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EVEN IN HIS LIFETIME ATTILA WAS BOTH OPPRESSOR AND hero, both symbol of paganism and instrument of God, depending on the beholder. Within years of his death, the truth was being encrusted with propaganda, legend, myth and pure hokum, flowing in a torrent of folklore that separated into three streams: the Christian West, the Germanic and Scandinavian borderlands, and Hungary.
Most of Attila’s victims and most of those who wrote about him were Christian, and Christians had an official agenda: to show that, although existence was a battleground between good and evil, between God and Satan, the end result would be God’s victory. Human history, therefore, was an unsteady progression towards Christ’s second coming, and every event had to be examined for evidence of God’s omnipotence and wisdom. The task of the Christian chronicler was to see through the murky flow of events to the underlying reality. Attila’s grim advance across Europe was no credit to him. He was unwittingly God’s instrument, a scourge laid upon Christian backs for past sins – or, in other metaphors, the wine-press of God’s vengeance, the furnace for the purification of his gold – and an opportunity for God to reveal his power, not directly, but through his representatives, the higher the better, from ordinary priests and nuns to bishops and the pope, with victims being marked down not as failures but as martyrs. In this cataclysm, the old corrupt world of pagan Rome must be seen to vanish and a new age to dawn, a Christian renaissance, with yet greater glory to follow.
So there is a certain logic to the way in which Hunnish mayhem was exaggerated. Vandals gave their name to a type of routine marauder; Goths inspired ‘Gothic’, which was originally a term of cultural abuse before it acquired its flattering overtones; but the Huns were always beyond the pale. From the chronicles written in the 300 years after Attila’s death, you would think he had left nothing standing in Gaul and Italy. He was even said to have destroyed Florence, killing 5,000 people, though the Huns never crossed the Po, 100 kilo-metres from Florence. As the Life of St Lupus puts it, ‘no city, castle or fortified town anywhere could preserve its defences’. Attila left nothing but barren land behind him. He was the fulfilment of the apocalyptic prophecy in the Book of Revelation: ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations.’ The worse the image of destruction, the greater the influence of those who successfully stood against him.
The most admired writer of his time, Sidonius, made sure that praise went first and foremost to those with divine backing. Well, he would. He had friends in high Christian places, as his surviving letters show. Lupus, Gaul’s most eminent cleric; Sidonius’ own father-in-law, the future emperor, Avitus; Prosper, successor to Anianus as Bishop of Orléans, ‘the greatest and most perfect of prelates’; and a dozen other bishops. He would himself become a bishop (of Clermont-Ferrant, when he was about 40). Who really saved Troyes, Orléans and Rome? Not Aetius and his army, but three godly men: Lupus, Anianus and Pope Leo – actually four, if you count Avitus, whose Christian commitment to peace enabled him to persuade his Visigothic friends to join Aetius.
The result of this agenda is that the real-life individuals and events were quickly hidden behind propaganda and symbols. Lupus and the rest became epitomes of saintliness, Attila the leader from hell – literally, in some portraits, which show him with devilish horns and pointed ears.
It’s an insidious process, because historians – especially those trying, as I am, to write narrative history – are tempted to mix legends with history, simply because they make a good story. I did it earlier with St Agnan saving Orléans. See what happens to thestory of Attila’s retreat from Italy after the meeting with Leo (assuming it took place at all). By the eighth century it has become a miracle. Paul the Deacon, an Italian of that time who wrote a history of the Lombards, has Attila remarking: ‘Oh! It was not the one who came [i.e. Leo] who forced me to depart, but another who, standing behind him sword in hand, threatened me with death if I did not obey his command.’ After that, almost everyone repeated the story, in ever more imaginative variants. Ravenna, the temporary seat of imperial administration, became the usual venue, although Attila never approached it. In one version, Attila asks who is approaching. It is the pope, he is told, ‘coming to intercede with you on behalf of his children, the inhabitants of Ravenna’. Attila takes this as a joke: ‘How can one man produce so many children?’
