Attila on the Road to Rome
In 452, Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God and most deadly enemy of Rome since Hannibal, descended upon Italy to avenge the ferocious, but indecisive, battle fought in Roman Gaul on the Catalaunian Plains in the previous year. This time he was determined to capture Rome, the eternal city, seat of the Roman Empire and Christianity. Even then, Rome still retained her luster and her look as the capital of the Mediterranean world, even though the cravenly Emperor Valentinian III resided at Ravenna, a modest, sleepy town protected by malarial swamps and with direct access to the sea.1 Valentinian’s colleague Marcian too acknowledged the seniority of Rome to his own capital Constantinople, New Rome, seat of imperial power in the East. For Attila, Rome was the ultimate prize. Her capture would make Attila master of the Roman Western Empire. But more important was that Rome would confer legitimacy on the nomadic, barbarian conqueror. Attila would avenge the insult of two years previously when his marriage to the empress Honoria was rejected by her brother Valentinian III and his court.2 Attila would secure his bride and so ultimately rule as guardian (parens Augusti) for their children. Such a marriage might well have revived Roman power in the hands of a nomadic conqueror who could not possibly have ruled the empire from horseback but instead through the imperial officials of Rome.
The rejection of the marriage proposal had denied Attila the expected recognition by Rome of his status as indispensable ally and lord, or to use the later language of the steppes kaghan, of the barbarian world from the Danube to the Volga River. His ancestors, either vassals or scions of the Xiongnu (pronounced Hunna in ancient Chinese), had engaged in centuries of diplomatic exchanges with both their nomadic overlord, the celestial kaghan, and the Chinese emperor who ruled by the Mandate of Heaven.3 Whenever a charismatic conqueror of the Eurasian steppes achieved primacy, the emperor of the Han peoples acknowledged the newest conqueror of the warlike tribes of horse archers. The kaghans expected Chinese envoys who brought costly gifts, silk, imperial titles, and Chinese princesses as brides. To the Chinese court, these missions conveyed the “five baits,” subsidies intended to turn the kaghan from a foe into an ally.4 To the kaghan, the envoys rendered tribute to glorify his court, and to provide fancy gifts that he then distributed among the lesser khans of the tribes to secure their loyalty. Every great kaghan ruled a confederation comprising “Inner” and “Outer” tribes bound to serve in his army. Far lesser kaghans than Attila had even seized northern Chinese lands and ruled as Chinese-style emperors in their own right and sponsored Buddhism to uphold their legitimacy in the eyes of their Han subjects.5 In 450, when the empress Honoria had sent a signet ring and message for assistance to Attila, he could only have interpreted it as a marriage offer from the imperial court of Rome.6 But Roman princesses, unlike their Chinese counterparts, did not marry barbarian, pagan rulers. Hence, Attila waged war on the Western Roman Empire not only for loot and slaves, but also to assert his legitimate claim to be the greatest ruler of Europe and guardian of the Roman Empire.
In the spring of 452, Attila opened his second campaign against the Western Roman Empire by crossing the Julian Alps with a vast horde of allies summoned from the Germanic tribes of Central Europe and the nomadic tribes dwelling on the Pontic-Caspian (south Russian) steppes. Roman authors exaggerated the size of this army, numbered by them in the hundreds of thousands.7 It was the largest barbarian host yet to invade Italy. The horse archers of Huns were dreaded as invincible warriors, who, with many remounts, could cover great distances swiftly and endure the harshest of conditions. Their sturdy horses were just as formidable, and they could even forge under snow during winter campaigns. Yet the Huns were but a fraction of his army, for they had dwelled on the grasslands of eastern Hungary and Transylvania (the former Roman provinces of Pannonia and Dacia) for nearly two generations. Attila also summoned his vassals among kindred nomadic tribes to the east on the south Russian steppes, and from among the East Germanic peoples of Central Europe: Ostrogoths, Gepidae, and Herulians. Among his Germanic subjects, poets already celebrated him as the greatest warrior of all time, so that under various renditions of his name, such as Norse Atli or Middle High German Etzel, Attila lived on as a hero of the northern peoples of Germany, England, and Scandinavia.8 Finally, Attila recruited Roman deserters, captives, and renegades who served as his engineering corps so that Attila could capture walled cities. Attila, just like every other nomadic conqueror, appreciated the skills of the clever craftsmen and engineers of rival sedentary, bureaucratic empires.
