Attila the Hun (31 page)

They didn’t. The only person to mention the comet was the Spanish bishop and chronicler Hydatius, and that was only in passing. Of the battle itself being marked by an event of astronomical significance – nothing.

It is dangerous to draw conclusions from the absence of evidence, but this absence, combined with the other absences of storm and moon, strongly suggest that the day after the battle dawned dry, drab and cloudy. If so, imagine the surviving Romans staring over their shields at a scene of dusty desolation – corpses everywhere, riderless horses grazing, the Huns sheltered in silence by their wagons, the course of the Aube marked by a line of trees across the treeless plains rolling away into grey twilight.

Stalemate – with the advantage to the Romans, for they were on home ground of a sort, could keep supplies coming, and could keep the Huns penned up until starvation drove them out. It would take time. Attila showed no sign of giving up, inspiring a Homeric image from Jordanes. ‘He was like a lion pierced by hunting spears, who paces to and fro before the mouth of his den and dares not spring, but ceases not to terrify the neighbourhood by his roaring. Even so this warlike king at bay terrified his conquerors.’ The Romans and Goths re-formed, closer, and began their siege, forcing the Huns to keep their heads down with a steady rain of arrows.

Attila saw a possible end. His shamans had predicted
the death of a commander, who might turn out to be not Aetius, but Attila himself. He prepared for a hero’s death by immolation, as if about to enter a Hunnish version of Valhalla, the abode of slain warriors. He ordered a funeral pyre of saddles – an indication, by the way, that the Huns had wooden saddles, Mongol-style, not leather ones – ready for an overwhelming Roman assault. They would never take him alive, never have the satisfaction of killing him or seeing him die of wounds.

Meanwhile, the Visigoths had been surprised not to find their king leading the besiegers, just when victory seemed certain. They looked for and found him, a corpse among a pile of corpses. As the siege continued, they raised the body on a bier and, led by Thorismund and his brother, carried him off for a battlefield burial, with ritual laments – dissonant cries, as Jordanes calls them. It seems they made their slow procession in full view of the Huns, to display their pride in their fallen chief. ‘It was a death indeed, but the Huns are witness that it was a glorious one.’

Jordanes says that 165,000 died in the course of the two-day battle, and another 15,000 in the Frank–Gepid skirmish the night before: 180,000 dead. It is a ludicrous number, at a time when towns counted their populations in the low thousands. The countryside could not have supplied food enough to sustain such numbers. No-one can know how many actually did die, but if the losses had been one-tenth Jordanes’ numbers they would still have been massive. From armies that may have numbered 25,000 each, perhaps one-third
died: some 15,000 at a guess; and among them, as the shamans had predicted, a commander, though the two main protagonists, Aetius and Attila, had been spared to fight another day.

T
rying to identify the site of the battle is, as Maenchen-Helfen snootily puts it, ‘a favourite pastime of local historians and retired colonels’, as if the matter were beneath the notice of serious academics. But this was a turning point in European history. It matters, if only because, were it to be found, archaeologists could, perhaps, find some evidence of what really happened.

In August 1842 a workman was quarrying sand some 400 metres east of the village of Pouan, 30 kilometres north of Troyes, when he found about a metre down a skeleton, lying on its back in a grave apparently dug so hastily that it was not even flat. The skeleton lay on its back in a gentle curve, as if in a deckchair. Alongside were two rusty sword blades, some gold ornaments and a ring engraved with four enigmatic letters,
HEVA
. Jean-Baptiste Buttat might have kept his finds a secret, or disposed of them privately. Luckily, he sold the two sword blades to the Troyes museum, even though it could not afford Buttat’s full asking price, and the decorations to a local jeweller, who in 1858 sold them to Napoleon III. The regional government then offered the swords to the emperor, so that the treasure could be all together. Napoleon III saw the wisdom of the offer, but then, in a fit of generosity, turned it on its head. ‘National antiquities belong where they were discovered,’ he wrote, and sent the jewels to join the
swords, re-creating the original find in Troyes’ museum. There, in the excavated Roman basement, the Treasure of Pouan has pride of place.

Actually, there’s not much to it – the two swords; a torque, or neckring; a bracelet; two buckles and some decorative plaques; the ring. These few items were made to assert wealth and dignity. The settings and the sword handles are covered in gold leaf, the jewels are garnets. The larger sword, a double-edged blade almost a metre long, is of three pieces of steel turned, hammered and welded in the technique known as Damascene. Yet it is light enough to be used in one hand. Its pommel is of a unique shape, an oval piece of wood inlaid with garnets. The shorter sword is a single-edged weapon known as a scramasax.