That was in the ninth century. Four hundred years later, in newly converted Hungary, the Gesta Hungarorum has Attila taking the pope hostage, until he is terrified by a vision, ‘namely, when the king looked up he beheld a man hovering in the air, holding a sword in his hand and grinding his teeth, who threatened to cut off his head. So Attila obeyed the Romans’ request and released the Apostle’s successor.’ Others turn the vision into the war-god Mars, or St Peter; or transform the pope’s colleagues into sword-wielding saints, Peter and Paul, a version portrayed in a fresco by Raphael, painted in 1514 for Leo’s papal namesake, Leo X. That painting, moreover, in which Leo I has Leo X’s features, is entitled Attila the Hun Turned Back from Rome – not from Ravenna, please note. So, in the course of 1,000 years, a legend invented 300 years after the event became accepted fact; and it remains so even today in certain quarters. One Christian website says with casual assurance: ‘The man-like form Attila saw in the air holding a sword in his hand was probably an angel, as in similar Biblical accounts.’
The same thing happened with the epithet ‘Scourge of God’. The first surviving reference is in the Life of St Lupus, written in the eighth or ninth century, but it would probably have already been doing the rounds orally well before that. There are many later versions of the story. Here is one.
Troyes is well defended with walls and troops, commanded by the bishop. Lupus is on guard. Attila, swollen with arrogance, approaches on horseback, and bangs on the town gate.
‘Who are you,’ demands Lupus from above, ‘you who scatter peoples like chaff and break crowns under your horses’ hooves?’
‘I am Attila, King of the Huns, the Scourge of God.’
‘Oh, welcome,’ is the bishop’s unlikely reply. ‘Scourge of the God whom I serve! It is not up to me to stop you.’ And he descends to open the gate himself, take Attila’s bridle and lead him into the town. ‘Enter, Scourge of my God, and go wherever you wish.’
Attila and his troops enter, wander the streets, pass churches and palaces, but see nothing, because a cloud conceals their gaze. Blinded, they are led straight through the town, miraculously recovering their sight on exit. Thus is the Beast tamed by God’s servant.
And it worked. History slips away, legend sticks. Today, some histories simply refer to Attila as flagellum dei, the Scourge of God, as if that were how he was known at the time. You may even see the nonsensical statement that Attila adopted the phrase himself, as if he spoke Latin and consciously assumed the role of divine scourge.
Many places in western Europe have utterly spurious stories of Attila and Huns, so far removed from reality that the names should be in quotes. In the Friuli region of north-east Italy, folk tales distorted Attila’s German name, Etzel, into Ezzel and mixed him up with a harsh twelfth-century ruler, Ezzelino: ‘They said he was the son of the Devil or of a dog, he had black hairs on his nose that stood on end when he was angry and every speech he began with a bow-wow-wow.’ In Metz, an oratory acquired defences of granite that broke Hun swords. In Dieuze (in Lorraine, eastern France), Huns were blinded because they captured a bishop, their sight restored on his release. Modena in Italy had its own version of St Lupus. In Reims, the Devil himself opened the town’s gates to the Huns.
Cologne has the most famous of ‘Hun’ victims – St Ursula and her many virgins (I’ll tell you the numbers shortly). You can see their bones to this day in Cologne Cathedral; not their bones, of course, because the whole thing is a myth from which sprang a tangle of variants. The unlikely seed for the tales is a fourth- or fifth-century inscription, still on view in the Church of St Ursula, according to which a senator called Clematius was impelled by visions to rebuild a basilica on this spot to honour some martyred virgins. No hint of how many virgins, no mention of Huns. Over the years, these victims acquired a story, pulled together in 1275 and first printed by William Caxton in 1483. It concerns a princess, Ursula, from either Britain or Brittany, depending on the version, who is wooed by a pagan king. She refuses the match, dedicating herself to perpetual virginity and demanding a corps of ten virgins to attend her on a pilgrimage. The story becomes hopelessly complicated, with a journey down the Rhine to Rome and disputes between rival prelates, but the upshot is that on their return Ursula and her virgins reach Cologne, only to find it besieged by the Huns, who, on the orders from their unnamed prince, behead the lot.
