Attila, the Scourge of God
In the summer of 449, the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II dispatched to the court of Attila a mission headed by the senior official Maximinus and his friend the rhetorician Priscus of Panium. They were carrying a letter from the emperor in reply to Attila, who had charged the Romans with violating the treaty signed two years earlier.1 Unbeknownst to Priscus and Maximinus, their interpreter Vigilas was on a secret mission from the emperor’s eunuch minister Chrysaphius to suborn Attila’s bodyguards to murder their master. Vigilas thought he was in league with a leading Hun, Edeco, who had headed Attila’s legation to Constantinople, but Edeco himself was playing a double game to ferret out conspirators. The party traversed the desolate provinces of Thrace and Moesia, passing gloomy ruins of Roman cities sacked just years earlier by the Huns and now home to a handful of monks awaiting the Apocalypse.2 Attila’s men greeted them at the border, the juncture of the Margus (today Morava) and Danube Rivers. The next day the Roman envoys were received at the tent of Attila, for the restless king had journeyed south, and pitched his camp on the west bank of the Middle Danube. Edeco confided the details of the plot to Attila, and Vigilas was sent off on a fool’s errand back to Constantinople. Attila cleverly questioned Priscus and Maximinus, and determined that they were unwitting dupes, and so they accompanied Attila back to his royal settlement on the east bank of the Danube, perhaps near the Theiss River rather than opposite the former Roman fortress Aquincum, today a suburb of Budapest.3 Attila’s uncle Rugila had constructed a sprawling city of markets, tents, and halls as the seat of the Hun confederacy. Priscus, a polished diplomat and careful observer, recorded a reception by Attila in a great hall. At the festivities, Maximinus and Priscus sat at the far end, while the envoys of the Western Roman emperor Valentinian III sat at the other.4 Only noble warriors were seated in the middle closest to Attila, whereas the slaves of the despised Roman emperors were tolerated at the fringes of the feast. The scene inspired the Hungarian nationalist artist Mor Than to paint his “The Feast of Attila” (1870), hanging today in the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest. The scene exalts Attila as the progenitor of the Magyar kings of Hungary rather than recording the historical event.
During this visit, Priscus remembered vividly all that he saw, and so he gives our sole contemporary description of Attila. “He was a man born to shake the races of the world, a terror to all lands, who in some way or other frightened everyone by the dread report noised abroad about him, for he was haughty in his carriage, casting his eyes about him on all sides so that the proud man’s power was to be seen in the very movements of his body. A lover of war, he was personally restrained in action, most impressive in counsel, gracious to suppliants, and generous to those to whom he had given his trust. He was short of stature with a broad chest, massive head, and small eyes. His beard was thin and sprinkled with gray, his nose flat, and his complexion swarthy, showing the signs of his origin.”5
Attila, just like Genghis Khan, was every inch a charismatic conqueror who inspired his warriors. He despised ostentation, and never mistook ceremony for the reality of power. Throughout his life, Attila remained modest in his dress and abstemious in his habits. At the banquet, Priscus recalls how Attila toasted with a simple wooden goblet and ate simple fare off his wooden plate.6 The riches and slaves he won were for rewarding his loyal followers. Attila, shrewd, brave, and patient, shared the hardships of his men. He possessed a keen sense of tactics and a strategic genius of the first order so that he turned the Hun confederacy into an empire.
