7
IN 450 ATTILA’S SOUTHERN FRONTIER ALONG THE DANUBE was at peace. His advance across the Danube, the disputes over prisoners and fugitives, and now the easterners playing into his hands with their foolish plot: all of this had given him the money and security he needed to raise him from robber baron to empire-builder. He might have taken the road to consolidation and stability.
But that was not his nature. For a robber baron there can never be money and security enough. It would not do to trust Constantinople to honour its new commitments for long. His eyes turned westward. Of course, there had been fifteen years of peace with Rome, rooted in the Hun–Roman alliance underpinned by the Huns’ long-term friend Aetius. But Attila was not one to let friendship stand in the way of booty. Within the year his vassals, possibly even his own logades, would be restless. Something had to be done.
Rome itself was too tough a nut to challenge head-on – yet – but its northern province, Gaul, was a softer target.
Poor tattered Gaul had been a playground for barbarians for almost 50 years. Britons had fled their troubled isle for the north-west, the area that would become Brittany. Vandals, Alans and Suevi had crossed the Rhine in 406, streaming south-west into Spain; the Burgundians, having been chased out of the Main area by a combined Roman and Hun army in 435–7, had settled in Savoy; and the Visigoths had wandered via Rome and Spain to Aquitaine, where in 439 Rome recognized their independence. Wandering bands of brigands, the Bagaudae, terrorized the north. There were Alans living near Valence, more near Orléans.
Historians like to deal with discrete entities such as tribes and nation-states, but in fifth-century Gaul individuals, armies and tribes flow and scatter and combine and part so continuously that it is hard to define the fundamental units, let alone weave them into a narrative. No rules of geography or politics stand up for long. Barbarian tribes tended to drift from east to west, except when they didn’t or when they settled; they were Rome’s enemies, except when they weren’t; they preserved their own identities, except when they didn’t.
One undeniable truth was that Gaul was now well frayed at its edges, offering Attila some interesting openings.
On its north-eastern edge, the Franks retained a sturdy independence. Having mopped up the intervening tribes along the Rhine, the Huns had easy access to them.
In the north-west, a huge area centred on Brittany, the Bagaudae were as restless as ever. Attila knew of them because a wealthy Greek doctor, Eudoxius by name, who had been living among them, had got into some sort of trouble and had had to make a run for it. A turncoat in Roman eyes, he could not go to Rome. He fled instead to the Huns.
In the far south-west, today’s Aquitaine, the Visigoths had settled after their long migration through Spain. The Visigoths were old enemies of both the Romans and the Huns. It was a Hun army, under Aetius’ principal lieutenant, Litorius, that had driven the Visigoths from Narbonne in 437, and then been virtually wiped out near the Visigothic capital, Toulouse, the following year.
Yet Gaul’s heart went on beating, for Gallo-Roman provincials in the secure central and southern parts looked to Rome for their protection and culture. In 418 it acquired its own local administration, the Council of the Seven Provinces, asserting Roman-ness and Christianity from its new capital, Arles (still today a city rich in Roman remains), dominating the Rhône delta. It was here that Aetius had based himself as Gaul’s defender from 424 onwards, standing as firmly as possible first against the Visigoths, but also against the Germans on the Rhine frontier. Of course, to do so he employed some of the very barbarians he was opposing – as he also did in his own cause: when Aetius, the defender of Gaul against Franks and Huns, was fired by the regent Galla Placidia in 432, he led a rebellious army of Frank and Hun mercenaries to force his reinstatement. In 450 Aetius was still playing the same role, his power spreading along Rome’s network of roads to garrison towns like Trier guarding the Moselle valley, and Orléans, holding the Loire against Visigoths to the south, and the wild Britons and Bagaudae of the north-west. This was, however, a province on the retreat, guarding its core. The Rhine, the old frontier, had its line of forts, but they were beyond the Ardennes, and hard to reinforce in an emergency.
