Chapter VI: Preface (6)

This man, whose name is in fact the same as one of those borne by another great Northern conqueror, Gustavus _Adolphus_, had joined Alaric with reinforcements raised in Upper Pannonia in the year 409, and had taken part in the skirmishes with Sarus before Ravenna, which preceded the Third Siege of Rome. He was a blood-relation[76] of Alaric, as well as his kinsman by marriage, and was by general acclamation hailed as his successor and raised on the shield as king. Though not boasting the full number of inches of a Gothic warrior, he was of shapely form and noble countenance. He is especially interesting to us, because a chance conversation with a Provincial, a conversation which passed at Narbonne and was reported at Bethlehem, gives us a glimpse into his own secret hopes and aspirations, such as we do not possess into the mind of any other leader of the barbarians. Orosius tells us that when he was at Bethlehem he heard a citizen of Narbonne, who had served under Theodosius, and who was a wise and religious person, say that Ataulfus had frequently told him ‘that his first thought when he entered on the career of conquest had been to claim for the Goths all that leadership of the world which had once belonged to the Romans, and to vindicate for himself a position like that which had belonged to the mighty Augustus. Gradually, however, the fashion of his dreams had changed. He saw that it was not by the sword alone, but by law, that Rome had dominated the world, and that his own countrymen, wild and impetuous, had not learned that lesson of obedience to Law which alone could fit them to rule; and now his whole desire was to restore and re-invigorate the great Roman Commonwealth, transforming that which he once hoped to destroy.’

Consciously or unconsciously every really statesmanlike intellect among the Northern chieftains must have gone through the same change and come to the same conclusion. Out of the Goth, or the Frank, or the Saxon alone it was not possible yet to form a law-abiding nation. Either from the Roman State or the Roman Church they must learn those habits of discipline and self-restraint which they did in the end learn, and practise as no purely Romance nation, far less any purely Celtic nation, has ever practised them. What Ataulfus saw to be the statesman’s true aim was that which Theodoric accomplished with temporary, and Charlemagne with somewhat more permanent success—that transfusion of fresh Teutonic blood into the old Roman body which has in fact made modern Europe.

[Sidenote: _Loves of Ataulfus and Placidia._]

[Sidenote: _Their marriage at Narbonne, 414._]

The political conversion of Ataulfus was aided, as conversions have been so often aided, by a woman. The fair Placidia, forced to follow all the movements of the Gothic army, yet ‘treated with all honour and ever tended with royal ministrations,’ vanquished his heart. The old saying that ‘conquered Greece led her victor captive’ was renewed with Placidia and Ataulfus; but with a delicacy which we should term chivalrous if we were speaking of a later age, he refused to make her his bride, though she too loved him, till the consent of her brother came from Ravenna. After four years of weary negotiations this consent was obtained, but not until the Goths had marched out of Italy into Gaul. In January, 414, the marriage of the Gothic king and the Roman Lady was celebrated at Narbonne at the house of a citizen named Ingenuus. The ‘wise and religious person’ who afterwards conversed with Jerome at Bethlehem was doubtless present at the wedding, if indeed he were not (as is very probable) Ingenuus himself. Men noticed with interest that Ataulfus entered the inner apartment to claim his bride, dressed, not in the barbaric splendour of his countrymen, but like a Roman Senator. They saw with admiration the fifty goodly youths in silken robes, bearing plates filled with gold and gems, who formed part of Ataulfus’ splendid _Morgen-gabe_[77] to his bride. Then came music, and they saw, perhaps not without a touch of scorn, Attalus, once Emperor of Rome, leading the dance and song in honour of his great patron’s wedding.

[Sidenote: _Fortunes of the Visigothic kingdom._]

[Sidenote: _Death of Placidia’s child, and of Ataulfus, 415._]

Unhappily for the world, this union of Roman and barbarian led to no abiding results. The kingdom set up by Ataulfus did indeed endure, though not exactly in the shape which he had given to it. Established at first chiefly as a South Gaulish kingdom, and remaining such till the conquests of Clovis at the end of the fifth century, it then shifted its centre of gravity southward of the Pyrenees and became that Visigothic kingdom of Spain which was overthrown by the Moors in 711, and which gradually crept back to life again under the kings of Leon, Castille, and Arragon. But the dynasty of Ataulfus himself was short-lived. A child, named Theodosius, was born to him by Placidia; but this child, around which so many hopes centered, died, to the unspeakable grief of its parents, and was buried in a silver coffin at Barcelona, where they then dwelt. Soon after the infant’s death the father was stabbed in the back by one of his servants, who thus avenged an old grudge for the execution of a former master. His dying words to his brother were, ‘Live in peace with Rome and restore Placidia to Honorius.’

[Sidenote: _416-423._]

[Sidenote: _Humiliations of Placidia._]

[Sidenote: _She is restored to Honorius, 416._]

The murder of Ataulfus was possibly connected with a sort of insurrection against the Roman influences which had been of late so powerful in the Gothic Court. His successor, the brutal Singeric, murdered the sons of Ataulfus (the children of his first marriage) and forced Placidia to walk as a captive before his chariot for twelve miles from the gates of Barcelona. After only eight days’ reign however, this ruffian was dethroned and slain, and the gallant Walia was acclaimed king, whose name is one of the most distinguished in the early history of the Visigothic monarchy. He renewed and strengthened the alliance with Rome, and gave back Placidia to the Emperor, receiving in return the somewhat prosaic ransom of 19,000 quarters of corn.

[Sidenote: _Her marriage to Constantius._]

Placidia was escorted by the Roman general who had received her from the hands of the Goths to her brother’s Court at Ravenna, and there, nearly two years after the death of Ataulfus, she gave her hand to this general, an old lover of hers named Constantius.

