In 378
AD the Roman Empire suffered one of the most ignominious defeats in its long
history with the annihilation of Emperor Valens' army at the hands of Fritigern’s
Goths at Adrianople. It was a defeat in which the emperor himself perished. The
Goths themselves however had of course been seeking refuge in imperial lands;
fleeing from an even greater menace.
The dreaded Huns
On the
River Dniester some years before, far from the Roman frontier, the Gothic tribe
of the Greuthungi had suffered their own crushing defeat in which two of their
kings had fallen in battle. The Greuthungi had come under attack from a
barbarian people who had exploded out of the Eastern Steppe and who seemed
utterly unstoppable. These were the Huns; fierce nomadic tribesmen who
practically lived in the saddle and were peerless in the art of fighting on
horseback. They are described in Roman sources as being barely human; hideously
ugly, bow legged from a lifetime on horseback and dressed in filthy, reeking
clothes which were made improbably from the skins of mice. No one knew where
the Huns had come from since that part of the known world from which they had
appeared was a blank on the map. It has been suggested that they were descended
from the Xiongnu; a fearsome nomadic people who had so terrorised the Chinese
some centuries before that they had inspired the construction of the original
Great Wall.
Whilst
the Romans and even the Goths were happy to dismiss the Huns as savages, they
soon learned to respect their martial prowess. In around 350 the Huns had
crossed the Volga, initially in small raiding parties and then in greater
numbers. They had smashed the power of the nomadic Alans who were tough
warriors in their own right; sending them fleeing westwards. Now the Huns were
moving into the territory of the Goths. Athanaric the leader of the Tervingi;
another Gothic tribe who neighboured the Greuthungi to their west, had attempted
to stand and fight but was driven back to the old defensive lines which had
once protected the Roman province of Dacia. Still the Huns came on.
The Huns
were a pastoral people accustomed to survival in the unforgiving environment of
the Eastern Steppe and they were self-sufficient and hardy. From early
childhood, every Hunnic boy would learn the skills essential to a life of
driving livestock from one place to another and of hunting and raiding. He
would learn to ride almost before he could walk and soon after would begin to
learn to use a bow so that by the time he reached adulthood he would be an
expert horseman and archer.
The
Hunnic bow was the most powerful yet seen. It was a compound recurve bow with
an unusual asymmetric design being shorter at the bottom to allow it to be used
more easily from horseback. Based on the best efforts of modern re-enactment,
Hunnic warriors could fire perhaps as many as thirty arrows per minute from
horseback at speed. An army facing the Huns in battle would find itself facing
a maelstrom of galloping horsemen who would fire arrow after arrow into their
lines as they rode along them before wheeling away to resupply from carts in
the Hunnic rear. Fresh horsemen would then take their place and continue the deadly
hail of iron tipped shafts which were sent whistling through the air with
enough power to pierce armour from a range at which their enemies’ counter fire
was barely effective. The modern historian John Man has calculated that a force
of a thousand Huns fighting in this way could unleash a rate of fire of twelve
thousand shots per minute. The peoples whom they faced simply had nothing to
match that kind of firepower. At close quarters the Huns employed the skills
learned in rounding up horses on the steppe and wielded lassoes with which they
ensnared their opponents before running them through with the sword.
With large
numbers of Goths driven into imperial territory, where they would continue to have
a cataclysmic impact culminating in Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, the way was
clear for the Huns to become the major power in the lands beyond the Danube.
The disparate Hunnic groups under their own
leaders and the Germanic populations who had chosen to remain in their
lands and become subjects of the Huns rather than take their chances as
migrants had been gradually drawn into the gravitational pull of an
increasingly powerful and proportionally shrinking number of Hunnic warlords.
This dog eat dog process of absorption of the weaker by the stronger continued
towards its logical conclusion until the entire vast domain of the Huns,
stretching from the shores of the Black Sea to the banks of the Elbe, was
controlled by just two men who happened to be brothers. Their names were Attila
and Bleda. The fact that Bleda the Hun is not a household name suggests his
likely fate at the hands of his more famous brother.
The
Hunnic Empire under Attila and Bleda operated as a giant protection racket. The
Huns threatened to smash up the Danube provinces of the eastern empire unless
the level of yearly tribute previously agreed with their Uncle Rua, who had
bequeathed them their empire, was doubled from three hundred to seven hundred
pounds of gold. The Romans agreed to this and then the Huns attacked anyway.
Unlike previous barbarian invaders the Huns had mastered the siege craft
necessary to take walled cities and had now added rams, towers and scaling
ladders to their fearsome military repertoire. The cities of Margus,
Vimanaceum, Sirmium, Constantia and Singidunum which is now Belgrade were all
taken, plundered and reduced to smouldering rubble. Their people were led away
into slavery. In the peace agreement of 442 which was concluded outside the
blackened ruins of Margus where the
whitening bones of the slaughtered still lay scattered over the ground, the
Romans agreed to a further doubling of the tribute to fourteen hundred pounds
of gold. The Huns did not even bother to dismount during the negotiations.
