Attila the Hun (3 page)

Valens’ immediate concern was not the thud of alien hooves but the horde of refugees. They were Goths, members of a huge Germanic tribe that had wandered into eastern Europe and southern Russia two centuries before, and had now divided into western and eastern branches. These first refugees were western Goths, known as the Visi- (‘wise’) Goths, as opposed to the Ostro- (‘Eastern’) Goths, who, as Valens would soon discover, were hard on the heels of their distant kin.

Valens, approaching 50 and with twelve years of ruling behind him, knew a good deal about the proud and independent Visigoths, and had reason to be wary of them and their leader Athanaric. Wanderers no more, they had settled in what is now Romania and turned themselves from nomads into farmers, from marauders into disciplined foes. Thirty years before,
they had supposedly become allies of the empire, having been bribed into supplying soldiers for the armies of Rome and Constantinople. But they would not stay put, and ten years ago Valens himself had gone to war with the intention of penning them into their homeland. Things hadn’t gone to plan. The Goths could be broken in battle, but they had the annoying habit of holing up in the mountains of Transylvania, and as guerrillas they were unbeatable. Three years into the war, Valens – bow-legged, paunchy, with a lazy eye – needed to bolster his shaky authority with a show of dominance. But Athanaric said he had sworn a terrible oath to his father never to set foot on Roman soil; so, instead of summoning his opponent to discuss terms, Valens had to talk peace on a boat in the middle of the Danube, as if emperor and barbarian leader were equals. They agreed that good fences made good neighbours, that the Danube was the natural fence, and that neither side would cross it.

What a difference seven years made. Here were the Visigoths, down and out, about to ignore the terms of the treaty by invading not as warriors but as a whole nation of asylum-seekers: families, children, sick and aged, by the wagonload. What if Valens took a hard line, forced the refugees to stay where they were and revelled in Athanaric’s despair? It could not be that simple, because this was not Athanaric’s doing. Rumour of the alien menace had inspired rebellion among the threatened Visigoths, and Athanaric was no longer a force. It was a new leader, Fritigern, who was now begging for imperial permission to cross the
rain-swollen Danube, dreaming of a new life for his people in the welcoming and fertile valleys of Thrace.

The chances were they would come anyway; so Valens judged it best to turn the crisis to some advantage. Fritigern, smart enough to unite his desperate people and keep on the right side of Rome, made no threats; indeed, he promised not only to live peacefully, but also to supply more men for the imperial army. Both rulers knew there was a precedent: years before, a previous colony of Goths had been allowed to travel 150 miles south of the Danube to settle in Adrianople, today’s Edirne, and had proved exemplary citizens. Advisers urged Valens to see his former foes not as refugees but as recruits for the emperor’s overstretched army. Valens agreed, provided the Goths gave up their arms. Officials journeyed north, not to oppose, but to help, with transport, food and allocations of land in the frontier provinces.

So as the spring of 376 turned to summer the destitute Visigoths came plodding over the low-lying northern banks, past shallow lakes and marshes, taking to the river in boats and dug-out canoes hastily made from tree trunks, hauling rafts bearing their wagons and horses. Here the river, clear of the Iron Gate gorge that cuts through the Carpathian and Balkan mountains, runs broad and gentle for 400 kilometres before splitting up into its reedy delta. The challenge for the refugees was not the strength of the current, but the rain-swollen breadth of water, 2 or 3 kilometres across. Many, drawn by the sight of the low hills opposite, tried swimming, only to be carried
slowly downriver to their deaths in the flood plain.

How many were on the move? The imperial officials wanted to know to calculate food supplies and land grants. It was hopeless. Ammianus quoted Virgil:

To try to find their number is as vain
As numbering the wind-swept Libyan sands.

Perhaps they did not try very hard. The commanding officers were not the empire’s finest. Flawed, sinister and reckless, according to Ammianus, they hatched schemes to profit from the unarmed refugees. One scam involved rounding up dogs, which they offered as food if in return they received one Visigoth as a slave: hardly treatment to inspire lasting friendship.