In 434, the two brothers Bleda and Attila, in their mid-thirties, succeeded their uncle Rugila as joint rulers of the Hun confederacy.7 According to the rules of lateral succession, the brothers were acclaimed by the council or kurultai of the clans’ leading men, because they were the ablest mature members of the royal family of their generation. Bleda was slightly older, but Attila was the greater in deeds and words. For eleven years, the brothers ruled in an uneasy partnership, for each had his own jealous followers who incessantly argued and brawled with each other. Given the expanse of the confederacy, Attila ruled over the western tribes in Central Europe, while Bleda held sway over the eastern tribes on the south Russian steppes.8 Yet they often acted in concert against the Eastern Roman Empire, and negotiated from horseback as partners with Roman envoys from Constantinople. In 445, Attila arranged for the murder of Bleda while hunting.9 A long-simmering rivalry had erupted four years earlier. In 441, the Huns attacked the city of Margus, alleging the bishop had defiled a Hun cemetery near the city in search of treasures. The bishop fled to the Huns, where he cast the blame on his fellow citizens out of fear that they would turn him over to the Huns for punishment. The bishop swore that he would trick the garrison to sally out of the city so that the Huns could ambush them. He delivered on his word. Margus was taken and sacked.10 To Bleda fell Zerco, a humpback jester of Moorish ancestry, who amused Bleda by his ugly countenance, ungainly gait, and babbling tongue.11 Attila found Zerco repulsive, and the two brothers quarreled over the jester. Zerco even once escaped, was captured, and returned to Bleda. Bleda, who had a cruel streak of humor, married the dwarf off to a noble lady who had fallen into disfavor as a means to humiliate her family. For Attila, this was the final unforgivable act of cruelty. Once Bleda was killed, allegedly in a hunting accident, Attila was acclaimed the grieving brother and sole ruler. Yet the dispute over the jester concealed a deeper rivalry over who should succeed. Attila had at least three sons, and he favored Ernac as his successor, marking him out at feasts in the great hall.12 Attila was determined to impose the hereditary succession of his house alone and so eliminated any rivals to his heirs. Therefore, in treaties with the Romans, Attila always insisted on the provision that Hun exiles of high rank be turned over to him. Attila executed at least two young royal Hun exiles handed over by Theodosius. The cravenly emperor Theodosius II even appeased Attila by ordering the execution of a number of Huns of high birth unwilling to leave Constantinople lest Attila claim treaty violations.
For fifteen years, Attila played a dual game of attacking the wealthier Eastern Roman Empire and providing Aetius, patrician and magister militum of the emperor Valentinian III, with Hun armies to secure the Roman West.13 Attila timed his attacks precisely when Roman field armies were engaged on other distant frontiers, and he exacted the maximum terms from the feckless Eastern emperor Theodosius II. Attila displayed a keen sense of strategy, and an ability to gather and interpret reports about his foe. Attila also learned from Rome, for he was the only barbarian enemy of Rome who mastered siege warfare. He fielded a corps of Roman engineers and a supply train so that the Huns could wage winter campaigns. The Romans were shocked to see a barbarian army besiege, capture, and raze their cities. To be sure, the Huns fielded superb horse archers, but the subject Germanic tribes provided heavy cavalry and infantry to what was an imperial army.14 Attila, like the Xiongnu chanyu or the Rouran khan, depended on the tribute rendered by the Roman emperors and the booty and captives gained in raids. Yet he was hardly the boss of a barbarian protection racket, for he maintained a secretariat staffed by Orestes, a Roman who chose to take Hun service. Orestes kept records and wrote diplomatic letters in Latin.15 Attila sent out envoys who were able diplomats accompanied by skillful interpreters in Latin or Gothic. Since Attila died unexpectedly in his late forties, we shall never know whether he would have annexed and administered Roman provinces in the fashion of many steppe conquerors. Given time, he and effective heirs could well have learned to rule cities, tax sedentary subjects, and mint coins in the manner of contemporary Huns in Iran and northern India or the Tuoba Xianbe emperors of the Northern Wei in northern China.
