Attila

• 1. Introduction

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  Attila ruled the Huns from 434 until his death in early 453, and in those two decades he forced two Roman empires to their knees. His name, which most scholars trace to the Gothic word atta meaning "father" combined with a diminutive suffix, translates roughly as "little father." Yet the man described by the Byzantine diplomat Priscus was anything but modest in bearing: "haughty in his walk, rolling his eyes hither and thither, so that the power of his proud spirit appeared in the movement of his body." Short, broad-chested, flat-nosed, with a thin beard sprinkled with grey, he cut a physical figure that Priscus described as showing "evidence of his origin." How did a nomadic king from the steppes east of the Volga come within reach of both Rome and Constantinople? What made Roman emperors, Visigoth kings, and Frankish rulers all fear a single man? And why, more than fifteen centuries after his death, does his name still carry weight from Budapest to Ankara?

• 2. A World in Motion

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  The Huns first appeared west of the Volga around 370, migrants out of Central Asia who built their power through mounted archery and javelin throwing. They annexed the territory of the Alans and then attacked the Gothic kingdom between the Carpathian Mountains and the Danube. Vast populations fled ahead of them: Vandals, Alans, Suebi, and Burgundians crossed the Rhine into Roman Gaul on the last day of 406. The Goths had already crossed the Danube in 376, initially submitting to Rome but soon rebelling, killing Emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople in 378.

  Attila's father Mundzuk was the brother of kings Octar and Ruga, who ruled the Hunnic empire jointly in the early fifth century. That pattern of shared kingship was common among the Huns, though historians are unsure whether it was a fixed institution or simply a customary arrangement. Several historians have proposed 406 as Attila's birth year, though the question remains open, with some placing it earlier in the 390s. By the time Attila came of age, the Huns had become a regional superpower, and the relationship with Rome was already paradoxical. The Romans hired Hunnic warriors as mercenaries, even using them in civil wars; the usurper Joannes recruited thousands of Huns to fight Valentinian III in 424, with the future general Aëtius managing that arrangement. The Huns called this relationship tribute; Rome called it payment for services. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, described the arrangement with bitter clarity: "They have become both masters and slaves of the Romans."

• 3. Joint Rule and the First Wars

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  Rugila died in 434, leaving his nephews Attila and his elder brother Bleda as joint rulers of the united Hunnic tribes. Their very first year of power was spent negotiating. They met Eastern Roman envoys at Margus, modern Požarevac, seated on horseback in the Hunnic fashion, and secured a treaty with terms heavily in their favor. Rome agreed to double its tribute to 350 Roman pounds of gold annually, to pay eight solidi ransom for each Roman prisoner, and to open markets to Hunnic traders.

  For several years the brothers turned their attention east, invading the Sassanid Empire before being defeated in Armenia and withdrawing. When they returned to Roman attention in 440, they struck hard. A bishop at Margus had allegedly kept property Attila regarded as his; while Romans debated how to handle the matter, the bishop defected to the Huns and betrayed the city. Meanwhile the Western Empire was stretched thin: the Vandals under Geiseric had seized Africa, Rome's richest province, while the Sassanid Shah Yazdegerd II invaded Armenia. The Romans stripped the Balkans of troops to send to Sicily, and Attila and Bleda walked through the opening. By 441 they had sacked Margus, Viminacium, Singidunum, and Sirmium.

  In 443, Attila deployed something the Romans had not seen from him before: battering rams and rolling siege towers. He used them to assault Ratiara and Naissus, the city known today as Niš. Priscus, who traveled through Naissus not long after, found it deserted except for a few sick people in the churches; the ground near the riverbank, he wrote, was full of the bones of men slain in war. The subsequent advance swept through Serdica, Philippopolis, and Arcadiopolis. Rome could not hold back the Hunnic army in the field; it was only the double walls of Constantinople that stopped the advance. The final peace terms extracted by Attila were punishing: Rome owed 6,000 Roman pounds of gold in back penalties, and the yearly tribute tripled to 2,100 Roman pounds of gold.

• 4. Sole Ruler, Greater Terror

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  Bleda died around 445, likely shortly after the Huns withdrew from the Byzantine campaign. Attila then ruled alone, and in 447 he rode south again into Roman territory. The Roman army, under the Gothic general Arnegisclus, met him at the Battle of the Utus; the Romans were defeated, though they inflicted heavy losses. Nothing now stood between the Huns and the Balkans as far as Thermopylae.

  Constantinople survived this second push only through the efforts of Zeno's Isaurian troops and the prefect Constantinus, who organized emergency reconstruction of the city's earthquake-damaged walls and built a new line of fortification in front of the old. The toll on the surrounding region was staggering. Callinicus, writing in his Life of Saint Hypatius, recorded that more than a hundred cities were captured, that Constantinople almost fell, and that the monks and maidens slaughtered were beyond counting. It was during this period that Attila established his uncontested grip over an empire stretching across Central and Eastern Europe, commanding Huns, Ostrogoths, Alans, and Gepids, among many others.

