5
NESTORIUS, THE EX-BISHOP OF CONSTANTINOPLE, WAS A bitter and angry man. He had wrestled with the central problem that divided Christianity in its early days – Was Christ god, or man, or a bit of both? – and discovered what he considered – no, knew – to be the truth: that, although Christ had been both god and man, he possessed two distinct persons, because quite obviously the god part of him could never have been a human baby. Therefore Mary could not have been the Mother of God, since that would suggest that a mortal woman could produce a god, which was a contradiction. Therefore, he, Nestorius, was right, and all Christians who disagreed with him – namely, those who accepted the tenets laid down at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and all other, anti-Nicaean, heretics – were wrong.
The world had not appreciated his insight. His great rival, Cyril of Alexandria, had had him condemned and banished to Oasis, in the southern reaches of Egypt. There, as the 430s wore on, he railed against the injustice done to him. He would be revenged upon the lot of them – or, rather, God would on his behalf. Indeed, divine vengeance had already started. How else to explain the rise of the Huns? Once they were divided among themselves, and were no more than robbers. Now, suddenly, they were united, and likely to rival Rome itself. This was surely the Christian world’s punishment for its ‘transgression against the true faith’.
Nestorius might have been shaky on the causes, but he was right in the grand sweep of the problem. The Huns had indeed risen. Petty pillagers no longer, by the late 430s they had become pillagers on a grand scale. In fact, this had nothing to do with God backing Nestorius, and everything to do with the rise of our hero and anti-hero, Attila.
For a decade after Ruga’s death in about 435, Attila’s hands were tied by joint rule with his elder brother Bleda. For those ten years the two would work together to consolidate their kingdom, with Attila the junior, and increasingly resentful, partner.
How and why they came to power is a mystery. Of their childhood in the early years of the fifth century nothing is known, and their names, both fairly common in Germanic, are not much help. Bleda is a shortened version of something like Bladardus/Blatgildus. Attila derives from atta, ‘father’ in both Turkish and Gothic, plus a diminutive -ila; it means ‘Little Father’. The name even spread across the Channel, into Anglo-Saxon. A Bishop of Dorchester bore it, and so did the local bigwig recalled by the villages of Attleborough and Attlebridge in Norfolk. It may not even have been our Attila’s original name at all, but a term of affection and respect conferred on his accession, a Hun version of the pseudo-cosy dedyshka (‘Granddad’) by which Russians once referred to Lenin and Stalin.
At first all seemed set fair for the two princes. They were at peace with western Rome, and settled down to bind in local groups and focus on bleeding the East. Not that all was sweetness. Ruga’s death must have unleashed some nasty squabbling between the brothers, who for the moment divided the kingdom between them, Attila taking the downriver area in today’s Romania, while Bleda governed in Hungary, the forward territory with easier access to the rich west. Both must have demanded commitment from their relatives and subsidiary chiefs, and done so with menaces, because two royal cousins fled south, rejecting their own people to seek refuge among their supposed enemies.
The year of Ruga’s death, Attila and Bleda together completed the peace agreed between their uncle and the empire, riding south to the border fortress of Constantia, opposite Margus, guarding the mouth of the Morava river where it joins the Danube 50 kilo-metres east of Belgrade, just inside today’s Romanian border. Here they were met by Constantinople’s ambassador, Plintha – a good choice, according to Priscus, for Plintha was himself a ‘Scythian’, a term that was used for any barbarian or, as in this case, ex-barbarian. Plintha and his number two, Epigenes, chosen for his experience and wisdom, no doubt came prepared with a few wagons loaded with tents and scribes and cooks and a lavish banquet, ready to flatter with formality. The Huns, rough and ready and proud of it, were disdainful. As Priscus writes, ‘The barbarians do not think it proper to confer dismounted, so that the Romans [i.e. those from the New Rome, Constantinople], mindful of their own dignity, chose to meet the Scythians [i.e. Huns] in the same fashion.’
There was no doubt who was in control. Attila and Bleda dictated the agenda; Plintha’s scribes took down the terms. All Hun fugitives would be sent back north of the Danube, including the two treacherous princes. All Roman prisoners who had escaped were to be returned, unless each were ransomed for 8 solidi, one-ninth of a pound of gold (given that a Byzantine pound was slightly less than a modern one, this was about $600 in 2004 gold prices), payable to the captors – a good way of ensuring a direct flow of funds to the top Huns. Trade would be opened, and the annual trade fair held on the Danube made safe for all. The sum due to the Huns to keep the peace was doubled, from 350 to 700 pounds of gold per year (about $4.5 million in current terms), the peace to last as long as the Romans kept up payments.
As proof of their good faith, the eastern Romans later handed over the two royal refugees, Mamas and Atakam (‘Father Shaman’). The manner of their reception suggests both the vicious rivalry seething beneath the surface of Attila’s co-operation with his brother and the brutality of the times. The princes were delivered on the lower Danube, at a place called Carsium (today the Romanian town of Hâr
ova in the Danube delta), straight into Attila’s hands. There was no hope, apparently, of winning their loyalty. To punish and make an example of them, he had them killed in the manner made infamous 1,000 years later by Vlad the Impaler, the original Dracula, who was ruler of the same region.
This was a peculiarly terrible death.1 First, the executioners cut a wooden stake about 3 metres long, quite thin at one end, this end being finely sharpened and well greased with lard. The other end was thicker, to act as a secure base. The legs of the victim were spread-eagled by men hauling on ropes, the clothing cut, and the stake hammered into the anus with exquisite care and frequent pauses to avoid damaging the internal organs. The advancing stake pushed aside the intestines, colon, stomach, liver and lungs, until it reached the shoulder, emerging with the help of a knife through the skin of the upper back, to one side of the spine. The victim was skewered, ‘as a lamb on the spit’ – except that the heart and lungs were still working. Then the legs were bound to the stake at the ankles to prevent slippage in what was to follow. The stake with its burden was raised upright, and set very gently, in order not to jolt the body, into a firm holder of stones or wood, where it was held in place with struts. If everything had been done in the correct manner, the public agony that followed would last a couple of days. The Romans watching from the far bank, and any Huns who might have considered siding with Bleda, would have heard the slow, steady hammer blows and the screams, learned that Attila commanded some people well practised in the arts of ruthlessness – for impaling was a skill that demanded experience and a clinical hand – and taken note.
It is clear from the terms imposed by the Huns what they were after. Though they liked to melt down gold coins for jewellery, they were also developing a cash economy based on Roman currency, and there was no easier way to get the cash than by extortion. They could offer horses, furs and slaves at the trade fair on the Danube, but that would not bring real wealth – not enough to acquire the silks and wines that would make life pleasant, or to pay for foreign artisans who could construct the heavy-duty weapons upon which their long-term security would depend. Besides, it was only by matching Roman wealth that they could avoid being ripped off. According to St Ambrose, it was perfectly OK for Christians to bleed barbarians dry with loans: ‘On him whom you cannot easily conquer in war, you can quickly take vengeance with the hundredth [i.e. a percentage]. Where there is the right of war, there is also the right of usury.’ When Attila and Bleda returned to their own domains, they had what they wanted in the short term – some gold, some breathing-space; but peace did not serve their long-term interests. They needed war, and events elsewhere soon gave them opportunity.