It was never more than a legend, and soon became ludicrous. An early version recorded the eleven martyrs in Latin numerals as ‘XI M’, with the M standing for ‘martyrs’. But M is also 1,000 in Latin script, which was how some unknown copyist understood it. Now, suddenly, there were eleven thousand virgins – not that it made sense, because Ursula was one of the eleven, so the 11,000 would have included 1,000 Ursulas. Never mind. The legend thrived, inspiring a cult and variants and paintings, all branching off one another like a hypertext fantasy. In one version, Attila himself offers to marry Ursula, allowing her to assert her virgin holiness: ‘Get away!’ she says. ‘I did not disdain the hand of Caesar only to become the property of someone as cursed as you!’ In 1143, bones which supposedly were those of some of the long-martyred virgins were sent to the Rhineland monastery of Disibodenberg, where they inspired the ascetic and intellectual Hildegard of Bingen to write a song (‘O ecclesia’) rejecting earthly marriage for the love of God. Later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ursula and her story were much painted: by two anonymous Dutch and German masters, by Caravaggio, and by Carpaccio, who portrayed her life in eight episodes, with the Huns in Florentine dress. Also in the sixteenth century, Lucas Cranach the Elder drew on the story for an altarpiece in Dresden, focusing not on the victims but on a dispassionate Hun prince leaning on his sword. In 1998 the British playwright Howard Barker used the myth to examine the meaning of a commitment to virginity (victims) and the nature of a moral detachment (the prince) that seemed to recall that of a Nazi SS officer. Meanwhile, the legend had spun off into another realm, having inspired a sixteenth-century Italian nun, St Angela, to found the Ursuline order of nuns, which by 1700 had 350 foundations in France alone, many of which were forcibly shut down in the French Revolution. In Valenciennes, eleven Ursulines were guillotined for teaching Catholicism, allowing those who like historical parallels to cast the atheistic revolutionaries as Huns. Stories, paintings, a play, music, nunneries, schools and colleges galore – it goes on, endlessly. As a result of the sub-cult of Hildegard and the boom in medieval chants, a quartet has recorded11,000 Virgins: Chants for the Feast of St Ursula (Anonymous 4, HMV 907200). Enough already: if you are looking for real-life Huns, this is about as much help as using Hamlet to research medieval Denmark.
Other traditions in the ex-Roman empire took root and flourished, perhaps the oddest being the tales of the ‘good Attila’. Apparently, towns looking for their origins saw Attila as a force for renewal, as in the following fairy story.
Once upon a time, Attila was in Padua when there came a poet with a composition in praise of the great chief. Leading Paduans prepared a performance. The poet, following literary tradition, gave Attila divine origins. ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ interrupts our hero. ‘To compare a mortal man with immortal gods! I’ll have nothing to do with such impiety!’ And he orders the poor man to be burned on the spot, along with his verses. When the pyre is ready and the poet tied on top, Attila approaches: ‘Enough. I just wanted to teach this flatterer a lesson. Let us not frighten poets who use truth to sing our praises.’
There might have been enough here for some great post-Roman epic in French or Italian. No writer took up the challenge with success. But there have since been quite a few failures, all of them revising history in vain attempts to make something worthwhile. In 1667 Pierre Corneille’s Attila had 20 performances, then faded into well-deserved obscurity. A terrible German melodrama by Zacharias Werner, lawyer, philosopher, priest and playwright, performed a few times in Vienna in 1808, ends with Attila’s murder (not a natural death, as per history) by the Roman princess Honoria (not the Germanic princess Ildico). An English version, put on in London in 1832, concluded with a line by Attila’s brother Bleda (whom Attila murdered, but who is somehow still alive): ‘Ha! Is he dead? The tyrant dead? Ha! ha! [Laughs hysterically].’
This dire creation was the basis for Verdi’s 1846 opera Attila. Written when the struggle for Italian unification, the Risorgimento, was in full swing, it is full of enthusiastic expressions of Italian patriotism inspired by its hero’s destructive ambitions. The first scene plunges right into the theme, when the maidens of Aquileia appear, alive, against Attila’s express command. ‘Who dared against my interdict to save them?’ demands Attila of his Breton slave, Uldino, who replies that they are a worthy tribute for Attila: ‘Warriors extraordinary, they defended their brothers . . .’
‘What do I hear?’ interrupts the king. ‘Whoever inspired unwarlike women with valour?’
And Odabella, Aquileia’s princess, daughter of her slain father, answers con energia, several repetitions and a shattering top C, ‘The boundless holy love of our country!’
One line, a plea to Attila by Aetius – the baritone Ezio – quickly became a political slogan:
Avrai tu l’universo
Resti l’Italia a me.
(You may have the whole world,
but leave Italy to me.)
