Attila (61 page)

Let my son Marcus, if that should be his wish, take up this history where I leave off. But it is to Constantinople, not Ravenna, that he must turn his eyes. West Rome may fall, but East Rome will live on.
Vale
.

 

¹
Chnodomar, King of the Alamanni, defeated by the Romans at the Battle of Strasbourg in 357.

²
Horburg in Alsace.

³
In large measure impressively intact today.

⁴
In Teutonic mythology, Orms or Worms were giant serpents.

⁵
A famous charioteer, the first to win a thousand races.

⁶
On 16 March 455, by an eerie coincidence almost exactly five centuries to the year and the day from the murder of Julius Caesar, on the Ides (15th) of March 44
BC
.

The murder of Valentinian III ended the Theodosian dynasty which, for all its defects, did provide a measure of stability to the crumbling Roman state. Deprived of the inspired leadership of ‘the great safety of the Western Empire', as a Byzantine chronicler has described Aetius, that empire entered its terminal decline. Valentinian's successor, Petronius Maximus, lasted barely three months before being lynched by an angry mob, as he prepared to flee Rome ahead of a Vandal assault on the city.
¹
He was briefly followed by Avitus, who had served Aetius so well in Gaul but who, falling foul of the Senate (enjoying a temporary, astonishing revival of its power) was sentenced to death by that assembly. Next, German warlords proceeded to set up a succession of puppet emperors (of whom Majorian, another former colleague of Aetius, alone showed any promise), the last of whom, Romulus Augustus (sic!) was deposed in 476, bringing to an end the Roman Empire in the West.

Gaiseric, who contributed more to the destruction of the West than any other individual, outlasted that empire by a single year. Like the Huns', the Vandals' legacy was entirely negative, their name linked for ever with cruelty and destruction. Two generations after Gaiseric's death, they were routed by the East Roman army of Justinian and, like the Huns, wiped from the slate of history. (After Attila's death, the Hun Empire rapidly disintegrated, leaving no mark on posterity except a memory of massacre and devastation with which the name of Attila, ‘the Scourge of God' will ever be associated.)

Was the work of Aetius, then, all for nothing? By no means. Although he probably appeared too late on the scene to rescue the Western Empire, not only did he save Europe from Asiatic domination, but his career helped to make possible the future harmonious co-existence between Germans and Romans within
the limits of the former empire. The Catalaunian Plains was the Western Empire's greatest (although final) triumph. The victory was due to a new development of seminal importance: Romans and Germans
combining
to repel a common enemy. This contrasts with previous Roman policy towards federate ‘guests': reluctant toleration and containment as with the Visigoths and Franks or, in the case of the Burgundians, military suppression. Henceforth, the political dynamic lay with the constructive interaction between the two peoples, a process which survived the dissolution of the empire itself.

The conversion of the Frankish king Clovis to Catholicism in 498 – an example followed eventually by other German monarchs – removed the last major barrier to co-operation between Germans and Romans. (Hitherto, the Franks, like other German tribes, had been Arian Christians, heretics in Roman eyes.) Aetius laid the foundation on which Theoderic (no connection with the Visigothic kings of that name) was able to build his successful Romano-German synthesis in Ostrogothic Italy. This, despite renewed conflict between the two peoples in the course of Justinian's re-occupation of the West, was to prove a lasting achievement. From it developed European medieval civilization, embodied politically in the empire of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, whose heir is, arguably, the European Union.

The two thousand years of the Christian era have been significantly occupied by Rome. The Western Empire lasted almost a quarter of that period, the Eastern nearly three-quarters, surviving (admittedly in increasingly attenuated form) until 1453 – less than two generations before the birth of Henry VIII, which, in the long perspective of history, is the day before yesterday. Rome's influence on architecture, law, languages, ideas, the arts, religion, government, etcetera, etcetera, has been immeasurable – and lasting. To take just one example: for nearly two centuries British India was ruled by classically educated young men, who took as their model for government that of Imperial Rome; on the whole, whatever one thinks of the morality of imperialism, they made a pretty good fist of running the subcontinent. Rome's legacy has, in the main, been a noble one, whose preservation and transfer owes not a little to Aetius – ‘the last of the Romans', as Procopius described him.

