Attila the Hun (19 page)

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A
s leaders often do, Attila boosted his natural self-confidence by rewriting tradition so that it supported his rise to power. This he did by hijacking the ancient cult of sword-worship. Many tribes worshipped, venerated or swore by their swords, sometimes seeing in one particular sword a symbol of divine support. There is perhaps a recollection of this practice in the Arthurian legend of the ‘sword in the stone’, which may recall the respect conferred upon the metalworkers who knew how to abstract iron from rock, in effect drawing swords from stones. The Xiongnu, the Avars and the Bulgars all had their sword-cults. So did the Huns. Shortly after Attila came to power he made the cult his own. This is the story as heard by Priscus, our main source for the court of King Attila, whose adventures are the subject of the next chapter. Some of his work was lost, though some of the lost bit was saved at second hand, quoted by the Gothic historian Jordanes over a century later. It seems that one particular sword – Latinized as the Sword of Mars – had always been esteemed by the Hun kings, but had been lost. This is how it was rediscovered, according to the story as it must have been approved by Attila:

A certain herdsman saw one of his heifers limping. Unable to find a cause for such a wound, he anxiously followed the trail of blood and at length came to a sword the beast had unwittingly trampled while grazing. He dug it up and straight away took it to Attila. He rejoiced at this gift and being of great
courage he decided he had been appointed to be ruler of the whole world and that, thanks to the Sword of Mars, he had been granted the power to win wars.

Attila had both the power and the incentive to wage war on the empire of Theodosius. What he lacked for the moment was focus. He faced a threat from a tribe or clan named as Acatiri or Akatziri – they have various spellings and much disputed etymologies, which Maenchen-Helfen takes ten pages to summarize. In brief, they were probably steppe-dwellers living on the shores of the Black Sea, somewhere over towards the Don. Trouble of some kind was brewing there. It would eventually be sorted out with one of the Acatiri tribal leaders retaining his independence by an ingenious and outrageous piece of flattery. Offered gold by Attila along with an invitation to visit, he suspected a trap, and sent a message saying he couldn’t possibly come because, as a man could not look at the sun, so he could not look upon a god – small evidence that Attila was beginning to be seen as selected by Heaven above for conquest. Attila decided to settle for control rather than conquest, sending his elder son Ellac to assert Hun rule.

Aetius himself arrived from Rome to negotiate another peace. No-one left an account of his visit, but it is deduced from a Latin verse by an eminent Gaulish poet, Sidonius, who will become a significant source later in this story. The poem was a panegyric in praise of Aetius, probably written to commemorate his third term as consul, which began in 447. As one line put it, ‘he returned with peace from the Danube and stripped
the Don of its rage’. Aetius was certainly the man for the job, confident that his old hosts would give him a good welcome. If Attila and Aetius had not met as children – Aetius was some ten years the elder, quite the patriarch now at fifty-something – they surely met now, and saw in each other matching qualities of leadership. They could do business together, and serve each other’s interests.

This would have been the first time a high-ranking outsider had been to Attila’s headquarters since he had assumed sole leadership. It is a good time to ponder where he lived, how he lived and what he was like. To do so, I must get a little ahead of myself, because I have to draw upon the description set down by Priscus, whose visit took place a couple of years later.

First comes the much-disputed position of Attila’s headquarters. Historians have taken a great interest in the course Priscus took on his journey north from Constantinople, because if they could pin that down they would know where Attila lived, and then they could excavate and open many windows on Attila and Hun life. But all we have are strong hints, like a treasure-hunt with half the clues missing. Priscus crossed three large rivers, which he names Drecon, Tigas and Tiphesas; but Jordanes, in quoting him, distorts the names and the order into Tisia, Tibisia and Dricca. Or perhaps Jordanes got them right and Priscus wrong, or both were trying to record local usages now forgotten. This uncertainty has inspired many an academic footnote. The names can be paired, but the
three pairs can be made to yield only two known rivers (and even these are disputed):

Tiphesas/Tibisia = Tibiscus (Latin)/Tamiš (Serbian), Timi
or Timi
ul (Romanian);

Tigas/Tisia = Tisza (Hungarian)/Theiss (German);
Dricca/Drecon = unknown, but possibly today’s Begei.

The Tamiš joins the Danube just north of Belgrade, close to where the Begei flows into the Tisza. But there are several other rivers, and names have changed as peoples and languages have changed. The identification that makes most sense is that of the Tigas/Tisia with the long, broad, meandering and variable Tisza/Theiss, which dominates the central Hungarian plain, and did so to a far greater extent before it was tamed in the nineteenth century by Count István Szécheny, who practically reinvented his country politically and physically (he regulated the Danube as well). The Tisza/ Theiss had scores of different spellings over the centuries (and still has quite a few in this multi-lingual part of Europe). Unfortunately, not a single one has a
g
in the middle. Still, it is inconceivable that a scholar like Priscus would not have known of the Tisza, and it is widely accepted that this was the river Priscus meant. If he crossed it, it means Attila was based on the other side i.e. the west. This makes sense, because Attila needed his army to have rapid access west as well as south, and the Tisza could, in spring, spread out for miles, a barrier best avoided by basing himself on the western side.