Initially, Attila and Bleda were content to collect the annual tribute of 350 pounds of gold under the treaty their uncle Rugila had extorted from the Eastern emperor Theodosius II twelve years earlier. In 435, Attila demanded the return of exiles at the imperial court of Constantinople, and complained about trading rights accorded to Huns at Roman markets along the Danube.16 Theodosius II, preoccupied with the Vandals in North Africa, dispatched envoys who concluded a new treaty at Margus, in Moesia, in 435.17 Theodosius agreed not to receive Hun exiles or to ally with any foes of the Huns. He also doubled the annual subsidy to 700 pounds of gold and extended access to Roman markets. Border incidents continued. In 441, Attila seized on the one over the violations of Hun cemeteries by the Bishop of Margus to launch a six-year war, devastating the Balkan provinces almost to the suburbs of Constantinople.18 The Huns sacked every major city along the imperial highways with the exceptions of Adrianople and Heraclea on the shores of the Sea of Marmara. Theodosius could do little, because the field army under the ablest general, Aspar, an Alan by descent, was campaigning against the Vandals who had captured Carthage in North Africa. Theodosius hastily concluded a peace with the Vandals, and recalled Aspar and his army in 442.19 In the next year, Aspar suffered a decisive defeat in Thrace. The desultory war raged on, with more Roman setbacks. On January 26, 447, a major earthquake shook Constantinople, bringing down fifty-seven towers and a long section of the walls.20 Theodosius, barefoot and dressed as a suppliant, headed a procession through the devastated city to implore God’s protection lest Attila suddenly appear before the walls. Within sixty days, under damp, overcast winter skies, members of the circus factions (the clubs that backed chariot teams in the Hippodrome) feverishly repaired the walls.21 But Theodosius lost confidence in the walls and his soldiers, so that he dispatched a senior general, Anatolus, to beg for terms. Attila dictated the most humiliating treaty ever imposed on the imperial government.22 The annual tribute was tripled to 2,100 pounds of gold, and an additional 6,000 pounds for arrears, and yet thousands more to redeem Roman captives at an exorbitant rate. To be sure, these sums represented a fraction of the empire’s wealth, but it was a significant proportion of the emperor’s disposable income. In twenty-eight years, between 422 and 450, Theodosius had paid in tribute to the Huns 18,500 pounds of gold.23 Only two other payoffs, each a onetime payment to a Persian shah, matched this sum.24 Furthermore, Attila insisted on prompt payment each year from his slave Theodosius. Finally, the Romans agreed to evacuate their fortresses and the civilian population at a distance of five days’ journey (at least one hundred miles) from the lower Danube frontier. The Roman frontier in the Balkans had just collapsed.
On July 26, 450, the emperor Theodosius, age forty-nine, died after having been thrown from his horse days earlier.25 His older sister Aelia Pulcheria, renowned for her intelligence and piety, secured the court. She quickly married and elevated to the throne Marcian, a senior Roman officer, who had the backing of the imperial army.26 Marcian, a blunt Illyrian provincial, ended the tribute, ordered the recruitment of soldiers and repairs of the walls, and braced for the inevitable Hun invasion. It never came. Attila, while furious over Marcian’s embassy that repudiated the treaty, turned his attention to the Western Roman Empire. Court intrigues at Ravenna during the summer of 450 offered him an opportunity to gain control over most of the Western Roman Empire.
