Attila the Hun (37 page)

Valentinian had no heir; with him, a dynasty died, and so did the final basis for the transmission of power. The Senate proclaimed Petronius emperor. But Petronius, having achieved the heights, found only despair. He was suddenly and utterly alone, without a valid claim to the throne, unpopular, and powerless in the face of events beyond his control.

Across the Mediterranean, the Vandal ruler Gaiseric was watching. Gaiseric’s grandparents had migrated in a vast sweep from north of the Alps through Spain to Africa, and now he was set on completing the circle with a seaborne invasion of Italy from the south. Gaiseric had long taken a keen interest in events on the mainland, because, you will remember, his son had antagonized the Visigothic king Theodoric by doing dreadful things to his daughter, and Gaiseric had hoped that Attila might be able to deal with both the Visigoths and the Romans. That hope had died on the Catalaunian Plains. But now, with Aetius and Valentinian dead and their murderer precariously on
the throne, Gaiseric had his chance. Three months after Petronius Maximus had himself proclaimed emperor, a huge Vandal fleet anchored at the mouth of the Tiber.

Poor Petronius. He had been nicknamed ‘the most fortunate’ because of his success. Ten years later, Sidonius wrote about his supposed good fortune: ‘Personally, I shall always refuse to call that man fortunate who is poised on the precipitous and slippery peak of office.’ Petronius had had his every wish fulfilled, yet now, having reached the heights, he was overwhelmed by vertigo. ‘When the supreme effort brought him to the yawning gulf of the imperial dignity, his head swam beneath the diadem at the sight of that enormous power, and the man who once could not bear to have a master could not bear to be one.’ With no legitimate claim to the throne, opposed by the bureaucrats, he felt a prisoner in his palace, and ‘was rueing his own success before the first evening fell’. His only major act was to reappoint Avitus to be, in effect, ruler of Gaul, in the hope that he could use his diplomatic skill to control half a dozen barbarian tribes. At home, Petronius was useless. If he knew of the approach of the Vandal fleet, he could do nothing about it. When it anchored in late May, he saw defeat staring him in the face.

He panicked and fled the palace, right into the arms of a mob, which, incensed by his impotence and cowardice, stoned and stabbed him to death, tore him apart and tossed his bloody bits into the Tiber.

And who should try to save the city? Why, the man who was Rome’s expert in handling these barbarians,
Pope Leo, who had gone out to meet Attila four years before. This time, he was only half successful. Gaiseric spared the people, but in a two-week operation stripped the city of its wealth, including the Capitol’s gilt bronze roof, the gold table and candlesticks originally seized from Jerusalem in AD 70, the palace furniture, the imperial jewels, and prisoners by the hundred, including the empress herself, her two daughters and Aetius’ son.

A few days later the news of this catastrophe reached Avitus, who was in Toulouse at the time with his friends the Visigothic royals, minus old Theodoric, who had fallen on the Catalaunian Plains, and also minus his son, Thorismund, who, at Aetius’ urging, had returned home to secure the succession he claimed. For three years all had gone well, even though there were those who did not accept him. Then Thorismund fell sick, and luck played into his enemies’ hands. He was letting blood from a vein, sitting on a stool, when a treacherous servant sent word that he was alone and unarmed. Assassins stormed in. Thorismund grabbed the stool and – according to Jordanes – slew several of his attackers with it before they killed him. His brother, Theodoric the younger, widely believed to have masterminded the murder, took over. So it was this Theodoric who was presiding over the Visigothic court when news arrived of the second seizure of Rome by barbarian hordes (the first, of course, having been by Theodoric’s ancestor, Alaric, on the Visigoths’ long march westward half a century earlier).