During this decade, disaster loomed on several fronts for both parts of the empire. Aetius was fire-fighting in Gaul, quelling the Franks in 432, then the Bagaudae (435–7), an obscure and disorderly band who fought a guerrilla war from their forest bases, and finally the Goths, who almost took Narbonne in 437. In 439 Carthage itself, the old capital of Rome’s North African estates, fell to the Vandal chief Gaiseric. After 40 years of wandering – over the Rhine, across France and Spain, over the Straits of Gibraltar – the Vandals had seized present-day Libya only fourteen years previously. Carthage, with its aqueduct, temples and theatres (one of which, named the Odeon, served as a venue for concerts), was vandalized, in every sense. The invaders found their new homeland, though fertile enough, rather a tight fit between the Sahara and the Mediterranean, and quickly learned a new skill: shipbuilding. Carthage was wonderfully located to dominate the 200-kilometre channel dividing Africa from Sicily, and became a base for piracy, and then for a navy. In 440 Gaiseric prepared an invasion fleet, landed in Sicily, did some vandalizing, and crossed to the Italian mainland, intending no-one knew what. From the East, Theodosius II sent an army to help repel the invaders, but he was too late: the Vandals had headed home with their spoils before the easterners arrived.
Attila and Bleda took advantage of these desperate times. In the West they had a wonderful opportunity for pillage, thanks to their alliance with Aetius, who needed them to bolster his campaign against those unruly barbarians inside Gaul. There were Huns helping to fight the Franks, and the Bagaudae, and most memorably the Burgundians/Nibelungs. This was the tribe that had crossed the Rhine almost en masse 30 years before, leaving behind a remnant that successfully resisted the Hun attack. They had settled, with Rome’s unwilling agreement, on the Roman side of the middle Rhine, taking over several towns, with Worms as their capital. Under their king, Gundahar, better known to history and folklore as Gunther, they remained a restless bunch, trying to take more land. An invasion westwards through the Ardennes in 435 drew the attention of Aetius and his mercenary Huns, who had a score of their own to settle after their defeat a few years previously. The results were devastating, though no details of the assault survive. Thousands of Burgundians died (though probably not the 20,000 mentioned in one source), Gunther among them, in a slaughter that would be transformed into folklore, notably in the great medieval epic the Nibelungenlied and in more recent times by Wagner in his Ring cycle. Along the way, folk memory made the assumption that Attila himself was behind the destruction of the Burgundians. That doesn’t fit. He had his hands full back home. But there is an underlying truth to the legend, for there could have been no slaughter without an understanding between Aetius and the Huns. Now they had their reward: vengeance, and booty. The few surviving Burgundians were chased on west and south, their name clinging to the area around Lyon and its vineyards long after the tribe itself and the later kingdom had vanished.
Already, Attila and Bleda needed more, if not from other barbarians, then from the eastern empire. They had their pretexts ready. Tribute had not been paid. Refugees who had fled across the Danube had not been returned. And, to cap it all, the Bishop of Margus had sent men across the river to plunder royal tombs. (Priscus says they were Hun graves, but the Huns made no burial mounds; they must have been ancient kurgans, which had always been ransacked as if they were little mountains to be mined at will.) The bishop should at once be surrendered, came the order, or there would be war.
No bishop was handed over, and Attila and Bleda made their move. Some time around 440, at the trade fair in Constantia, Huns suddenly turned on the Roman merchants and troops, and killed a number. Then, crossing the Danube, a Hun army attacked Viminacium, Margus’ immediate neighbour to the east, subjecting the town to an appalling fate. No-one recorded why it was so vulnerable, but the townspeople seemed to know what was in store, because its officials had time to bury the contents of their treasury, over 100,000 coins which were found by archaeologists in the 1930s. The survivors were led away into captivity, among them an unnamed businessman whom we shall meet again in rather different and much improved circumstances. The city was then flattened, and not rebuilt for a century. It is now the village of Kostolac.
Then the Huns turned on Margus itself. The grave-robbing bishop, terrified that he would be handed over by his own people to ensure their safety, slipped out of the city, crossed the Danube, and told the Huns that he would arrange for the gates of his town to be opened for them if they promised to treat him well. Promises were made, hands shaken. The Huns gathered by night on the far bank of the Danube, while somehow the bishop persuaded those on watch to open the gates for him. Right behind were the Huns, and Margus too fell, and burned. It was never rebuilt.
What happened then is unclear. Sources and interpretations vary so dramatically that no-one is certain whether there was one war or two, or how long it, or they, lasted, estimates varying from two to five years. Two or three seems to fit best. It was all mixed up with the Vandals invading Sicily and the eastern army being sent to help the West. There was much destruction in the Belgrade region. In any event, the Huns were now in possession of Margus and its sister town, Constantia, on the Danube’s northern bank, and could dominate the Morava valley, along which ran the main road into Thrace. Two other cities fell, Singidunum (Belgrade) and Sirmium (now the village of Sremska Mitrovica, 60 kilometres west of Belgrade up the River Sava), where the bishop handed over some golden bowls that would, a few years later, become the cause of a nasty dispute.
Then something seems to have stopped the Huns in their tracks – trouble at home, perhaps, or a rapid offer of gold from Theodosius. Attila and Bleda pulled their troops out, leaving the borderland of Pannonia and Moesia in smoking ruins. There was another peace treaty, agreed by Anatolius, commander-in-chief of the eastern empire’s army and friend of the emperor.
It was perhaps as part of this renewed peace that the Huns picked up another item of booty: a black dwarf from Libya who adds a bizarre element to our story. Zercon was already a living legend. He owed his presence in Hun lands to one of the greatest of Roman generals, Aspar, who was in command of the Danube frontier for a few years until 431, when he was sent to North Africa in a vain attempt to quell the Vandals. It was Aspar who captured Zercon and took him back to Thrace. Here he was either seized by the Huns or perhaps handed over by Aspar. Zercon was not a prepossessing sight. He hobbled on deformed feet, had a nose so flat it looked as if it wasn’t there at all, just two holes where a nose should be, and he stuttered and lisped. He had had the sense to turn these deficiencies into assets, and became a great court jester, specializing in parodies of Latin and Hunnish. Attila couldn’t stand him, so he became his brother’s property. Bleda thought Zercon was hilarious – The way he moved! His lisp! His stutter! – and treated him like a pet monster, providing him with a suit of armour and taking him along on campaigns. Zercon, however, did not fully appreciate Bleda’s sadistic sense of humour, and escaped with some Roman prisoners. Bleda was so furious that he ordered those sent in pursuit to ignore all the fugitives but Zercon and to bring him back in chains. So it was. At the sight of him, Bleda asked why he had fled from such a kindly master. Zercon, speaking in his appalling mixture of Latin and newly learned Hunnish, apologized profusely, but protested that his master should understand there was a good reason for his flight: he had not been given a wife. At this, Bleda became helpless with laughter, and allocated him a poor girl who had once been an attendant on his own senior wife. Zercon will reappear, and his story continue, later.