From his accession, Attila had consistently honored an alliance with Flavius Aetius, magister militum of the Western army, and the dominant figure of the court of Emperor Valentinian III at Ravenna. Aetius, a provincial Roman in origin, was the son of a high-ranking officer of Stilicho. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, he was sent as a hostage, first among the Visigoths, and then the Huns, from whom he learned their languages, archery, and horsemanship.27 He encountered the leading Huns, and likely became a sworn brother, or, in Mongol terms, anda, to many of them. He met Attila already the most promising among the younger royal princes. On August 15, 423, the Western emperor Honorius, then thirty years old, died from a wasting disease. He left no sons. Castinus, a lackluster ex-general and scheming courtier at court, placed on the imperial throne Johannes, a meek and bookish bureaucrat.28 The Eastern emperor Theodosius II refused to recognize Johannes and furnished his cousin Galla Placidia, the half sister of Honorius, and her young son Valentinian III with an army. The Eastern army invaded Italy, and easily defeated the kingmaker and usurper in 425.29 But Castinus had sent Aetius to the court of Rugila with ample gold to buy a Hun army. Aetius arrived three days late and missed the civil war so that, at the head of a Hun army, he extorted from an unwilling Galla Placidia command of a field army in Gaul.30 Although the historian Procopius two centuries later hailed Aetius as “the last of the Romans,” in truth, he was the first of the Medieval warlords.31 For twenty-five years, Aetius controlled the best Western field army, which was stationed in Gaul.32 He intrigued incessantly to achieve supreme military and civilian power in the Roman West. Aetius was not above masterminding the poisoning of a rival general, and mortally wounding another by cheating in single combat. Galla Placidia was eventually forced to retire into a private life of Christian charity, while her son Valentinian grew to fear and loathe his general, who pressed for an imperial marriage of his son to the emperor’s younger daughter.33 Yet Aetius delivered order in Gaul and Spain by employing his Hun allies to terrorize the Germanic and Alan federates settled within the Western Roman Empire. In 437, Attila obliged Aetius by lending a Hun army that wiped out the troublesome Burgundians settled around Worms in the Rhineland.34 Later German, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse poets recast the mundane event into a heroic legendary tale about the ill-fated royal house of the Burgundians.35 While Attila had ravaged the Balkan provinces of the Eastern Empire, Aetius stayed on respectful terms with Attila, but this alliance of convenience ended in the summer of 450. The empress Honoria, the older sister of Valentinian, was forced into a marriage with a boring elderly senator after she was allegedly caught in a scandalous sexual liaison with her chamberlain. She sent her signet ring and a message to Attila, imploring him to rescue her.36 Attila chose to interpret the call for help as a marriage proposal, and demanded as the dowry Gaul and Spain, all that was left of the Western Empire outside of Italy. Aetius and Valentinian were both shocked, and flatly refused. To Attila, the refusal was an act of war, for as a son of the steppes, he expected such a marriage offer as a recognition that he was, after all, lord of all Huns and the equal of Roman emperors.37 The Persian Great King, the Chinese emperor, and the Sassanid shah all offered daughters to the harems of nomadic conquerors, but Romans were strictly monogamous. Christian Roman princesses should not marry pagan, barbarian monarchs.
In the spring of 451, Attila marched rapidly west along the Danube, and descended into the Rhine valley, striking terror among Romans and Germans alike. Throughout the spring and summer, Attila waged a campaign of terror. He enrolled numerous Germanic allies, and divided his army into at least two columns. His army numbered at most fifty thousand men, and depended on speed and surprise.38 The Huns quickly captured with siege engines Strasbourg, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Metz, Reims, Tournai, Cambrai, Amiens, and Beauvais. The cities were ruthlessly sacked and burned; captives were herded together for the slave markets. The destruction across Roman Gaul was without precedent, and the Gauls long remembered how saints, such as Saint Geneviève of Paris, implored God’s intercession to save their city from Attila’s hordes. Aetius, with a field army of twenty thousand Romans, gained thirty thousand more men by engaging King Theoderic of the Visigoths, and the federate Alans settled near Orleans, and the Franks settled on the Lower Rhine.39 In late summer, Attila put