In the spring and early summer of 452, Attila marched across northeastern Italy, encountering little resistance. The citizens of Aquileia, the strategic gateway of Italy, manned their walls and long defied Attila. The proud Latin colony had never been captured, and one imperial contender, Maximinus Thrax (235–238), had lost his throne and his head by his failure to capture Aquileia.9 Yet Attila, inspired by an omen of white storks fleeing their nests on the rooftops of the doomed city, stirred his men to storm and sack the city.10 The other cities of Venetia fell in quick succession: Concordia, Altinum, Patavium, Vicetia, Verona, Brixia, Bergamum (modern Bergamo), Ticinum, and Mediolanum (Milan). Most cities were ruthlessly sacked. Ticinum and Mediolanum were spared for unknown reasons. Survivors and refugees fled to the lagoons on the shores of the Adriatic Sea, where their descendants would found the city of Venice. At the former imperial capital of Mediolanum, Attila ordered the palace’s mural of the emperor Theodosius I receiving submissive barbarians to be repainted featuring Attila, receiving two suppliant Roman emperors, Valentinian III and Marcian, offering tribute.11 The anecdote, most likely reported by suave diplomat and historian Priscus, reveals much about Attila’s aims and conception of himself. He sought universal rule in the fashion of nomadic conquerors who had preceded and who would follow him. For Romans, Attila was the first of such conquerors, but Chinese emperors had fought, courted, and intrigued against such conquerors for nearly seven centuries. With Attila, successive conquerors commanding invincible horse archers poured out of the Eurasian steppes to threaten Christian Medieval Europe for the next seven centuries. Attila, like all these conquerors, once he had welded the nomadic tribes into a confederation, strove to control the sources of wealth generated by the neighboring literate civilizations with cities, trade, and agriculture. For no pastoral nomads on the Eurasian steppes could prosper without trade with the agriculturalists and urban dwellers of the great civilizations of China, India, the Middle East, or Europe.
In the summer of 452, Attila appeared to be on the road to such a success. His army had penetrated to the Minucius River, a tributary of the Po, near Mantua, eighty miles southeast of Mediolanum, from whence he could cross the Po, secure the passes of the Apennines, and follow the Roman highway, Via Flaminia, down the Tiber to Rome, the Eternal City. His courtiers and advisers warned him that the far lesser Gothic King Alaric, a generation earlier, had looted the city and carried off captives only to die soon afterward—an evil portent for those risking the wrath of the Christian God. Yet Attila’s host could surely have taken the city. Attila intended to rule over the Roman world with a Roman empress, whereas Alaric acted out of frustration to pressure the reluctant Emperor Honorius to grant him a command and his people land. In the summer of 452, the road to Rome lay open.
Flavius Aetius, the generalissimo (magister militum) of the Roman field army who dominated the court at Ravenna, had been taken by surprise by Attila’s sudden invasion of Italy. The hostile monk Prosper of Aquitaine alleged that Aetius initially panicked and urged the imperial court to flee Italy.12 Valentinian III stayed in his capital, Ravenna, protected by its malarial lagoons, and kept the ten thousand soldiers sent by his eastern colleague Marcian as reinforcements for the Western field army.13 For three decades, Aetius had maintained Roman power in the West by his alliance with Attila, whose horse archers terrorized into dutiful loyalty the Germanic federates (foederati) settled on imperial lands in Gaul—Visigoths, Burgundians, Alans, and Franks. In 452, Aetius lacked sufficient soldiers to defend Italy because these vital German federates, who had fought the Huns to defend their new homelands in Gaul in the previous year, had no interest in opposing Attila in Italy. They remained north of the Alps, while Aetius was powerless to stop Attila’s march on Rome.
Aetius had no choice but to treat for whatever terms Attila might grant. In the late summer of 452, a delegation headed by the three most distinguished Roman patricians arrived at Attila’s camp on the banks of the Minucius River.14 They were Trygetus, former Prefect of Rome and the envoy who had signed away Roman Africa to the Vandals, Gennadius Aviennus, consul of 450, who was long on lineage and short on ability, and the most impressive member, Pope Leo I, the Great, the impeccable defender of orthodoxy who defined the theology of the Western church. No contemporary report of the meeting has survived, but legend almost immediately supplied the answer. The imposing pontiff had conveyed through interpreters his admonishment that Attila risked his soul by an attack on the holy city of Saints Peter and Paul. Raphael, commissioned by Pope Leo X, captured the moment in a magnificent fresco of the legendary meeting in an apartment of St. Peter’s in 1512–1514. Raphael dutifully painted the portrait of his Pope Leo for that of Leo the Great. Legend and painting epitomized the meeting of churchman and conqueror as the symbolic triumph of civilization over barbarism.