Military force and Aetius formed only half the equation. For the other half, the cultural bit, we may turn to Avitus, statesman, art lover and future emperor. He was to be found 15 kilometres south-west of Clermont-Ferrand, in the steep volcanic hills of the Massif Central, beside a lake formed when a prehistoric lava flow blocked a little river. Romans called the lake Aidacum. Today, it is Lake Aydat, 2 kilometres across, smaller than it was in Roman times, but still edged with trees and open fields. It was here that Avitus built a villa to administer Avitacum, as he called it. It was described in a letter by his son-in-law, Sidonius, one of the best-known poets of his age, who made sure of his fame by writing obsequious homilies to the rich and powerful.1
The panegyric in question was written not long after these events to mark Avitus’ brief reign as emperor in 455–6, just before his death, when Sidonius was in his mid-twenties. In poems and letters full of floweriness and orotundities (he would have liked that word) he paints a portrait of what it meant to be a provincial Roman just before the Hun invasion. It is like looking back to the long Edwardian weekend just before 1914, or the life of privileged Anglo-Indians in the 1930s, or the old American South of Gone With The Wind just before the Civil War. There’s an empire going to pot all around, yet the provincial rich go on with their house-parties and baths and dinners and sports and pretentious discussions of literature, as if nothing will ever change.
Avitus, one of the most eminent men of his age, was in 450 virtually Gaul’s equivalent of royalty. He was the province’s anchor in turbulent times. The head of a rich and influential family, he had been a military commander under Aetius, and his service had been rewarded with the senior posts in Gaul, both military and civilian. In 439, after many envoys had failed, he persuaded the Visigothic king, Theodoric, to sign a peace treaty. By 450 Avitus was a noted patron of the arts, a lavish host, an impassioned collector of manuscripts, admired across the empire for his diplomatic skills.
Sidonius’ letter takes us on a guided tour of Avitus’ palatial home. To the west rises a steep hill, with ridges that run north and south of the villa and its 2-acre garden. The lake is to the east. Avitacum is more of a village than a villa in the modern sense, encompassing separate accommodation for estate administrators, tenant farmers and slaves. One important set of buildings, the central statement of wealth, culture and identity, are the baths, hugging the base of steep woodland, from which, when the tree-cutters get to work, the logs ‘slide in falling heaps almost by themselves into the mouth of the furnace’. By the furnace is the hot bath, supplied with steaming water through a labyrinth of lead piping. Off the hot room are the anointing room, where masseurs work their magic with perfumed oils, and the frigidarium. All these rooms are topped with a conical roof and enclosed by plain white concrete walls, decorated not with the usual murals but austerely and tastefully with a few lines of verse. Three arches with porphyry columns lead out to a 20-metrelong swimming-pool, its water, taken from a stream running down the hill, gushing through six lion-headed pipes with a roar that drowns conversation. Adjacent are the ladies’ dining-room, the main storeroom and the weaving-room. Facing the lake is a grand portico, from which a corridor leads to an open area where slaves and their families gather for meals.
Somewhere nearby – the layout is becoming hard to follow – are the winter dining room, with a vaulted fireplace, and the summer dining room, with a short flight of stairs leading up to a veranda overlooking the lake. Here guests enjoy watching the fishermen cast their nets or set lines dangling from cork floats to catch trout overnight. If it gets too hot, you can always recline in the north-facing drawing room, a good place to be lulled by the midday chirp of the cicadas. Nature has other choruses, too: frogs at twilight, geese in the evening, cocks before dawn, prophetic rooks at sunrise, nightingales in the bushes, swallows in the rafters. A walk down the grassy slope to the lake brings you to a grove, overshadowed by two huge limes, where the family play ball or dice with guests. You can take a boat-ride, if you like. Avoiding the marshy western end, with its vulgar and disorderly bulrushes, you row along the forested and sinuous southern bank, circling the small island, turning at a post dented by the oars of rowers frantic with sweat and laughter during one of the annual races. And over all this Avitus watches, because the library overlooks the baths and the lawn and the lake, and, while dictating his letters and conferring with managers, he likes to make sure his guests are enjoying this Roman Arcadia.