[Sidenote: _Second widowhood and exile of Placidia._]

The union of Constantius and Placidia lasted four years, and the fruit of it was a son and a daughter, the first named Valentinian (after his maternal great-grandfather), the second, Honoria. Constantius, a brave soldier, but a rough, sullen, unpopular man, was associated in the Empire by his brother-in-law, and, after six months’ enjoyment of the Imperial dignity, died, apparently of mere _ennui_, in 421. Two years after his death, Placidia and her children withdrew to Constantinople, on account of a quarrel which had broken out with her brother, who, as I suspect from the description of his conduct, had begun to show symptoms of softening of the brain.

[Sidenote: _Death of Honorius. Elevation of Joannes._]

[Sidenote: _423-425._]

In this same year (423) Honorius died at the age of thirty-nine, and was buried in a gigantic marble sarcophagus, which may still be seen in ‘the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia’ at Ravenna. There was no member of the family of Theodosius on the spot to claim the vacant diadem, and Joannes, a somewhat obscure member of the Civil Service (_Primicerius Notariorum_), was permitted to wear it, under the patronage of the powerful _Magister Militum_, Castinus.

[Sidenote: _Theodosius II places the son of Placidia on the Western throne._]

When the news of this event (usurpation we must not call it, for there was no strict hereditary right in the Roman Empire) reached the Court of Constantinople, the young Emperor Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius, determined to send an expedition to the West to overthrow Joannes. The expedition was commanded by two brave Alans—father and son—named Ardaburius and Aspar; and, after one or two reverses, was in the end completely successful. Joannes was brought as a prisoner to Aquileia; his right hand was cut off, he was paraded round the city upon an ass, and, after some more ungenerous insults of this kind, he was put to death. Ravenna, which had sympathised with the elevation of Joannes, was punished by being sacked by the soldiers of Ardaburius. Rome was flattered by the young Valentinian III, a boy of seven years old, being sent there to assume the purple. At Constantinople, Theodosius II and his people, who were assembled in the Hippodrome when the news of victory arrived, walked in procession to the great Basilica, singing praises to God for his deliverance.

[Sidenote: _Placidia as regent, 425-450._]

From 425 to 450, that is, from the thirty-eighth to the sixty-third year of her life, Placidia was virtually the sovereign of what remained of the Western Empire. She was already styled Augusta in right of her husband Constantius’ six months’ wearing of the purple. She was, in accordance with one or two precedents, entitled to hold the reins of power (with the rank, though not the precise title, of Regent) during her son’s minority: and as that son was idle and pleasure-loving, reproducing only the weaker features of the Theodosian character, she continued to hold them after he had grown to manhood, and until her own death in 450.

[Sidenote: _Events of Placidia’s regency._]

Great events, disastrous events, were happening during this second quarter of the fifth century. In the Church of the East the wind was rising for that great storm of the Monophysite controversy which for a hundred years took peace from the earth. In the West, Carthage was being conquered by the Vandals, Gaul and Spain were being more and more hopelessly lost to the Empire, ‘the groans of the Britons’ were being borne across the sea to ‘Aetius, thrice Consul.’ All these events Placidia had to witness with failing heart from her palace at Ravenna by the Pine Wood and the sea.

[Sidenote: _Her chief adviser, Aetius._]

[Sidenote: _Danger from the Huns._]

If the Augusta did not herself display any conspicuous faculty of rule during these twenty-five years of decline, she at least had the merit of loyally supporting the one man who, like Stilicho in the previous generation, was best able to sustain the falling Empire. This was that ‘Aetius thrice Consul’ to whom allusion has just been made. He was born at Silistria, on the Danube, the son of Gaudentius, an official of high rank in the Western Empire. If he was not of barbarian extraction, a point on which we cannot speak with certainty, the events of his life threw him into close intercourse with the barbarians. For three years a hostage in the camp of the Visigoths, and then, for an indefinite time, hostage in the country of the Huns, he had contracted friendships with the leading men of both nations, had perhaps learned something of their language, had doubtless observed their tactics and formed his own opinion of the best means of defeating them[78]. After the death of Honorius he had adhered to the party of Joannes, but, not having been able to avert his overthrow, he had accepted high command under Placidia and Valentinian, whom he served loyally to the end of his days[79]. Loyally, that is, as far as his sovereigns were concerned. If the hitherto accepted story of his quarrel with Bonifacius, governor of Africa, be correct, there was deep disloyalty on the part of Aetius towards his greatest colleague in the Imperial service, and that disloyalty cost a province to the Empire; but the account of these transactions may be reserved till the next lecture, in which I shall have to speak of the conquests of the Vandals. During ten years, from 429 to 439, the energies of Aetius were chiefly directed to maintaining some hold on the East and Centre of Gaul, with which object he waged war with diverse success on the Visigoths, the Franks, and the Burgundians, and it is noteworthy that in these wars the most useful auxiliaries of Aetius were men of the Hunnish nation. During the last nine years of the life of Placidia (441-450) the chief factor in European politics, the care that bit most deeply into the hearts both of the Eastern and Western Sovereigns of the Empire, was the menacing might of ATTILA, king of the HUNS. To these savage Asiatic marauders it is now time to turn our attention.