Besides, this was no promised land. So many people all at once would have overwhelmed the Thracian countryside. They had to be kept where they were. The southern banks of the Danube turned into a vast holding camp for the bedraggled and tunic-clad refugees. To the Visigoths, it seemed that they had fled one frying-pan only to land in another. They muttered about taking direct action to seize the lands they thought they had been promised. The flawed, sinister and reckless regional commander, Lupicinus, ordered up more troops from Gaul to quell disorder.

But time was running out. The Visigoths’ eastern cousins, crowds of Ostrogoths also fleeing the unnamed menace to the east, arrived at the Danube, saw it weakly held, and crossed, without waiting for permission. Pushed and reinforced by the new influx,
Fritigern led his own people 100 kilometres south, to the local provincial capital, Marcianople (the ruins of which lie half-exposed near Devnya, 25 kilometres inland from the Bulgarian Black Sea resort of Varna). There Lupicinus, whose every act seemed to lead to disaster, invited the Visigothic leaders to a lavish dinner, ostensibly to discuss an aid package, while outside the walls the mass of their people, kept at bay by several thousand Roman soldiers, seethed with rumour and resentment. Suspecting their chief had been lured to his downfall, the Visigoths attacked a contingent of Romans and seized their weapons. When news of this foray reached the dinner table, Lupicinus had some of Fritigern’s attendants killed in revenge, and probably had plans to kill them all. But that would have been suicidal. The rioters were now an army. Fritigern had the presence of mind to point out that the only way to restore peace was for him to return to his people, sound, healthy and free. Lupicinus saw he had no choice, and released his guest – who at once, as Ammianus says, ‘took horse and hurried away to kindle the flame of war’.

Across Lower Moesia – northern Bulgaria today – outraged Visigoths robbed, burned and looted, seizing yet more weapons. A pitched battle ended with more Romans dead, more arms seized, and Lupicinus cowering in the sacked streets of Marcianople. The empire had overcome similar disasters, as Ammianus recalls – but that was before the old spirit of high morals and self-sacrifice had been undermined by a craving for ostentatious banquets and ill-gotten gain.

And, he might have added, sheer stupidity: for Valens, afraid that Goth would side with Goth, ordered the long-established and peaceful Visigothic colony in Adrianople to leave, at once. Adrianople, dominating the main pass out of the Balkan mountains on the way to Constantinople, was not a city to risk. He intended to secure the place, and achieved the exact opposite. When the Goths asked for a two-day delay to pack, the local commander refused, encouraging locals to drive them out by pelting them with stones. At this the colonists lost their tempers, killed a number of their oppressors and, quitting the city, threw themselves into the arms of their fellow Goths.

In the autumn of 377 the rival armies reached stalemate, with the main force of Goths seeking safety in the steep valleys of the Balkan range and the Romans in the parched grasslands of Dobruja, which today backs the Black Sea coast of Romania and Bulgaria. The Goths continued to pillage – the only course open to homeless refugees with families to feed – then broke through the Roman blockade to loot their way south into present-day Turkey. Ammianus paints a scene of anarchy anticipating future Balkan horrors: babies killed at their mothers’ breasts, women raped, ‘men led into bondage, crying out that they had lived too long and weeping over the ashes of their homes’.

What, meanwhile, were the prospects for reinforcement? Not good. Though the empire had perhaps 500,000 men under arms, half of these were frontier garrisons watching for trouble in the
barbaricum
, while only half formed mobile field armies. Besides, many of
the troops were non-Roman mercenaries, and any order to move inspired desertions. Troops could come only from the Gaulish frontier, under the command of Valens’ young nephew Gratian, who had been co-ruler and emperor of the West for the last two years. Still only eighteen, he had a growing reputation as a leader, but it was all he could do to keep the peace along the Rhine and the Danube. The plan to shift troops from Gaul to the Balkans leaked across the frontier, inspiring German raids that demanded Gratian’s attention all that winter. It was not until early 378 that he set out to aid his uncle.

I
f at this point you had asked a Roman or a Greek what was at stake, you would have been told that two worlds stood face to face: the barbarian and the civilized. In fact, in western, central and southern Europe, we are dealing with many worlds. The empire of Rome, Gaul and Constantinople; barbarian tribes fighting each other and the empire; and the untamed forested borderlands of the north-east.