And what might the guests be up to, besides boating, bathing and eating? Sidonius tells us in another letter describing country-house activities (on two estates near Nîmes, actually, but such things were common upper-crust pastimes). In the morning, there might be a sort of pig-in-the-middle ball-game, in which a circle of players toss the ball while one of them tries to intercept it. Inside, others play at dice. To one side lie piles of manuscripts, as it were the Sunday newspapers, Country Life and a few of the latest hardbacks: some of a devotional nature for the ladies, and literature noted for its eloquence and stylistic grandeur for the men. Then, while the men discuss the latest Latin version of some eminent Greek writer, a butler announces lunch, it being the fifth hour by the water-clock – a range of roast and stewed meats and wine, enjoyed while listening to a reading of a short story. Afterwards, a light walk to work up an appetite is followed by a sauna. In those estates unlucky enough to lack a steam-bath, servants dig a trench, fill it with heated stones and build a roof of branches covered with rugs. While guests crowd in, servants throw water onto the stones.
Here we whiled away the hours with no lack of witty and humorous conversation, in the course of which we became wrapped and choked in the breath of the hissing mist, which drew forth a wholesome perspiration. When this had poured out sufficiently to please us, we plunged into the hot water. Its kindly warmth relaxed us and cleared our clogged digestions; and then we braced ourselves in turn with the cold water of the spring and the well or in the full flow of the river.
Remember as we wander the estate that although this was the grandest of provincial villas, the very pinnacle of refinement, elegance and wealth, there were hundreds of other lesser villas, all the product of Gaul’s 100 or so towns, some of them sizeable regional capitals like Narbonne and Lyons, even the meanest outshining Attila’s village on the Hungarian grasslands. It is just possible that one of Attila’s Roman secretaries had heard of Avitacum, and told his master of its delights. Such people, with their corrupting luxuries, would be easy prey.
And then, would not this be a wonderful spot for a conqueror to take his ease from the affairs of state – a country retreat, a Berchtesgaden or Chequers or Camp David, where some high-class Roman beauty could be allowed to play at culture, and entertain, and await the occasional gracious visit from her lord and master?
How to proceed? The main problem was to manoeuvre without seeming to threaten Gaul directly, and thus threaten Rome, and thus risk losing the friendship with Aetius, Gaul’s guardian. The Visigoths seemed to be the key, because they were traditionally enemies of both Romans and Huns. Attila tried to play the diplomat, at which, to be frank, he was a novice. To Rome, Attila made a specious argument about the Visigoths being vassals who had fled from their Hun overlord, and had to be brought back into the fold. He could give himself some diplomatic cover by claiming that, since the Visigoths were the enemies of Rome, he would be acting ‘as guardians of the Romans’ friendship’, in the words of a contemporary chronicler, Prosper of Aquitaine. Such a move might even win friends among Romans in Aquitaine, where landowners would be happy to retake estates seized by the Visigoths only a generation before.
But of course the Visigoths would not take kindly to Attila’s arrival. They too had to be neutralized. To Theodoric, Attila sent a message with an altogether different argument, urging him to recall who his real enemies were – i.e. the Romans – and in so many words offering assistance. As Jordanes comments, ‘Beneath his great ferocity he was a subtle man.’ Not very subtle, though. Was Attila really naïve enough to think that his enemies might not see where the greatest danger lay? I rather think he was.
His ambitions were encouraged from afar by another new barbarian kingdom, that of the Vandals in North Africa. Jordanes explains why in a striking anecdote. A Visigothic princess, Theodoric’s daughter, had married a Vandal prince, Huneric by name, son of the king, Gaiseric. At first, all went well. There were children. Then Huneric turned brutal, and paranoid. ‘He was cruel, even to his own children, and because of the mere suspicion that she was attempting to poison him, he had [his wife’s] nostrils and nose cut off, thus despoiling her natural beauty, and sent her back to her father in Gaul, where this wretched girl was an ever-present unsightly ruin. The act of cruelty, which affected even strangers, spurred her father powerfully to take revenge.’ So Gaiseric had cause to be nervous about what Theodoric might do. A pre-emptive strike by Attila would come in very handy.
What a prospect for Attila if he achieved his aim! With the Visigoths beaten, Attila would rule from the Caspian to the Atlantic, a sweep as wide as both parts of the Roman empire put together, with a supply line across Gaul cutting between the unruly Bagaudae of the north and the Roman legions to the south. It would surely then be possible either to crush the Bagaudae or simply ignore them and go for Gaul itself. Attila would rule all of northern Europe, a new, dynamic empire balancing, and then dominating, and eventually – why not? – conquering the decaying, corrupt and divided imperium to the south.