[Sidenote: _History of the Huns after 374._]

For more than fifty years after the Huns crossed the Sea of Azof, and fell like a thunderbolt on the kingdom of Hermanric the Ostrogoth, their history is almost a blank. They had set in motion an avalanche of ruin on the Empire, but they themselves, though doubtless spreading wide the terror of their name through Southern Russia and Hungary, and though once travelling southward as far as Antioch on a marauding expedition, did not often during this period come forward as claimants for the goods of the dying Empire. In fact, as we have already seen, on several occasions the Hunnish soldier seems to have been the bravest and most faithful of the auxiliaries of Rome. In part this was probably due to common enmity to the intervening Visigoths. The Roman Provincial hated and feared the Goth: the Goth feared and loathed the Hun: accordingly the Roman and the Hun found it for their interest to be friends.

[Sidenote: _Attila’s accession, 433._]

[Sidenote: _His character and appearance._]

[Sidenote: _The sword of Mars._]

In the year 433, Attila and his brother Bleda mounted the throne of the Huns. Twelve years later Bleda died, having been, according to some accounts, craftily slain by order of his brother. At all times Attila’s was the commanding personality, and with him alone need we here concern ourselves. Let us hear how he is described by the historian of the Goths[80]: ‘Attila was a man born into the world to agitate the nations, the fear of all lands, one who, I hardly know how, terrified all by the awful apprehensions spread abroad concerning him. He was proud in his gait, rolling his eyes hither and thither, so that the elation of his heart showed itself even by every movement of his body: a lover of war, but not himself given to acts of violence[81], mighty in counsel, placable by those who humbled themselves before him, favourable to those whom he had admitted to his fealty: short of stature, broad of chest, with an over-large head, with little eyes, thin beard, hair sprinkled with grey, turned-up nose, muddy complexion. All these were the characteristics which recalled his origin’ [or, to use our modern phraseology, the distinctive marks of the Mongol race]. ‘By natural temperament he was always confident that he should do great things, but this confidence of his was increased by finding “the sword of Mars,” which is ever held sacred by the Scythian kings, and which is said to have been discovered in this way. A certain herdsman saw one of his heifers limping, and being anxious to discover the cause of her wound, carefully followed her bleeding footprints through the grass, till at length he came to the sword, upon which the heifer had incautiously trodden while grazing, and having dug it up he at once carried it to Attila. He, having gratified the herdsman with a generous present, deemed himself to be now appointed sovereign of the whole world, and victory in all wars to be assured to him in right of the sword of Mars.’

[Sidenote: _433. Hunnish demands at Constantinople._]

Immediately upon the accession of Attila and Bleda, they demanded and obtained from the Eastern Emperor the duplication of their yearly _stipendium_, or, as they more truly called it, tribute, which was now raised from £14,000 to £28,000. At the same time they insisted on the return of all Huns or Romans who had fled from the Hunnish dominions and taken refuge under the ineffectual aegis of Rome. This demand for the surrender of refugees, the result, doubtless, of the barbarous despotism of the Huns, was afterwards frequently renewed, and its imperfect fulfilment was a standing grievance against the Eastern Emperor.

[Sidenote: _433-441. Extent of Attila’s Empire._]

For the next eight years, however, we hear but little of diplomatic relations between Attila and the Empire. There can be little doubt that during these years he was engaged in consolidating his dominions northwards and eastwards. His own peculiar territory was evidently the flat land of what we now call Hungary, between the Danube and the Carpathians; but the nations which owned his over-lordship stretched probably from the Caspian to the Rhine. Very loose and ill-compacted, no doubt, was the Empire of the Huns; but the kings of the Ostrogoths, Gepidae, Alans, Suevi, and Heruli, all followed Attila to battle, all formed part of that confederacy of rapine which he could hurl whenever it pleased him against a civilised and wealthy foe.

[Sidenote: _His campaigns in Asia._]

[Sidenote: _Did he drive our Saxon forefathers from their homes?_]

In the East another Tartar horde, the Geougen, perhaps even more savage than the Huns themselves, threatened the new barbarian Empire; but Attila appears to have formed an alliance with China which neutralised their hostility, and left him free to prosecute his designs of conquest west of the Ural mountains and south of the Caspian. He marched from the latter sea fifteen days southward into the Persian kingdom, and ravaged the ancient province of Media. He evidently ruled without a rival in European Russia, or at least in that part of it which was then worthy of even a barbarian’s notice, and—what is more important to us—he had, we are told, ‘subjected the islands in the ocean to his sway.’ These ‘islands in the ocean’ can be none other than the islands and peninsula of Denmark and the southern part of Sweden, which the geographers of the time considered to be an island. Now, however transient may have been the Hunnish conquest of those Baltic lands, of Holstein, Jutland, and South Sweden, it was sufficient to produce results of world-historical importance. In those lands our fathers, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Angles, were dwelling at the commencement of the fifth century, making doubtless many a piratical raid against the ‘_Litus Saxonicum_’ in Britain, but, as a rule, returning with their plunder to their homes by the Baltic. From those lands, before the year 441, they had begun to swarm forth, alighting upon the eastern and southern coasts of Britain, coming probably with wives and children, and coming to conquer and to _remain_. Why this new and sudden change in the current of the nation’s thoughts? Surely it was the swarthy Hunnish riders, the same who had scared the Visigoths across the Danube, who sent the Angle and the Saxon in their long ships scudding across the German Ocean. If this be so, the obscure movements of this squalid Hunnish people not only threw down the Empire of Rome, but indirectly caused the building up of the Empire of England.

[Sidenote: _Attila torments the Eastern and Western Courts with his embassies, 441-450._]

With the year 441, Attila re-enters the arena of Imperial politics. For the next nine years he sends ceaseless embassies to the Eastern and Western Empires, ostensibly to press for the redress of grievances, really in order to claim higher and ever higher terms for the maintenance of peace, and to enrich his favourites at Court by the presents which he well knows that the trembling Augusti at Constantinople and Ravenna will give them in order to purchase their good offices with their master.