For a couple of years the Danube front remained quiet, Attila having discovered the benefits of diplomatic exchanges. As Priscus tells it, Attila sends letters to Theodosius – letters which must have been in Greek or Latin; the illiterate Attila must already have had at least one scribe and translator, if not a small secretariat. He demands the fugitives who have not been delivered and the tribute which has not been paid. He puts a diplomatic gloss on what is little more than a gangster’s threat. He is a patient man. He is willing to receive envoys to discuss terms. He also portrays himself as a man with a problem, namely his impatient chiefs. If there is a hint of a delay or any sign that Constantinople is preparing for war, he will not be able to hold back his hordes.
It seems that Attila did indeed have a problem with some of his own people. Since peace was cheaper than war, and ambassadors cheaper than armies, Theodosius sent an envoy, an ex-consul named Senator. The land route was apparently too dangerous, for Thrace was still a prey to freebooting Huns who had not yet been brought under Attila’s control, the ‘fugitives’ he wanted returned by the terms of the Treaty of Margus. So Senator opted to make the first part of his journey by ship, sailing up the coast of the Black Sea to Varna, where a Roman contingent was able to provide him with an escort inland. Senator duly arrived, impressing Attila, who would later cite him as a model envoy, but nothing else seems to have been achieved.
Perhaps something was promised, for Attila rather took to the idea of exchanging envoys. His reason for sending embassies had nothing to do with diplomacy and fugitives. This was a gravy train for his top people, and a way to win time. It was not the issue that was the issue, but the generous reception his ambassadors received, which was something along these lines: My dear chaps, how wonderful to see you! Fugitives? Tribute? All in good time. We’ll talk after supper. Let us show you to your rooms. Yes, the carpets and the silks are nice, aren’t they – nothing but the best. A glass of wine, perhaps? You like the glass? It’s yours. Oh, and after supper, there are the dancing girls. You’ve had a long journey. These girls are chosen specially to restore the spirits of great warriors such as your good selves. Priscus noted all this in rather staider terms: ‘The barbarian [Attila] seeing clearly the Romans’ liberality, which they exercised through caution lest the treaty be broken, sent to them those of his retinue he wished to benefit.’ Four times in the mid-440s this happened, and each time a retinue returned happy, with trinkets and cash as diplomatic gifts.
Neither side believed in the peace. Constantinople was nervous – or so scholars surmise on the scanty evidence of two laws rushed into effect in the summer and autumn of 444. Landowners had long been required to supply recruits from their tenantry, or pay cash in lieu. But senior officials, most of them also landowners, were exempt; that was a perk of their high office. Now, by one of the new laws, they too had to provide troops, or pay a fine. The second law was a 4 per cent tax on all sales. Clearly, the city needed more men in arms and the money to pay them. And, according to one of Theodosius’ edicts, the Danube fleet was being reinforced and the bases along the river being rebuilt.
The emperor was in fact quite right to expect trouble, because he was about to give the Huns cause for complaint. He had no intention of losing more money to the barbarians. In the succinct words of Otto Maenchen-Helfen, one of the greatest of experts on the Huns, ‘To get rid of the savages, Theodosius paid them off. Once they were back, he tore up the peace treaty,’ and simply cut the payments dead.
Perhaps it was this crisis that inspired Attila to make his move for absolute power. He would by now have had his own power base, in the form of an elite referred to by Greek writers as logades (we will meet half a dozen of them in person later, in the company of the Greek diplomat Priscus), and the inner circle would already have been in place, or Attila would not have been able to grab supreme power. Among them were his deputy, Onegesius; Onegesius’ brother Scottas; some relatives (we know of two uncles, Aybars and Laudaric); and Edika, the leader of a tribe immediately to the north, the Skirians, now in alliance with Attila’s Huns, whose foot soldiers would henceforth form the heart of the Hun infantry. They were all bound to Attila by something more than fear of his brutality, for they must have equalled him in that. This was the man who would best serve their interests, and those of the Huns as a whole. They were a substantial group, these logades. Historians have debated whether they are best seen as local governors, policemen, tribute collectors, priests, wise men, shamans, military commanders, clan leaders, nobles or diplomats. Probably, each played several roles. The implication is there in Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon: logades is the plural oflogas, ‘picked, chosen’. Logadesmeans ‘picked men’: the elite. As Maenchen-Helfen concludes: ‘There is no evidence that these prominent people of the Huns had anything in common but prominence’ – something like Hunnish SS officers, if you regard Attila as a Hitler figure.
And the rest of the Huns? All that can be said is that there was a tribe or people, subdivided into clans, across which cut a hierarchy consisting, at the very least, of slaves at the bottom, then common people made up of herders and householders, then an aristocracy, which may have been both of birth and of merit, and at the head a supreme leader, who was now ready for a coup.
It would have been sudden, brief, and bloody. Bleda vanished from history. Attila assumed power over the whole estate, from the Black Sea to Budapest, a kingdom 800 kilometres across and 400 deep. The putsch must have been over almost as soon as begun, because no word of civil war reached the outside world, and Attila had the confidence to spare at least one, presumably the most senior, of Bleda’s wives: we shall come across her again later, apparently in good heart, living not far from the headquarters the victor now snatched from his brother’s dead hands.
We can infer something of the flow of goods and the brief panic unleashed by Attila’s fratricide thanks to some Hungarian turkeys. This story is set just outside a little town 18 kilometres north-east of Szeged. I hesitate to tell you the name of the town, because it obeys the First Law of Hungarian Linguistics, which states that the smaller the town, the more impossible it is for outsiders to pronounce. It’s Hódm
závárhely, which for Hungarians is no problem at all: it means ‘beaver-field-market-place’, this whole low-lying area having once been frequently flooded by the nearby Tisza, with little lakes where beavers thrived (in fact there is still a ‘Channel-of-the-Beaver-Lake’ near the village). The land, now drained, runs flat to a straight horizon. In 1963 a middle-aged farmer’s wife named Józó Erzsébet – Elizabeth Józó – was tending her turkeys when she saw that they had scratched up something glittery from the subsoil. She stooped down, scratched a little more, and found a mass of gold coins: 1,440 to be exact, together weighing 64 kilos. Her son cannily took one of them to the National Museum in Budapest and offered to sell it. They gave him 1,500 forints, the equivalent of about two months’ wages. Next day, he turned up again with another two coins. At this point the museum curators realized that Mrs Józó’s turkeys needed expert attention. The treasure was whisked off to the museum, pictures were taken of Mrs Józó in her headscarf and the shallow pit – the picture is still there in the Szeged museum – and the family was left richer by 70,000 forints, enough to buy two houses.