Two
years later Attila disposed of his brother and assumed sole control of
operations. Dispensing the vast quantities of loot from the eastern empire with
great largesse he kept the leaders of his subject peoples on side with gifts of
fine clothes, silver plate and elaborate weapons. As the Huns still lived an
essentially nomadic existence there was not really much else to spend it all
on, although one of Attila’s deputies had himself a Roman bath house
constructed at one of the permanent royal settlements that Attila had
established throughout his domains. Attila himself preferred substance to style
and affected a simplicity in his dress and possessions, leaving it to his
followers to outdo each other with bling. Like any good gangster Attila the Hun
rewarded loyalty with generosity and swiftly eliminated any whom he had reason
to suspect. Under the terms of the treaty, the Romans were obliged to return
any of his subjects who sought asylum in their lands to face an immediate and
nasty death by impalement. Like all successful empire builders Attila
understood that fear and violence, magnanimity and generosity were all tools to
be employed as the situation demanded. He kept the leaders of his subject
peoples close by him, as honoured members of his inner circle, where he could
keep an eye on them.
In 447
Attila was obliged to march into the eastern empire once again when the Eastern
Emperor Theodosius II suspended tribute payments. This time the Huns raided as
far south as Thermopylae and even threatened the walls of Constantinople itself
although the mighty land walls, which had been hurriedly shored up following an
earthquake, were formidable enough to deter the Huns. Two heavy defeats in the
field and the destruction of more cities soon persuaded Theodosius to resume
payments. Predictably, the amount of tribute demanded by Attila was again
doubled.
Determined
to free the empire from the menace of Attila, the imperial chamberlain in
Constantinople; a eunuch by the name of Chrysaphius, decided to employ some
gangster tactics of his own. Taking aside a member of a Hunnic delegation, Chrysaphius
attempted to bribe one of Attila’s most trusted henchmen to arrange the murder
of his master whilst accompanying Roman
diplomats on an embassy to the Huns. This plan backfired spectacularly as the
would-be assassin agreed to the plot but then reported the Romans’ intentions
immediately to Attila upon his return. The Roman delegation’s translator was
apprehended by the Huns whilst bringing the money to pay for the hit. Having
caught the Romans red handed Attila enjoyed the moment; dispatching an embassy
to Constantinople to publically castigate Theodosius in his own court,
admonishing him as an unworthy and dishonourable vassal who had raised his hand
against his rightful lord.
Attila's court
In 450
the weak willed Theodosius II died and was succeeded by his Master of Soldiers
Marcian who strengthened his claim to the purple by marrying Theodosius’ sister
Pulcheria, who had always been the power behind her brother’s throne. The more
militarily minded Marcian immediately declared that gold was for his friends whilst
iron was for his enemies. There would be
no more payments made to the Huns. Attila, ever the opportunist, decided that
he had milked the eastern empire for long enough and that easier pickings could
be found by now turning against the poorly defended west rather than by picking
a fight with the defiant Marcian. Attila had an interesting pretext for making
war on the west, for he had received an offer of marriage from the Princess
Honoria, the sister of Western Emperor Valentinian III.
Valentinian
was another weak willed emperor who had initially been dominated by his mother,
the formidable empress Galla Placidia and then presided as little more than a
figure head as a trio of warlords divided up responsibility for the governance
and protection of the western empire, although predictably they had soon fallen
to fighting amongst themselves.
The man
who eventually prevailed in this struggle to become de facto leader and protector of the west was Flavius Aetius. Aetius
was well connected in barbarian circles, having spent time as a boy as a
political hostage to both the Goths and the Huns. He was appointed initially to
the Gallic command where he faced barbarian incursions on all fronts and
where the footprint of Roman imperial
control was steadily shrinking. The south-west had been gifted to the Visigoths
whilst in Brittany a rebel state now existed where the locals had taken matters
into their own hands and no longer recognised the sovereignty of Rome. To the
north the Franks had occupied the Belgic provinces and on the Rhine frontier
another Germanic group known as the Burgundians were encroaching onto Roman
territory. Aetius thus had plenty to keep him busy and scant resources with
which to defend his patch. As a result he relied heavily on his connections
amongst the Huns in order to bolster his forces with large numbers of Hunnic
mercenaries. These additional troops proved a decisive advantage, allowing
Aetius to keep his various enemies at bay. He had been powerless however to prevent
the loss of Roman North Africa to the predations of the Vandals under their
swashbuckling king Gaiseric. In 439 the Vandals had taken Carthage and the rich
province of Africa Proconsularis had
been lost. This was a disaster which constituted a very large nail in the
coffin of the Western Roman Empire.
Getting
back to Honoria; having found her freedom curtailed following a series of
scandalous liaisons culminating in an embarrassing pregnancy, the princess
wrote to Attila; sending him a ring and imploring him to rescue her. This
improbable turn of fortune prompted Attila to demand that Valentinian should
hand over his sister to be the latest bride of the King of the Huns along with
half of the remaining territory of the western empire by way of a dowry.