The standing grievance against the Eastern Court was, as has been said, the alleged failure to surrender the fugitives, Hunnish princes or Roman merchants, who had escaped from Attila’s dominions. The chief grievances against Placidia and Valentinian were two: the vases of Sirmium and the dowry of the lady Honoria.

[Sidenote: _The matter of the Sirmian vases._]

(1) A certain Gaulish provincial named Constantius, who filled the post of Secretary to Attila, when the city of Sirmium was besieged by the Huns, received from the Bishop of that city a deposit of the rich gold Communion-plate of the Church, in trust to apply the proceeds to the ransoming of the Bishop and his flock. Regardless, however, of this trust, he carried off the sacred vessels to Rome and raised a large sum of money upon them from the goldsmith, Silvanus. Eventually Sirmium was taken; Constantius, a traitor to all parties, was crucified; and Attila, claiming a sort of ‘resulting trust’ of the vases for himself as conqueror, insisted that Silvanus should be surrendered to him as having stolen _his_ property.

[Sidenote: _Honoria’s ring._]

(2) Honoria, the sister of Valentinian III, a young and giddy girl, had compromised her reputation by an intrigue with an Imperial chamberlain, and was sent by her mother to the Court of Constantinople in a kind of honourable imprisonment. Her spirit chafed at the seclusion in which she was kept by her four middle-aged and almost nun-like cousins, and she formed the wild scheme of plighting her troth to the King of the Huns, and calling upon him to be her deliverer. Attila received the ring which she sent him, and, though he had already many wives, disdained not to add Honoria to the number, so far at least as this that ‘he claimed as her betrothed husband one half of the Western Empire which had been bequeathed to Honoria by her father, but out of which she was kept by her brother’s covetousness.’

[Sidenote: _Embassy of 448._]

[Sidenote: _Imperial plot for Attila’s assassination._]

The most important of the return-embassies was that which was sent by Theodosius II, in the year 448, to the Court of Attila. The chief ambassador was Maximin, a man of illustrious birth and high official rank; and the official whom we should call the Secretary of Legation was Priscus, to whose able pen we owe a minute account of the embassy, which is certainly the most interesting historical document of the century. Both Maximin and Priscus were Pagans, and both were men of high character. They were used, however, to cloak an infamous plot which had been concerted at the Court of Constantinople, but of which they were themselves ignorant, for the assassination of Attila by one of the nobles of his guard named Edeco. It is like reading a chapter of _Quentin Durward_ or _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, to see the way in which the plot is hatched, developed, and finally detected: and the honest indignation of Attila against ‘his slave, Theodosius, who paid him tribute but dared to plot the assassination of his master,’ is finely expressed, and puts the savage Hun for the time immeasurably above the cultured and nominally Christian Emperor. I have no space here, however, to insert these details; but, though it has been often quoted before, I must transcribe Priscus’s account of Attila’s palace and of a banquet therein, to which he and his chief were invited.

[Sidenote: _Attila’s palace._]

‘Having crossed some more rivers we arrived at length at a very large village, in which was situated the palace of Attila. This dwelling was, we were told, the finest building in all the country. It was made of logs and smooth planks, and surrounded by wooden palisades, not for safety but for ornament. Next to the King’s house, that of Onegesius (his chief minister) was most conspicuous. It, too, was surrounded by a palisading, but was not adorned with towers as Attila’s was. Not far from this enclosure was a bath which Onegesius had built of stones brought from Pannonian quarries, for the barbarians who dwell there have not a stick nor a stone in their own country, but have to import all building materials from a distance. The architect of this bath was carried captive from Sirmium, and hoped to receive his freedom as the reward of his ingenuity; but unconsciously he prepared for himself a worse lot than that of ordinary slavery, for Onegesius made him his bath-man, and he had to wait upon him and his retinue whenever they had a mind to bathe.’

THE BANQUET.

[Sidenote: _Attila’s banquet._]

‘When we returned to our tent, there came an invitation to us both from Attila to be present at his banquet, which would take place about 3 P.M. Punctually, at the time appointed, we went to the dinner and stood on the threshold before Attila. According to the custom of the country, the cup-bearer brought us a bowl of wine that we might pray for the good-luck of the host before taking our seats. When this was done, and we had just tasted the bowl, we came to the chairs of state on which we were to sit at dinner-time. All the seats of the guests were ranged along the walls on either side of the building. In the centre of all sat Attila on a couch, with another couch behind him, behind which again a flight of steps led up to his bed, hidden by curtains of white linen and variegated stuffs, ornamentally arranged as the Greeks and Romans prepare the nuptial couch.’ Then the order of precedence is described. The Ambassadors, to their evident surprise, found that the seats of honour were given, not to them, but to Hunnish nobles.

‘Opposite to Onegesius on a double chair sat two of the sons of Attila, while his eldest son sat on Attila’s couch, not near to him but on its extreme verge, and with eyes cast down upon the ground through awe of his father. When all were thus arranged in order, the cup-bearer came in and handed to Attila his ivy-wood drinking-cup filled with wine. When he had received it, he saluted him who sat nearest him in rank. The guest thus honoured stood up, and it was not etiquette for him to sit down till he had sipped or drunk off the wine and returned the goblet to the cup-bearer. In the same way all who were present showed their respect to the King: he remaining seated all the while, they stood up, received the cup, greeted him and tasted the wine. Behind each guest stood a cup-bearer, whose business it was to go into the centre of the hall, each in his proper order, and meet Attila’s cup-bearer coming out from beside his master.