The coins are Byzantine, minted by Theodosius II, and a good proportion of them are dated 443, right when Attila and Bleda started sending their ambassadors on their gravy-train missions to Constantinople. Finds like this are an invitation to imagine. Why would someone bury coins like this in a field, with no other goods? Here is a possible scenario. Attila has just made his move. Bleda is dead. He too had his logades. Most of them are also dead now, but one has escaped. Like the unfortunate royal cousins whose skeletons for years graced the sharpened stakes downriver, he thinks his chances will be better if he flees across the Danube. He gathers his share of the latest payment to arrive from Constantinople and heads south. But then, all of a sudden, he sees horsemen ahead of him, and behind. He’s surrounded. He doesn’t give much for his chances if he’s caught with the cash on him. Hastily, he buries it. He will take shelter with peasants, and hope to fade into the landscape until things calm down, when he will retrieve his loot and build himself a better life somewhere else. Does he survive? I doubt it, because he never returns, and the hoard lies hidden for 1,500 years, until scratched up by Mrs Józó’s turkeys.
* * *
As leaders often do, Attila boosted his natural self-confidence by rewriting tradition so that it supported his rise to power. This he did by hijacking the ancient cult of sword-worship. Many tribes worshipped, venerated or swore by their swords, sometimes seeing in one particular sword a symbol of divine support. There is perhaps a recollection of this practice in the Arthurian legend of the ‘sword in the stone’, which may recall the respect conferred upon the metalworkers who knew how to abstract iron from rock, in effect drawing swords from stones. The Xiongnu, the Avars and the Bulgars all had their sword-cults. So did the Huns. Shortly after Attila came to power he made the cult his own. This is the story as heard by Priscus, our main source for the court of King Attila, whose adventures are the subject of the next chapter. Some of his work was lost, though some of the lost bit was saved at second hand, quoted by the Gothic historian Jordanes over a century later. It seems that one particular sword – Latinized as the Sword of Mars – had always been esteemed by the Hun kings, but had been lost. This is how it was rediscovered, according to the story as it must have been approved by Attila:
A certain herdsman saw one of his heifers limping. Unable to find a cause for such a wound, he anxiously followed the trail of blood and at length came to a sword the beast had unwittingly trampled while grazing. He dug it up and straight away took it to Attila. He rejoiced at this gift and being of great courage he decided he had been appointed to be ruler of the whole world and that, thanks to the Sword of Mars, he had been granted the power to win wars.
Attila had both the power and the incentive to wage war on the empire of Theodosius. What he lacked for the moment was focus. He faced a threat from a tribe or clan named as Acatiri or Akatziri – they have various spellings and much disputed etymologies, which Maenchen-Helfen takes ten pages to summarize. In brief, they were probably steppe-dwellers living on the shores of the Black Sea, somewhere over towards the Don. Trouble of some kind was brewing there. It would eventually be sorted out with one of the Acatiri tribal leaders retaining his independence by an ingenious and outrageous piece of flattery. Offered gold by Attila along with an invitation to visit, he suspected a trap, and sent a message saying he couldn’t possibly come because, as a man could not look at the sun, so he could not look upon a god – small evidence that Attila was beginning to be seen as selected by Heaven above for conquest. Attila decided to settle for control rather than conquest, sending his elder son Ellac to assert Hun rule.
Aetius himself arrived from Rome to negotiate another peace. No-one left an account of his visit, but it is deduced from a Latin verse by an eminent Gaulish poet, Sidonius, who will become a significant source later in this story. The poem was a panegyric in praise of Aetius, probably written to commemorate his third term as consul, which began in 447. As one line put it, ‘he returned with peace from the Danube and stripped the Don of its rage’. Aetius was certainly the man for the job, confident that his old hosts would give him a good welcome. If Attila and Aetius had not met as children – Aetius was some ten years the elder, quite the patriarch now at fifty-something – they surely met now, and saw in each other matching qualities of leadership. They could do business together, and serve each other’s interests.
This would have been the first time a high-ranking outsider had been to Attila’s headquarters since he had assumed sole leadership. It is a good time to ponder where he lived, how he lived and what he was like. To do so, I must get a little ahead of myself, because I have to draw upon the description set down by Priscus, whose visit took place a couple of years later.
First comes the much-disputed position of Attila’s headquarters. Historians have taken a great interest in the course Priscus took on his journey north from Constantinople, because if they could pin that down they would know where Attila lived, and then they could excavate and open many windows on Attila and Hun life. But all we have are strong hints, like a treasure-hunt with half the clues missing. Priscus crossed three large rivers, which he names Drecon, Tigas and Tiphesas; but Jordanes, in quoting him, distorts the names and the order into Tisia, Tibisia and Dricca. Or perhaps Jordanes got them right and Priscus wrong, or both were trying to record local usages now forgotten. This uncertainty has inspired many an academic footnote. The names can be paired, but the three pairs can be made to yield only two known rivers (and even these are disputed):
Tiphesas/Tibisia = Tibiscus (Latin)/Tamiš (Serbian), Timi
or Timiul (Romanian);
Tigas/Tisia = Tisza (Hungarian)/Theiss (German);
Dricca/Drecon = unknown, but possibly today’s Begei.
The Tamiš joins the Danube just north of Belgrade, close to where the Begei flows into the Tisza. But there are several other rivers, and names have changed as peoples and languages have changed. The identification that makes most sense is that of the Tigas/Tisia with the long, broad, meandering and variable Tisza/Theiss, which dominates the central Hungarian plain, and did so to a far greater extent before it was tamed in the nineteenth century by Count István Szécheny, who practically reinvented his country politically and physically (he regulated the Danube as well). The Tisza/ Theiss had scores of different spellings over the centuries (and still has quite a few in this multi-lingual part of Europe). Unfortunately, not a single one has a g in the middle. Still, it is inconceivable that a scholar like Priscus would not have known of the Tisza, and it is widely accepted that this was the river Priscus meant. If he crossed it, it means Attila was based on the other side i.e. the west. This makes sense, because Attila needed his army to have rapid access west as well as south, and the Tisza could, in spring, spread out for miles, a barrier best avoided by basing himself on the western side.
Estimating the distance Priscus travelled brings us up the west bank of the Tisza to the flat lands near present-day Szeged, in southern Hungary. Szeged itself is right on the river, and even with the embankments is still subject to flooding. It was almost wiped out in 1879, and swamped again in 1970 and 2000. If Attila was based west of the river, he would have settled 20–30 kilometres west, safely away from the flood plain, with its bogs and slow streams, out on the puszta, with open ground on which the Hun cavalry could operate and manoeuvre.
