Attila the Hun (38 page)

EVEN IN HIS LIFETIME ATTILA WAS BOTH OPPRESSOR AND
hero, both symbol of paganism and instrument of God, depending on the beholder. Within years of his death, the truth was being encrusted with propaganda, legend, myth and pure hokum, flowing in a torrent of folklore that separated into three streams: the Christian West, the Germanic and Scandinavian borderlands, and Hungary.

M
ost of Attila’s victims and most of those who wrote about him were Christian, and Christians had an official agenda: to show that, although existence was a battleground between good and evil, between God and Satan, the end result would be God’s victory. Human history, therefore, was an unsteady progression towards
Christ’s second coming, and every event had to be examined for evidence of God’s omnipotence and wisdom. The task of the Christian chronicler was to see through the murky flow of events to the underlying reality. Attila’s grim advance across Europe was no credit to him. He was unwittingly God’s instrument, a scourge laid upon Christian backs for past sins – or, in other metaphors, the wine-press of God’s vengeance, the furnace for the purification of his gold – and an opportunity for God to reveal his power, not directly, but through his representatives, the higher the better, from ordinary priests and nuns to bishops and the pope, with victims being marked down not as failures but as martyrs. In this cataclysm, the old corrupt world of pagan Rome must be seen to vanish and a new age to dawn, a Christian renaissance, with yet greater glory to follow.

So there is a certain logic to the way in which Hunnish mayhem was exaggerated. Vandals gave their name to a type of routine marauder; Goths inspired ‘Gothic’, which was originally a term of cultural abuse before it acquired its flattering overtones; but the Huns were always beyond the pale. From the chronicles written in the 300 years after Attila’s death, you would think he had left nothing standing in Gaul and Italy. He was even said to have destroyed Florence, killing 5,000 people, though the Huns never crossed the Po, 100 kilo-metres from Florence. As the
Life of St Lupus
puts it, ‘no city, castle or fortified town anywhere could preserve its defences’. Attila left nothing but barren land behind him. He was the fulfilment of the apocalyptic prophecy in the
Book of Revelation: ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations.’ The worse the image of destruction, the greater the influence of those who successfully stood against him.

The most admired writer of his time, Sidonius, made sure that praise went first and foremost to those with divine backing. Well, he would. He had friends in high Christian places, as his surviving letters show. Lupus, Gaul’s most eminent cleric; Sidonius’ own father-in-law, the future emperor, Avitus; Prosper, successor to Anianus as Bishop of Orléans, ‘the greatest and most perfect of prelates’; and a dozen other bishops. He would himself become a bishop (of Clermont-Ferrant, when he was about 40). Who really saved Troyes, Orléans and Rome? Not Aetius and his army, but three godly men: Lupus, Anianus and Pope Leo – actually four, if you count Avitus, whose Christian commitment to peace enabled him to persuade his Visigothic friends to join Aetius.

The result of this agenda is that the real-life individuals and events were quickly hidden behind propaganda and symbols. Lupus and the rest became epitomes of saintliness, Attila the leader from hell – literally, in some portraits, which show him with devilish horns and pointed ears.

It’s an insidious process, because historians – especially those trying, as I am, to write narrative history – are tempted to mix legends with history, simply because they make a good story. I did it earlier with St Agnan saving Orléans. See what happens to the
story of Attila’s retreat from Italy after the meeting with Leo (assuming it took place at all). By the eighth century it has become a miracle. Paul the Deacon, an Italian of that time who wrote a history of the Lombards, has Attila remarking: ‘Oh! It was not the one who came [i.e. Leo] who forced me to depart, but another who, standing behind him sword in hand, threatened me with death if I did not obey his command.’ After that, almost everyone repeated the story, in ever more imaginative variants. Ravenna, the temporary seat of imperial administration, became the usual venue, although Attila never approached it. In one version, Attila asks who is approaching. It is the pope, he is told, ‘coming to intercede with you on behalf of his children, the inhabitants of Ravenna’. Attila takes this as a joke: ‘How can one man produce so many children?’

