Attila the Hun (32 page)

T
horismund now wanted to finish the job. But Aetius, older and wiser, had a longer-term strategy in mind, which involved doing something quite astonishing.

He decided to let the Huns off the hook.

It takes some effort and some tortuous logic to see
why. The Visigoths were Rome’s traditional enemy, drawn into alliance only to face the great danger posed by Attila. If Attila were now overwhelmed and wiped off the face of the empire, that would leave the Visigoths in a position of some strength, and as much of a threat as the Huns had been – more, in fact, because Aetius knew the Huns of old and thought he could deal with them again. He knew the Visigoths as well, and did not trust them, whatever Avitus claimed about their ambitions to be considered civilized. Aetius was getting on. He was set in his ways, and was certain the Visigoths would remain a threat; as always in the past, he would need the help of the Huns to restrain them. Better an uncertain balance of power now than the risk of total collapse later. Attila had asked only for half the empire; the Visigoths would want the lot.

Of course, he couldn’t tell Thorismund all that. Instead, he reminded the Visigoth prince of his brothers at home. Once they knew of their father’s death, who knew what disputes over the succession might break out, if Thorismund, the eldest, were not around to claim the throne? Better for him to swallow his anger, break off the engagement and head for home to secure the succession. He was not to worry – the Romans would handle the Huns from now on. He made a similar argument to his Frankish allies. The surviving Huns would be on their way soon, cutting through or round the Ardennes, which would put them in a good position to extend their control over the area, unless the Franks were strong enough to put them off. Better for the Franks as well to head home.

Both agreed. And so, to the astonishment of the Huns, the rain of arrows ceased, the Visigoths filed away south-west on the 350-kilometre journey back to Toulouse, the Franks left for Belgium, and silence fell. Attila’s troops, in their laager of wagons, wondered what it meant. They knew about retreats like this, for their archers had used similar tactics many times in the last century. It had to be a trick. They sat tight.

‘But when a long silence followed the absence of the foe, the spirit of the mighty king was aroused at the thought of victory, and his mind turned to the old oracles of his destiny.’ A commander had died; he, Attila, was therefore destined to live. But there was no point in fighting on. Granted safe passage, the Hun wagons began to roll away, along the roads past Troyes to the Moselle, the Rhine and distant Hungary.

It is just possible that Lupus had something to do with Attila’s escape. All this while, he had been hostage and guide, whether forced or voluntary. Perhaps, working for his own survival and that of his town, he had advised on the battle site. Now, having survived, he would advise how best to retreat, and get the battered Huns away from Troyes as fast as possible. If so, it worked; though not to Lupus’ advantage, if there is any truth in his life-story. After seeing Attila safely back to the Rhine, he was allowed to return, as promised – to a less than rapturous reception.

He received from his people only rejection for all the benefits he had brought them; for instead of being welcomed by the citizens, as he deserved for having
delivered them from the loss not only of their livelihood but even their lives, seeing as how he had led Attila to the Rhine, he received defiance and discontentment as if he had been at one with him, on account of which the saint withdrew to Mt Lassoir, near Châtillon-sur-Seine.

T
hen, penitence done, he returned to Troyes to live for another 25 years, dying forgiven, famous and much honoured, and in due course canonized as St Loup, memorialized in the names of dozens of towns, peaks and churches all across France.

Gaul was saved.

And Attila lived to fight another day.

¹
Not exactly. The actual date he mentioned was
viii kal. julii
, i.e. 1 July minus eight days: 23 June.

²
. . . and thus a distant kin of his Visigothic victim. His claim was not believed by enough people to turn him from footnote into hero.

³
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1973.

⁴
For further details, see Gary Kronk,
Cometography
, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1999).

⁵
The find is described by Elisabeth Okasha and Susan Youngs, ‘A Late Saxon Inscribed Pendant from Norfolk’,
Anglo-Saxon England
, vol. 32, Dec. 2004. The suggested interpretation is Howlett’s.

THE BATTLE OF THE CATALAUNIAN PLAINS IS OFTEN SEEN AS
one of the great decisive battles in world history, the battle that saved western Europe from Attila. It was not that simple. This was not a Stalingrad, a turning point that stopped a barbaric invader in his tracks; more of a Hunnish Dunkirk, at which a great army escaped to fight on. Orléans had been the turning point, as Attila had seen when he avoided action and turned around; but it led to no definitive conclusion. Thereafter, for a couple of weeks, he was working to keep his army intact. The Catalaunian Plains was a rearguard action, forced upon Attila when he was already in retreat.

What if he had been victorious? After losing the initiative at Orléans, he would have had at best a
bridgehead in Gaul. The open fields of Champagne would have offered valuable pasture and suitable territory on which his mounted archers could operate. But that would have been of use only if he managed to hold Metz, Trier and the Moselle corridor to the Rhine. That was his supply line, the artery that would feed him in some later advance that would seize all Gaul, the half of the empire he had so speciously claimed as Honoria’s dowry. Now all that was lost, at least for the present. He had escaped by the skin of his teeth, and by pure chance – there was no way he could have known that Aetius would decide to let him go for political reasons to do with the death of Theodoric.