‘Then entered first Attila’s servant bearing a plate full of meat, and after him came the general waiters who laid bread and other victuals on the tables, of which there was one for every three or four guests, or sometimes more. For all the rest of the barbarians and for us a costly banquet had been prepared, which was served on silver dishes, but Attila had plain meat on his wooden plate. He showed also simple tastes in all his other surroundings. For the other banqueters had golden and silver drinking-cups put beside them, but his was of wood. His raiment also was quite plain, distinguished by its cleanness only from that of any of his followers; and neither the sword which was hung up beside him, nor the clasps of his barbaresque shoes, nor the bridle of his horse, was adorned, as is the case with other Huns, with gold or precious stones or anything else that is costly.’

Priscus then again describes the drinking of Attila’s health, which was performed by all the guests, standing, between each of the courses.

‘When evening came on, torches were lighted, and two barbarians coming in and standing opposite to Attila, recited songs previously composed, in which they sang of his victories and his warlike virtues. The banqueters gazed earnestly on the minstrels; some were delighted with the poems; others, remembering past conflicts, felt their souls stirred within them; while the old were melted into tears by the thought that their bodies were grown weak through age and their hot hearts were compelled into repose.

‘When the songs were ended a mad Hun came forward, who by his strange, wild, incessant chatter moved all the guests to laughter. After him entered Zercon the Moor’ [whom we know from another source[82] to have been a hump-backed dwarf with ape-like nose]. ‘By his garb, his voice, and his wild promiscuous jumble of Latin, Hunnish, and Gothic words, he sent all present, except Attila, into fits of laughter. The King, however, remained quite unmoved, changed not a line of his countenance, and neither by word nor deed showed the slightest enjoyment of the joke, except that when his youngest son, Ernak, came in and stood beside him he gently pinched his cheek and looked upon him with kindly gaze. When I expressed my wonder at his neglect of his other sons and the favour which he showed to this one, the barbarian who sat beside me and who understood the Italian language, after making me promise secrecy, assured me that the prophets had foretold to Attila that his race should suffer reverses and then be raised up again by this son.

‘When we had sat at the banquet till far into the night, we departed, not wishing to persist in drinking any longer.’

From this single picture we may imagine the scenes which frequently occurred when the Ambassadors of Theodosius and Valentinian came, with fearful hearts, into the presence of Attila, striving, yet striving in vain, to keep up the traditions of the majesty of Rome. We may imagine, too, the reception which would be accorded to the Teutonic under-kings, Gepid, Herul, Ostrogoth, when they came, as assuredly they would come, at least once a year, into the presence of their supreme lord.

[Sidenote: _Deaths of Placidia and Theodosius II, 450._]

[Sidenote: _Marcian, the new Eastern Emperor, will not truckle to Attila._]

The years from 441 to 450, the era of embassies, came to an end. In 450 death wrought great changes in the palaces both of Ravenna and Constantinople. In the West, Placidia died, and the functions as well as the show of governing had to be assumed by Valentinian III, who still for a time gave his confidence loyally to Aetius. In the East, Theodosius II died of injuries received by a fall from a runaway horse, and the sovereign power became vested in his sister Pulcheria and her husband, the brave old soldier, Marcian. The next Ambassador sent by Marcian’s orders to the Court of Attila took a higher and more manly tone than the Hun had heard during the whole reign of Theodosius. It was clear that there would be no more chance of sending oppressive embassies, of doubling and quadrupling the ‘tribute,’ or of worrying about the return of refugees. Any further advantages that were to be gained from the East must be gained at the point of the sword: and upon a survey of the whole situation, Attila decided that since the time had come for war it should be war, not with the East but with the West, not with the grim Marcian but with the soft and indolent Valentinian.

There is thus a certain correspondence between the careers of Alaric and Attila. Each took up a position on the confines of the two Empires. Each at first spent some years in making war or threatening war on the Eastern Empire, and each finally devoted his whole energies to war with the Empire of the West.

[Sidenote: _Attila prepares for war with the Western Empire._]

Pretexts for war were of course easily found. The great question of the vases of Sirmium was probably still unsettled. Honoria’s dowry had certainly not been handed over to the affianced Hun. Aetius, warring in Gaul, had seated on one of the Frankish thrones a young prince (possibly Meroveus), whose supplanted rival claimed the assistance of Attila. Above all, the Huns and their allies yearned to burn, to plunder, to slay, and the Western provinces alone could at the moment satiate this desire. Attila did not, however, entirely neglect the prudent precautions of a statesman. He concluded an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Gaiseric, the Vandal conqueror of Carthage, an alliance which, had it been followed up by a well-timed Vandal attack on Rome, might probably have ended the life of the Western Empire.

[Sidenote: _Alliance between that Empire and the Visigoths. 451._]

On the other hand, Aetius, at this crisis of the fortunes of Gaul, concluded an alliance which was of infinite importance, both for its immediate results and for the rearrangement of parties to which it pointed in the not distant future. Theodoric the Visigoth, successor of Walia, reigned at Toulouse over a well-compacted monarchy which had been rapidly growing in strength and in civilisation. We are now speaking of a time forty-one years after Alaric’s sack of Rome: and the days when the Visigoths were a wandering horde of _foederati_, seeking on almost any terms for a recognised position within the Empire, are already far below the horizon. Theodoric is the acknowledged lord of one of the fairest portions of Gaul; his people have become a dominant caste of warriors, whose ascendancy the Provincials do not dream of disputing; but Aetius has been for years struggling, sometimes with the aid of Hunnish auxiliaries, to prevent him from extending his dominion yet further over Gaul.