The long-term strategy is a guess, but there is some evidence that he had at least started on this road. He sent a note to Valentinian III in Rome stating his intention to attack the Visigoths and assuring him that he had no quarrel with the western empire. This was in the spring of 450, just the time to prepare for the long march westward. The campaign might well have gone according to plan – but for two events that changed everything, tempting Attila to reach far beyond his grasp, and thus assure his downfall.
The Emperor Valentinian III, still only in his early thirties, had a sister, Honoria, the two of them being the children of the formidable Galla Placidia, twice-widowed daughter of Theodosius the Great. Her own story had been a drama: carried off from Rome by the Gothic chieftain Athaulf, handed back to the Romans after Athaulf was assassinated, and then married to Athaulf’s Roman opposite number, Constantius (another Constantius, not to be confused with Attila’s secretary). What follows now is melodrama: the story of her daughter, the princess Honoria, of her wounded pride and how she changed the course of history.
The imperial family had been in the current capital, Ravenna, for the last 25 years, since the defeat of the usurper John (or Johannes). Honoria had from her girlhood been raised in a position of power and privilege, having been given the honorary title ‘Augusta’ far too young for her own good. She had her own residence in the palace, an establishment run by a steward named Eugenius. Like her mother, she was an ambitious woman; unlike her mother, she had plans to rule in her own right; and unlike her dim and feeble brother, the Emperor Valentinian, she had the wit to do so. All that she lacked was opportunity, which might have come her way had her brother not produced heirs, threatening to consign her to obscurity. But dreams of power remained, to achieve which she needed a consort. Eugenius was to hand, first as conspirator, and then as rather more, a story well milked by Gibbon: ‘The fair Honoria had no sooner attained the sixteenth year of her age than she detested the importunate greatness which must for ever exclude her from the comforts of honourable love: in the midst of vain and unsatisfactory pomp Honoria sighed, yielded to the impulse of nature and threw herself into the arms of her chamberlain Eugenius.’
It slightly spoils the story to know that she was actually no dizzy teenager but a scheming thirty-something when this happened. Gibbon says she became pregnant, and was shuffled off to remote exile in Constantinople. No-one else mentions pregnancy or an exile in Constantinople, and Gibbon does not provide his source, but in any event the affair and plot were discovered, Eugenius was put to death and Honoria betrothed to a rich and safe consul with no whiff of intrigue about him.
Driven into paroxysms of rage by the loss of her lover, the failure of her plans and the prospect of a boring husband, Honoria planned a dreadful revenge and a new life that would give her the power she longed for. As she knew from his recent note to her brother, Attila, already Europe’s most powerful monarch outside the empire, was planning to extend his rule to the land of the Visigoths and would perhaps end up as ruler of all Gaul.
This was how she would have her revenge on her brother: she would become Attila’s consort. She would reign, if not as empress of Rome, then as empress of Gaul.
Gibbon’s account of her plan is pure Hollywood, with a classic swing and a good dose of xenophobia:
Her impatience of long and hopeless celibacy urged her to embrace a strange and desperate resolution . . . In the pursuit of love, or rather of revenge, the daughter of Placidia sacrificed every duty and every prejudice, and offered to deliver her person into the arms of a barbarian of whose language she was ignorant, whose figure was scarcely human and whose religion and manners she abhorred.
There is enough in other sources for us to have faith in the main lines of the story. Among her entourage was a loyal eunuch, Hyacinthus, to whom she entrusted her extraordinary mission. Giving him a ring to hand to the Hun ruler as proof of her good faith, she sent Hyacinthus off to Attila with a plea for help. In exchange for a certain sum of money, he was to come at once and rescue her from a marriage that was hateful to her. Her ring carried the implication that in return for her rescue she would become his wife.