The story-line is complete tosh, with Attila being stabbed to death by his intended wife Odabella, but Ezio’s soulful plea for Rome’s resurrection (Dagli immortali vertici/From the immortal peaks) was an instant hit, and the passion of the music has its admirers, which is why the opera is still occasionally performed.1
In a few places you can still hear the noise of Attila’s passing echoing faintly. In Udine, not far from Aquileia, they say that the castle-topped hill dominating their town was built by Attila’s hordes, using their helmets as buckets, so that their leader could relish the spectacle of Aquileia in flames. There is one name that acts as a memorial to the Huns: Hunfredus was its original form, a combination of ‘Hun’ and ‘peace’, denoting someone who could make peace with the Huns. Hunfroi, as it was in old French, was brought by the Normans into England, where it became Humphrey, and into Italy as Umberto. Near Châlons, at the northern edge of the Catalaunian Plains, a sign points north-east to ‘Attila’s Camp’, which turns out to be no such thing. The tree-covered mound is a first-century hill-fort, attached to Attila simply because the arrival of the Huns was the biggest thing to happen around that time. If French schoolchildren know anything of Huns, it is Attila’s supposed boast: Là où mon cheval passera, l’herbe ne repoussera pas(Wherever my horse passes, the grass will not grow). And, finally, his fame has also kept him alive in film, first in Fritz Lang’s Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924), and more recently in a couple of remakes that should not be mentioned except in a footnote.2
The Germans – that is, the Germanic tribes – saw things rather differently, because they had formed part of Attila’s empire. They remembered with greater respect. Between the Germanic-speaking communities of old Europe travelled bards and poets, who sang of past glories, carrying their creations from court to court, commuting from Lombardy in northern Italy to the Gothic capital of Toulouse, the Germanic enclaves in France, the emerging German-speaking lands east of the Rhine and all points northwards. Attila became a famous figure in Germanic lore, which means early English lore as well. He gets a passing mention in the oldest English poem, Widsith, probably written in Mercia in the seventh century. All these legends plundered history, distorting it out of recognition into a rag-bag of heroes and wonders and gods and literary motifs.
By the ninth century, Attila was part of Scandinavian sagas as well as Germanic ones. This is odd, because his brief empire hardly touched the Baltic. Yet the Hun imperium, though not Germanic, seems to have been powerful enough to capture folk memory and popular imagination. Until the last century, ordinary people in north Germany referred to funeral-mounds as Hunnenbette, ‘Hun beds’. Thus, among Norwegians and Danes, Attila joined Ermanaric the Ostrogoth and Gundicarius (Gundahar or Gunther) the Burgundian, woven with them into stories to carry grand themes of honour, justice, vengeance and the workings of fate. Vikings carried Attila’s name with them to Iceland in the tenth century, and then beyond, to Greenland, source of the tenth-centuryGreenlandic Lay of Atli (Attila). He went yet further, to the New World with Thorfinn Karlsevni and his 100 Vikings, who in 1018 founded a short-lived colony on the coast of Newfoundland. I imagine them huddling round fires in their turf houses, listening to their bard. Noskraeling (as the Norsemen called the local Indians and Inuit) would have heard, but it is an odd thought that one of the first musical and poetic works heard in the New World told of Attila, the Huns and their fights with the Burgundians.
For that was the heart of the legends: a minor incident in written sources, but strong in folk memory, probably because it played well as a family feud. Only a few surviving fragments hint at its popularity – a ninth-century Latin epic, German and English versions of the same story, a few Norse sagas. The principal hero is a certain Walther, a hostage at Attila’s court, and a favourite of the king. He flees with a princess, Hildegund (the original German form of Ildico). They have a treasure. The hero Hagen, who may be either a Burgundian or a Hun, pursues them, joined by King Gunther of the Burgundians. There is a great battle, after which the three heroes are reconciled. In the English version, Waldere, part of which survives, Hildegund urges Walther to fight Gunther:
Companion of Attila,
Even Now, in this hour, let neither your courage
Nor your dignity desert you.
This story overlaps with another set of legends, about the Burgundians themselves, a.k.a. the Nibelungs, or Niflungs. Here, as in other strands, poets treated the elements as components for a do-it-yourself epic: you can have Attila enticed by Siegfried (Sigurd in Norse) into Siegfried’s treasure-chamber, where Attila dies; or Attila providing a maiden for Hagen, who begets Aldrian, who does the enticing. In other stories, Hagen also begets Niflung, after whom the whole collection of sagas is named. There is no unity to be found.
Here’s one version.
Gunther the Burgundian (who in real life was killed by the pre-Attila Huns in about 437) has a treasure. He also has a sister, Gudrun, who is married to Attila. Attila, wishing to extort the treasure’s hiding-place from Gunther, kills him by throwing him into a snake-pit. Then Gudrun takes a grisly revenge. In the greatest surviving version of the legend, the Volsungsaga, Gudrun holds a grand feast, which she says is to show that she accepts her lot. Far from it. She kills the two boys she has had by Attila, and then, at the feast—
‘The king asked where his sons were. Gudrun replied: “I will tell you and gladden your heart. You caused me heavy sorrow when you killed my brother. Now you shall hear what I have to tell you. You have lost your sons – on the table both their skulls are serving as cups – and you yourself drank their blood mixed with wine. Then I took their hearts and roasted them on a spit, and you ate them.”’
