Attila the Hun (27 page)

And what might the guests be up to, besides boating, bathing and eating? Sidonius tells us in another letter describing country-house activities (on two estates near Nîmes, actually, but such things were common upper-crust pastimes). In the morning, there might be a sort of pig-in-the-middle ball-game, in which a circle of players toss the ball while one of them tries to intercept it. Inside, others play at dice. To one side lie piles of manuscripts, as it were the Sunday newspapers,
Country Life
and a few of the latest hardbacks: some of a devotional nature for the ladies, and literature noted for its eloquence and stylistic grandeur for the men. Then, while the men discuss the latest Latin version of some eminent Greek writer, a butler announces lunch,
it being the fifth hour by the water-clock – a range of roast and stewed meats and wine, enjoyed while listening to a reading of a short story. Afterwards, a light walk to work up an appetite is followed by a sauna. In those estates unlucky enough to lack a steam-bath, servants dig a trench, fill it with heated stones and build a roof of branches covered with rugs. While guests crowd in, servants throw water onto the stones.

Here we whiled away the hours with no lack of witty and humorous conversation, in the course of which we became wrapped and choked in the breath of the hissing mist, which drew forth a wholesome perspiration. When this had poured out sufficiently to please us, we plunged into the hot water. Its kindly warmth relaxed us and cleared our clogged digestions; and then we braced ourselves in turn with the cold water of the spring and the well or in the full flow of the river.

Remember as we wander the estate that although this was the grandest of provincial villas, the very pinnacle of refinement, elegance and wealth, there were hundreds of other lesser villas, all the product of Gaul’s 100 or so towns, some of them sizeable regional capitals like Narbonne and Lyons, even the meanest outshining Attila’s village on the Hungarian grasslands. It is just possible that one of Attila’s Roman secretaries had heard of Avitacum, and told his master of its delights. Such people, with their corrupting luxuries, would be easy prey.

And then, would not this be a wonderful spot for a
conqueror to take his ease from the affairs of state – a country retreat, a Berchtesgaden or Chequers or Camp David, where some high-class Roman beauty could be allowed to play at culture, and entertain, and await the occasional gracious visit from her lord and master?

H
ow to proceed? The main problem was to manoeuvre without seeming to threaten Gaul directly, and thus threaten Rome, and thus risk losing the friendship with Aetius, Gaul’s guardian. The Visigoths seemed to be the key, because they were traditionally enemies of both Romans and Huns. Attila tried to play the diplomat, at which, to be frank, he was a novice. To Rome, Attila made a specious argument about the Visigoths being vassals who had fled from their Hun overlord, and had to be brought back into the fold. He could give himself some diplomatic cover by claiming that, since the Visigoths were the enemies of Rome, he would be acting ‘as guardians of the Romans’ friendship’, in the words of a contemporary chronicler, Prosper of Aquitaine. Such a move might even win friends among Romans in Aquitaine, where landowners would be happy to retake estates seized by the Visigoths only a generation before.

But of course the Visigoths would not take kindly to Attila’s arrival. They too had to be neutralized. To Theodoric, Attila sent a message with an altogether different argument, urging him to recall who his real enemies were – i.e. the Romans – and in so many words offering assistance. As Jordanes comments, ‘Beneath his
great ferocity he was a subtle man.’ Not very subtle, though. Was Attila really naïve enough to think that his enemies might not see where the greatest danger lay? I rather think he was.

His ambitions were encouraged from afar by another new barbarian kingdom, that of the Vandals in North Africa. Jordanes explains why in a striking anecdote. A Visigothic princess, Theodoric’s daughter, had married a Vandal prince, Huneric by name, son of the king, Gaiseric. At first, all went well. There were children. Then Huneric turned brutal, and paranoid. ‘He was cruel, even to his own children, and because of the mere suspicion that she was attempting to poison him, he had [his wife’s] nostrils and nose cut off, thus despoiling her natural beauty, and sent her back to her father in Gaul, where this wretched girl was an ever-present unsightly ruin. The act of cruelty, which affected even strangers, spurred her father powerfully to take revenge.’ So Gaiseric had cause to be nervous about what Theodoric might do. A pre-emptive strike by Attila would come in very handy.