Valentinian had his spies, but Hyacinthus was long gone before he knew what was up. News of this scandalous business swept through the top ranks of society, and thus to the ears of Theodosius in Constantinople. Theodosius, who had just finished appeasing Attila after the collapse of the assassination plot, did not want either him or the newly made peace upset. His advice to Valentinian was to hand over Honoria at once. She could be sent off across the Danube, and good riddance. But Valentinian was not going to take this challenge to his authority. How Hyacinthus accomplished his mission was not recorded, of course, there being no official historian at Attila’s HQ to record it. I have a feeling that Onegesius would have been initially inclined not to bother his master with this envoy and his batty offer – but then had second thoughts. Perhaps the two of them heard Hyancinthus out after all, because Attila stored up the idea until it suited him to recall it. All this would have taken a few weeks. When Hyacinthus returned to his mistress to report the success of his mission, Valentinian had him arrested, tortured for the details, and then beheaded.
He must have been tempted to get rid of his troublesome sister as well, but was prevented by their ever-formidable mother, Galla Placidia, who demanded the care of her errant daughter. Valentinian duly handed her over; later that same year Placidia died, at which point Honoria vanished from history into her dull marriage, where her husband kept her from wreaking any more damage.
But the consequences of her actions lived on, boosted by the second unexpected event of 450. Honoria having made her extraordinary offer in the spring, on 28 July Theodosius, emperor of the East, fell from his horse and broke his back. Two days later he was dead, at the age of 50, leaving two daughters, no male heir, and a problem. Having come to the throne as a child 43 years before, he had never been a strong emperor. The power behind the throne had been his elder sister, Pulcheria, and she was not about to give up this power simply because her brother had died. Within three weeks she had married a Thracian senator named Marcian, revealing to a surprised but compliant court that he had been named successor by Theodosius on his deathbed. Marcian, like Pulcheria, was no appeaser. Now was a good moment to show some resolve and staunch the northward flow of gold, for Attila, in the midst of planning his move westward, would have neither the time nor the inclination to change tack. One of Marcian’s first acts was therefore to repudiate the payments to Attila agreed by Theodosius.
Attila was already gathering an army such as the Romans had never seen before, drawing on all the tribes of his empire, a list that grew ever larger with the passing years, until chroniclers bolstered the force with tribes drawn from myth and spoke glibly of half a million men. Well, it could hardly rival the combined might of Rome, but it might have numbered tens of thousands. Among them were Gepids from the Transylvanian hills, under their king Ardaric, much admired (Jordanes says) for his loyalty and wisdom; three Ostrogothic contingents from their new homeland south of the Danube, now returned to the care of Constantinople, but providing men for both sides, these ones being commanded by Valamir – tight-lipped, smooth-tongued, wily – with his lieutenants Theodomir and Vidimir; the Rugians, perhaps originally from northern Poland, soon to resettle in the hills north of Vienna; Skirians, whose foot soldiers had formed the backbone of Hun infantry units since the days of Ruga and whose ex-king, Edika, was very much in Attila’s good books, having proved his loyalty in the assassination fiasco; Akatziri and Herulians from the Sea of Azov, near the Huns’ homeland; those renowned lancers the Alans, some of whom had been absorbed in the early days of the conquest; from the Rhineland, contingents of Thuringians, and remnants of those Burgundians who had remained when the rest of the tribe migrated westward; and, from Moravia, Langobards (‘Long-Beards’), who had once lived on the Elbe and would later migrate to Italy as the Lombards, giving their name to their final homeland around Milan.
Attila was now in a bind. He had a campaign ready to roll, an army numbering tens of thousands to feed, no more funds from Constantinople, and the very real possibility that his long-term plans – first the Visigoths, then Gaul, then the empire itself – would be scuppered by Marcian’s army. There was no time to waste. But which way to turn first?
Perhaps Marcian was a paper tiger, who would crumple at the first firm touch? Far from it. A Hun embassy requesting aid received short shrift. As one account put it, Marcian replied that gold was for his friends, iron for his enemies. The most Attila could expect were ‘gifts’ if he kept the peace. And if he threatened war, he could rest assured that he would meet a force more than equal to his own. Hope flickered back to life when, in late 450, Marcian sent his own ambassador, Apollonius; but, on learning that he was not bringing tribute money, Attila furiously refused to see him, sending a message that he could leave whatever gifts he had and go, or be put to death. Apollonius, a general and one of the most senior envoys Marcian could have chosen, was not a man to be intimidated. It was not right, he replied, for Attila to make such a demand. He had the power to steal and kill, of course; and that’s just what he would have to do, if he wanted the Romans’ gifts without negotiation. Or he could act the diplomat, and have the gifts. A bold response, and well judged. Attila still refused to negotiate, but let Apollonius go, taking his goodwill gifts with him.
