Attila the Hun (16 page)

There was no stopping the Huns by force; so an unnamed Roman general arranged peace talks to offer cash. Early one summer morning, the two leaders met somewhere on the borders of Thrace. Uldin was not impressed. Pointing to the rising sun, he said he could take every land it lit, if the Romans did not pay enough. Unluckily for him, some of his officers were eager to accept the offer, and seceded, allowing the Romans to mop up Uldin’s loyal forces and cart them off to Constantinople in chains. The major source for this anecdote, Sozomen, a church historian writing in Constantinople in the mid-fifth century, reported seeing many of these men later working on farms near Mount Olympus. Uldin, his authority much undermined, made a hair’s-breadth escape back over the Danube, being kept in his place thereafter by imperial patrol ships hastily sent to reinforce the Danube fleet.

Uldin’s demands are revealing: he was not interested
in land, or the right to settle, as the Goths had been 40 years before. New territory colonized by Huns would have scattered his people and diluted his power. He wanted cash, because pastoral nomadism, even when bolstered by slave land-workers, was no longer enough. What he needed to maintain his rule was national unity; and that could be achieved only if he had the money to buy loyalty; and the obvious source of wealth was Rome and Constantinople; and to get his hands on it he needed a powerful army. Authority, unity, control of vassals, leverage over Rome and Constantinople, cash – all to maintain authority and unity: already the Huns were trapped in a cycle of conquest, from which retreat meant failure, ignominy, poverty and collapse.

The Huns had their new homeland more or less to themselves; but Uldin’s authority was weakened by the 408 campaign, and vassals were slipping away. So too were bands of his own people. Ignoring him, small groups of Huns took off on their own, some to join the Goths in their march against Rome, some to join the Roman contingents defending it.

What did Uldin do about all this? Nothing that made any impact on the world beyond the Danube. Instead, he consolidated power locally, in particular over a small group known as Gepids, who lived on the grasslands east of the Tisza, as archaeologists know from about 100 sites, many of which contain examples of the eagle-headed silver buckle that was the defining Gepid decoration. From then on, Gepids became part of the Hun federation. Otherwise, what the Huns were up to in the first two decades of the fifth century is a blank.
One historian, Olympiodorus of Thebes in Egypt, wrote a rich and detailed account of his visit to a certain King Charaton of the Huns in about 412. We know this because others mention it. But of the original, or indeed of his whole 22-volume
History
, there is no trace, and Charaton remains nothing more than a name.

It seems likely that differences arose in the Huns’ relations with the eastern and western empires. Two eastern laws of 419 and 420 cast tiny lights in the gloom, suggesting that Charaton’s ambitions were directed at the east. The first law decrees the death penalty for anyone betraying to the barbarians the art of shipbuilding; the other bans the export by sea of certain goods. These odd details suggest that the Huns, impoverished but still unified, had ambitions to build a seaborne trading empire, and that the eastern Romans stopped them. If so, then perhaps it was imperial opposition that caused the Huns to look once again at ways of earning a living by pillage.

And pillage they did, apparently. That is one conclusion to be drawn from a surviving edict concerning the defences of Constantinople, in particular the new walls, begun in 413 in response to the Hunnish threat. The walls are named after the emperor, Theodosius II, but he was only a child when construction got under way. The work was actually conceived and carried forward by the regent, the praetorian prefect Anthemius, who had already done much to guard the eastern empire. As well as ordering the new naval patrols on the Danube, he had signed a peace treaty
with Persia and worked for better relations with Rome. Now there were to be new walls; for on the landward side the city had outgrown Constantine’s old defences, spilling over onto the plain beyond – a clear risk in time of war. The new ramparts would extend for 5 kilometres, running from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn inlet, with nine gates and dozens of towers. The towers were large enough for the authorities to engage in a little private enterprise, allowing the original owners of the land to use the lower floors, freed of the usual restriction that public buildings should be available for the use of troops when necessary. Nine years later, the wall was in place and power in the hands not of the fifteen-year-old Theodosius, but of his ambitious elder sister, Pulcheria. So it was probably her idea to issue a controversial edict to those living in the new towers. From now on, ‘the ground-floor rooms of each tower of the New Wall’ would be made available to soldiers preparing for or returning from war. ‘Landholders shall not be offended’ at this change of use, said whoever drafted the law, knowing well enough what protests it would cause. ‘Even private homeowners customarily furnish one third of their space for this purpose.’