Taking on the role of Ildico-as-murderess, Gudrun kills Attila in his sleep and burns down the hall of the sleeping Huns.
To this you can add a back-story, that of Brunhild, who is won by Gunther with the help of the hero and dragon-slayer Siegfried, formerly married to Gudrun before Attila. It is from Siegfried that Gunther, having killed Siegfried, acquires the treasure, to get which Attila murders him.
Many of these tales of greed and vengeance play out with Attila as a sort of centre point. He may be a rival for the Nibelungs’ treasure. Or, perhaps because originally he was the non-Germanic outsider, he may have the unlikely role of a powerful, kindly and victimized ruler. That is how he is portrayed in the most famous of medieval German epics, the Nibelungenlied, created in about 1200 by some anonymous Homer-like poet from the many current tales. But the Attila of the Nibelungenlied is a strangely unassertive figure. In the context of the epic’s time, he exemplifies the two highest virtues of kingship: faithfulness and mildness. But this makes him rather useless in dramatic terms. He is ignorant of almost everything that matters. He doesn’t know that his wife, Kriemhild, mourns her former husband Siegfried. He hasn’t a clue about the tensions between the visiting Burgundians and his own Huns. He suspects nothing even when the Burgundians attend church in full armour. It is Kriemhild who dictates the action, keeping him in the dark. Nothing could be more at odds with the historical Attila, the cunning Attila whose careful records so embarrassed Priscus and his diplomatic mission, the Attila who built a nation and an empire, and challenged both Constantinople and Rome.
Faithfulness and mildness were not good qualities for blue-blooded heroism, which was part of the problem faced by nineteenth-century German writers who wrestled to adapt this national treasure. The philosopher Georg Hegel thought the whole thing should be dumped as reactionary, irrelevant, trivial and trite; better for writers in need of sources to focus on Germany’s real roots, Christianity and the Roman empire. Writers took no notice. Besides Werner’s lamentable drama, there were five more Attila plays in German in the nineteenth century, followed by another four in the twentieth. The playwright Friedrich Hebbel tried a Hegelian synthesis in a Nibelung trilogy performed in 1861, filling Attila with Christian virtues, so that his death leads on to a brave new Christian world.
It was Wagner who saw how best to handle Attila. In the four operas of his Ring cycle, he did what a good bard would have done: he cherry-picked what best suited him from Germanic and Norse legends, opted mainly for Norse mythology – a hoard of gold, a Ring of Power, a Helmet of Invisibility, gods, giants, a dragon, magical warrior-maidens – rejected history, and dropped Attila completely.
Perhaps the folk memories would have died, but for Europe’s descent into new forms of barbarism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given the right circumstances, outrage and prejudice had a ready-made symbol. Those circumstances first arose in the Franco-German War of 1870 (usually called ‘Franco-Prussian’ by British historians, but Prussia was already Germany, as near as made no difference).
In the summer of 1870 the Germans killed 17,000 French soldiers and took 100,000 prisoner at Sedan, and headed on south, towards Châlons and the Catalaunian Plains, for the same geostrategic reasons as Attila – open spaces, fast progress – except that their target was Paris. A widely syndicated newspaper article that October made the obvious equation between the invading Germans and the Huns, compared Kaiser Wilhelm I to Attila and recalled the tale of how St Genevieve saved Paris. Now, as then, God would help those who helped themselves; and so he did, apparently. Encumbered by prisoners – by the very weight of their success – then slowed by French guerrilla attacks, the Prussian army stuttered to a halt. The western limit of their advance, rather oddly, was Orléans, where Attila had turned back. The armistice that followed confirmed Germany in the French imagination as Europe’s latter-day Huns.
For the next 40 years, the great powers stared at each other with narrowed eyes, each seeing treachery and barbarism in the others. The French, in particular, seethed in humiliation and impotence, waiting for a chance for revanche on these reincarnated Huns.
Actually, the Germans welcomed the comparison. When Germany sent off troops to China to confront the Boxers, the peasant rebels who in 1900 sought to drive all foreigners from China, Kaiser Wilhelm II told his soldiers: ‘Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as the Huns a thousand years ago under the leadership of Attila gained a reputation by virtue of which they live in historical tradition . . . so may the name of Germany become known in such manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again dare even look askance at a German.’