Estimating the distance Priscus travelled brings us up the west bank of the Tisza to the flat lands near present-day Szeged, in southern Hungary. Szeged itself is right on the river, and even with the embankments is still subject to flooding. It was almost wiped out in 1879, and swamped again in 1970 and 2000. If Attila was based west of the river, he would have settled 20–30 kilometres west, safely away from the flood plain, with its bogs and slow streams, out on the
puszta
, with open ground on which the Hun cavalry could operate and manoeuvre.

But this was no military camp. It was a regular little town, with wooden buildings, plus a couple with stone bases, and one entirely of stone – of which more in the next chapter. It was not much in modern terms, but it is still an expression of Attila’s imperial outreach. There were no trees and no quarries in the area, so every log and stone had to be brought in on wagons and rafts. Despite a vast amount of academic wrangling over the possibility that the village was some sort of fort, with a surrounding palisade, no such thing is mentioned by Priscus. Inside the village there were indeed palisades, encircling collections of wooden buildings. One, for instance, belonged to Attila’s deputy, Onegesius; another to his senior wife, Erekan. But these served no military purpose, for their gates were unguarded and unlocked. They indicated status. There was plenty of space between these enclosures for tents to be pitched.

You can see little towns like this today in Mongolia, put up by people in the process of abandoning their herds for urban life. In the north, where the mountains
and forests roll down from Siberia, it has always been easy for those who wish to build in wood. Here are villages of spruce and pine planks, the single-storey houses set in compounds to keep thieves out and dogs in, separated by spider’s webs of tracks, punctuated by the occasional round felt tent and horses tethered next to a motorbike. Even in the Gobi, you may be driving over an infinity of gravel plain and see, shimmering on the horizon, a little town, the centre of local administration. The houses are more likely to be brick and concrete, and there will be a telephone line and poles at odd angles, but they have similar compounds of wooden planks. If pastoral nomads have to settle, this is how they do it. They are, in effect, Hun villages.

I imagine Aetius’ first view of Attila’s new palace must have been much the same as Priscus’. ‘Wooden walls made of smoothly planed boards’, whose joints – the addition is from Jordanes – ‘so counterfeited solidity that they could scarce be distinguished by close scrutiny . . . a courtyard bounded by so vast a circuit that its very size showed it was the royal palace’. This was a place designed to impress, not only by its size but also by the quality of its workmanship: fine wood and excellent carpentry, possibly the work of captured Goths or Burgundians, both of whom had traditions of building in wood.

Now for the man himself. Priscus described him, in Jordanes’ Latin version:

He was a man born to shake the races of the earth, a terror to all lands, destined I know not how to frighten
everyone as terrifying reports spread about him. His gait was haughty, his eyes darting here and there, so that his power and pride was apparent as he moved. Yes, he was a lover of war, but he knew how to restrain himself. He was excellent in council, sympathetic to supplicants, gracious to those received into his protection. He was short of stature, broad-chested, with a large head, small eyes, thin beard flecked with grey, snub nose, and the repulsive complexion of his forefathers.
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His nature was such that he always had great confidence.

Having dealt successfully with this new king, Aetius duly returned with peace from the Danube, sealing the renewed bond by sending his son Carpilio, perhaps on a second embassy, perhaps as a hostage, as he had himself been sent in his youth. This is confirmed by a letter written in the first half of the sixth century, a hundred years after the events, by the historian Cassiodorus, who wrote a history of the Goths. In the letter he described how his grandfather had been sent to Attila along with Carpilio. This must therefore have been the second group of outsiders to meet Attila as sole leader. Naturally, Cassiodorus is keen to show his grandfather
in a good light, and the Huns as the evil conquerors of his own Goths, but his account backs up Priscus’ portrait. Cassiodorus writes that his grandfather

looked undaunted at the man before whom the Empire quailed. Calm in his conscious strength, he despised all those terrible wrathful faces that scowled around him. He did not hesitate to meet the full force of the invectives of a man, who, driven by some fury, seemed to strive for the domination of the world. He found the king insolent; he left him pacified; and so ably did he argue down all his slanderous pretexts for dispute that though the Hun’s interest was to quarrel with the richest empire in the world, he nevertheless condescended to seek its favour . . . Thus did he bring back the peace which men had despaired of.

Together Cassiodorus and Priscus give us a portrait of an ugly little man of extreme contradictions, mercurial in his moodiness and adept at putting on the appearance of moods, suspicious of all but his most trusted lieutenants, often brutal, tough as a bare-knuckle fighter. He had killed men, might actually have killed his brother with his own hands. It was impossible to know what he really felt or guess what he would do next. Stalin and Hitler had that same talent of keeping even the closest aides on tenterhooks, absolutely dependent on their every whim. Like them, he and only he held the secret of victory, and not even he could say what that secret was. Part of the mystique of leadership was his self-confidence, part his austerity – and part his
generosity, in which his chosen ones and honoured guests basked as if in sunlight. I think he had a sudden smile that could melt rocks. To be in his presence would have been to feel charisma in its original, theological sense, the power that flows as a divine gift and turns an ordinary man into a leader.