That was in the ninth century. Four hundred years later, in newly converted Hungary, the
Gesta Hungarorum
has Attila taking the pope hostage, until he is terrified by a vision, ‘namely, when the king looked up he beheld a man hovering in the air, holding a sword in his hand and grinding his teeth, who threatened to cut off his head. So Attila obeyed the Romans’ request and released the Apostle’s successor.’ Others turn the vision into the war-god Mars, or St Peter; or transform the pope’s colleagues into sword-wielding saints, Peter and Paul, a version portrayed in a fresco by Raphael, painted in 1514 for Leo’s papal namesake, Leo X. That painting, moreover, in which Leo I has Leo X’s features, is entitled
Attila the Hun
Turned Back from Rome
– not from Ravenna, please note. So, in the course of 1,000 years, a legend invented 300 years after the event became accepted fact; and it remains so even today in certain quarters. One Christian website says with casual assurance: ‘The man-like form Attila saw in the air holding a sword in his hand was probably an angel, as in similar Biblical accounts.’

The same thing happened with the epithet ‘Scourge of God’. The first surviving reference is in the
Life of St Lupus
, written in the eighth or ninth century, but it would probably have already been doing the rounds orally well before that. There are many later versions of the story. Here is one.

Troyes is well defended with walls and troops, commanded by the bishop. Lupus is on guard. Attila, swollen with arrogance, approaches on horseback, and bangs on the town gate.

‘Who are you,’ demands Lupus from above, ‘you who scatter peoples like chaff and break crowns under your horses’ hooves?’

‘I am Attila, King of the Huns, the Scourge of God.’

‘Oh, welcome,’ is the bishop’s unlikely reply. ‘Scourge of the God whom I serve! It is not up to me to stop you.’ And he descends to open the gate himself, take Attila’s bridle and lead him into the town. ‘Enter, Scourge of my God, and go wherever you wish.’

Attila and his troops enter, wander the streets, pass churches and palaces, but see nothing, because a cloud conceals their gaze. Blinded, they are led straight through the town, miraculously recovering their sight
on exit. Thus is the Beast tamed by God’s servant.

And it worked. History slips away, legend sticks. Today, some histories simply refer to Attila as
flagellum dei
, the Scourge of God, as if that were how he was known at the time. You may even see the nonsensical statement that Attila adopted the phrase himself, as if he spoke Latin and consciously assumed the role of divine scourge.

Many places in western Europe have utterly spurious stories of Attila and Huns, so far removed from reality that the names should be in quotes. In the Friuli region of north-east Italy, folk tales distorted Attila’s German name, Etzel, into Ezzel and mixed him up with a harsh twelfth-century ruler, Ezzelino: ‘They said he was the son of the Devil or of a dog, he had black hairs on his nose that stood on end when he was angry and every speech he began with a bow-wow-wow.’ In Metz, an oratory acquired defences of granite that broke Hun swords. In Dieuze (in Lorraine, eastern France), Huns were blinded because they captured a bishop, their sight restored on his release. Modena in Italy had its own version of St Lupus. In Reims, the Devil himself opened the town’s gates to the Huns.

Cologne has the most famous of ‘Hun’ victims – St Ursula and her many virgins (I’ll tell you the numbers shortly). You can see their bones to this day in Cologne Cathedral; not
their
bones, of course, because the whole thing is a myth from which sprang a tangle of variants. The unlikely seed for the tales is a fourth- or fifth-century inscription, still on view in the Church of St Ursula, according to which a senator called
Clematius was impelled by visions to rebuild a basilica on this spot to honour some martyred virgins. No hint of how many virgins, no mention of Huns. Over the years, these victims acquired a story, pulled together in 1275 and first printed by William Caxton in 1483. It concerns a princess, Ursula, from either Britain or Brittany, depending on the version, who is wooed by a pagan king. She refuses the match, dedicating herself to perpetual virginity and demanding a corps of ten virgins to attend her on a pilgrimage. The story becomes hopelessly complicated, with a journey down the Rhine to Rome and disputes between rival prelates, but the upshot is that on their return Ursula and her virgins reach Cologne, only to find it besieged by the Huns, who, on the orders from their unnamed prince, behead the lot.