 

¹
This resulted in a second (and much more destructive than that of 410) Sack of Rome.

Regarding the history of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, we know pretty well
what
happened, but not always why or how it happened. This requires the writer of historical fiction to flesh out the skeleton of available fact with speculation as to the motivation and personality traits of real persons. For example, we don't know if Attila planned to build a ‘Greater Scythia', as I have suggested. But it is at least arguable that he might have done. Great military leaders have tended to harbour ambitions beyond the mere acquisition of plunder and territory – Alexander and Napoleon, for instance.

Such creative guesswork aside, I have, except in a few instances, kept to the known historical facts as closely as possible. (The story of Attila and Aetius is so extraordinary and dramatic in itself that it needs little in the way of embellishment.) The exceptions are as follows. The Burgundians have been relocated to Savoy a few years before this actually happened. My character Constantius is a conflation of two real persons of that name. Even Gibbon admits that the two Constantii ‘from the similar events of their lives might have been easily confounded'; so I don't feel too guilty about uniting them. I have made him the key figure in Chrysaphius' plot to have Attila murdered, rather than Edecon or Bigilas (Vigilius), the two agents most closely involved in the conspiracy. Ambrosius' meeting with Germanus is conjectural, but certainly within the bounds of possibility when the difficulty in precisely dating events in Britain for this period, is borne in mind. According to some scholars (Winbolt, Musset,
et al
.), Ambrosius was active in the early to mid-fifth century; others (e.g., Cleary) place him late in that century. Like Aetius, Ambrosius Aurelianus (sometimes given as Aurelius Ambrosius), who is thought to have come from a consular family, has earned the epithet ‘the last of the Romans'. The estimated date of Germanus' second visit to Britain (440–44) virtually coincides with that for the third appeal for help to Aetius (445), permitting, I think, a
fictional conjunction. Irnac I have presented as a child rather than the young man whom Priscus saw. And Daniel, Constantinople's ‘pillar-saint', I have placed on his column ten years before he first sat on it. In addition, I have made a few minor changes to topography: part of the necropolis of Tarquinii (the Etruscans' southern capital) has been translated a hundred miles north – but still within Etruria – to the valley of the Garfagnana; in Gaius' transit of the Black Forest I have telescoped one or two features (for instance, bringing the Triberg Falls a few miles further south), and have relocated the Himmelreich from the western to the eastern end of the Höllenthal. The above changes were made in the interests of dramatic emphasis or rounded storytelling, and on that count are hopefully excusable.

As for sources, Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(still the most vivid and readable general account), E. A. Thompson's
A History of Attila and the Huns
, and
The Later Roman Empire
by my old lecturer, A. H. M. Jones, were essential background reading. Of the many books kindly lent to me by my co-publisher Hugh Andrew, the following were especially valuable:
Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity
, a series of papers edited by John Drinkwater and Hugh Elton;
The Early Germans
by Malcolm Todd; Peter Brown's
The World of Late Antiquity
;
The Germanic Invasions
by Lucien Musset; and – a real treasure –
The Rome that Did Not Fall
by Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell. Some primary sources that I found extremely useful were:
Notitia Dignitatum
, a list of senior army and civil posts with units, for both halves of the empire, compiled
c
. 400;
The Histories
of Ammianus Marcellinus, which gives a marvellous picture of the late Roman world in the period just before that of my story; Ptolemy's
Geographia
; and excerpts from the
Byzantine History
of Priscus of Panium, which includes an eye-witness account of the Eastern embassy's visit to Attila's court.