Avitus was clearly fond of this athletic young man,
for his son-in-law Sidonius paints him in a flattering light, making him sound like a superstar. Above average height, solidly built, long curly hair down over his ears, bushy eyebrows and long lashes, hook-nosed, well muscled, with thighs ‘like hard horn’, slim-waisted and well groomed (a barber shaves him every day, and trims his nose-hairs as well). A good administrator, he starts his day with a prayer (like most Visigoths, he professes Arianism, but probably doesn’t take it very seriously), then holds audiences for petitioners and foreign envoys. Mid-morning is time for hunting, with Theodoric practising his archery. Lunch is served simply, with no great show of silver to overwhelm the conversation. Toasts are few, drunkenness unknown. Afterwards, a short nap, then a board-game, in which self-restraint combines with good fellowship. At supper, there may be some entertainment: no musicians or singers – Theodoric seems to be totally unmusical – just a mime-artist, without anything satirical or hurtful. More petitions, then bed, with armed sentries on guard.

Somehow, at this refined barbarian court, the idea arose that there was a possible new emperor right there with them in Toulouse. Sidonius described the scene in obsequious verse.

The Gothic elders assemble, an unkempt crowd, in tarnished and greasy linen tunics and skin cloaks and horse-hide boots, an obvious contrast to their elegant prince. Avitus addresses them, urging a renewed commitment to peace from young Theodoric – ‘you, as the old men here can witness, whom these hands held weeping against this breast, if perchance the wet-nurse
sought to bear you off against your wishes’. Who can resist? All urge the cause of peace, and Theodoric, whose rough ways had been smoothed away in childhood by Avitus himself, swears to redress past wrongs by avenging the Vandal assault on Rome, if only – now comes the punch-line – ‘if only you, renowned leader, would take upon yourself the name of Augustus’.

Avitus looks down, acting modest and unworthy.

‘Why do you avert your eyes?’ asks Theodoric. ‘Your unwillingness becomes you all the more . . . with you as leader, I am a friend of Rome.’

A month later, the magnates of Gaul also rallied to the cause, and proclaimed Avitus emperor. In September he was in Rome, winning grudging support from sceptical senators. Sidonius delivered his panegyric in fawning praise of the new emperor, asserting his past successes, his present legitimacy and his inevitably glorious future.

But in this tattered realm, past success conferred neither present legitimacy nor any guarantee of future glory. Most of Gaul was lost to Franks, Burgundians and freebooting Bagaudae. The Visigoths held the south-west, and would soon seize most of Spain. Germans of various tribes ran the Rhineland. The Vandals had North Africa. Ostrogoths dominated the Danube. It didn’t leave much: just Italy itself. Power was not now with either emperor or Senate, but with the army, the only defence against assault. As Aetius had shown, who ruled the army ruled the (diminishing) western empire. With Aetius gone, Avitus gave the position of commander-in-chief to a
non-Roman, Ricimer, who was a Visigoth on his mother’s side and a Suevian on his father’s. It was Ricimer who managed to save Italy from another seaborne invasion by the Vandals in 456, and thus proved himself the true, if temporary, power in the land.

Avitus, the patrician from Gaul with a private army of barbarians, was never popular in Rome. Almost at once he was out of his depth. In 456 the harvest was bad. Famine threatened. Avitus said that to reduce the number of mouths to feed he would dismiss his private army, but to pay them off he melted down some of the few bronze statues that the Vandals had not taken. Crowds took to the streets in protest. Ricimer and the army made no move to protect their emperor. Avitus fled back to Arles, regathered contingents of his own, returned with them, and was defeated by Ricimer near Piacenza. Ricimer was magnanimous in victory, and let Avitus retire gracefully. He died on his way home.

Our subject, Attila, is almost lost in the next 20 years of Rome’s collapse. Seven more emperors; an interregnum; assassination and usurpation in Rome; murder and conflict among the barbarian kingdoms – all this, which would take a book to recount in detail, leads to a sort of end of the western empire in 476, when the last Roman emperor, Romulus, was deposed by a barbarian, Odoacer.