Why was this necessary? One terse comment by a sixth-century chronicler, Marcellinus Comes, tells us: ‘The Huns devastate Thrace.’ He gives no further details. For the moment, this was thunder too distant for comment.

R
elations with the western empire took a rather different course. In that direction, all seemed set fair.
Some Hun groups were signed up as
foederati
, being offered land around the eastern end of Lake Balaton; Huns formed contingents in the regular army; and locally Huns and Romans seem to have lived cheek by jowl in mutual tolerance, even under the gaze of Roman soldiers, who continued to man the great fortress of Valcum, guarding the roads that led round the western end of Lake Balaton through the area known to Romans as Valeria. From its ruins by the present-day village of Fenékpuszta, this huge quadrangle – 350 × 350 metres square, with 44 towers and 4 gates, one facing each compass-point – was as much town as fortress, with a command centre, civil offices, a church and a 100-metre-long building that may have been a trade hall. A surviving plough and other farm tools show that the town relied on its surrounding countryside for supplies. An 82-kilo anvil suggests industrial capabilities. Valcum had its blacksmiths, masons, potters, leather-workers, weavers and goldsmiths (who, judging from the remains found in the workshop, did not produce their own gold, but only refashioned and repaired existing items). Hundreds must have lived there, thousands looked to it for trade – even, it seems, the local Huns.

It was in these propitious circumstances, probably towards 410, that a Roman teenager, Flavius Aetius, came for a time as a hostage to the Huns: a small event that would have momentous consequences for all of Europe. ‘Hostage’ is the word usually used, but it is not quite right. The young man would have been sent officially for two reasons: as proof of honourable intent
– in exchange, of course, for an equally eminent Hun – and as a sort of youthful ambassador, an equivalent of a VSO or Peace Corps volunteer, whose job would have been to ensure good relations and a flow of information. Like any ambassador, he would have been in effect a spy by another name. He had already played the same role among Alaric’s Goths, remaining with them for three years. His experiences made Aetius uniquely qualified both to broker peace and, if necessary, to act as military adviser. He spoke Gothic, Hunnish, Latin and Greek. He had friends everywhere. He would use his knowledge and contacts to preserve peace with the Huns for the next 30 years, an achievement that helped him rise to become the empire’s greatest general.

Aetius’ experience was soon put to good use. In 423 the empire was torn by war between Rome and Constantinople – civil war, to those who still saw the empire as one – when the usurper John (Johannes), a mere civil servant, was made emperor in Ravenna and an eastern army set out to depose him. John needed help, and Aetius, now in his twenties, could be relied upon to provide it in the form of his Hun friends. In 425 Aetius went back to the Huns, carrying chests of gold. This, of course, would have been merely a down payment, with more to follow once the easterners were vanquished. A huge army of Huns – later reports spoke of 60,000, but scholars accept that almost all reports were wildly exaggerated, perhaps tenfold – rode towards Italy and attacked the eastern army from the rear just after they reached Ravenna. They were too
late: three days earlier, John had been executed. The Huns fought anyway, until Aetius saw there was no point, and made peace – in exchange, of course, for additional gold for his avaricious army. There was no ideology or loyalty involved. These Huns would fight for whoever paid them, and would have been happy to stay on serving the empire. But the new rulers in Ravenna were keen for a wider peace. Aetius, now a
comes
(count), was sent to sort out the unruly northern frontier in Gaul, where he remained for the next seven years, and the Huns returned home, to Pannonia and Valeria, where, in gratitude for their help, they were apparently allowed to take over estates and fortresses with no sign of opposition.

