Attila the Hun (26 page)

At this point, Attila nods to the guards holding Vigilas’ son. A sword is drawn. One word from me, says Attila, and the boy dies. Now tell me the truth.

This is the moment Attila has been waiting for since he first learned of the scheme some six weeks ago. A Roman ambassador caught in an assassination plot, and such a stupid one. Could anything better reveal the duplicity of the Romans and the superiority of the Huns?

Vigilas breaks down, bursts into tears, and calls upon Attila, in the name of justice, to let the sword fall upon him, not on the innocent lad, who knows nothing.

The truth, then.

So it all comes out: the truth, as Attila has known it all along. Chrysaphius, Edika, the meetings in the palace
in Constantinople, the emperor’s agreement, the gold, everything.

It was enough to save lives. If Attila can do anger, he can also do magnanimity. But there is more to be squeezed out of this. Vigilas is put in chains, and becomes a hostage. He, who said he had come to ransom others, will himself be ransomed. The son is to be sent back with the news, and will return with another 50 pounds of gold. There is something poetic in the way this works out. Fifty pounds was the amount suggested to fund the assassination of a king. Now Attila demands the same sum for a mere ambassador. The emperor will lose twice what he committed, and will gain nothing but humiliation. For anyone with a sense of drama, and Attila has that in abundance, this revenge is exquisite.

But there is no point unless he can ensure the humiliation is public, for both the emperor and the dreadful eunuch Chrysaphius. He sends Orestes and Eslas, both of proven honesty, along with the boy. Their job is to rub salt into the emperor’s wound.

When they have their audience with Theodosius in Constantinople, Orestes wears around his neck the bag in which Vigilas had hidden the gold. Chrysaphius is present, of course. The words in this scene are Attila’s, given to Eslas to speak:

Do the emperor and Chrysaphius recognize the bag? A significant pause for explanation and recognition, then Attila’s message:

‘Theodosius is the son of a nobly born father. So am I, Attila, the son of my father the King of the Huns,
Mundzuk. I have preserved my noble lineage, but Theodosius has not. Who now is the barbarian, and who the more civilized?’

The answer is obvious: the bag proves the point. Theodosius, by plotting the assassination of Attila, his superior, his master, has acted like a rebellious slave.
As a result, Attila declared, he would not absolve Theodosius from blame unless he handed over the eunuch for punishment
.

There is something else to be resolved as well: the matter of Constantius’ wife. His intended has been married off to someone else, taking her dowry with her. But Theodosius surely knew about this, in which case he had better get her back. Or was he not in control of his own servants? In which case, Attila would be happy to make the man an offer he would be unlikely to refuse.

There is only one way to get out of this mess and save the life of Chrysaphius: find a lady even richer and better connected than the one promised to Constantius, and then pay, and pay, and pay. An embassy is prepared, headed by men even more eminent than Maximinus. In exchange for cash on a scale never seen before, all is resolved. Attila withdraws from the lands south of the Danube, lands he would have struggled to keep anyway. Constantius gets his rich wife (she is the daughter-in-law of the general and consul Plinthas whose son has died). Vigilas is released, Chrysaphius saved to scheme again, the Roman prisoners of war released, the fugitive Huns conveniently forgotten.

And Attila is free to turn his attention to a softer target than Constantinople – the decaying empire of Rome itself.

¹
A
solidus
weighed 4.54 grams/0.22 oz. A fifth-century gold
solidus
today fetches up to $600.

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.