Now, in the presence of this vaster danger, this thunder-cloud rolling up from the plains of Hungary, which threatens to overwhelm Goth and Roman in one common ruin, all these bickerings cease. The Visigoth no doubt is yet barbarous, but he is rapidly becoming civilised; while the Hun is an utter savage. The Visigoth, though an Arian, is a Christian; the Hun is a brutal Pagan. The Visigoth desires, it is true, to rule in Gaul; but the Hun will utterly destroy it. The result of these considerations was that Aetius and Theodoric formed an alliance against the invader, and, notwithstanding some delays and some misunderstandings, they seem on the whole to have both, honourably observed its obligations.

[Sidenote: _Attila enters Gaul, 451._]

[Sidenote: _Siege of Orleans._]

[Sidenote: _Attila retreats._]

At Eastertide, 451, the waters of the great deep were broken up. The motley host, said to number half a million of men, marshalled by ‘a mob of kings[83],’ but all trembling at the nod of Attila, moved westward, hewed down trees in the Thuringer Wald, and, on the rude boats and rafts which they thus constructed, crossed the Rhine. All the towns in Belgic Gaul—Tongres, Metz, Rheims—yielded to their savage onslaught. Everywhere flew the red banner of fire. The citizens were slain on their hearth-stones; the priests, against whom the invaders had an especial hatred, were murdered before the altars, on which glittered the coveted silver and gold. Paris escaped destruction; whether saved by the prayers of Sainte Geneviève or guarded by its own comparative insignificance it is not for us to decide. So the savage host, having rolled on through Belgic and Lugdunensian Gaul, reached the great river Loire, which circled the kingdom of the Visigoths. Here they laid siege to Orleans, that city so memorable for her sieges. The battering-rams (for Attila possessed these engines of war) were shaking the walls of the city, and the inhabitants feared that only ruin was before them. But their Bishop, Anianus, bade them be of good courage, and foretold that deliverance would reach them on the 24th of June. On that day, while they were praying in the church, Anianus sent a messenger to mount the ramparts and see if help were approaching. The messenger went once, twice, in vain. The third time he brought word that a cloud of dust was seen upon the horizon. It was caused by the troops of Aetius and Theodoric, who, after some delay and wavering of purpose, had joined forces and were approaching to deliver the city. Attila, for some reason with which we are not acquainted, declined to await their attack, and began to retrace his steps towards the Rhine. Doubtless his vast army was difficult to feed, and difficult to keep together, in the country which they had so ruthlessly ravaged; and probably Attila foresaw great danger in attempting to cross the broad Loire in the face of a large army, which united Gothic courage to Roman science of war. Whatever the cause, he retreated, and reached the city of Troyes, which he consented to exempt from pillage on condition that the Bishop, St. Lupus, whose saintly appearance awed and impressed him, should accompany him as far as the Rhine. On the Mauriac plain, some five miles from Troyes, the pursuing armies came up with him; and here was fought that ‘cruel, manifold, monstrous, and stubborn battle[84]’ to which historians have given, not quite correctly, the name of the Battle of Châlons.

[Sidenote: _Battle of Châlons. July? 451._]

Before the fight began, Attila consulted the rude auguries of his nation, drawn from the inspection of the bowels of a sheep and the markings of some bones. The soothsayers predicted ‘ill fortune to the Huns,’ but qualified it with the assurance that the leader of their foes should fall. The hope that Aetius, the one great Roman champion, would perish, seemed to console Attila for the presage of his own defeat.

It was indeed a battle of many nations. Under the standards of the king of the Huns marched Ostrogoths, Gepidae, Heruli, and a host of less-known nationalities, Teutonic, Slavonic, and Turanian. The three kings of the Ostrogoths, and especially the eldest of them, Walamir, and Ardaric, king of the Gepidae, were Attila’s chief advisers and lieutenants on the battle-field.

The allied army, on the other hand, contained not only Visigoths, who were posted on the right wing, and Romans, who were on the left, but Franks, Saxons, Bretons, Burgundians, and a number of other tribes settled in Gaul. Chief among these lesser nationalities were the Alans, who were settled at Valence on the Rhone. They were near of kin to the Huns, and their king, Sangiban, was suspected of intending to desert to them on the battle-field. He was therefore placed in the centre of the allied line, tightly wedged in between Romans and Visigoths, both of whom watched his movements narrowly and prevented him from accomplishing the meditated treachery.

[Sidenote: _Hunnish defeat._]

Beyond this statement as to the Alans, and Attila’s orders to his troops to neglect the Romans and strike hardest at the Visigoths, we hear little or nothing as to the tactics of the day. The battle began at three in the afternoon, and raged on, upon a line of immense length, till the end of the July day. Theodoric, the Visigothic king, was thrown from his horse and accidentally trampled to death by his own countrymen. His men, however, rushed forward and broke the Hunnish line. Attila himself fled and took shelter behind his rampart of waggons. Thorismund, son of Theodoric, and Aetius both lost their way in the darkness which had now come on, and nearly fell victims to their rashness, having actually wandered into the quarters of the foe.

[Sidenote: _Results of the battle._]

The next morning dawned upon a ghastly sight. It is said that 177,000 men were slain in the ‘manifold and monstrous battle.’ This number represents a slaughter nearly twice as great as that at Leipsic, with all the improvements in the machinery of destruction which fifteen centuries have wrought. It is doubtful whether we ought to listen with perfect faith to calculations which were probably very hasty and fragmentary. But it is not doubtful that the slaughter on the Mauriac plain was one of the greatest ever witnessed on any battle-field before the invention of gunpowder. And, measured by its results, the battle was even greater than when we take account of the carnage. For this was pre-eminently one of ‘the decisive battles of history,’ since it settled the question of supremacy in Europe against the Hun, the squalid, unprogressive heathen Tartar, and kept the ground clear for the Romance, the Teutonic, and the Slavic peoples.

