors, peace was impossible. Priscus records the ridiculous quarrel which followed. The Huns began to magnify the power of Attila,--was not his work around them? The Romans knowing the contents of the letter they bore sang the praises of the Emperor. Suddenly Vigilas, perhaps already drunk, asserted that it was not right to compare men with the gods, nor Attila with Theodosius, since Attila was but a man. Only the intervention of Maximin and Priscus prevented bloodshed, nor was harmony restored till Orestes and Edecon had received presents of silk and jewels. Even these gifts were not made altogether without an untoward incident. For Orestes in thanking Maximin exclaimed that he, Maximin, was not like those insolent courtiers of Constantinople “who gave presents and invitations to Edecon, but none to me.” And when Maximin, ignorant of the Chrysaphian plot, demanded explanations, Orestes angrily left him. Already the plan of assassination was beginning to fester.

The ambassadors went on from ruined Sardica to desolate Naissus (Nisch) utterly devoid of inhabitants, full only of horror and ruins. They crossed a plain sown with human bones whitening in the sun, and saw the only witness to the Hunnish massacre of the inhabitants--a vast cemetery. “We found,” Priscus tells us, “a clean place above the river where we camped and slept.”

Close to this ruined town was the Imperial army, commanded by Agintheus, under whose eagles five of the seventeen refugees to be surrendered had taken refuge. The Roman general, however, was obliged to give them up. Their terror as they went on in the ambassadorial train towards the Danube may well be imagined.

The great river at length came in sight; its approaches lined and crowded with Huns, the passages served by the Barbarians in dug-outs, boats formed out of the hollowed trunks of trees. With these boats the whole Barbarian shore was littered as though in readiness for the advance of an army. Indeed, as it appeared Attila was in camp close by, and intent on hunting within the Roman confines to the south of the river, a means certainly of reconnaissance as habitually used by the Huns as commerce has been for the same end by the Germans.

We do not know with what feelings Maximin and Priscus saw all this and crossed the great river frontier at last and passed into Barbary. To their great chagrin, for they had made the way easy for the Hunnish ambassadors on the road through the Imperial provinces, Edecon and Orestes now left them brusquely enough. For several days they went on alone but for the guides Edecon had left them, till one afternoon they were met by two horsemen who informed them that they were close to the camp of Attila who awaited them. And indeed upon the morrow they beheld from a hill-top the Barbarian tents spread out innumerable at their feet, and among them that of the King. They decided to camp there on the hill; but a troop of Huns at once rode up and ordered them to establish themselves in the plain. “What,” cried they, “will you dare to pitch your tents on the heights when that of Attila is below?”