Attila the Hun (33 page)

The glass-makers of Aquileia are worth a small diversion, under Kurinsky’s guidance. The art was still a mystery to Europeans when the Jews arrived among the bays of the Adriatic coast, so their products were in
demand over a wide area, to the resentment of some Christians. St Jerome, briefly a resident of Aquileia, complained that glass-making had become one of the trades ‘by which the Semites had captured the Roman world’. Recent finds have astonished experts, because they are some of the earliest produced in Europe. Surprise on surprise – a few preserve the names of their proud makers, some of whom were slaves, at least one being a woman. Two glass vessels emerged in Linz, the Danubian town on the Roman trade route over the Dolomites. The mouldings include the phrase
Sentia Secunda facit Aquileiae vitra
: ‘Sentia No. 2 makes Aquileian glass’.

The stout walls of this rich and important city had often been besieged, but never taken – except once, when Alaric led the Visigoths towards Rome in 401. If Alaric could do it, so could Attila. And, as Attila’s spies would have told him, Aetius, certain that he had shut the Huns back in their cage, had not ordered the town to prepare for action.

A
ction came in late June 452. We can infer this thanks to the pope and some birds. Pope Leo I, who wrote letters in May and June, made no mention of an invasion of Italy, so it is unlikely to have begun earlier; and Attila’s siege could not have started much later, according to an unlikely source: the storks which nested on Aquileia’s roofs.

The storks come into the story because this was no quick siege. Aquileia’s citizens did not need orders from Aetius: they knew how to withstand an assault, having
good access downriver to the open sea. After nearly two months of waiting, with Aquileia living up to its reputation, Attila must have begun to hear murmurs from his generals. How long was this going on? Vineyards and orchards and grain-rich fields would sustain the troops through the late summer, but where was the loot? Priscus, quoted by Jordanes, takes up the story:

The army was already muttering and wishing to leave when Attila, as he was walking round the walls deliberating whether he should break camp or remain longer, noticed some white birds, namely storks, which make their nests on rooftops, taking their young away from the city and, contrary to their custom, conveying them out into the country. Since he was an extremely shrewd inquirer, he had a presentiment and said to his men: ‘Look at the birds, which foresee what is to come, leaving the doomed city, deserting endangered strongholds which are about to fall. Do not think this is without meaning; it is certain; they know what is going to happen; fear of the future changes their habits.’

Gibbon, always good for a quote, described the scene thus:

[Attila] observed a stork preparing to leave her nest in one of the towers, and to fly with her infant family towards the country. He seized, with the ready penetration of a statesman, this trifling incident which chance had offered to superstition; and exclaimed, in a
loud and cheerful tone, that such a domestic bird, so constantly attached to human society, would never have abandoned her ancient seats unless those towers had been devoted to impending ruin and solitude.

Could there be any truth in this charming tale? Possibly, because the Huns would have sought and respected auguries, both natural and man-made (like the omens read into blood-marks before the battle on the Catalaunian Plains). For Romans and barbarians alike, birds were portentous creatures, especially ravens, owls and storks, as magpies are to us: ‘One for sorrow, two for joy.’ Now, storks are indeed creatures of habit, about which Attila would have been rather better informed than Gibbon; as, thanks to two and a half centuries of ornithology, are we. Storks in general – unlike Gibbon’s lone mother in her Disneyesque devotion – do not have ancient seats. They migrate, heading south for winter. The white stork,
Ciconia ciconia
, leaves its European summer nests between mid-August and early September, heading for Africa overland. Juveniles leave first, trailed by their parents. Western populations take one flight path, easterners another, both circling the Mediterranean, the two groups being divided with remarkable precision along latitude 11°E, a mere 200 kilometres west of Aquileia. Westerners fly over Spain, easterners, including those of Aquileia, over Turkey and the Dead Sea to the Nile valley and points south. Attila, coming from Hungary, would have been familiar with the habits of eastern white storks; and so would his shamans, who, as we
know from the Catalaunian Plains, accompanied his entourage. A smart shaman might have been looking out for a reliable sign to buttress whatever Attila had in mind. It seems unlikely that the storks knew much about the ins and outs of siege warfare; but it is just possible, I suppose, that smoke and the collapse of their nesting-places drove them out early, which places this moment during the siege of Aquileia, with stork-like precision, a few days before mid-August. It is not too far-fetched to imagine a shaman, knowing Attila’s hopes, coming up with an excuse to continue the siege. How better to inspire trust than by claiming inevitable victory? What better backing than the forces of nature, proclaiming the fall of the city as surely as rats proclaim the imminent sinking of a ship?