[Sidenote: _Attila retreats from Gaul. 451-2._]

The expectations of both armies that the battle would be renewed on the morrow were not fulfilled. Attila, behind his entrenchments, bade his trumpets sound, and feigned a fresh attack, but all the time he knew himself beaten, and had a pyre of Hunnish saddles prepared, into which, had his entrenchments been stormed, he would have cast himself headlong, that living or dead he might escape the insults of his foes. Meanwhile the Goths, having at length found their old king’s body, buried him on the battle-field to the music of their rough war-songs. Thorismund then marched rapidly to Toulouse to claim his father’s throne. Aetius also quitted the field, and Attila was saved from utter destruction, whether owing to the too great prudence of the allies or to a want of perfect harmony between them, it is impossible now to determine. The Hunnish king reached the Rhine without further molestation, and thence sent the venerable Bishop Lupus back to Troyes, asking him to pray to the Almighty for the welfare of his late entertainer.

[Sidenote: _Attila’s invasion of Italy, 452._]

[Sidenote: _Siege of Aquileia._]

[Sidenote: _Aquileia taken and destroyed._]

The next year (452) Attila determined to wipe out the shame of his defeat by an invasion, not this time of Gaul, but of Italy. He crossed the Julian Alps, entered Venetia by the well-known route, trodden of late by so many armies, and invested the great, the hitherto impregnable city of Aquileia. In two stubborn sieges at least, probably in more, this city had shown herself the unconquerable bulwark of North-east Italy; and now, so long was the investment by the Huns vainly protracted, that it seemed as if she would once more prove her title to that name. Attila was about to abandon the siege in despair, when suddenly looking up, he beheld the storks collecting their young broods about them and preparing to fly from the city. The omen struck him. He pointed it out to his soldiers, and in a short, inspiriting speech, urged them to renew their attack on a city which, as the heaven-guided instinct of the birds told them, was doomed to ruin. The appeal was fatally successful. The fierce Huns once more moved their engines against the walls; they effected a practicable breach; they swarmed in; they slew, they pillaged, they ravished. The rage of Attila at his long detention before the walls made the usual savagery of Tartar destruction more savage; and soon there was nothing left of Aquileia—its Mint, its Baths, its Theatres—but a smoking heap of ruins. Tradition says that Attila caused a mound to be raised at Udine, twenty miles distant, and stood on the top of it to see the flames ascend from the burning city.

[Sidenote: _Other Adriatic cities ruined._]

[Sidenote: _Founders of Venice._]

All the sister cities, beautiful and stately, which were mirrored in the waters of the North-western Adriatic, shared the fate of Aquileia. The Roman colony of Concordia; Altinum, with its fair white villas; Patavium, the birthplace of Livy, were levelled with the ground. A few trembling fugitives from all these cities, including, perhaps, some from Aquileia herself, sought shelter in the wide lagoons at the mouths of the Piave and the Brenta. These miserable refugees founded a gorgeous city, whose fame spread far and wide over all lands, and whose merchandise was sold even on those dreary plains of Central Asia over which Attila’s ancestors once wandered. She was the affianced City of the Sea—Venice.

[Sidenote: _Attila at Milan._]

Attila marched westwards through the broad green plain which we now call Lombardy, and as he went his fury somewhat abated. All the cities, Verona, Pavia, Milan, and the rest opened their gates to him; and in all, the Huns plundered at their will, but the lives of the inhabitants were spared and the buildings were left unburned. At Milan, Attila saw with contemptuous amusement a picture representing the Scythians prostrate under the feet of the Eastern and Western Emperors. He allowed the picture to remain, but ordered an artist to paint on the opposite wall the King of the Huns seated on his throne, with Theodosius and Valentinian emptying their sacks of _aurei_ at his feet.

[Sidenote: _Embassy of Pope Leo._]

During all this time abject terror reigned in the City of Rome, where, and not at Ravenna, the Emperor appears to have been residing. Even the stout heart of Aetius seems to have failed him, and he is said to have counselled Valentinian to flee from Italy, probably to the Narbonensian Gaul, almost the only Western province which was left to Rome. However, it was decided to try what effect a humble embassy might have in mitigating the wrath of the terrible Hun. Two of the highest officials in the Empire were sent on this embassy, and with them went Pope Leo I, greatest in character and mental gifts of all the men who had yet sat in the chair of St. Peter, rightly named Leo, for a more lion-hearted man had not been found even among the Consuls and Emperors of Rome.

[Sidenote: _Its success._]

The embassy found the Hunnish king by the banks of the Mincio, probably not far from the city of Mantua. Strange to say, they won a peaceful and easy victory. ‘[85]He laid aside his fury and excitement, and returning by the way that he had come, that is to say beyond the Danube, he departed with the promise of peace, uttering, however, this one warning and threat above all others, that he would bring yet heavier calamities upon Italy unless they sent to him Honoria, with the portion of the Imperial treasure which was her due.’ We shall probably seek in vain for any reasons of state-craft which could have induced Attila thus to forego the supreme prize of barbarian conquest, the sack of Rome, when victory lay ready to his hand. Apparently the reason assigned by contemporary chroniclers is the true one. It was the influence exerted over him by the saintly majesty of Leo, which induced him to sheathe the sword and to be satisfied with promise of tribute when he might have grasped the reality of plunder. There was in Attila’s character, with all its brutal savageness, something almost like magnanimity, a certain readiness, when his own greatness was acknowledged and when his enemy had humbled himself in the dust before him, to accept his humiliation, and if he trampled, not to trample him to death. There was also in his heathen soul some capacity of being impressed by those whose spirits really rose above the clash of the kingdoms of the world, into the serener air of the Kingdom of God. There may possibly have been mingled with this feeling a remembrance of the premature death of Alaric which followed so soon upon his conquest of the Eternal City, and a fear that he too, if he sacked Rome, might find his grave in Italy.