German nationalism went hand in hand with German imperialism. Seeing rival imperialists all around – France, Russia, Britain – Germany seized new colonies and built a fleet to equal that of Britain, the world’s superpower. It was Britain’s ruling class, therefore, that felt the threat of German expansion most keenly. One among them was the literary guardian of empire and Englishness, Rudyard Kipling.
It was Kipling who first brought to English readers the French equation of German with Hun. In 1902 he was inspired by a long-forgotten incident in which Germany proposed a joint naval demonstration to collect debts from Venezuela. Kipling, incensed at the very idea of co-operating with Germany, put his anger into the mouths of oarsmen who symbolize those who toil worthily for king and empire:
And you tell us now of a secret vow
You have made with an open foe!
‘The Rowers’ now sounds obsessive, obscure, self-righteous and thoroughly blimpish, a rhyming harrumph from some peppery colonel.
In sight of peace – from the Narrow Seas
O’er half the world to run –
With a cheated crew, to league anew
With the Goth and the shameless Hun!
Twelve years later, Kipling’s fears came true, without any recognition from him that British and German imperialism were opposite sides of the same coin. Germany, though, faced a unique problem: the near-certainty of war on two fronts, against both France and Russia. The key to victory was the rapid conquest of France, which meant a fast advance through neutral Belgium, any hint of opposition or delay to be dealt with ruthlessly. Thus, in Germany’s case, war had to involve an unprovoked invasion of a neutral country and a readiness to use terror. It was virtually inevitable that theory would become practice, which it did a few days after Germany’s advance into Belgium in August 1914. In the university town of Leuven (Louvain), a few Belgian snipers provoked a dreadful over-reaction, which proved a propaganda gift to Germany’s opponents. Hundreds were killed, thousands imprisoned, 1,000 buildings burned, including the ancient library and its 230,000 books. On 29 August The Times deplored the loss of the ‘Oxford of Belgium’, at the hands of ‘the Huns’. Kipling himself urged Britain into war:
For all we have and are
For all our children’s fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate!
Nor was this reaction confined to the British. The ‘Flames of Louvain’ came to symbolize the fate of ‘poor little Belgium’, and nations not yet at war were horrified. Across Europe, outrage justified prejudice and self-righteousness. From Switzerland, the French poet and soon-to-be Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, formerly rather pro-German, wrote a letter of protest to the German writer and 1912 Nobel laureate Gerhard Hauptmann, making the German–Hun analogy and asking whatever happened to the legacy of Goethe? Hauptmann, formerly critical of Prussian nationalism, replied testily that right now Germans would rather be considered the sons of Attila than the sons of Goethe, an outburst that won him a decoration in the Kaiser’s birthday honours.
The whole delicate network of treaties unravelled in two months, and once again Germans followed in Attila’s footsteps. Their Third Army advanced on the Catalaunian Plains, and once again failed to achieve the instant victory they sought. This time the British were France’s allies, and quickly adopted France’s and Kipling’s insulting analogy, as well as the less insulting epithet Boches.3
Kipling’s glib equation – German = Hun – became a commonplace, almost always as a generalized singular, ‘the Hun’. A quick internet search produces examples by the hundred. War Illustrated for 1 December 1917 entitled an article ‘The Footprints of the Hun’. Robert Lindsay Mackay of the 11th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders wrote in his diary: ‘It was apparent in many ways that the Hun meant to hold his third line but our early move where we broke in and rolled up his flanks, upset him.’
But there is something odd about the term. No-one had ever talked about Attila’s Huns as ‘the Hun’. Yet – if you rely on the literary sources – for English-speakers everywhere, ‘the Hun’ came to stand for Germany, and Germans, and German barbarism. It was a peculiarly English thing: the French did not speak of le Hun, although the analogy was theirs originally. Les Boches or le Boche was enough, which seems somehow more human, more in line with the German term for the English soldier, Tommy, paralleled in English by Fritz and Jerry. Neither French nor German had a term with the satanic connotations of ‘the Hun’.
You might think ‘the Hun’ was a universal English usage. Certainly the conditions were bad enough to justify its spread. When the Western Front settled into trenches, soldiers entered a nightmare in which any atrocity seemed likely and rumour was taken as fact. Ordinary soldiers ‘knew’ that Germans boiled down corpses to make tallow, crucified prisoners in no man’s land, and fought with saw-edged bayonets, the better to rip open English bellies. As Paul Fussell writes in The Great War and Modern Memory, ‘Such is the desire for these bayonets to bespeak nastiness in the German character that to this day the rumour persists that they were a specific instrument of Hun nastiness.’