But this was no military camp. It was a regular little town, with wooden buildings, plus a couple with stone bases, and one entirely of stone – of which more in the next chapter. It was not much in modern terms, but it is still an expression of Attila’s imperial outreach. There were no trees and no quarries in the area, so every log and stone had to be brought in on wagons and rafts. Despite a vast amount of academic wrangling over the possibility that the village was some sort of fort, with a surrounding palisade, no such thing is mentioned by Priscus. Inside the village there were indeed palisades, encircling collections of wooden buildings. One, for instance, belonged to Attila’s deputy, Onegesius; another to his senior wife, Erekan. But these served no military purpose, for their gates were unguarded and unlocked. They indicated status. There was plenty of space between these enclosures for tents to be pitched.
You can see little towns like this today in Mongolia, put up by people in the process of abandoning their herds for urban life. In the north, where the mountains and forests roll down from Siberia, it has always been easy for those who wish to build in wood. Here are villages of spruce and pine planks, the single-storey houses set in compounds to keep thieves out and dogs in, separated by spider’s webs of tracks, punctuated by the occasional round felt tent and horses tethered next to a motorbike. Even in the Gobi, you may be driving over an infinity of gravel plain and see, shimmering on the horizon, a little town, the centre of local administration. The houses are more likely to be brick and concrete, and there will be a telephone line and poles at odd angles, but they have similar compounds of wooden planks. If pastoral nomads have to settle, this is how they do it. They are, in effect, Hun villages.
I imagine Aetius’ first view of Attila’s new palace must have been much the same as Priscus’. ‘Wooden walls made of smoothly planed boards’, whose joints – the addition is from Jordanes – ‘so counterfeited solidity that they could scarce be distinguished by close scrutiny . . . a courtyard bounded by so vast a circuit that its very size showed it was the royal palace’. This was a place designed to impress, not only by its size but also by the quality of its workmanship: fine wood and excellent carpentry, possibly the work of captured Goths or Burgundians, both of whom had traditions of building in wood.
Now for the man himself. Priscus described him, in Jordanes’ Latin version:
He was a man born to shake the races of the earth, a terror to all lands, destined I know not how to frighten everyone as terrifying reports spread about him. His gait was haughty, his eyes darting here and there, so that his power and pride was apparent as he moved. Yes, he was a lover of war, but he knew how to restrain himself. He was excellent in council, sympathetic to supplicants, gracious to those received into his protection. He was short of stature, broad-chested, with a large head, small eyes, thin beard flecked with grey, snub nose, and the repulsive complexion of his forefathers.2 His nature was such that he always had great confidence.
Having dealt successfully with this new king, Aetius duly returned with peace from the Danube, sealing the renewed bond by sending his son Carpilio, perhaps on a second embassy, perhaps as a hostage, as he had himself been sent in his youth. This is confirmed by a letter written in the first half of the sixth century, a hundred years after the events, by the historian Cassiodorus, who wrote a history of the Goths. In the letter he described how his grandfather had been sent to Attila along with Carpilio. This must therefore have been the second group of outsiders to meet Attila as sole leader. Naturally, Cassiodorus is keen to show his grandfather in a good light, and the Huns as the evil conquerors of his own Goths, but his account backs up Priscus’ portrait. Cassiodorus writes that his grandfather
looked undaunted at the man before whom the Empire quailed. Calm in his conscious strength, he despised all those terrible wrathful faces that scowled around him. He did not hesitate to meet the full force of the invectives of a man, who, driven by some fury, seemed to strive for the domination of the world. He found the king insolent; he left him pacified; and so ably did he argue down all his slanderous pretexts for dispute that though the Hun’s interest was to quarrel with the richest empire in the world, he nevertheless condescended to seek its favour . . . Thus did he bring back the peace which men had despaired of.
Together Cassiodorus and Priscus give us a portrait of an ugly little man of extreme contradictions, mercurial in his moodiness and adept at putting on the appearance of moods, suspicious of all but his most trusted lieutenants, often brutal, tough as a bare-knuckle fighter. He had killed men, might actually have killed his brother with his own hands. It was impossible to know what he really felt or guess what he would do next. Stalin and Hitler had that same talent of keeping even the closest aides on tenterhooks, absolutely dependent on their every whim. Like them, he and only he held the secret of victory, and not even he could say what that secret was. Part of the mystique of leadership was his self-confidence, part his austerity – and part his generosity, in which his chosen ones and honoured guests basked as if in sunlight. I think he had a sudden smile that could melt rocks. To be in his presence would have been to feel charisma in its original, theological sense, the power that flows as a divine gift and turns an ordinary man into a leader.
A few dribs and drabs of tribute, the odd diplomatic gift – it was simply not enough to keep a restless people happy. To retain power, Attila had to seize the initiative, fast. And so, in 447, he went on the warpath. His aims were threefold: one, to get as much loot as he could as quickly as possible; two, to ensure he could do this again in the future; and three, at the same time to deny the eastern empire any chance of retaliation. This meant occupying the whole Danube frontier region, taking over the river with its fleet, and occupying the cities that acted as the empire’s outposts. Previously, when the Huns were consolidating, they had avoided territorial gain; but Attila’s new ambitions demanded expansion. For the first time, Attila was seeking territory, en route to empire.
Of the 447 campaign itself there are few details. Two things seem certain: that the Huns reached but could not take Constantinople; and that they destroyed many cities in the Balkans. How events unfolded exactly is not recorded, so the following sequence is my conjecture, the reason for which I will explain later.
Consider what this ex-nomad was up against. He could advance whenever he liked, but with what war aims? Surely not simply to ravage and pillage an already ravaged and pillaged countryside. Wealth lay in towns, of which there were several. But they were well defended, with thick, high walls against which mounted archers would be useless. There is only one way for nomads to take cities, and that is to besiege them so thoroughly that the inhabitants are starved out, always assuming that no heavily armoured reinforcements arrive. That means a siege of several months, during which a hungry army grows restless for lack of loot. No, this time, the Huns would have to take cities.
What of the greatest prize of all, Constantinople? Attila had never been that far south, but he would have known what awaited him if he got there. It was quite a march. From the Hungarian plains you would follow the Tisza for 160 kilometres to Belgrade, then the Morava for a further 180 kilometres down to well-defended Naissus (Niš as it is today). Another 120 kilometres would take you through the narrow valley of the Nišava, where the railway runs now, to Sofia; picking up the Maritsa for the ancient road across southern Bulgaria, where the mountains give way at last to flatter ground and the Turkish town of Adrianople (now Edirne, 220 kilometres), after the final 160 kilometres, making in all a march of 840 kilometres, you would see before you the totally impregnable walls of Constantinople.