It was not a neat end, however, because the barbarians had been at and inside the gates for so long that the change from Roman to barbarian at the head
was more a symbolic than a practical switch. And suddenly it becomes easy once again to see Attila’s influence at work, because both the last Roman emperor, Romulus, and the first barbarian emperor, Odoacer, owed their lives to him. By a strange coincidence, their respective fathers, Orestes and Edika, had both been officials at Attila’s court, and colleagues in 449 on the ill-fated embassy written up by Priscus. Romulus would have heard all about it from his father, Attila’s Roman henchman, Orestes; and so would Odoacer, from his father, Edika, the Skirian whom Chrysaphius tried so disastrously to recruit as an assassin.

How had this come to pass? After Attila’s death, Orestes had returned to his estate in Pannonia, from where he was plucked to lead an army against the Goths, now on the warpath once again. Orestes, with the army behind him, became king-maker, and, after making a few others, the last he made, in 475, was his own child, little Romulus, known contemptuously not as Augustus, but Augustulus, ‘baby Augustus’.

The army was itself now fatally infected by decay. With no outlying empire and a collapsing bureaucracy, the taxes dried up and the pay stopped, and at last the barbarian troops had had enough. Odoacer, thanks to his father, was in command of Skirians who, after Attila’s death, had taken service with Rome. At first they backed Orestes, who promised cash, then land. Cash was in short supply; and of land there was none. So it was Odoacer and his Skirians who finally revolted against the very symbol of Roman power, and replaced
the son of Attila’s right-hand man with the son of one of his generals.

O
ne-third of the western empire was now in barbarian hands, and at its centre sat a barbarian ruler. Was this deplorable? For conservatives, of course. But in the very long run a new Europe would emerge, a Europe with a new diversity of cultures and nations. Rome itself endured in many ways: its institutions, its culture, its traditions, its Christian faith. Only in Britain did barbarian invaders forget Rome, looking upon its buildings, walls and roads as upon alien artefacts and asserting their own pagan origins. On the mainland, barbarian rulers saw themselves as proud heirs to an ancient power, and paid lip-service to their nominal overlord in Constantinople. In Gaul, non-Romans took over Roman villas, learned Latin and adopted Christianity. Great Roman cities remained great. Latin remained the
lingua franca
for educated Europeans for 1,500 years, a tradition faintly echoed today in the ceremonies of ancient European universities, and across Christendom, for which AD –
anno domini
, the year of our Lord – still divides history in two.

And Attila himself? He remains one of history’s great might-have-beens. With a little more diplomacy, better sense, less war and a commitment to administration he could have had so much. He could have seized all northern Europe, had Honoria in marriage, created a dynasty that ruled from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the Alps to the Baltic. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, Britain would have fallen to the Huns rather
than to the Angles and Saxons, and Chaucers and Shakespeares would have written in Hunnish, and we would all have ended up worshipping not the Christian God but some shamanistic Blue Heaven. As it was, Attila’s contribution to Europe’s history remained bound by barbarian migration and Roman collapse, processes that were happening anyway. He tweaked both. In his rise, he drove tribes westward faster than they would otherwise have travelled. Once in power, having blotted up outlying tribes, he slowed down the same movement. In political and historical terms, Attila did little more than add a few speed bumps in the high road of Europe’s history, allowing an acceleration here and a slowing down there. It all amounted to a perfect balance of pluses and minuses, signifying nothing.

Along the way there had been much sound and fury. But this, too, signified nothing. Thompson sums him up succinctly: ‘Did the Huns make no
direct
contribution to the progress of Europe? Had they nothing to offer besides the terror which uprooted the Germanic nations and sent them fleeing into the Roman Empire? The answer is, No, they offered nothing . . . They were mere plunderers and marauders.’

Is that it, then? Not quite. There is more to Attila than plundering and marauding, because his name resounds still as an archetype of a certain sort of power. His influence is to be found not in his practical achievements, but in his appeal to the imagination. He broke the bonds of historical fact, and entered legend, a shift that is the subject of the final chapter.

¹
Reigned 457–74. Not the same as Pope Leo I (440–61). For four years (457–61), both pope and emperor were called Leo I.