Orleans (Aurelianum) under siege, but Aetius arrived with his coalition army to raise the siege. Attila dared not risk an engagement near Orleans. He retired northeast in search of supplies and favorable terrain on the Catalaunian fields, between Troyes and Châlons.40 There, in early autumn, Attila fortified his camp by circling his wagons into a laager and awaited Aetius. On the morning of the battle, Attila remained in camp because his shamans read unfavorable omens in the charred sheep bones.41 In the afternoon, Attila suddenly issued forth from his camp, with his Huns and Alans occupying the center, and Germanic allies holding the flanks.42 The Hun right wing rested on high ground overlooking the Marne River. Aetius placed his least reliable allies, Alans, in the center, and deployed Romans and Franks on his left to contest Attila’s Germanic allies for the summit of the hill. The Visigoths on his right opposed their cousins the Ostrogoths on Attila’s left. The battle lines looked more like a civil war among who’s who in the barbarian world than a clash of empires. Attila’s Huns drove back the Alans in Aetius’s center, in what was likely a combined attack by horse archers and heavy cavalry. But the Romans and Franks gained the crest of the high ground and then wheeled into the right side of Attila’s center. The Franks recklessly led the charge downhill, throwing their axes on the run. The Visigoths drove back the Ostrogoths on Attila’s left, but King Theoderic fell in a failed counterattack against Attila, who had broken through Aetius’s center. The inconclusive fighting raged on until dusk, when Attila retired to his camp, covered by the superb Hun archers. Later legends claimed the slain warriors still battled in the sky during the night. Attila feared a night counterattack, and prepared a funeral pyre of saddles so that he could immolate himself rather than fall into enemy hands. Aetius’s forces were scattered over the battlefield. Aetius and Thorismund, the son of the fallen Theoderic, both lost their way back to their own lines. Aetius dared not press a night attack, for his army was exhausted.43 The next morning, Aetius rejected Thorismund’s proposal to storm the Hun camp. Aetius feared Attila might win a decisive victory or, even worse, suffer a crushing defeat. Politically, Aetius still needed Attila, for Aetius hoped to renew the alliance. First the Visigoths, then the Franks, and finally Aetius withdrew. Tactically the battle was a draw, but Attila held the field and retreated in good order, with his slaves and booty, across the Rhine. He could always recruit fresh forces in the winter. The war would go on.
In the following year, 452, Attila invaded Italy, but he halted and retired rather than press on to Rome.44 Aetius and Valentinian were amazed. Legend soon supplied the answer: Pope Leo I had persuaded Attila to depart.45 In that winter, Attila died unexpectedly from overindulgence at marriage festivities.46 If Attila had not died so suddenly and realized his goals of an imperial marriage with Honoria, the course of events in the Western Roman Empire might well have turned out quite differently. The last Roman field army had sustained heavy casualties at Catalaunian Plains, and an imperial army of Huns under Attila could have restored order in Gaul and Spain. Attila and Honoria, and their heirs, might well have presided over a successful composite state of Romans and Huns not too dissimilar from that of the contemporary state of the Northern Wei emperors. Instead, for the next fifteen years, Attila’s sons fought over the succession, while the subject tribes rebelled in a bid for independence.47 Attila’s empire did not collapse so much as fragment, as was the case of so many steppe empires. On the banks of the Nedao River, a tributary of the Danube, a coalition of Germanic tribes defeated and slew Attila’s eldest son, Ellac, in 454, just eighteen months after Attila’s death.48 The emperor Marcian had supplied gold and encouragement to the disaffected vassals, who soon fought among themselves. The Gepidae and Lombards fought over the great Hungarian plains between the middle Danube River and the Carpathian Mountains, while the Ostrogoths, then settled in the rolling plains of Pannonia (today Hungary west of the Danube), migrated south into the depopulated lands of the Roman Balkans.49 Farther east, Attila’s other two sons, Dengizich and Ernac, as allies of Rome, briefly ruled lesser groups of Huns residing between the lower Danube and Dnieper Rivers.50 No charismatic ruler emerged to succeed Attila, and so to unite the nomadic tribes into an imperial confederacy. Instead, over the next century, newcomers, the Turkic-speaking Kutrighurs, Otrighurs, and Sabirs, steadily migrated out of the arid Kazakhstan steppes and settled across the south Russian steppes.