R. L.

The received understanding of Attila's soubriquet
Flagellum Dei
, the Scourge of God, is of a ruthless barbarian leader heading a horde of bloodthirsty savages on a rampage through the Roman Empire. There is an undeniable element of truth in that image. To contemporaries, however, the epithet had a somewhat different meaning. Attila was seen as just retribution sent by God to chastise the Christian Romans for some (unspecified) collective fault or omission. Catastrophes, whether caused by man or nature, then tended to be regarded as the consequence of divine disapproval. Which perhaps lends a fresh perspective to the interpretation of Attila's nickname. Had Attila been Christian instead of heathen, would he still have been seen as the Scourge of God? It's a moot point. The Vandal monarch Gaiseric, who
was
Christian, and whose tally of destruction and atrocities was not so very inferior to Attila's, was never known by anything other than his own name.

Judged by the standards of the ancient world, Attila may not have been quite the monster he appears to us. ‘Greatness' in that world tended to be equated with scale of conquest, large numbers of enemy killed or enslaved being a bonus – vide Alexander ‘the Great', Pompey ‘the Great',
et al
. One condition of a Roman general's being awarded a triumph was that enemy dead should number not less than five thousand. (Julius Caesar boasted of having slaughtered a million Gauls.) By this yardstick, Attila would certainly qualify as a legitimate contender for the palm of greatness! ‘Attila the Great' – it sounds preposterous, but only perhaps because he left no legacy. Had the vast empire he built up endured, and not disintegrated immediately following his death, his reputation might today be very different. History, after all, is written by the winners.

On a personal level, Attila compares favourably with many supposedly ‘civilized' Greeks and Romans. His legendary simplicity of dress and lifestyle (skin garments, wooden cup and platter) was in refreshing contrast to the ostentatious pomp and luxury of the imperial courts of Constantinople and Ravenna. Although his punishments could be cruel (crucifixion and impalement were favourite forms), he could – as befits magnanimous monarchs who are above acts of petty revenge – display mercy and forgiveness. For example, when Bigilas/Vigilius, the chief agent in the bungled conspiracy to assassinate Attila, was brought before him, the King disdained to punish the man as being so insignificant as to constitute no threat. This surely displays a certain nobility of character, which contrasts with the jealous vindictiveness of Valentinian III, who slew his chief general, Aetius, with his own hand, or the rancorous spite shown by the Empress Eudoxia in hounding the saintly John Chrysostom to his death.

Attila's onslaught on first the Eastern then the Western Roman Empire, has created an indelible image of a power-hungry megalomaniac. The truth is that he had little choice. By inheriting the Hun throne, he became shackled to a juggernaut. The only way to hold the Hun nation together, and maintain personal power by rewarding his followers, was to wage war – incessant,
successful
war. Failure to maintain that momentum would have resulted in his swift replacement (and almost certain liquidation). So, by a (very) generous re-interpretation of history, Attila could be portrayed more as a man of his time and the prisoner of circumstances, than as the Scourge of God.

The West finally succumbed in 476, but the East survived for many more centuries. Why? A hundred years before the West's collapse, Rome was still a mighty power with an immense army which, though stretched, was dealing capably with enemies on many fronts. These extended from the Rhine to the Euphrates, as Ammianus Marcellinus, an army officer turned historian, shows us in his
Histories
, that magnificent picture of the late Roman world, at a time when it was the
West
that was seen as the stronger of the two halves of the empire. In his vivid pages, the only hint of coming disaster lies in his account of the Battle of Adrianople (Hadrianopolis) and its immediate aftermath: a conflict (involving the destruction of East Rome's army and the death of her emperor) whose effects, initially at least, seemed confined to the East. However, events in the next few decades were brutally to expose the true reality of the empire's situation: the West had serious deep-seated weaknesses, not fully apparent till after the death of Theodosius I in 395, while the East was in fact far stronger and more stable than it seemed in 378, the year of Adrianople. These differences become clear if we compare the two halves of the empire in three areas.