The city was now defended by the new Theodosian Walls built by Anthemius after 413. The walls endure to this day, the russet brickwork looming up from the plain. They are much eroded now, but in 445 they were one of the world’s wonders, running from river to sea for 5 kilometres, lined with hewn stone at their bases, mounting like a stairway. An attacker first faced a moat, 20 metres wide, 10 metres deep, partitioned by locks, each section having its own pipes that could flood it and also carry water to the defenders. Then came a parapet – a peribolo, as it was known – some 20 metres wide, which would of course be manned by defenders. Once they were cleared, invaders came up against the outer wall, some 10 metres high, with a roadway along the top, and punctuated with guard towers. Beyond this another parapet, 15 metres wide, and finally the inner wall, up to 20 metres high, wide enough at the top for soldiers to parade. Every 50 metres along its whole length rose a tower. Each of its 10 gates had a drawbridge that was removed entirely in time of siege.
If facts and figures do not impress, listen to the awed words of Edwin Grosvenor, Professor of History at Amherst College, Massachusetts, one-time history professor in Constantinople, in his 1895 account of the city:3
In days when the cannon was unknown, the most dauntless commander and the mightiest army might well shrink back in terror at the sight of such tremendous works. Like a broad, deep, bridgeless river stretched the moat in its precipitous sheath of stone. Even were it crossed and its smooth, high face of rock surmounted, there rose beyond the formidable front of the outer wall and towers, defended on the vantage ground of the peribolos by phalanxes of fighting men. And if those bastions were carried, and their defenders driven back in rout inside the city, there loomed beyond, mocking the ladder and the battering-ram, the adamantine, overawing inner wall. Along its embrasured top the besieged might stroll, and laugh to scorn the impotent assault of hitherto successful but now baffled foes.
No enemy ever managed to breach this barrier until the Turks took the city in 1453, and they managed it because they deployed an 8.5-metre bombard that was hauled by 60 oxen and could lob half-tonne balls from a kilometre away. Attila would not have dreamed of making the attempt.
But he was granted a chance for easy victory, a heaven-sent chance it must have seemed, for at the end of January 447 the city was struck by a terrible earthquake that turned whole sections of the new wall to rubble. The emperor led a congregation of 10,000, barefoot in deference to God’s will, through the rubble-strewn streets to a special service of prayer. But there would be no deliverance from the barbarian menace without hard, fast labour. The work was taken in hand by the praetorian prefect Cyrus, poet, philosopher, art lover and architect, who had already been responsible for more public buildings than anyone since the time of Constantine.
It could well have been that this was the very moment Attila was preparing to head south. One interpretation of the sources is that, upon hearing news of the earthquake and the collapse of the walls, he rushed together an army and led it on a hard march through the Balkans to Constantinople. If there is anything in this conjecture, then the city would have been in a complete panic at his approach. There is one hint that this is how it might have been. Callinicus, a monk living near Chalcedon (modern Kad1köy), across the Hellespont from Constantinople, recalled the horrors 20 years later:
The barbarian people of the Huns, the ones in Thrace, became so strong that they captured more than 100 cities, and almost brought Constantinople into danger, and most men fled from it. Even the monks wanted to run away to Jerusalem. There was so much killing and blood-letting that no one could number the dead. They pillaged the churches and monasteries, and slew the monks and virgins . . . They so devastated Thrace that it will never rise again.
According to the fifth-century Syrian writer Isaac of Antioch, the city was saved only by an epidemic among the would-be invaders. Addressing the city, he says, ‘By means of sickness he [God] conquered the tyrant who was threatening to come and take thee away captive.’ In fact, Isaac makes the same point again and again. ‘Against the stone of sickness they stumbled . . . with the feeble rod of sickness [God] smote mighty men . . . the sinners drew the bow and put their arrows on the string, then sickness blew through [the host] and hurled it into wilderness.’ It is all very vague; but perhaps it is significant that there is no mention of an assault, and certainly no siege engines.
That was because Cyrus had been an answer to the city’s prayers. The walls were repaired in double-quick time. Inscriptions in Greek and Latin, still visible to Grosvenor when he was gathering material for his book in the 1880s, praised the achievement of the prefect, who had ‘bound wall to wall’ in 60 days: ‘Pallas herself could hardly have erected so stable a fortification in so short a time.’ Attila would have been confronted not by enticing gaps in a ruined wall, but by the whole restored and impregnable edifice. A wasted journey, then; though he may have drawn a tiny consolation that a decision already taken had now to be followed through.
That decision, I suggest, was to adopt a whole new type of warfare, which owed little to the Huns’ nomadic past. The most vivid record of the 447 Balkan campaign is Priscus’ description of the siege of Naissus, the consequences of which he saw for himself two years later. The Huns, not being city people, would not have been good at sieges. Yet over the last few years they had learned much from their Roman enemies to east and west, and now they put their research and development to good use in a massive, mechanized assault. Naissus lies on the river now called the Nišava. The Huns decided to cross by building a bridge, which would have been not of the usual design but a quickly built pontoon of planks on boats. Across this came ‘beams mounted on wheels’ – siege towers of some kind, perhaps tree-trunks fixed to a four-wheeled frame. With the details given by Priscus, it is possible to guess how they worked. Above the frame was a platform protected by screens made of woven willow and rawhide, thick and heavy enough to stop arrows, spears, stones and even fire-arrows, but with slits through which the attackers could fire. How many bowmen on the platform? Shall we say four? Below, well protected, were another team of four (or perhaps eight) who pedalled the wheels. There could have been a third team behind, steering the contraption with a long lever. There were ‘a large number’ of these siege towers, which, when in place, delivered such a hail of arrows that the defenders fled from the walls. But the towers were not high enough to reach the ramparts, not up to the standards of classical siege towers like the helepolis (‘city-taker’) used by Philip of Macedon when he tried to take Byzantium in 340 BC, or other towers that were supposedly up to 50 metres high (an extraordinary size: even half that height would be astonishing). Nor is there any mention of drawbridges, vital if the assault were to be carried through, which had been used in siege towers since the time of Alexander the Great 800 years previously. The Huns were learning, but they had a way to go yet.
Now the Huns brought up their next devices: iron-pointed battering-rams slung on chains from the point where four beams came together, like the edges of a pyramid. These too were screened by willow and leather armour, protecting teams who used ropes to swing the rams. These were, says Priscus, very large machines. They needed to be, because their job was to batter down not only the gates but also the walls themselves. The defenders, returning to the ramparts, had been waiting for this moment. They released wagon-sized boulders, each of which could smash a ram like a sledgehammer blow on a tortoise. But how many giant boulders could have been stored on the battlements, and how many men were ready to risk the hails of arrows to drop them? And how many siege towers and how many rams did it take to assure victory – 20, 30, 50 of each? Priscus gives no details. Whatever the actual numbers, these tactics would have demanded a huge investment of time, energy, expertise and experience – armies of carpenters and blacksmiths, months of preparations, wagonloads of equipment. Attila’s army was not yet something to rival the best that Rome and Constantinople could muster; but it was too much for Naissus. With the walls kept clear by a steady rain of arrows, the rams ate away at the stone even as the Huns finished off their assault by deploying scaling ladders, and the city fell.