Yet it never caught on in the front lines. Tommy felt some familiarity with the Boches or Boche (singular), and Fritz, and Jerry, trapped like him in a horror dictated by the top brass. Sometimes, Tommy referred to ‘old Jerry’, even ‘poor old Jerry’, the ‘old’ proclaiming familiarity, even affection. Fighting men did not talk about ‘the Hun’, because they did not hate as those at home might have wished. In the play Journey’s End, by the ex-soldier R. C. Sherriff, the men in the trenches talk of ‘the Boche’, never ‘the Hun’. Indeed, one character remarks, ‘The Germans are really quite decent aren’t they? I mean, outside the newspapers.’
Outside the newspapers. The term ‘Hun’ belonged to those back home with an interest in whipping up hatred, like Kipling, and official propagandists, and anti-German headline writers. E. A. Mackintosh, killed at Cambrai in November 1917, aged 24, recalled in ‘Recruiting’:
‘Lads, you’re wanted, go and help,’
On the railway carriage wall
Stuck the poster, and I thought
Of the hands that penned that call.
Fat civilians wishing they
‘Could go and fight the Hun.’
Can’t you see them thanking God
That they’re over forty-one?
On Sunday, 10 November 1918, the day before the armistice, the News of the World proclaimed the end with HUN SURRENDER CERTAIN.
‘The Hun’ was of its time, and its time passed. By the early 1930s, it was slipping out of fashion and into mock-imperial speech, giving way before a greater horror, ‘the Nazis’. Hitler’s antisemitism unleashed an evil against which the beastliness of ‘the Hun’ paled into insignificance. Two books published in the 1940s – The Hun in Africa and Harrying the Hun – were last gasps. Today, the term is an archaism, used only to evoke a moment in time and its antique prejudices.
In Hungary, his homeland, Attila’s rise to stardom began soon after the arrival of the Hungarians, the Magyars, in 896. For the best part of a century, these warrior-nomads acted like latter-day Huns, raiding into Bulgaria, France, Italy and Germany, until the Emperor Otto I put a stop to their bandit ways on the banks of the River Lech in 955. After that, with nowhere left to migrate to and no-one weaker to raid, they settled. In the 970s the current leader, Geza, did a deal with Emperor Otto II and the pope. The deal was this: he would have himself baptized, and release all Christian slaves, in exchange for recognition as king. To seal the agreement, he betrothed his son Vaik, renamed István (Stephen), to Gisela, daughter of the King of Bavaria, one of Otto II’s subsidiary monarchs. The clause about releasing Christian slaves was not popular with Hungarian nobles, and the place was still seething when Geza died in 997. It was young Stephen, aged 22, who finally asserted royal authority, and had himself crowned king in 1001. To mark the occasion, Pope Sylvester II sent Stephen a crown, which by tradition was worn by all Hungarian kings for the next thousand years. It (or a replica: its authenticity is debated) is on view today in the Hungarian National Museum, a glittering symbol of Hungarian and Christian stability in the heart of central Europe. Stephen went on to found ten dioceses under two archbishops and act as patron for many monasteries. Fifty years after his death in 1038 he was canonized.
The point of all this? A Hungarian, Christian, landowning nobleman in (say) 1020 would have sprung from a grandfather who had been a pagan marauder, and from great-great-grandparents who had been illiterate nomads. Not much of an identity there, nor deep roots, nor any historic claim to the land. Now, people who lack these things like to acquire them somehow, which is what the Hungarians did, looking with relief back to the people and the leader whose successes seemed so remarkably to foreshadow their own.
Very quickly, folk tales sung by bards provided three great heroes: Attila, Árpád and Stephen. Stephen back to Árpád, a mere century, was an easy link. But between Árpád and Attila was a blank of four centuries and a thousand unrecorded miles. Such a blank, though, was a gift to poets, and quickly filled, with stories along the following lines.
