Attila the Hun (36 page)

So how do you keep the secret? Maenchen-Helfen, again, is somewhat snooty about the idea. ‘To kill the labourers who buried the king was an inefficient means to prevent the robbing of the tomb, for thousands must have known of it. Besides, who killed the killers?’ I’m not so sure. It would not have been all that hard to
organize, because the Huns had an expendable labour force of slaves taken in a dozen campaigns, from among the Germanic tribes, from the Balkans, from Gaul, from Italy. Priscus had seen some of them on his trip, and contrasted the successful Greek businessman with the other grim-faced and depressed prisoners employed around Attila’s headquarters. The Huns had no compunction about killing (remember the two princely refugees punished by impaling). It is as easy to kill a man as a sheep – easier, actually, because with a sheep you have a slight extra worry about the quality of the meat. It would not have been a great leap from self-inflicted cuts to cutting the throats of house-servants.

I can imagine a crowd of prisoners, about 50 of them, led off to dig a burial-pit, utterly unaware of their coming fate, because the plan was known only to a few
logades
; then the approaching procession, and the crowd of mourning Huns, thousands of them, being told to return to their homes by the small group of
logades
; the slow advance with a guard of 50 or so Hun soldiers and pall-bearers, the reverential entombment, the slow work of filling in the grave and the careful raking of the spot, perhaps even an area that would be soon covered by the spring-time floods of the River Tisza; then the prisoners formed up, the march off into the darkness; and then, with the first glimmer of dawn in the eastern sky, the separation of the prisoners into groups, and the quick cutting of throats, with each Hun guard performing one or two executions, all over in a minute. Of course, there would be Huns who knew the
secret, but they would be the guardians of a sacred trust. The secret was safe with them, until the passing seasons and the Tisza’s annual floods had disguised the spot for ever.

¹
Jordanes, or Priscus, says that the Huns called the rite a
strava
, which, as the only single surviving word that could perhaps be Hunnish, has been the cause of much hopeful speculation. Scholars arguing for over a century agree on one thing: Turkish it isn’t, which means almost certainly that it was not after all Hunnish. According to several experts, it is a late-medieval Czech and Polish word for ‘food’ in the sense of a ‘funeral feast’, though whether the Huns had adopted it 1,000 years earlier, or whether Priscus’ informant used the term in passing, is a mystery.

ALMOST INSTANTANEOUSLY, THE EMPIRE THAT HAD SEEMED
so grand turned into a house of cards. Attila, the greatest leader to emerge from the steppes until Genghis, had never made proper provision for the succession. Priscus had seen him lavishing affection on his younger son, Ernak, and responsibility on his eldest, Ellac, but it takes more than wishful thinking to hold an empire together. Genghis got it right, establishing a bureaucracy, and written laws, and a formal statement of who should take over when he died a good eight years before the event. Attila was like a parent who dies intestate, with the result that his sons – and by now, with all those wives, there were so many that they were almost a sub-tribe – squabbled his inheritance to bits. Each one claimed his share, arguing that the vassal
peoples should be divided equally, as if they were family servants. The Mongols had stories about chiefs (Genghis, of course, but also others) who showed their sons how, while a single arrow can be easily broken, a bundle remains unbreakable: unity is strength! Attila and his family had no such wisdom. In Jordanes’ words, ‘A contest for the highest place arose among Attila’s successors – for the minds of young men are wont to be inflamed by ambition for power – and in their heedless rush to rule, they all destroyed his empire.’

If the sources for what happened while Attila was in power are thin, now the links to the outside world were cut to bits, and we have nothing but the baldest of generalizations. Chiefs of once independent tribes would not be treated like servants, and rose in fury. First, perhaps, the Ostrogoths, but the main rebellion was led by the leader of the Gepids, Ardaric, one of Attila’s greatest allies. He had supported his new lord on the Balkan campaign of 447 and formed the right wing on the Catalaunian Plains. It was he who now formed an alliance to win back the freedom of the Germanic tribes from their Hunnish overlords.

In 454, according to Jordanes, there was a great battle. Its details are unknown; all we have is a name, the Nedao river in Pannonia – but no Nedao river is mentioned in any other source, and the name and location have since vanished from memory. Even the most ardent of Hun experts, Maenchen-Helfen, can say no more than that it was probably a tributary of the Sava, which flows into the Tisza at Belgrade. Anyway,
it was a great victory for Ardaric, who, it was said, killed 30,000 Huns and Hun allies – a figure that should be cut to a tenth, as usual, if it is to be brought within the realms of possibility. Among the dead was Attila’s eldest, Ellac. ‘Thus did the Huns give way, a race to which men thought the whole world must yield.’

And thus did the Gepid Alliance take over the Huns’ lands, and their vexed relationship with the empire. Ambassadors were despatched to Constantinople, where they were well received by Marcian, who had stood up to Attila and had been waiting apprehensively for his next move. He must have been hugely relieved by events beyond the Danube, and happily granted Ardaric aid to the tune of 100 pounds of gold a year – one-twentieth of the sum his predecessor had paid Attila.

With Attila’s death, the imperial world became a marginally better place. Divided, the barbarians were easier to handle. There were large-scale resettlements of minor tribes: the Ostrogoths were granted land in Pannonia, and the remaining Huns broke into two groups, one on the Black Sea coast, another straddling today’s Serbian–Bulgarian border. Smaller struggles continued, especially between the western Huns and their old enemies, the Ostrogoths. Jordanes mentions a battle in which the Huns, ‘regarding the Goths as deserters from their rule, came against them as though they were seeking fugitive slaves’, and got a severe beating. A new Hun leader emerged, Tuldila by name. Sidonius mentions him in another of his grovelling
panegyrics, this one to the Emperor Majorian in 458: ‘Only one race denied thee obedience, a race who had lately, in a mood even more savage than their wont, withdrawn their untamed host from the Danube because they had lost their leader in warfare, and Tuldila stirred in that unruly multitude a mad lust for fight.’