Naissus was wrecked. When Priscus travelled past it two years later, the bones of the slain still littered the riverbank and the hostels were almost empty (but at least there were hostels, and people: devastation was never total, and there were always survivors to make a go of reconstruction).
How are we to put these events together? Some historians assume that Attila took Thrace town by town, working his way down to Constantinople. If so, what happened to the siege machinery which would have been vital to take the city? Actually, it wouldn’t have been good enough to tackle Anthemius’ new walls, and he would have known that; so why even bother to get it there? My feeling is that he raced to the capital in the hope of finding its walls still in ruins from the earthquake, found them intact, retreated, and met up with his advancing siege machines to take out easier targets like Naissus. In this way he could hold the eastern empire to ransom anyway, get piles of booty, and gain vital experience in siege warfare that would stand him in good stead down the line, especially if and when he wanted to move against Constantinople at some later date.
Theodosius sued for peace, and was given it – on Attila’s terms.4 Fugitives were handed over, the ransom for Roman captives raised from 8 to 12 solidi, the arrears – 6,000 pounds of gold – paid, the annual tribute tripled to 2,100 pounds. To the Huns, this was real money: $38 million down, with $13.5 million to follow every year, a river of gold for pastoral nomads. Roman sources claim that Constantinople was being bled dry. When the tax collectors came to collect, rich easterners had to sell their furniture, even their wives’ jewels, to raise the money. Some were said to have committed suicide.
In fact, it wasn’t that bad. In 408, Alaric was paid off with 9,000 pounds (4,000 from Constantinople, 5,000 from Rome). Other enemy leaders were bribed with annual subsidies of 1,000–3,000 pounds. In 540–61 the Persians received four payments amounting to 12,600 pounds, or just over 1,000 pounds per year. These were sums matched occasionally by a ransom paid for an eminent captive or an emperor’s celebratory games or the building of a church. According to one estimate, the revenue of the eastern empire averaged 270,000 pounds of gold annually. So Attila managed to extort about 2.2 per cent of the treasury’s income as a down-payment, with less than 1 per cent per year thereafter: well within the amount a prudent chancellor would allow in his budget under the heading of ‘bribes and miscellaneous’. Anyway, it lasted at most for three years. Attila guessed that there was more to be had, and must surely have been planning his next move.
The key element in his strategy was his acquisition of the huge swathe of land south of the Danube, stretching 500 kilometres west to east from Pannonia to Novae (today’s Šistova), and ‘five days’ journey’ – say, 160 kilometres – north to south: 80,000 square kilometres, an area the size of Scotland or Maine. Now there were no walled cities and campsites for Roman troops, no Danube fleet, and the way through the Balkans to Constantinople was wide open. The site of the annual trade fair shifted south, from the banks of the Danube to ruined Naissus, which would henceforth be the main frontier town. Thrace was at Attila’s mercy. When the campaign opened, his authority over outlying areas had been shaky. Now, with all the cash he needed, his people well heeled with loot and ransom-money, all the Hun clans brought to heel, and his authority imposed over those who had fled, he was perfectly positioned to set his bounds yet wider.
Attila’s empire was already something that this part of Europe had never seen before, something Europe as a whole had not seen since the growth of Rome. There had once been a kingdom centred on Dacia, built by a certain Burebesta in 60 BC, which stretched from the Black Sea west to Hungary and north into Slovakia, but it had lasted only ten years, then vanished almost without trace. Attila already exercised influence over a much larger area, across to the Caspian in the east, to the Baltic in the north-east, northwards to the North Sea. The evidence for a Hunnish presence comes from scattered references across this area. As we have seen, the two princes handed over for impaling after the Treaty of Margus were delivered at Carsium, today’s Hârova, on the Danube only 60 kilometres from the Black Sea. Archaeologists have found hundreds of Hun objects from Austria (bits of a recurved bow and a deformed skull in Vienna) to the Volga (pots and swords in Ukraine). Priscus makes a vague reference to Hun rule over the ‘islands in the ocean’, which most scholars understand to be islands in the Baltic, off the coast of Denmark and Germany (a much debated point, this; but it makes sense, because Attila had inherited control of Ermanaric’s Ostrogothic federation, which had fallen to the Huns in the 370s). This huge estate embraced all of central and eastern Europe from the Rhine eastwards, including a dozen of today’s nations, together with bits of southern Russia, the Balkans and Bulgaria – some 5 million square kilo-metres, an area almost half the size of the United States. Not that it was a unified empire, all under Attila’s direct control; not that every tribe would do as he said; but at least none would march against him, and most would back him with troops if asked. By the late 440s he was the barbaricum’s top Alpha Male, who could virtually guarantee the booty that justified an offensive war.
It was an empire largely hidden from those who might have recorded it, since it reached eastwards and northwards, and did not therefore seem to leaders in Constantinople and Rome to be an imminent threat to all Christendom (not yet; not for another year or so). As a result its nature is unclear. Different experts have different views, and argue mightily, sometimes quite rudely. ‘Thompson views the Huns as a howling mass of savages,’ writes Maenchen-Helfen. ‘He even mistranslates the text.’ Marxists have seen Attila as the epitome of the last stage of barbarism, on the verge of a military democracy, destined in the Marxist scheme of things to break down the slave-owning society of Rome in preparation for feudalism, capitalism, socialism and heaven on earth. None of this can be supported by facts, because so little is known about how the new society worked.
What, for example, was Attila’s position? All sorts of terms have been bandied about – basileus (the term for the Roman emperors), rex, monarchos, hegemon, archon, phylarchos. All of these terms are Greek or Roman, and all are ambiguous. Was he, perhaps, more – a god to his people? It has been suggested, and it sounds plausible, given that Roman emperors were accorded divine status, as Augustus deified Caesar and Caligula deified himself and Constantine graciously allowed a hint of deification to attach to himself. But this madness was never part of nomadic culture. A ruler might at best claim to be chosen by Heaven, as Genghis later felt himself to be selected for world dominion by the Blue or Eternal Sky, and as Chinese emperors claimed the Mandate of Heaven. But this was not the same as claiming divinity. It was apparently OK to flatter by mentioning the Leader in the same breath as Heaven, God or a god. That was what sparked a row on Priscus’ journey (as we shall see in the next chapter), and that was the basis of the Akatziri chief’s specious excuse for not coming to kow-tow to Attila in person. But he didn’t really mean it. Attila was no Sun King, whose every expression was a command. Respect was given to the man, not to a god.