To its citizens, the Roman domain was their world, their foundation, their pride, their very life. As republic and then as empire, it had been there for over 700 years, as we know from archaeological research – even longer for Romans, whose history was rooted in legendary beginnings: for them AD 377 was 1130 AUC,
ab urbe condita
, ‘from the foundation of the city’. Rome’s cultural roots were deeper still, for it was the heir of ancient Greece. It was Rome’s manifest destiny, as the rock of civilization and good government, to rule
the shores of the Mediterranean, to reach southwards down the Nile and northwards across the Alps, to Gaul, the Rhine, the North Sea and beyond, even to the remote northern reaches of the islands off Europe’s coast, where Hadrian finished building his rampart against the highland barbarians in 127. In the third century there had even been a brief advance across the Danube, into present-day Romania, when it seemed for a while that the true frontier in eastern Europe would be the Carpathians.

But expansion had its limits, dictated by non-Roman peoples and by geography. The north-east had a formidable barrier of forest.
The Forest
. To feel the trepidation inspired by the word demands an imaginative leap back to a time when much of Europe beyond the Rhine was still an untamed landscape, its vast, dark woodlands hardly touched. For non-forest people, it was the epitome of danger, the grim and forbidding abode of evil spirits. To Romans, the Ciminian forests of Etruria were bad enough; but those north of the Alps were the very essence of barbarism. In AD 98 Tacitus painted a picture of the landscape in his
Germania
. Beyond the Rhine, he says, the land was
informis
– unshaped, hideous, dismal: the word has all these senses. The Hercynian forest, named after an ancient Greek term for the forest of Bohemia in today’s Czech Republic, was by extension the tree-covered region that stretched from the Rhine to the Elbe. Pliny claimed that its huge oaks had never been cut or lopped since the world began. People said it took 9 days to cross north to south, and 60 days for the 500-kilometre east–west
journey – not that, in the words of Julius Caesar, ‘anyone in Germany can say that he has heard about the end of this forest’. Here lived beasts unknown elsewhere, some dangerous – elk with horns like tree-boughs, brown bear, wolf and aurochs, the European bison. Rome and Greece looked back to legends of Arcadian groves, recalling a time when even Greece was forested; but not to anything so uncharming and impenetrable as this.

To Romans, the inhabitants of this wilderness were themselves wild, men descended from a primal deity, Tuisto, who had sprung from the soil like a tree. They wore cloaks pinned with thorns and lived on wild game, fruit and milk products. In all this huge area there was, they said, not a single town. Villages, linked by tracks, were of mean wooden houses. The picture was not all bad, of course. Tacitus was eager to point out that, in contrast to the sturdy simplicity of the forest peoples, Rome had become soft and corrupt. It was best, though, for civilized folk to steer clear; those who dared to probe risked a terrible fate. In AD 9, Publius Quintillius Varus had led 25,000 men into the Teutoburg forest, in north Germany somewhere between the Rhine and the Weser, where they were ambushed and slaughtered by Cheruscan spearmen materializing from among the swamps and trees. Varus saw the devastation and fell on his sword.

Of course, things had moved on in 300 years. The clan warriors of Tacitus’ day, typified by the image of a hot-blooded, blond, beer-swilling giant, had long since vanished or amalgamated into larger units, the Saxons,
Franks and Alemanni from which future nations would arise. Already the forests were patched by the clearings and farms of a dozen tribes; but, by comparison with today, they remained largely intact. This was the primeval world of magic and power, the source of life and death, the habitation of prey and predator, where children were lost and witches found and spirits inhabited trees. It is recalled in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and the other fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers in the nineteenth century, and later still in the Mirkwood of Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
.

If the forest dictated the outermost limits of empire, the retreat from beyond the Danube had marked the beginning of its collapse. By the late fourth century, there were no thoughts of retaking trans-Danubian Dacia and of conquering the German forests. Soon Britain would be abandoned, Hadrian’s frontier wall left an empty monument to former greatness. Once all had been governed from Rome, by the emperor and the Senate. Now the Senate was a husk and real power was wielded by the army, while the emperor did his best from some campaign HQ, or from his residences in Trèves and Milan and Ravenna.