What a prospect for Attila if he achieved his aim! With the Visigoths beaten, Attila would rule from the Caspian to the Atlantic, a sweep as wide as both parts of the Roman empire put together, with a supply line across Gaul cutting between the unruly Bagaudae of the north and the Roman legions to the south. It would surely then be possible either to crush the Bagaudae or simply ignore them and go for Gaul itself. Attila would rule all of northern Europe, a new, dynamic empire balancing, and then dominating, and eventually – why
not? – conquering the decaying, corrupt and divided imperium to the south.

The long-term strategy is a guess, but there is some evidence that he had at least started on this road. He sent a note to Valentinian III in Rome stating his intention to attack the Visigoths and assuring him that he had no quarrel with the western empire. This was in the spring of 450, just the time to prepare for the long march westward. The campaign might well have gone according to plan – but for two events that changed everything, tempting Attila to reach far beyond his grasp, and thus assure his downfall.

T
he Emperor Valentinian III, still only in his early thirties, had a sister, Honoria, the two of them being the children of the formidable Galla Placidia, twice-widowed daughter of Theodosius the Great. Her own story had been a drama: carried off from Rome by the Gothic chieftain Athaulf, handed back to the Romans after Athaulf was assassinated, and then married to Athaulf’s Roman opposite number, Constantius (another Constantius, not to be confused with Attila’s secretary). What follows now is melodrama: the story of her daughter, the princess Honoria, of her wounded pride and how she changed the course of history.

The imperial family had been in the current capital, Ravenna, for the last 25 years, since the defeat of the usurper John (or Johannes). Honoria had from her girlhood been raised in a position of power and privilege, having been given the honorary title ‘Augusta’ far too young for her own good. She had her own residence in
the palace, an establishment run by a steward named Eugenius. Like her mother, she was an ambitious woman; unlike her mother, she had plans to rule in her own right; and unlike her dim and feeble brother, the Emperor Valentinian, she had the wit to do so. All that she lacked was opportunity, which might have come her way had her brother not produced heirs, threatening to consign her to obscurity. But dreams of power remained, to achieve which she needed a consort. Eugenius was to hand, first as conspirator, and then as rather more, a story well milked by Gibbon: ‘The fair Honoria had no sooner attained the sixteenth year of her age than she detested the importunate greatness which must for ever exclude her from the comforts of honourable love: in the midst of vain and unsatisfactory pomp Honoria sighed, yielded to the impulse of nature and threw herself into the arms of her chamberlain Eugenius.’

It slightly spoils the story to know that she was actually no dizzy teenager but a scheming thirty-something when this happened. Gibbon says she became pregnant, and was shuffled off to remote exile in Constantinople. No-one else mentions pregnancy or an exile in Constantinople, and Gibbon does not provide his source, but in any event the affair and plot were discovered, Eugenius was put to death and Honoria betrothed to a rich and safe consul with no whiff of intrigue about him.

Driven into paroxysms of rage by the loss of her lover, the failure of her plans and the prospect of a boring husband, Honoria planned a dreadful revenge
and a new life that would give her the power she longed for. As she knew from his recent note to her brother, Attila, already Europe’s most powerful monarch outside the empire, was planning to extend his rule to the land of the Visigoths and would perhaps end up as ruler of all Gaul.

This was how she would have her revenge on her brother: she would become Attila’s consort. She would reign, if not as empress of Rome, then as empress of Gaul.

Gibbon’s account of her plan is pure Hollywood, with a classic swing and a good dose of xenophobia:

Her impatience of long and hopeless celibacy urged her to embrace a strange and desperate resolution . . . In the pursuit of love, or rather of revenge, the daughter of Placidia sacrificed every duty and every prejudice, and offered to deliver her person into the arms of a barbarian of whose language she was ignorant, whose figure was scarcely human and whose religion and manners she abhorred.