It was thanks to Aetius and the western empire, therefore, that the Huns were able to consolidate their hold on what is now Hungary, a firm base for leaders with wider ambitions. (It was not the last time that westerners would back barbarians in the hope of peace, only to see their protégés turn nasty.) The leaders in question were two brothers, Octar and Ruga. Where they came from no-one knows. Perhaps they were descendants of Balamber, Basich, Kursich, Uldin and/or the shadowy Charaton; or perhaps they were scions of some new, upstart clan. They have inspired all sorts of academic argument about the nature of ‘dual kingship’, and the reasons for it. Probably there was no great mystery, because it had happened before among the Huns and it happened again later, twice. Most likely the two simply ruled different bits of territory, Ruga in the east, Octar in the west. What can be said is that
dual kingships were unstable (witness what happened between Rome and Constantinople). To reach such heights, both men had to be ambitious and ruthless. Rivalry was virtually inevitable.

Their first campaign did not turn out well. Fenced in by the empire on land and sea, they rounded on the only available victims: the German peoples along the Rhine, to the north-west. Among them were the remnants of a tribe known as the Burgundians or Nibelungs (after a former chief, Niflung), most of whose relatives had crossed the Rhine some fifteen years before. Those Burgundians who remained were no threat to anyone. They were the dregs left behind by the
Völkerwanderung
, the Migration of the Tribes, and were happy to live in peace, working mainly as carpenters in the valley of the Main. Their tale is told by an ecclesiastical historian, Socrates, writing a few years later. Now, suddenly, come the Huns, and devastation. Distraught, the Burgundians decide to seek help from Rome, and do so by sending a delegation across the Rhine and asking for a bishop to make them Christians. It works. Conversion leads to a revival of spirit. When the Huns come again, 3,000 Burgundians kill 10,000 Huns – among them the co-ruler Octar – and this small branch of the tribe is saved. The figures are exaggerated, no doubt, but there is probably some truth in the story, because the Burgundians’ conversion is also mentioned in a world history by a fifth-century Spanish writer, Orosius. However many the Huns lost, it must have taught them about the difficulties of operating in the forests of southern Germany.

In 432, then, with Octar’s death, Ruga emerged as sole leader; and it was he who was responsible for strengthening the link with the Huns’ old friend Aetius, who had become the victim of some vicious infighting in Rome. Having been fired by the regent, Galla Placidia, he fled across the Adriatic to Dalmatia, then north across the no-man’s-land where Romans, Germans, Goths, Sarmatians and Huns lived in interfused confusion, across the Danube into the Hun heartland. Here Ruga provided his old ally Aetius with a band of mercenaries, who gave him the military clout he needed to return home and regain his position from the regent-empress Placidia.
¹
The same year, he was made consul (the first of his three consulships), appointed commander-in-chief of the army of the West, and sent off once again to secure the Rhine frontier against the Franks.

Ruga was the man who, it seems, gave the Hun kingdom a firm foundation. He had an army formidable enough to launch successful raids against the eastern Romans, and envoys smart enough to negotiate an annual tribute of 350 pounds of gold from them, along with yet another promise to return Hun refugees. Not a huge victory, not a huge sum; but a good start on both
counts. The cash was paid to him directly, which means he had the authority to distribute it and thus preserve the loyalty of his chiefs. If some objected – and some did, several whole clans – they fled, seeking refuge over the border as illegal immigrants. Ruga could not tolerate this if he was to maintain and extend his authority. He would clamp down on his less willing clans and demand the return of the outlaws from Rome.

At which point, in the mid-430s, Ruga died – unless we are to believe the melodramatic account of the church historian Socrates, who said that God rewarded the emperor Theodosius for his meekness and devoutness by striking Ruga dead with a thunderbolt, following up with plague and heavenly fire that decimated Ruga’s subordinates. Socrates did not explain, however, why God missed Ruga’s two remaining brothers, named Mundzuk and Aybars (Oebarsius in its Latin form).
²
Mundzuk, the elder, had two sons, and this pair now move to centre stage, in another double kingship, with the task of keeping their unruly subjects united and ensuring a flow of funds and goods from the Romans, both eastern and western. One was called Bleda; his brother, Attila.