It was never more than a legend, and soon became ludicrous. An early version recorded the eleven martyrs in Latin numerals as ‘XI M’, with the M standing for ‘martyrs’. But M is also 1,000 in Latin script, which was how some unknown copyist understood it. Now, suddenly, there were
eleven thousand
virgins – not that it made sense, because Ursula was one of the eleven, so the 11,000 would have included 1,000 Ursulas. Never mind. The legend thrived, inspiring a cult and variants and paintings, all branching off one another like a hypertext fantasy. In one version, Attila himself offers to marry Ursula, allowing her to assert her virgin holiness: ‘Get away!’ she says. ‘I did not disdain the hand of Caesar only to become the property of someone as cursed as you!’ In 1143, bones which supposedly
were those of some of the long-martyred virgins were sent to the Rhineland monastery of Disibodenberg, where they inspired the ascetic and intellectual Hildegard of Bingen to write a song (‘O ecclesia’) rejecting earthly marriage for the love of God. Later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ursula and her story were much painted: by two anonymous Dutch and German masters, by Caravaggio, and by Carpaccio, who portrayed her life in eight episodes, with the Huns in Florentine dress. Also in the sixteenth century, Lucas Cranach the Elder drew on the story for an altarpiece in Dresden, focusing not on the victims but on a dispassionate Hun prince leaning on his sword. In 1998 the British playwright Howard Barker used the myth to examine the meaning of a commitment to virginity (victims) and the nature of a moral detachment (the prince) that seemed to recall that of a Nazi SS officer. Meanwhile, the legend had spun off into another realm, having inspired a sixteenth-century Italian nun, St Angela, to found the Ursuline order of nuns, which by 1700 had 350 foundations in France alone, many of which were forcibly shut down in the French Revolution. In Valenciennes, eleven Ursulines were guillotined for teaching Catholicism, allowing those who like historical parallels to cast the atheistic revolutionaries as Huns. Stories, paintings, a play, music, nunneries, schools and colleges galore – it goes on, endlessly. As a result of the sub-cult of Hildegard and the boom in medieval chants, a quartet has recorded
11,000 Virgins: Chants for the Feast of St Ursula
(Anonymous 4, HMV 907200). Enough
already: if you are looking for real-life Huns, this is about as much help as using
Hamlet
to research medieval Denmark.

Other traditions in the ex-Roman empire took root and flourished, perhaps the oddest being the tales of the ‘good Attila’. Apparently, towns looking for their origins saw Attila as a force for renewal, as in the following fairy story.

Once upon a time, Attila was in Padua when there came a poet with a composition in praise of the great chief. Leading Paduans prepared a performance. The poet, following literary tradition, gave Attila divine origins. ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ interrupts our hero. ‘To compare a mortal man with immortal gods! I’ll have nothing to do with such impiety!’ And he orders the poor man to be burned on the spot, along with his verses. When the pyre is ready and the poet tied on top, Attila approaches: ‘Enough. I just wanted to teach this flatterer a lesson. Let us not frighten poets who use truth to sing our praises.’

There might have been enough here for some great post-Roman epic in French or Italian. No writer took up the challenge with success. But there have since been quite a few failures, all of them revising history in vain attempts to make something worthwhile. In 1667 Pierre Corneille’s
Attila
had 20 performances, then faded into well-deserved obscurity. A terrible German melodrama by Zacharias Werner, lawyer, philosopher, priest and playwright, performed a few times in Vienna in 1808, ends with Attila’s murder (not a natural death, as per history) by the Roman princess Honoria (not the
Germanic princess Ildico). An English version, put on in London in 1832, concluded with a line by Attila’s brother Bleda (whom Attila murdered, but who is somehow still alive): ‘Ha! Is he dead? The tyrant dead? Ha! ha! [Laughs hysterically].’

This dire creation was the basis for Verdi’s 1846 opera
Attila
. Written when the struggle for Italian unification, the Risorgimento, was in full swing, it is full of enthusiastic expressions of Italian patriotism inspired by its hero’s destructive ambitions. The first scene plunges right into the theme, when the maidens of Aquileia appear, alive, against Attila’s express command. ‘Who dared against my interdict to save them?’ demands Attila of his Breton slave, Uldino, who replies that they are a worthy tribute for Attila: ‘Warriors extraordinary, they defended their brothers . . .’