The historical reality was more mundane, and pressing. When the envoys arrived at his camp, Attila was facing shortages of fodder and food for his army, for Italy was facing a second year of famine. With the threat of starvation came the first signs of pestilence.15 The Hun army had ravaged and stripped northeastern Italy, and Attila had lost valuable time in his siege of Aquilea. An advance on Rome would have arrived in the autumn. Attila would have gained the city but put his army at risk to the privations and disease of a siege. Furthermore, Attila had learned of the arrival of reinforcements from the eastern army, and reports of an attack on his borders on the Danube by the eastern army under another Aetius, general of the emperor Marcian.16 Withdrawal was prudent. The terms discussed at the fateful meeting were never reported, but negotiations were sure to follow. Attila had proved that he could strike at will in Italy, and he could always return to claim his bride, the empress Honoria, should negotiations fail. Thereupon, the Hun army departed as suddenly as it had invaded. Once at his capital near Aquincum (modern Budapest) on the Upper Danube, Attila planned fresh campaigns for the next year, foremost against the defiant Eastern Roman emperor who refused to render the promised tribute. But Attila was never to set out again on the road to Rome or New Rome. In the winter of 452–453, he overindulged in a wedding celebration to his newest wife, a stunningly beautiful woman named Ildico.17 He collapsed in a stupor into the marriage bed, burst a blood vessel, and drowned in his own blood. With his ignominious death, the Hun Empire fragmented soon after as his sons battled over the succession and vassal tribes rebelled. On the banks of the Nedao River, in 454, the Herulians and Gepidae, with the gold of the emperor Marcian, crushed the Hun army and shattered the empire of Attila.18
The career of Attila the Hun, memorialized in Medieval epic poetry, modern novels, and classic film, is perhaps more widely known than that of any other barbarian conqueror of the Eurasian steppes except for that of Genghis Khan. Parallels have often been drawn between Attila and Genghis Khan, his grandsons Batu, Hulagu, and Kublai Khan, and his emulator, Tamerlane, Prince of Destruction. Yet seven centuries earlier, a barbarian conqueror of the Eurasian steppes, Modu Chanyu (209–174 BC), had likewise posed an existential threat to imperial China.19 Historians are now debating the role of each of these barbarian conquerors in shaping the history of Eurasia. Attila himself has been subject to interpretations, from an annoying wayward ally of Rome who exploited opportune times to attack, to a conqueror with a grand strategy and vision of empire. The scope of this work is to present the story of barbarian nomadic peoples, and their empires, from earliest times down to Tamerlane (1370–1405). For all of them had an impact on the great civilizations of China, India, the Middle East, and Europe. Seldom do they speak to us in their own words. So often we depend on the descriptions of their foes and victims. The Greek historian Herodotus (ca. 495–425 BC) gives us our first vivid description of Scythians, nomads dwelling on the south Russian steppes.20 The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a pagan writing under Christian emperors, paints a similar description of the Huns when they first entered Europe.21 Both authors have been criticized for resorting to stereotypes with a mix of fear and contempt for these nomadic barbarians. Likewise, Chinese or Muslim authors often show the same curiosity and disdain. The Han envoy Zhang Qian deplored the customs of the Xiongnu north of the Great Wall in 129–119 BC, and the Arab geographer Ahmad ibn Fadlan was shocked by the customs of the Turkish Bulgars on the lower Volga River in 921/2 AD, even though they had converted to Islam.22 Despite their prejudices, these authors were eyewitnesses, or they based their reports on firsthand testimony. Therefore, their words must judiciously be weighed against other evidence furnished by archaeologists, philologists, biologists of historical genetics, or anthropologists. On a number of occasions, the barbarians speak for themselves, such as on the inscription from the Orkhon valley (today in Mongolia). Bilğe (717–734), Kaghan of the Gök Turks, warns his tribesmen not to be seduced by the pleasures of Chinese civilization.23 Genghis Khan is best known from his faithful portrait commissioned by Kublai Khan and the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, a Chinese redaction of the Mongolian original composed in the reign of Genghis Khan’s son Ögedei.24 From such sources, my aim is to tell the story of these barbarian conquerors and the empires they founded from their perspective, and so re-create them and their world, and how they changed it.