• 5. The Western Gamble

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  In 450, the course of events shifted through an unlikely figure: Honoria, sister of the Western Emperor Valentinian III. To escape a forced betrothal to a Roman senator, she sent Attila a plea for help, along with her engagement ring. Attila interpreted this as a marriage proposal and demanded half the western Empire as dowry. Valentinian's mother Galla Placidia persuaded him to exile Honoria rather than execute her; Attila's envoy replied that the proposal was legitimate and that Attila would come to collect what was his.

  Attila had other reasons to move west. The Visigoth king Theodoric I held power in Toulouse, and the gifts and diplomatic efforts of Geiseric, who feared the Visigoths, may have helped push Attila in that direction. He also intervened in a Frankish succession dispute, backing the elder claimant while the Roman general Aëtius backed the younger. Crossing the Rhine in 451, he arrived in Belgica with an army that Jordanes, probably exaggerating wildly, described as half a million strong. On the 7th of April he captured Metz. Strasbourg fell. Other cities can be traced through the records of their bishops: Nicasius was killed at the altar of his church in Rheims; the bishop Lupus of Troyes is credited with meeting Attila personally to save his city.

  Aëtius built a coalition from Franks, Burgundians, Celts, and eventually the Visigoths under Theodoric. The combined Roman and Visigoth force reached Orléans before Attila, turning him back. Aëtius pursued and caught the Huns near Catalaunum, modern Châlons-en-Champagne. In the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, Attila chose ground where his cavalry could operate. Theodoric was killed in the fighting. The outcome is generally read as a strategic Roman-Visigoth victory, though Aëtius did not press his advantage. According to Edward Gibbon and Edward Creasy, he feared an overwhelming Visigoth victory almost as much as a defeat, and so he let Attila withdraw.

• 6. Italy and the End

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  Attila returned in 452, still pressing his claim for Honoria. His army devastated northern Italy, razing Aquileia so thoroughly that, as the sources record, it was afterwards hard to identify where the city had stood. Refugees from the attacked communities fled to small islands in the Venetian Lagoon, giving rise to what would eventually become Venice. Aëtius lacked the strength to offer a pitched battle; he could only harass and slow the advance.

  Attila halted at the River Po. Disease and starvation may have weakened his army by that point, and Italy had suffered a terrible famine in 451. An East Roman force had also crossed the Danube under an officer named Aetius, defeating the Huns left behind to guard the home territories. When Emperor Valentinian III sent three envoys to meet Attila near Mantua, at the Mincio river, the delegation included the high officers Gennadius Avienus and Trigetius, as well as Pope Leo I. Attila agreed to withdraw from Italy and negotiate peace. Priscus noted that superstitious fear played a role: Alaric, who had sacked Rome in 410, had died shortly afterward, and that precedent gave Attila pause. Hydatius summarized the combined pressures concisely in his Chronica Minora: famine, disease, and military defeats in the Hunnic homeland forced the army to conclude peace with the Romans.

• 7. Collapse and Memory

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  Attila's three sons, Ellac, Dengizich, and Ernak, immediately quarreled over the inheritance, demanding that peoples and territories be distributed among them by lot. That fragmentation gave Ardaric, the Gepid ruler who had been one of Attila's closest advisers, his opening. He led a Germanic revolt in Pannonia; at the Battle of Nedao in 454, Ellac, Attila's eldest son, was killed. The empire came apart within a year of Attila's death.

  Dengizich attempted a renewed invasion across the Danube in 468, but was defeated at the Battle of Bassianae by the Ostrogoths and killed the following year by the Roman-Gothic general Anagast. With that, Hunnic dominion ended.

  What survived was the legend. Attila appears as a major character in the Nibelungenlied, in several Norse Eddas and sagas, and in texts from the Atlakviða to the Volsunga saga. Medieval Hungarian chronicles, including the Gesta Hungarorum and the Chronicon Pictum, claimed that the Árpád dynasty descended directly from Attila. King Matthias of Hungary, who reigned from 1458 to 1490, was content to be called "the second Attila." The meeting with Pope Leo I was retold in increasingly miraculous terms, eventually attracting the attention of Raphael and the sculptor Algardi, whose treatment Edward Gibbon praised as establishing "one of the noblest legends of ecclesiastical tradition." In 1846, Giuseppe Verdi wrote an opera loosely based on Attila's Italian campaign. A sword held today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, a cavalry sabre probably made by Hungarian goldsmiths of the ninth or tenth century, has been identified as the Sword of Attila. In Budapest alone there are ten streets named after him, one running behind Buda Castle.