Whoever said what to whom, it did the trick. Hun spirits revived, inspiring a return to the tactics developed in the taking of Naissus in 447, only five years previously. ‘Why say more?’ comments Jordanes. ‘He inflamed the hearts of the soldiers to renew the assault on Aquileia.’ A siege train took shape – slings to throw boulders, ‘scorpions’ (heavy crossbows firing metre-long arrows), battering-rams swinging beneath shells of shields – which in a remarkably short time broke through Aquileia’s walls, with awful consequences for the city, ‘which they despoiled, smashed asunder and devastated so savagely that they left hardly a trace of it to be seen’ – an exaggeration to which we shall return later.

What, meanwhile, of Aetius and the Romans during Attila’s advance? Not much, according to our main
source, Prosper, a chronicler and theologian from Aquitaine who became one of Rome’s leading religious and literary figures, possibly working as an official at the court of Pope Leo I. He was a man of abrupt and succinct opinions. To him, Aetius was idle and a coward. He made no provisions. He did not look to the Alpine defences. He would have scurried for safety with the emperor, if shame had not braced him. There is no need to take this as gospel, though. Prosper had an agenda, which was to downgrade Aetius in order that his master the pope should take the spotlight, centre stage, hand in hand with God, in the coming events. The fact was that the empire never did defend the Alpine pass, because it was too wide an entrance for easy defence. Italy was invaded six times in the fifth century, and not once were the invaders opposed until they got to the valley of the Isonzo and Aquileia.

What actually happened after the fall of Aquileia is vague. Attila apparently raided half a dozen smaller towns – Concordia and Altinum among them – in the surrounding area, but did not head for the seat of imperial government in Ravenna. Perhaps he judged it too tough a target, or perhaps he knew that the emperor was in Rome; in any event, he kept instead to the north, following the edge of the Po valley. Rather than suffer the fate of Aquileia, cities simply opened their gates: Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo and, finally, Milan. There the Huns burned and looted so much that the citizens had time to flee. According to one account, Attila took up residence in the imperial palace, where he saw a painting of Scythians prostrate before the two
Roman emperors of East and West. He liked the idea, hated the subject matter, and ordered a local artist to paint a similar scene with himself on a throne and the two emperors pouring out gold at his feet.

Now the advance faltered. A conqueror would have headed south across the Apennines to Rome, sweeping all before him. Priscus says that Attila, following closely in Alaric’s footsteps and with the same intentions, was warned by his shamans that he might suffer the same fate should he take Rome, namely death immediately after victory. Certainly death was in the air, in the form of heat, food shortages and disease. High summer was over, but September in the north Italian plains is oppressive; and the area was home to malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Others experienced a similar fate later. In 540 the Franks were ‘attacked by diarrhoea and dysentery, which they were quite unable to shake off because of the lack of proper food. Indeed they say that one third of the Frankish army perished in this way.’ Another Frankish army failed for the same reasons in 553.

Possibly an army headed by Aetius also had an effect, though there is only one brief and confusing sentence by the Spanish chronicler Hydatius, writing in about 470, to support the idea. Instead of an all-out military response, though, Rome opted for a diplomatic one, written up by Prosper, who was keen to record the role played by his master, Pope Leo I.