When King Attila died, he left two sons. The first, Dengizich, died in battle. The second, Ernak, became known as Csaba, or Chaba (meaning ‘shepherd’, i.e. of his people). He was the son of Honoria, the Roman princess (whom Attila had married in some unexplained way). Chaba returned to Asia, leaving behind 3,000 warriors, the Szeklers, as border guards (székel = ‘border guard’ in Hungarian). Chaba prayed that whenever his people were in trouble Nature herself would tell him, and he would return to protect them. Twice he galloped back to save them. Years passed, and Chaba died. At long last, mighty enemies arose and threatened the Székely. Chaba returned one last time, leading an army across the starry skies to scatter the enemy. The path of the shining, ghostly army became a road in the Heavens. Hungarians call the Milky Way ‘The Way of the Souls’, and remember Chaba and his heroic father, Attila. From Chaba followed those generations during which Hun joined seamlessly with Magyar: Ugek, El
d, and then Álmos, who had his own cycle of epics, because it was he who, Moses-like, led his people back to the Carpathians, where he died, to be succeeded at last by Árpád. Now the Magyars were back in their homeland, where they formed an alliance with the Székely, who held fast to their duties as border guards; and that is why they remain to this day as a large Hungarian-speaking minority in central Romania, still claiming descent from Attila.
These tales were sung by pagan bards, who had no place in a Christian nation, with its corps of literate monks. As the oral tradition died, a written one took its place, hijacking the old stories and retaining their nationalist agenda. In the thirteenth century, in theGesta Hungarorum, an anonymous Benedictine monk repeated the claim that Attila was a direct forefather of Árpád, whose Magyar invasion over the Carpathians in 896 was nothing more than a return to land that was his anyway, thanks to Attila.4 Shortly after theGesta were written, the Huns suffered a brief setback as heroes, because Hungarians equated them with the Mongols, who devastated the country in 1241–2. Attila’s reputation was restored by a chronicler named Simon Kézai, who portrayed his hero surrounded by wealth; even his stables were lined with purple velvet. Thereafter, Attila remained both ancestor and hero-king. It was even believed that Attila’s sword, the Sword of Mars, had been owned by the Hungarian kings, until it was given to a German duke in 1063, who gave it to his emperor, Henry IV, who . . .
And so legends about legends could lead for ever onwards, if we let them. By the late fifteenth century Attila had become a sort of Hungarian Charlemagne, the forebear not simply of Árpád and Stephen, but of their successor, Hungary’s greatest king, Matthias Corvinus, whose courtiers praised him as the ‘second Attila’ for restoring Hungary to power and glory under a strong, centralized monarchy. Matthias revelled in the comparison. His pet historian, the Italian Antonio Bonfini, cast Attila as a Roman and proto-Renaissance figure, inventing for him grand orations to mark the murder of Bleda and the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. The comparison with Attila was not always flattering, however. One of Matthias’ critics, Callimachus, an Italian aristocrat with an abiding love of the Polish monarchy, saw him as a threat to peace in Europe and attacked Matthias-as-Attila in a biography of the Hun, presenting him as a back-stabbing, land-grabbing tyrant. But even he did not deny that Attila was a Hungarian at heart, a myth which suited the Hungarian aristocracy as well as the king. In the eighteenth century, the Ésterházys – princes of the Holy Roman Empire, Haydn’s patrons, owners of the castle known as the Hungarian Versailles – traced their proud but spurious lineage right back to Attila.
So it is not surprising that Hungarians today have a very different take on Attila from western Europeans. Nor is it an invalid one. Attila was in the end more plunderer than emperor; but he did no more than most leaders of his time would have done if they could have, namely gain as much as possible from victims and enemies. Only victory allows time and leisure for more civilized virtues to emerge; and Attila was not quite successful enough to afford them. He could have created an empire reaching from the Atlantic to the Caspian; he could have rivalled Rome at its height; his heirs could have seized Rome itself, turned on Constantinople and redirected the course of history. If he ever dimly glimpsed such a vision, he could not focus on it, let alone achieve it, because in the end he did not control his creature: it controlled him, and it drove him to death and itself to a hasty end. His legacy is his name, his image, and the mystery of what might have been.
1 The Royal Opera House in London did it in 2002.
2Attila the Hun (original title: Attilo Flagello di Dio), 1954, with Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren; Attila, made for American TV in Lithuania, 2001, with Gerard Butler as Attila, Powers Boothe as Aetius, Siân Phillips as Attila’s grandmother and Steven Berkoff as Rua (Ruga).
3 Origin unknown. One derivation is from Alboche, supposedly a blend of Allemand and caboche, slang for ‘head’, but also a sort of hammer and a part of the tobacco plant. More research is needed.
4 This section is based on works by Bäuml and Birnbaum; Thierry; Cordt; and Daim et al.: for details, see the bibliography.