In 1860 a local antiquarian, Achille Peigné-Delacourt, published his conclusions about the treasure. ‘A chance discovery may have unexpected consequences,’ he begins, ‘and may furnish the means to resolve long disputed historical questions.’ This is a case in point. Perhaps – Peigné-Delacourt quotes an eminent historian, a certain Monsieur Camut-Chardon – these were the remains of a warrior who, overtaken by some disaster, had fallen into the river, the course of which had subsequently changed? No, replies Peigné-Delacourt, that cannot be, because the soil in which the items were found long pre-dates the appearance of man on earth. M. Camut-Chardon had reported another bolder hypothesis, only to reject it. Peigné-Delacourt picks it up and runs with it: ‘I am going to declare that I am one of the bold who attribute the skeleton and
ornaments found at Pouan to Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, who was killed fighting Attila in 451.

‘This conclusion impels us to fix the battle-ground to the spot where these remains were recovered.’

The geography of the place seemed to fit well with Jordanes’ account. Roman roads bypassed and converged on Troyes. One road from Orléans, now vanished, led past Troyes 25 kilometres to the northwest, through Châtres (originally
castra
, the camp). It was here that the Franks and Gepids could have skirmished. A road ran north from Troyes, straight as an arrow, and so it remains today, the N77, still running as the Romans built it over a plain as big as an ocean. It’s all agribusiness now, a patchwork of pastel browns and greens and yellows, but 1,500 years ago its chalky grasslands would have been terrific galloping country. A ten-minute drive brings you to Voué, which in Roman times was Vadum. It is on a stream, the Barbuise, with low, firm banks, no obstacle at all to a galloping horse, just a few centimetres deep, which runs off to your left to Pouan, with the Aube just beyond. The ground rises gently to the east of Pouan. Here, suggests Peigné-Delacourt, was where the Romans gathered, blocking the Huns from crossing the river.

I had no great hopes that Pouan would offer any revelations. On the map, it looks to be just one among the villages loosely scattered across the Catalaunian Plains north of Troyes. I went there early one spring morning, expecting drabness and insignificance, and was charmed. The Barbuise, flowing in over flat chalky fields and past trees speckled with balls of mistletoe,
trickles right through the village, past a half-timbered mill and a solid grey church and houses with exposed beams. There is a public tennis court. Pouan is a comfortable dormitory for commuters to Troyes – or so I imagined, because there was no-one around to ask. It was time for breakfast. There seemed to be no square, no central shopping area, no focus to the village’s bourgeois rambling. Ah, a bakery. It had tables, and there was a woman setting out chairs, and it advertised coffee. No, I was too early. All I could hope for was information. I hoped I did not derange her, but could she tell me – did people round these parts know about Attila? She looked politely puzzled. ‘
Attila le Hun
,’ I explained. ‘The great battle, near here, sixteen hundred years ago. Romans and Huns. And the treasure . . .?’

‘
Pardon, m’sieur, je ne sais rien
. Have you tried the
mairie
?’

Well, I couldn’t wait for the town hall to open. That was that. I turned the car, paused to consider a lane leading along the Barbuise, backed up beside a half-timbered house to check my map, and saw a woman hurrying towards me.

‘You want to know about Attila,
m’sieur
?’ She was panting after her run from the bakery. My strange question had become a matter for instant gossip. ‘My husband knows about Attila. Excuse me, my child, the bus, but this is our house, go and ask him.’

There was an entrance into a courtyard, the house on one side, a barn on the other – guarded, to my surprise, by a lion made of white stone. From the barn’s shadowy interior stepped a slim figure in jeans and a
green sweater – ‘Raynard Jenneret.
Sculpteur
’, as a sign on the barn proclaimed. We explained ourselves to each other. Jenneret mostly works metal into angular creations that look like toys, or science-fiction machines, or tribal totems, but the lion suggested more traditional interests. He likes history. Attila and Aetius were old acquaintances of his. He knew all about the treasure, and had himself dug around the site in the hopes of finding more. So he could take me there? He was delighted. We drove down a track, bumping past a field of winter wheat to our right which rose like a soft billow in this ocean-plain to a cross, an odd thing to mark the middle of a field. To our left, the slope levelled into an ancient flood plain, across which the Aube wound out of sight a kilometre away. Now I saw what gave Pouan its advantage. As well as having its own charming little river, it stood a crucial metre or two clear of the Aube’s flood plain. Once, this sloping wheatfield had been a gentle riverbank, which accounted for its economic significance as a source of sand. Builders had always used it, Jenneret said; still do, as some yellow mounds further along the slope revealed. That also explained the cross – 20 years before, a
sablier
had been quarrying when the sand fell in and suffocated him. Right there, in waste ground coarse with grass clumps and straggly dogwood, was where the treasure had been found. Oh, no doubt that it was Theodoric’s burial, and this was where Attila fought Aetius. Everyone knew that.