Naturally Valentinian refused and so the Huns and the Western Romans prepared
for war.
In 451 a
vast force of Huns and allied peoples, which the Romano-Gothic historian Jordanes
describes as being an unbelievable half a million strong, began marching on
Gaul. They drove up the Moselle Valley, bypassing heavily fortified Trier and
sacking Metz. As the Huns spilled out on to the plain of Champagne, Aetius
desperately organised a coalition of Romans, Goths, Franks and Burgundians in
order to resist the invader who was an enemy feared equally by them all.
By
mid-June Attila had laid siege to the large and prosperous city of Orleans
whilst the defenders desperately looked to the south for the approach of Aetius’ coalition. When the
Roman and Gothic army appeared, Attila
decided to retreat and retraced his steps eastwards towards Troyes. Here
his forces ran into a contingent of advancing Franks and following heavy
fighting which the Huns had the worst of, they made a fortified camp from their
circled wagons in an area known as the Catalaunian Plains.
Battle of Catalaunian Plains
Here
Aetius caught up with the Huns and battle was joined. Both sides raced to claim
an area of high ground in the centre of the battlefield, with the Visigothic
cavalry reaching it first and driving off the Huns. The Hunnic cavalry then
unleashed their storm of arrows against the advancing allies who somehow stood
up to the battering and kept coming on. The battle was now a clash of infantry
between the various allied contingents in the Hunnic force and those fighting
under Roman colours. On Attila’s side were Goths, Rugi, Scirians, Gepids and
those Franks who supported Attila’s preferred claimant to their disputed throne
rather than Aetius’ man.
Battle
raged until darkness fell and men could no longer identify each other in the
gloom and ended with Aetius’ forces as masters of the field and the Huns driven
back inside their circle of wagons. Somewhere in the confusion King Theodoric
of the Visigoths was struck by a spear and as he fell from his horse was
trampled under the hooves of friend and foe.
As dawn
broke on the Catalaunian Plains Attila prepared to face the final onslaught of
his enemies. He ordered a great pyre to be made from saddles and resolved to
burn alive if his camp fell to the enemy. He was spared so dramatic an end
however as the Visigoths came across the body of their fallen king in a heap of
corpses and the threat of a succession crisis prompted them to return to Aquitaine.
The Franks were similarly preoccupied and also retired and Attila was permitted
to slip away to friendly territory. Aetius let him go, appreciating perhaps
that the dreaded Hun was of more use to him alive than dead, given the
foreboding he inspired amongst the other groups who threatened the west.
Attila
however was not done yet and in the following year he once more led his forces
onto Roman soil, this time invading Italy itself. The northern city of Aquileia
was subjected to a typically brutal sack and Attila next contemplated the
inviting target of Rome itself. Disease had broken out in his army however and
supplies were short. Already laden with plunder, he decided to withdraw. This
at any rate is a more plausible reason for his withdrawal than the intercession
of Pope Leo I, who is credited with persuading the man the western church had
dubbed the ‘Scourge of God’ to spare the city of Rome. Whatever the reason, the
Romans had been given another reprieve.
A year
later came news of the biggest let off of all for Attila was dead. He had
expired on his wedding night. Having just deflowered his latest teenage bride
and sozzled with alcohol, the King of the Huns suffered a nosebleed and choked
upon his own blood in his sleep. It has to be admitted that by the standards of
the time this was a pretty good way to go.
The
demise of its most formidable enemy was not enough to prevent the continuing
collapse of the western empire. The foolish Valentinian III, jealous of Aetius’
talents and suspicious of his ambition, murdered the western empire’s most
effective defender in 454. Unusually the emperor did his own dirty work and cut
the unsuspecting Aetius down with his sword during an audience. Valentinian was
then himself killed in reprisal by officers loyal to Aetius within a year of
the deed. His passing marked the end of the Theodosian dynasty which had ruled
in both east and west for over sixty years and left the western empire
destabilised and vulnerable as enemies closed in from all sides.
As for
the Huns, the death of Attila led to the rapid disintegration of his empire
which it seemed had only been held together by the force of his personality.
Within a year of his death a major battle took place on the River Nedao in
modern Hungary in which an alliance under the King of the Gepids defeated the
Huns under the command of Attila’s son Ellac and shattered Hunnic control over
the various peoples settled along the Danube. Whilst bands of Huns would
continue to serve as mercenaries in the wars of the Roman Empire, spreading
terror wherever they went, their own days of empire were alas, or perhaps
thankfully, at an end.
Priscus' account of the embassy to Attila
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/priscus1.asp
Jordanes' account of the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/451jordanes38.asp
I was lazy for this article and reused material from my own book The Battles are the Best Bits, but if you liked it please check out the book.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Battles-Best-Bits-ebook/dp/B008GT05IY
You may also enjoy my Enemies at the Gate series of posts
http://slingsandarrowsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/enemies-at-gate-part-one-umayyad-sieges.html
You may also enjoy my Enemies at the Gate series of posts
http://slingsandarrowsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/enemies-at-gate-part-one-umayyad-sieges.html