There is enough in other sources for us to have faith in the main lines of the story. Among her entourage was a loyal eunuch, Hyacinthus, to whom she entrusted her extraordinary mission. Giving him a ring to hand to the Hun ruler as proof of her good faith, she sent Hyacinthus off to Attila with a plea for help. In exchange for a certain sum of money, he was to come at once and rescue her from a marriage that was hateful to her. Her ring carried the implication
that in return for her rescue she would become his wife.

Valentinian had his spies, but Hyacinthus was long gone before he knew what was up. News of this scandalous business swept through the top ranks of society, and thus to the ears of Theodosius in Constantinople. Theodosius, who had just finished appeasing Attila after the collapse of the assassination plot, did not want either him or the newly made peace upset. His advice to Valentinian was to hand over Honoria at once. She could be sent off across the Danube, and good riddance. But Valentinian was not going to take this challenge to his authority. How Hyacinthus accomplished his mission was not recorded, of course, there being no official historian at Attila’s HQ to record it. I have a feeling that Onegesius would have been initially inclined not to bother his master with this envoy and his batty offer – but then had second thoughts. Perhaps the two of them heard Hyancinthus out after all, because Attila stored up the idea until it suited him to recall it. All this would have taken a few weeks. When Hyacinthus returned to his mistress to report the success of his mission, Valentinian had him arrested, tortured for the details, and then beheaded.

He must have been tempted to get rid of his troublesome sister as well, but was prevented by their ever-formidable mother, Galla Placidia, who demanded the care of her errant daughter. Valentinian duly handed her over; later that same year Placidia died, at which point Honoria vanished from history into her dull marriage, where her husband kept her from wreaking any more damage.

But the consequences of her actions lived on, boosted by the second unexpected event of 450. Honoria having made her extraordinary offer in the spring, on 28 July Theodosius, emperor of the East, fell from his horse and broke his back. Two days later he was dead, at the age of 50, leaving two daughters, no male heir, and a problem. Having come to the throne as a child 43 years before, he had never been a strong emperor. The power behind the throne had been his elder sister, Pulcheria, and she was not about to give up this power simply because her brother had died. Within three weeks she had married a Thracian senator named Marcian, revealing to a surprised but compliant court that he had been named successor by Theodosius on his deathbed. Marcian, like Pulcheria, was no appeaser. Now was a good moment to show some resolve and staunch the northward flow of gold, for Attila, in the midst of planning his move westward, would have neither the time nor the inclination to change tack. One of Marcian’s first acts was therefore to repudiate the payments to Attila agreed by Theodosius.

Attila was already gathering an army such as the Romans had never seen before, drawing on all the tribes of his empire, a list that grew ever larger with the passing years, until chroniclers bolstered the force with tribes drawn from myth and spoke glibly of half a million men. Well, it could hardly rival the combined might of Rome, but it might have numbered tens of thousands. Among them were Gepids from the Transylvanian hills, under their king Ardaric, much admired (Jordanes says) for his loyalty and wisdom;
three Ostrogothic contingents from their new homeland south of the Danube, now returned to the care of Constantinople, but providing men for both sides, these ones being commanded by Valamir – tight-lipped, smooth-tongued, wily – with his lieutenants Theodomir and Vidimir; the Rugians, perhaps originally from northern Poland, soon to resettle in the hills north of Vienna; Skirians, whose foot soldiers had formed the backbone of Hun infantry units since the days of Ruga and whose ex-king, Edika, was very much in Attila’s good books, having proved his loyalty in the assassination fiasco; Akatziri and Herulians from the Sea of Azov, near the Huns’ homeland; those renowned lancers the Alans, some of whom had been absorbed in the early days of the conquest; from the Rhineland, contingents of Thuringians, and remnants of those Burgundians who had remained when the rest of the tribe migrated westward; and, from Moravia, Langobards (‘Long-Beards’), who had once lived on the Elbe and would later migrate to Italy as the Lombards, giving their name to their final homeland around Milan.

Attila was now in a bind. He had a campaign ready to roll, an army numbering tens of thousands to feed, no more funds from Constantinople, and the very real possibility that his long-term plans – first the Visigoths, then Gaul, then the empire itself – would be scuppered by Marcian’s army. There was no time to waste. But which way to turn first?