This, I could well believe, was the setting for a scene imagined by Peigné-Delacourt, a conspiracy theory of
ambition, intrigue and murder. In his book, he wonders if Thorismund, eager to claim the throne over his brothers, might have had an interest in finding a corpse, any corpse, that could be identified, rightly or wrongly, as his father’s, and buried quickly, with a show of grief and instant acclamation for Thorismund as king. And then, given the uncertainty of the battle’s outcome and the knowledge of where the tomb was, would it be likely that those who conducted the burial would be allowed to live? It all sounds a bit over the top, given that the burial would have been so quick, almost in the heat of battle, with no burial mound to mark the spot. But it is not entirely the fruit of his imagination, because there have been other finds in the area of Pouan and its neighbour Villette, a couple of kilometres to the east – two small bronze vases, a cup, a gilded bronze ewer, three blades, horse-trappings: all sustaining the idea – for Jenneret, the certainty – that this was the battle-ground, and this the site of Theodoric’s burial.

French scholars tend to agree. Others, on the other hand, point out similarities with the artefacts of other cultures in Russia or across the Danube, undermining any Visigothic links. Estimated dates range from the third to the seventh century. It is all infuriatingly vague, though when they try for greater accuracy archaeologists are drawn back to Peigné-Delacourt’s suggestion, to the mid-fifth century, to a rich Goth, and, in the end, to Theodoric.

Of course, the letters
HEVA
engraved on the ring would settle it, if only anyone had a clue what they
meant. The ring and the script are Roman. Scholars agree that it must be sheer coincidence that Heva is a common Latin spelling for Eve, unless we adopt the romantic idea that this noble had the ring engraved in honour of some Roman mistress. Scholars of Gothic have thrown up several possibilities, circling around
heiv
, ‘house’ or ‘family’, as in
heiva-franja
, ‘head of a household’, possibly connected to the Old High German,
hefjan
, to raise or educate. Old Saxon has
hiwa
, a husband. Or it means ‘Strike!’, the imperative of
heven
, to strike. There is no sense to be found in any Gothic or Germanic solution. Latin, though, might work. The inscription is, after all, in fine Latin lettering, which justifies a little speculation. Suppose this was a royal ring, and engraved accordingly: what might Theodoric have wished it to record? Remember that he aspired to things Roman. He was a friend of one of Gaul’s most eminent scholars and politicians, Avitus. He knew that Rome proclaimed its authority with four letters:
SPQR
,
senatus populusque romanus
, the Roman Senate and People. I like to think that
HEVA
is a four-letter phrase, recalled by initials. But this is not a ring of royal authority, because it was not taken from him in death. It’s personal, as personal as his sword. Perhaps he wished to state his own claim not in terms of government, but of personal achievement.
HIC EST
(‘This is’) fits; but ‘This is’ who, or what? We have several possible initial As: Aetius, Avitus, Aquitania. Theodoric had conquered Aquitaine. How about
HIC EST VICTOR AQUITANIAE
– ‘This is the Victor of Aquitaine’? Or perhaps he liked to look forward to ever
greater success –
HIC EST VICTORIAE ANULUS
, ‘This is the Ring of Victory’? A totally different possibility was suggested to me by David Howlett, editor of the Oxford University Press’s
Dictionary of Medieval Latin
. An inscription on an Anglo-Saxon lead pendant, found in the village of Weasenham All Saints in Norfolk, suggests that some in Europe shared with Jews a mystical interest in the names of God.
⁵
In that case, perhaps the initials stand for
Ha’shem Elohim V’ Adonai
– The Name of God is ‘Lord’. How odd if this were so. A Hebrew phrase recalled in neat Roman letters? But why, and whence? The questions fire the imagination – was this a war trophy, a gift or purchase from a Romano-Jewish community, a talisman with a meaning hidden from its owner, who looked on it as a Tolkeinian Ring of Power? Well, this is all wishful thinking. But it keeps open the hope that Raynard Jenneret, or some future
sablier
, will stumble on a bit of armour or a coin which will tell us once and for all, as clearly as if incised in a fine Roman typeface, that Theodoric was here, and so therefore
HIC ERAT
A
TTILA
.