Leo was a genuinely significant figure, made more so by Prosper in what would today be regarded as appallingly right-wing terms. Leo’s election, delayed by
his absence in 440, was awaited with ‘marvellous peace and patience’. He rooted out heresy with admirable zeal, burning books as a divinely inspired holy man should. He showed himself to be a strong pope just at the moment when the greatest threat to the church, Attila, murdered his brother Bleda and assumed absolute power beyond the Danube. Worldly leaders like Aetius were examples of pride, ambition, injustice, impiety and imprudence, from all of which Leo, by comparison, was free. He even opposed the eastern emperor Theodosius II, who at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449 allowed that Christ did not share in the human nature of his mother, but was only apparently human. When Theodosius died in 450, Marcian, brought in to rule by Theodosius’ sister, came as the saviour of orthodoxy, Leo’s orthodoxy; hence the Fourth Council in Chalcedon in 451. Women, to Prosper, were irrelevant. Marcian’s wife, Pulcheria, to whom he owed the crown? Galla Placidia, mother of the Emperor Valentinian and the erratic Honoria, one of the most powerful women of her age? Not a mention. And of course, now that Attila was threatening the very heart of the empire, Aetius was worse than useless and everything was down to Leo.

Where Aetius relied on his own judgement, Leo relied on God. His mission to Attila was from the Senate and Valentinian III. ‘Nothing better was found than to send an embassy to the terrible king and ask for peace.’ He took with him two colleagues: Trygetius, former prefect and experienced negotiator with Gaiseric the Vandal in Africa, and the ex-consul Avienus, now one of the two
most powerful senators in Rome. Possibly, Leo’s main role was to negotiate the ransom of captives. This, then, was a mission of top envoys. Yet in Prosper, Leo and God are Rome’s real saviours. As a result, later accounts wrote out the other two entirely, or transformed them into something very different.

Attila was apparently quite ready to meet the three envoys, perhaps seeing in them a mirror-image of his own elite
logades
, headed by Rome’s most senior shaman. As Prosper puts it, ‘The king received the whole delegation courteously, and he was so flattered by the presence of the highest priest that he ordered his men to stop the hostilities and, promising peace, returned beyond the Danube.’

Just like that. Magic. Because Leo was in Prosper’s eyes a living embodiment of Christ working through man. ‘The elect receive grace,’ he said in another context, ‘not to allow them to be idle or to free them from the Enemy’s attacks, but to enable them to work well and to conquer the Enemy.’

What really happened at the meeting no-one knows. Perhaps, as some sources say, it occurred on the shore of Lake Garda, ‘at the well-travelled ford of the River Mincius’ (now the Mincio, which flows out of Lake Garda at Peschiera), though what Attila would have been doing travelling east prior to an invasion of Rome, I can’t imagine; he should have been heading south. Certainly, there would have been some hard bargaining. Quite likely, Attila would have threatened Italy with a terrible fate, as Jordanes says, ‘unless they sent him Honoria, with her due share of the royal wealth’.
That would open the way for a counter-offer: no Honoria, who was now either safely married off or ‘bound to chastity’ (perhaps the same thing, given Honoria’s raging rejection of her husband); but on the question of the royal wealth a deal could be done. Prisoners would have been released, cash paid, honour satisfied.

In the absence of any hard information, legends soon arose claiming a miracle. The version in the thirteenth-century Hungarian codex (
Gesta Hungarorum
), in which Attila is terrified into compliance by a vision of an angry, armed angel, is one among several examined in chapter 12 below. Certainly Attila was not a man to take much notice of popes. He had problems enough to stop his advance. Disease, famine, a sudden appreciation of what he was really up against: Attila must have now seen how much more he had bitten off than he could chew. In addition, he was now dangerously exposed, deep in Italy, with Rome’s other half, Constantinople, closer to Hungary than he was himself.

He headed back across the Isonzo, and home to Hungary.

In the autumn of 452, as the ice re-formed over the Danube, he sent off yet more ambassadors to Marcian threatening devastation ‘because that which had been promised by Theodosius was in no wise performed, and saying that he would show himself more cruel to his foes than ever’.

But this was bluster. He had lost thousands on the Catalaunian Plains, thousands more to disease in Italy. He had not returned home in time to catch the full
benefit of the summer grass. Even if the Italian campaign had paid for itself with Leo’s ransom money, nothing was coming from Marcian, and now, once again, he had an exhausted army and expectant commanders to keep happy. There were no more embassies. That winter, an ominous silence descended on the Danubian frontier, leaving Marcian ‘disquieted’ at what Attila might be planning. Come the spring, something would have to be done.