Meanwhile, the empress Honoria retired to a villa on the Bay of Naples, where she grew reconciled to the comfortable life of leisure with her elderly retiring husband. Aetius was fatally compromised, and he did not long survive Attila. In 454, the year after Attila’s death, Aetius was cut down by his own master, Valentinian, at an audience.51 In the next year, Valentinian too was dead, murdered by a cravenly ambitious senator who failed to prevent a Vandal sack of Rome.52 A succession of phantom emperors followed for the next two decades. Edward Gibbon, with regard to one such emperor, Severus III, wrote, “History has scarcely deigned to notice his birth, his elevation, his character or his death.”53 Gibbon’s obituary for Severus, with one exception, could be applied to the rest of the last emperors of the Roman West.54 Barbarian generals who commanded the tribal regiments exercised real power.55 In the final four years of the Western Roman Empire, Odoacer, a general of the former Hun Empire, gained power as magister militum at the head of a band of Attila’s unemployed Germanic veterans. Odoacer elevated to the throne the last two Western Roman emperors. The second, Romulus Augustulus, was ironically the son of Attila’s secretary Orestes, who had entered Roman service after Attila’s death. In 476, Odoacer executed Orestes, forced the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus to abdicate, and ruled henceforth as king in Italy in the name of the Eastern emperor Zeno.56 The Western Roman Empire had come to an ignominious end.
The meteoric career of Attila has inspired awe, wonder, and fear to this day. Even in his own lifetime, Attila was the stuff of legends. Priscus was told a legend about how Attila received the invincible sword of Mars from a shepherd who had stumbled upon it by accident, and so Attila could claim a universal kingship bestowed upon him by the eternal blue sky.57 This particular legend gained currency among the Christian kings of Medieval Hungary, who claimed descent from Attila and the discovery of his lost sword in the eleventh century. This sword passed into the hands of the Dukes of Bavaria, then to the Habsburgs, and now it is on display in the Künsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Ironically, the Ottoman sultans, the ancestral enemy of the Hungarians, too claimed Attila as a progenitor and a fellow ghazi warrior so that statues and displays of Attila are still found across Turkey today.
Medieval Christian writers cast Attila as the Scourge of God, a pitiless barbarian conqueror at the head of the hordes of Gog and Magog sent to punish a sinful world. To be sure, Attila ruthlessly sacked churches and slew priests and monks across the Balkans, Gaul, and northern Italy, but he waged the nomadic way of war in which those who resisted could expect no mercy. Yet Attila never persecuted his Christian subjects out of religious intolerance, and he welcomed loyal warriors and servants of many faiths. Quite in contrast, Arian Vandal and Visigothic kings in the Roman West fiercely persecuted their Catholic Roman subjects on several occasions.58 Attila remained devoted to his ancestral spirits and scrupulously consulted shamans and seers, but he also respected the holy ones of other religions. Hence, the legend of Pope Leo, by his mere presence, impressing Attila to withdraw has a plausible ring. The fateful meeting with Pope Leo might well have led Attila to make up his mind whether to retreat or press on to Rome.