Whatever the cause, there can be no doubt that the success of Pope Leo, when the Emperor and the Master of the Soldiery confessed that they saw only ruin before them, profoundly stirred the hearts of the Roman people. The events of the year 452 contributed enormously to raise the Vatican above the Palatine, and to give the Pope the moral, if not yet the political, sovereignty of Rome.

[Sidenote: _Death of Attila, 453._]

If Attila had planned for himself the luxury of another raid upon Italy in 453, his schemes were suddenly and unexpectedly frustrated. In addition to the many wives whom he already possessed, he married a beautiful damsel named Ildico. At the wedding banquet he drank copiously, and afterwards slept the sleep of intoxication. In the midst of it he was attacked by a violent bleeding from the nose, which proved fatal to him in his drunken stupor. That same night, it is said, the brave Emperor Marcian had a dream, in which he saw the bow of Attila broken.

[Sidenote: _The Hunnish power broken. 454._]

The great Hunnish king received a magnificent burial from his people. Three coffins, one of gold, one of silver, one of iron, enclosed his body, but the precise place of his burial was kept a secret. After his death the ascendancy which by his own tremendous force of character he had been able to exert over many subject nations, suddenly vanished. His sons proposed to partition his realm among themselves. The auxiliary peoples resented the proposal: the great confederacy was broken up: Ostrogoths, Gepidae, and Heruli met the young Hunnish kings in battle by the Pannonian river Netad. Attila’s sons were beaten, his first-born slain, the rest put to flight. Ernak, his father’s favourite, became a subject-ally of the Eastern Emperor, and ruled at the mouth of the Danube.

But the great Hunnish Empire after its short and terrible day of dominion was now a thing of the past, a vanished nightmare of the nations. The fierce Hun had himself built nothing that endured, though indirectly he had contributed to three of the greatest changes in Europe,—the ‘making of England,’ the establishment of the Papal Supremacy, the foundation of Venice.

LECTURE VII.

GAISERIC.

We have seen that though the north-east corner of Italy was cruelly ravaged by the Huns, the Eternal City herself escaped the degradation of their presence as conquerors. But the blow, which had been averted by the embassy of Pope Leo, fell three years later (455), the agents of destruction being now, not the Huns, but the VANDALS. I purposely abstained in my last lecture from making any but the slightest allusion to the Vandal conquest of Africa (428-439), though that was in fact one of the most important events under the government of Placidia, and certainly the event which produced the most permanently disastrous consequences for Rome.

[Sidenote: _Early history of the Vandals._]

If we go back from the fifth century after Christ to the first, we shall find that the Vandals were then dwelling not far from the Baltic coast in the countries which we now call West Prussia and Posen. A little later on, sharing the general southward movement of all these races, they appear in Silesia and give their name to the _Vandalici Montes_, which are the same that are now called Riesengebirge, the Mountains of the Giants. Possibly there may be in the new name some dim remembrance of the old, for we are told[86] that the Vandals, as well as the Gepidae, were nearly allied in blood to the Goths, and like them were tall of stature, fair-skinned, yellow-haired, and handsome.

In the reign of Marcus Aurelius (171) we find them in the plains of Hungary warring against the Romans. Three years later they have become the allies of Rome, and this attitude of friendship towards the Empire is generally maintained by them for more than two centuries (174-406). Especially was this the case in the latter part of the reign of the Emperor Constantine (330), when the Vandals had suffered a terrible and well-nigh exterminating defeat at the hands of their Gothic kindred, by the banks of the river Marisia. The survivors of that terrible day humbly pleaded for permission to enter the province of Pannonia on the western shore of the Danube, and there to dwell as _foederati_ under the protection of the Empire. For more than sixty years they faithfully observed this treaty. This was probably the time in which they embraced the Christian faith under that Arian form of it which Ulfilas had preached to the Goths. Many of their chiefs doubtless entered the service of the Emperors as life-guardsmen, and it was probably in this way that the father of the great Stilicho, though a Vandal, rose high enough to prepare a splendid position for his son.

[Sidenote: _The Vandals enter Gaul, 406._]

The calumniators of Stilicho attributed to him, probably most unjustly, a share in the next development of Vandal history. It came to pass in the year 406, in the interval of suspense between the first and second invasions of Alaric, and just after the exhausting campaign with the terrible Radagaisus, that (as has been already mentioned) three great barbarian hordes, taking advantage of the defenceless state of the Rhine-frontier, denuded of its legions for the defence of Italy, poured westwards into the provinces of Gaul. These three tribes were the _Suevi_, a name of puzzling indefiniteness, once including almost all the High-German family of nations; the _Alans_, a Tartar horde who had come into Europe at the same time as the Huns, but had pressed further westwards than their kinsmen; and the _Vandals_.

[Sidenote: _War with the Franks._]

If Stilicho had anything whatever to do with the invitation or the permission given to these barbarian hordes to enter Gaul, it is probable[87] that he did it in the hope of finding in them a counterpoise to the Franks, who were already appearing with menacing strength in the north-eastern provinces of that country. At any rate the Franks are the only enemy that we hear of as attempting to bar their way. A great battle was fought, in which Godigisclus, the Vandal king, fell with 20,000 of his followers, and only the timely intervention of Respendial, King of the Alans, saved the Vandals from utter destruction.