There was one chance that Attila could get what he wanted with hardly a battle – a remote chance, but still worth exploring. He had in his hand Honoria’s ring, and her words as reported by Hyacinthus. Thus did the crazy act of a woman wild with grief and frustration inspire an equally crazy response. The emperor’s own sister had begged for rescue, had surely – with her ring – offered herself to him in marriage; and just as surely a wife came with a dowry – in this case, a dowry limited only by Attila’s dreams. There were just two problems: first, she had to be freed; then she had to achieve what she had always wanted, which was to be co-ruler with Valentinian. As her betrothed, he assumed the right to make all this happen.
Priscus takes up the tale: ‘He sent envoys to declare that Honoria should not be wronged at all, and that if she did not receive the sceptre of sovereignty, he would avenge her . . . The Romans replied that Honoria could not come to him in marriage since she had been given to another and that she had no right to the sceptre since the rule of the Roman state belonged not to females but to males.’
It was mad. Attila must have seemed to Valentinian’s officials as removed from reality as did Idi Amin, Uganda’s buffoon-dictator in the 1970s, to Whitehall when he proclaimed himself Conqueror of the British Empire. When the inevitable reply came, Attila’s mind was made up. Westward it would be, as fast as possible to forestall action from Marcian in Constantinople. He would forget the Visigoths, and go for Gaul right away. With victory there, all northern Europe would be under his control, and even a united empire would quail.
First, though, there was the matter of getting there. This demanded a campaign such as Attila had never previously attempted. He was about to cross mountains and rivers and forests, which he had done when advancing into the Balkans, but never when simultaneously tackling such a great distance – indeed, he had never faced so great a distance at all. And speed was of the essence. What was needed was an equivalent of a Blitzkrieg: a fast thrust up the Moselle, then a cross-country dash that would outwit and out-manoeuvre the opposition and establish a bridgehead on the Atlantic. For this he needed his cavalry, with the infantry mopping up behind him. Better to do without the mangonels and trebuchets and siege towers with which he had taken Naissus. Such things could grind along at only 15 kilometres a day, and needed firm going. He would have to cover the entire width of France – over 700 kilometres – in a month.
But this could not be. He was trapped in paradox. He needed the speed; but there were towns that had to be neutralized. Fast-moving mounted archers were good in open country against infantry and the slower, heavily armed Roman cavalry, but it was no use galloping right past fortress-towns like Trier and Metz, leaving their battalions untouched to retaliate at their leisure. He had to have some siege gear after all, which meant wagons. There would be some wagons anyway, of course, to keep the archers supplied with arrows; but the heavy machinery required solid ones, which meant teams of oxen, and fodder, and outriders, who would also need feeding. It was possible to combine mounted archers and siege warfare near home, but not if you were moving steadily away from it.
It was a fearful risk. He would have liked, if possible, to avoid a conflict that was bound to be a tough one. He returned once again to the matter of Honoria. By now – with his army right on the imperial frontier, as committed to war as the German army in 1914 – he seems to have convinced himself that he actually had a strong case. Back went the envoys, with yet higher demands. Honoria was his by rights – they had the ring with them as proof – and so was everything that was hers, because she had received it from her father and been deprived of it only by her brother’s greed.
And what was it exactly that was hers, and which was now his? Priscus states Attila’s case: ‘Valentinian should resign to him half of his empire.’
It was an outrageous claim: all Gaul. Again came the inevitable rejection. Back went a final, uncompromising demand from Attila, who must by now have been on his way westward through the German forests to the Rhine. His ambassador told Valentinian: ‘Attila my master and your master has ordered you, through me, to prepare your palace for him.’
At last Rome got the message. No more self-deception about the target being Visigoths, no more reliance on the old friendship between Attila and Aetius, no more buying time with hopeful diplomatic exchanges. If he wasn’t stopped, he would go on until Rome itself fell.
1 Letter II, ii, to a friend, Domitius, an academic who (he writes elsewhere) was so severe that ‘even the man who, they say, laughed only once in his life was not as critical as he’. Perhaps the description of Avitacum was intended to lighten his friend’s grim temper.