The Huns were now on their way up, with growing wealth, an expanded territory, and a multi-ethnic elite eager for more of both. Hard evidence for all this emerged in 1979 in northern Hungary, as I learned on a visit to Gyr.
I was there to meet Peter Tomka, Hun expert, one of Hungary’s top archaeologists, and head of the János Xánthus museum. I was new to my subject and would have been a little nervous, except that it was a glorious summer’s day, the town’s eighteenth-century centre was pastel-pretty, I had Andi Szegedi to interpret and I knew I had a little something in common with Tomka. We both knew Mongolia. People who know Mongolia are a freemasonry. It would help break the ice, and I was glad of it, for this was to be an important interview. Tomka had supervised the recovery of one of the greatest of Hun treasures. I would like to say Mongolia did the trick, but actually there was no ice to break. Tomka was every child’s idea of a big, friendly bear. Solidly built, white-bearded, tousled, clad in baggy shorts, Tomka welcomed me to his den of books, papers and iron shelves with a Mongolian greeting, ‘Sain bain uu!’, a huge, infectious laugh, and a story.
It starts in mid-May 1979, in a field in the lee of the massive, white hilltop monastery of Pannonhalma. Farm workers were making a new vineyard. One of them was digging the footing for a concrete post in the soft, sandy soil when, almost a metre down, his spade struck something hard. It was iron – a long piece of iron. He dug, and found more iron, and levered, and up came two swords. By the time his supervisor had managed to get through to the museum, the labourer had found more objects, mostly little flakes of gold. Hours later, safely boxed, they were all driven to the museum. That was when Tomka first saw the Pannonhalma Treasure.
‘Oh yes, it was very exciting. The experience of a lifetime!’ He threw back his head and roared with laughter at the memory. ‘They were typical Hun things, with shell-shaped ornaments, a horse decoration the shape of an omega, the bits of gold foil which had been on the swords’ wooden scabbards. So I went out to the field, and did some more digging and hunting around with my metal detector, but found nothing but a few flecks of gold. There was no sign of a grave, no ashes, no bones. So I was very certain that this was an Opferfund [sacrificial trove].’ He spoke excellent German, which made things easier, because Hungarian was Greek to me.
The site lies off a farm track in the middle of a maize field. When I went there, I stood amid silent fields and scattered trees, the scene made significant not by the long-gone treasure but by the mass of the 1,000-yearold monastery presiding over the surrounding farmland from its hill a couple of kilometres to the south. The same hills would have been there 1,500 years ago. This was Hun land, just, but right on the edge of the Roman territory, because the Romans never left Aquincum, the town on which Budapest now stands, 100 kilometres to the east. And this part of Pannonia was under Hun rule for only 20 years, from 433 to 454. What were they doing, these rich Huns, burying these valuables in an unmarked hole?
These were things valued by those who hid them: iron horse-bits, two-edged swords about a metre long and a bow, both weapons adapted for decorative or ritual purposes with little 3- or 4-centimetre rectangles and clover-shaped pieces of wafer-thin gold foil, worked with circular and oval patterns. Similar gold pieces were also used to decorate reins. They were attached with bronze tacks, the points of which were neatly folded over. In his paper on the finds, published in 1986, Tomka pointed out that some of these are stylistically identical to others found in the Rhineland and near the Sea of Azov, which for Tomka is proof of the extent of the Hun empire. ‘The two groups, separated by many thousands of kilometres [about 2,000], are linked geographically and chronologically by the Pannonhalma find.’
There is meaning, too, in what was not there. No arrowheads; no coins; no buckles (such as are common in other finds). So this is neither a time capsule of everyday objects nor a proper treasure trove of real wealth or loot. They were things loaded with emotional significance, but useless in any practical sense.
‘The really exciting things were the bow-decorations,’ Tomka said, leaning forward urgently. Other finds contained similar horn ears, but not little bits of gold like this, with net-like and fir-tree-like patterning. ‘No parallels! Unique! The golden bow of the Huns!’ He gave another delighted laugh.
‘A bow that was actually used?’
‘Good question. There was no bow, of course, just the decorations. After all, these things were just lying in the earth. There must have been a wooden box once, because the nails were there, but all the wood had rotted away, like the sword-scabbards. I believe that with such a bow, decorated with very fine gold leaf, you would not be able to shoot, because the decorations would fall off. It must have been a symbol of power, a status symbol. I like to joke – but also I’m serious – that it must have been the status symbol of Attila himself. Perhaps the original had the fingerprints of Attila.’
Well, the likely location of Attila’s HQ was almost 200 kilometres to the south-east. But a status symbol makes sense. Tomka speaks of a ceremony, recorded during Hun times and extremely widespread among steppe people, in which the funeral involved a feast, during which special items like horse harnesses and weapons would be placed on show. The dead man’s soul would not yet have risen to Heaven, and he would need his familiar objects around him on earth – not his real wealth, of course, because that would be shared among his heirs, but his cult objects. Then, when the time came for the final farewell, which might be months or even a year later, an effigy of the departed would be burned, along with – often, but not always – his cult objects, the remains of which were then buried nearby. Over 100 such sacrificial repositories have been found, and in none were there any human bones. ‘And so’, concludes Tomka, ‘we can no longer doubt that the Pannonhalma find is the buried remains of a funeral sacrifice.’
But Pannonhalma is 100 kilometres west of Aquincum, Roman Budapest. Some important Hun had established himself well inside what had until recently been Roman territory, up in rolling hills and woodlands which are not as well suited to herds as the openpuszta. Attila’s new empire is reaching westwards and northwards; and men like this and his surviving family would need slaves, and possessions, and cash, and land if their way of life were to be maintained, and their loyalty assured.
1 These details are taken from The Bridge over the Drina (1945) by the Nobel Prize-winning Serb writer Ivo Andrić (trans. Lovett Edwards, London, 1959/1994).
2 The word translated as ‘repulsive’ is teter, a variant of taeter, ‘foul, hideous, noisome, repulsive’. Inexplicably, this appeared as ‘swarthy’ or ‘dark’ in some translations, a mistake much copied. The ‘complexion of his forefathers’ is originis suae signa restituens, literally ‘restoring the signs of his origin’. This odd phrase recalls Ammianus Marcellinus’ prejudiced descriptions of the Huns, but I think Jordanes is referring to a family trait.
3 The introduction is by his friend Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur.
4 Many scholars place these events and the one-sided treaty in 442, when Bleda was still alive. ‘This is certainly not correct,’ comments Maenchen-Helfen, relying on Priscus to back him up. ‘Attila is the sole ruler of the Huns. He sends letters to the emperor, he is ready to receive the Roman envoys, he demands the tribute money. There are no more “kings of the Huns”. Bleda is dead.’