No-one in these confused times accorded the battle the importance it later acquired. In that very year, in Marseille, a chronicler was at work recording what he learned of these events. This unnamed sage, known only as the Chronicler of 452, was a devout Christian, his aim being to continue the history written by Jerome, which ended in the late fourth century. Yet when he came to the events of the last chapter, all he wrote was: ‘Attila invaded Gaul and demanded a wife as if she were his by right. There he both inflicted and received a serious defeat, and withdrew to his own country.’ Scholars find it interesting that he already knew of the Honoria scandal, and apparently did not doubt it. They are also interested by what he did
not
say. Since this was not narrative history, more a chronological list, we have to guess what he approved and didn’t. He finished writing his account in 452, when Aetius was still one of the most powerful men in the empire (and might well
be returning to Arles, a day’s ride from Marseille, any time), but he does not say that this was a decisive victory for the great Aetius, because at the time of writing Aetius did not look like much of a saviour. ‘At this time, the condition of the state appeared to be intensely miserable, since not even one province was without a barbarian inhabitant, and the unspeakable Arian heresy, which had allied itself with the barbarian nations and permeated the whole world, laid claim to the name of Catholic.’ On top of that, Attila was still alive and kicking, which was very bad news, because he was, at that very moment, mounting yet another and possibly far more serious invasion. In brief, the world was going to the dogs and
it was all Aetius’ fault
.

B
y autumn 451 Attila was back in his Hungarian headquarters, with its wooden palace, its stockaded houses, Onegesius’ bath-house, and its encircling tents and wagons. Would he then have been happy to sit there, enjoying the loot brought back from the campaign in Gaul? A different character might have been. He might have learned his lesson, settled down to consolidate an empire that, if nurtured, would have created a lasting counterpart to Rome and Constantinople, trading with both. But Attila was no Genghis, willing to plan for stability and impose his vision on his minions and vassals. He was trapped by his circumstances. There would not have been much left in the way of silks, wine, slaves and gold after several weeks of enforced and ignominious retreat. His multi-tribal chieftains would have been restless.

No-one recorded what he did that winter. But we can infer that it was not good. In the summer of 451 the Emperor Marcian had called his 520 bishops to meet at Nicaea in the autumn, to sort out the vexed matter of Christ’s nature, saying that he himself hoped to be there ‘unless some urgent affairs of state should detain him in the field’ – which in fact they did, the field in question being Thrace. Something had drawn him to the Danube frontier. Something forced the venue of the Fourth Ecumenical Council to be changed from Nicaea to Chalcedon, safe the other side of the Hellespont from Constantinople. And something prevented bishops from the Danube border area going to Chalcedon. If that something was Attila, back from failure in Gaul, it would not have been enough to keep the funds flowing, for these were the same regions the Huns had pillaged time and again. They were milked dry.

By now Attila knew that his main enemy, Rome, had an unreliable ally in the Visigoths. The two would unite only in defence of Gaul. If he could ensure that his enemy was Rome, and only Rome, surely victory would follow, as it would have done at Orléans had it not been for Avitus, Theodoric and the Visigoths. Like all dictators, he must have known that his precarious confederation could be held together only with ever grander visions, and the promise of ever greater victories. What greater prospect than Rome itself – vulnerable, as everyone knew, because it had already been taken by barbarians, namely the Visigoths themselves, 40 years before?

But there were other enticing prospects along the way, in particular the town that guarded the main high road into Italy from Hun-occupied Pannonia. First in line was a minor prize, the Slovenian town of Ljubljana (Emona in Roman times), which, once taken, opened the road to the small but significant Isonzo river, Italy’s traditional frontier (and for that reason the site of no fewer than twelve battles in the First World War). It was what lay at Isonzo’s southern end that interested the Huns.

The fortress-town of Aquileia had a proud history of defending the homeland’s north-eastern corner. Almost two centuries before, its women had joined in to fight off a rebel, Maximin, by donating their hair to make ropes for the town’s defensive machinery. A temple had been built to ‘Venus the Bald’ in their honour. One of the richest, strongest and most populous of cities on the Adriatic coast, it had been built as a gateway to the east, a nodal point linking the land routes from Rome to the south and the Alpine pass to the north with the sea routes from the Adriatic.

So it was much more than a military base. Its thriving commercial life owed much to the presence of a large community of Jews, ‘Orientali’ in Latin sources, who may have been the original settlers. In any event, they introduced silk-weaving, dyeing and in particular glass-making, which had been practised in the Middle East for 2,000 years. It was they, therefore, who inspired the creation of a 5-kilometre canal leading across the Isonzo’s swampy mouth from the sea. The result has been analysed in a paper by Samuel
Kurinsky,
¹
a Jewish American businessman, philanthropist and scholar with a specialist interest in the history of glass-making. ‘The Jewish community’, he writes, ‘may have been one of the largest and most economically influential of the Diaspora, exceeded only by those of Rome and Alexandria.’ Naturally, given the town’s large Roman majority and the growth of Christianity, the Jews suffered repression, principally under a late-fourth-century bishop, Chromazio. It was he, it seems, who sanctioned the burning of the synagogue in 388, excused by St Ambrose, in standard antisemitic style, as ‘an act of providence’. Over time, Christian buildings replaced the Jewish ones, some of which were unearthed by archaeologists from the 1940s onwards, often being described as ‘paleo-Christian’ or ‘pagan’ despite their Jewish iconography. Among the finds are several lavish mosaic floors, one right under the bell-tower of a later Christian basilica, another huge one – over 800 square metres, making it one of the largest of its time – under the basilica itself. Alongside is a marble-lined, octagonal
mikvah
(ritual bath), fed by a spring, with the six steps required by Jewish law.