The Germanic peoples, many of whose ancestors were once subjects to Attila, celebrated him for centuries as a mighty lord, presiding over a great hall of heroes in the same fashion as their god Odin (or Woden in Old English) held court at Valhalla. Priscus witnessed the celebrations held by Attila in his hall, and the account reads as if it came right out of Beowulf or Norse saga.59 In legend, Atli, the Norse name for Attila, was extolled as a Great King, but avaricious and lusting after the gold hoard of the Niflungs, the treasure’s original guardian dwarfs of the Rhineland. The Burgundian king Gunnar, who is based on his namesake slain by the Huns in 437, gained the hoard from his brother-in-law, Sigurd the dragon slayer, by treacherously contriving the murder of Sigurd. Atli lured Gunnar and his warriors to their destruction in a legendary last stand fought within Attila’s own great hall. Gudrun, sister of Gunnar and wife to Atli, avenged her family by slaying Atli and setting the Hun hall ablaze.60 In the Nibelungenlied, the Christian version of the legend composed in the Middle High German verse, Etzel (Attila) is a sympathetic figure who presides over a court of the noblest of Germanic heroes. He is shocked that his wife Kriemhild (Gudrun) arranged the attack on her brother Gunther (Gunnar) to avenge herself against her own family for the murder of her first husband, Siegfried (Sigurd). Hildebrand, Etzel’s master of arms, then cuts down Kriemhild for violating the ties of kinship.61 Based on Germanic verse and Norse saga, Richard Wagner perpetuated the memory of the legendary Attila in his four operas of Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Since the nineteenth century, the image of Attila and his hordes of Huns sweeping across Europe still captures popular imagination in novels, paintings, and films. The best known image of rampaging Huns is still the painting by Alphonse de Neuville, the patriotic artist who illustrated the popular history of Medieval France of François Pierre Guizot, which the author published in 1823. The illustration combines the images of Attila’s horsemen as harbingers of the Apocalypse and European fears of the Asiatic peril. It was to this image Kaiser Wilhelm II appealed when he exhorted German soldiers about to embark for China at the port of Bremerhaven on July 27, 1900.62 He reminded the soldiers to avenge the atrocities of Attila and fight like Huns against the Boxers, Chinese rebels frustrated over decades of European imperialist oppression. The German expeditionary force arrived too late to participate in the relief of Beijing, where the foreign embassies had been besieged by the Boxers, but the Kaiser’s words were turned against him. An unseen reporter had recorded the speech of Kaiser Wilhelm, notorious for his tactless, spontaneous remarks (to the angst of his ministers). The reporter then telegraphed the speech to newspapers across Europe and the United States. The public outcry, even among many Germans, surprised the Kaiser, because Attila, Etzel, was a respected king in German legend. In 1914, the British delighted in turning the Kaiser’s own words against him, denouncing German soldiers rampaging across Belgium as the real Huns.63 Even during the Second World War, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in their communiqués to each other often referred to Germans as Huns. Two Hollywood epic spectacles, both released in 1954 and best seen in a drive-in theater, epitomize popular misconceptions about Attila and the Huns today. Anthony Quinn played the starring role in “Attila,” but a stunning Sophia Loren as the empress Honoria stole the show.64 In this less than historical epic, the best scenes are the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields and the meeting between Pope Leo and Attila. But Jack Palance wins honors as best Attila on the screen in “Sign of the Pagan.”65 Seven years later, he went on to play a just-as-menacing Ogatai Khan in “The Mongols,” which was very loosely based on the Mongol invasion of Europe in the thirteenth century.
Yet Medieval legends and modern novels and film, however unhistorical and at times even silly, pay homage to a charismatic, barbarian conqueror who is widely perceived as altering the course of history. Attila and his Huns had terrorized the Roman world for nearly fifteen years, and earned a reputation comparable to that of Genghis Khan. In comparison to Genghis Khan, Attila counts far fewer lasting achievements.66 Even so, Attila decided the destinies of the Roman world. His invasions forced an ineffective Western Roman court to turn to German tribal armies settled within the empire for defense. In so doing, Attila ensured that the Germanic kingdoms of the West would succeed Rome as the new order of Medieval Europe.67 His wars in the Roman Balkans severed the strategic highways between Constantinople and Ravenna, and so led to the parting of the Western and Eastern Roman worlds that shared a common Classical, urban civilization. The Medieval West, aligned along the axis of Rome to London, would find its future among the Romanized, Celtic, and Germanic populations of Northwestern Europe. The Byzantine East, centered on Constantinople, also turned north and realigned itself with the Slavic peoples.68 In the process, the modern boundaries between Western and Eastern Europe were born. Finally, for the Roman East, Attila compelled future emperors in Constantinople to perfect an artful diplomacy to undermine such confederations of steppe nomads from ever emerging in the future.