In 465–6 they tried again. One of Attila’s sons, Dengizich, who had a base on the Sava, somewhere within 75 kilometres west of Belgrade, joined with Ernak (Attila’s favourite, still alive) and sent an ambassador to Constantinople, asking the emperor, now Leo I,
¹
to reinstate the market on the Danube. Leo refused.

There was one final outburst of bellicosity when Dengizich and the last of the European Huns crossed the frozen Danube in 467, forcing himself upon a community of Goths in a desperate bid for an area to resettle. In a message to the local imperial commander, Anagastes, Dengizich said his people were even prepared to surrender, if only they had somewhere to call their own; and he had to have an answer a.s.a.p. because ‘they were starving and could no longer wait’. The emperor’s reply favoured the Huns; the Goths, in fury, turned on them; the Huns defended themselves; the Romans joined in; and that was pretty much it for the Huns in Europe. They fought on, hopelessly, until the end just two years later, in 469, recorded by a
laconic early-seventh-century source, the
Eastern Chronicle
. Dengizich was killed by Anagastes and his head brought to Constantinople, where it was ‘carried in procession through the Middle Street and fixed on a pole at the Wooden Cross. The whole city turned out to look at it.’ No-one knows Ernak’s fate.

A few Huns survived, merged with other tribes or scattered slowly eastwards, dissipating like dust after an explosion, sinking back into the dreamtime from which they had emerged a century before.

A
s the remains of Attila’s empire faded away in the East, so did those of Rome’s in the West. For historians, the western empire’s decline was a messy business. For years, the Roman army had not been one of true-blue Romans. Aetius may have been called the ‘last of the Romans’, but his army on the Catalaunian Plains would have been nothing without Visigoths, Franks and Burgundians, among others. What he would have done without them the gods alone knew. Attila’s disappearance removed a major threat, but left many others scrapping over Rome’s decaying body. Yet he did not disappear completely, for his influence reached beyond the grave, his name weaving through events and personalities as the western empire brawled and murdered its way to extinction.

For some, and for a few years, Aetius had been Rome’s saviour, its bastion against barbarism, until all his efforts were reduced to nothing by an astonishingly melodramatic end. It came in Rome, where the hopeless Valentinian had re-established his court. Since his
mother and his anchor, Galla Placidia, had died in 450, Valentinian had had no-one to talk sense to him. He had, in Gibbon’s words, ‘reached his thirty-fifth year without attaining the age of reason or courage’, and was open to all sorts of nonsense, much of which was whispered into his ear by a prominent senator and two-times consul, Petronius Maximus. Aged 60, Petronius was described by the prolific Sidonius as one of Rome’s leaders, of insatiable ambition, ‘with his conspicuous way of life, his banquets, his lavish expense, his retinues, his literary pursuits, his estates, his extensive patronage’. He was also, it seems, extremely suspicious of the famous Aetius, with his wealth, his friends in high places and his own private barbarian army, all of which made him the western empire’s most powerful official. As Petronius hinted to the emperor through his favourite eunuch and adviser Heraclius, Aetius could well be on the point of staging a coup. He could even be planning a new dynasty, for his son Gaudentius was engaged to Valentinian’s daughter Eudoxia. It was up to Valentinian, Petronius implied, to strike first, or be struck.

One day in September 454, when Aetius was in conference with the emperor, the eunuch Heraclius by his side, the general began to argue the case for a quick marriage between their two children. Perhaps he was too insistent, and perhaps this seemed proof of a plan to seize power. In any event, Valentinian, whether in sudden anger or a prearranged attack, jumped from his throne, accused Aetius of treason and drew his sword – ‘the first sword he had ever drawn’, in Gibbon’s
overheated words. At this, Heraclius drew his as well, other guards followed his lead, and the unarmed Aetius died where he fell beneath a dozen blades.

With his death, Rome itself fell faster. A Roman is supposed to have commented to Valentinian: ‘You have acted like a man who cuts off his right hand with his left.’ A friend of the Huns, possibly of Attila, and then their enemy, Aetius had spanned the Roman and barbarian worlds, and held the uncertain balance between the two. There was and would be no-one to replace him.

So far so good for Petronius, then; and so bad for Rome, with worse to follow. Heraclius the eunuch, with ready access to the emperor’s ear, urged his master to avoid replacing one ambitious man (Aetius) with another (Petronius), and Petronius received no thanks or reward for his scheming. Gibbon has a good story about the emperor raping Petronius’ wife, but there is no need to repeat it, because Gibbon does not give his source, and Petronius already had quite sufficient reason for wanting revenge on Valentinian.

Incensed, Petronius hatched another plot. He approached two barbarian guards, Optila and Thraustilla, who had served with Aetius and now served his murderer Valentinian, which does not say much for the emperor’s vetting procedures. Six months after Aetius’ murder, in the spring of 455, Valentinian went to the Campus Martius, the Field of Mars, once marshy flatlands to the north of the city, in the bend of the Tiber, now drained and mostly built up. Accompanied by a small contingent, he was going to
practise archery in one of the open areas. Dismounting, he strolled to the mark with Heraclius and the two barbarian guards. As the emperor prepared to shoot, Optila struck him on the temple, and, as he turned, Thraustilla delivered a second blow – I should imagine with a mace – which killed him. Another blow killed Heraclius. It seems the weak and cowardly emperor, murderer of Rome’s star Aetius, was so loathed that the imperial guard made no move to defend him. The two assassins leaped on their horses and galloped off to Petronius to claim their reward.