Cross-section of the Theodosian Walls.
public domain
The Theodosian Walls ran for three miles, north to south, following the undulations of the land from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara, where they connected with the sea walls, enclosing the city in an impregnable seal. The result was a wonder of late antiquity, a triple-layered network of defences that formed a crippling physical and psychological barrier to any would-be conqueror. Nine fortified gates were built into the walls to allow for military and civilian traffic. The most spectacular of these was the legendary Porta Aurea, the Golden Gate, clad in marble, gold and bronze, reserved for the ceremonial passage of a triumphant emperor.
As the city accumulated more and more wealth, Constantinople became a tempting target for other powerful nations. But the presence of the Theodosian Walls made an attack on Constantinople an act of madness; it would be like attempting to devour a giant porcupine. Ambitious warlords could only watch as their armies were shot to death in a hail of arrows, while the people inside the city could simply sit tight and enjoy continuous resupply by sea. There were cisterns full of fresh water, and silos that could be stocked full of grain. And they could always catch fish from the Golden Horn.
THE THEODOSIAN WALLS are still present in Istanbul, more or less. Some sections have been demolished, other sections are slowly disintegrating, a few have been restored. But it’s still possible to follow the ancient path of the walls from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn. I’ve set aside a day for us to do this.
‘I really want to stand on those battlements, Joe, and see what it was like for the poor bastards who had to charge at the walls.’
‘Why? What would have happened to them?’
‘First they had to get across a ditch while carrying a sword and a ladder.’
‘What about the ones who did get out of the ditch?’
‘Well, they would have to bolt towards the thirty-foot-high outer wall, dodging arrows and missiles. If they made it to the foot of the wall, they would have to plant a ladder and climb it, while the Romans in the guard towers above could rain rocks and boiling oil on their heads. It would be almost impossible to survive all that.’
‘What about the ones who did?’
‘Well, this is the cruellest part. If, somehow, a soldier managed to climb over the parapet, then the full horror of his situation would be revealed to him: he would see that he was caught in a perfect 360-degree killing zone between the towers of the outer wall and those of the much higher inner wall. In no time that guy would be pincushioned by arrow bolts from all sides.’
Nineteenth-century photo of Theodosian Walls.
public domain/Wikimedia Commons
The Theodosian Walls were the embodiment of every bit of tactical, strategic and engineering know-how the Romans had picked up from eight hundred years of siege warfare. Avars, Bulgars, Serbs and Seljuks would try to take the city by siege, and fail. Arab commanders who had never known defeat would fling thousands of soldiers at the walls in epic struggles that would last for years before packing up what was left of their armies and staggering home.
The walls were particularly affronting to the hordes of Hunnic and Turkic horsemen who would periodically ride out from the steppes of Central Asia into Europe, with hopes of plundering the wealth of the great city of the Caesars. They were riders accustomed to wars of movement, where a sudden inspirational dash might win the day. Instead they found themselves stuck on the outskirts of the city for months, camped in wretched conditions in front of the immovable walls. They were like the cavalrymen of World War I, obliged to abandon their horses and dig in for the slow grind of trench warfare.
The Princess and the Scourge of God
PRINCESS HONORIA was young, clever and ambitious, but for some months now she had been living in miserable seclusion within the women’s quarters of the Great Palace in Constantinople. Each day she endured the withering scorn of the emperor’s sisters, because Honoria was unmarried and with child.
Honoria was a very long way from her home in Ravenna. She was the older sister of Valentinian III, the boy-emperor of the battered western Roman empire. Honoria knew she was cleverer than her weak little brother; it was galling for her to see the throne handed to Valentinian in 426, but there was little she could do about it. As an imperial princess, Honoria could exercise very little power over her own life, let alone impress her will upon the empire at large. Nonetheless she was adorned with the noble title of Augusta, and upheld as a model of Roman womanhood: beautiful, chaste, saintly.
Honoria was expected to live quietly and remain a virgin until a suitable husband could be found. Bored beyond belief, she started an affair with her chamberlain, a man called Eugenius, and they conspired to overthrow her brother and rule the western empire together. The conspiracy was exposed when Honoria became pregnant. Eugenius was executed and Honoria packed off to faraway Constantinople to bear her child, away from the gossip of the emperor’s court in Ravenna.
And so Honoria’s days were spent wandering around a few unfriendly rooms in an unfamiliar palace: resting, eating and nursing her swelling belly, until the day came when her child was ready to be born. The fate of the child she gave birth to is not recorded.
Now that the disgraced princess was no longer a virgin, her market value as a bride had fallen considerably and her furious mother, Galla Placidia, had to abandon her hopes of marrying Honoria to a powerful prince or king. Eventually a suitable husband was found: a bland, middle-aged senator named Bassus Herculanus, who was considered a safe pair of hands.
Hemmed in on all sides, it seemed to Honoria that all the important decisions of her life had been made for her by others. Having no desire to enter into a meaningless marriage with a dull aristocrat, Honoria did an extraordinary thing: in the spring of 450 she wrote a letter, a plea for help, to the most dangerous man in the world – Attila the Hun.
THE ROMANS NAMED him ‘Flagellum Dei’, the ‘Scourge of God’. Even today, the name ‘Attila the Hun’ embodies the very notion of a pitiless warlord at the head of an all-conquering horde. The Huns were to be the first of a long line of fierce nomadic peoples who would periodically charge out on horseback from the Eurasian steppe to threaten the existence of Constantinople.* Their arrival on the Hungarian plain was first registered by the Romans as a mysterious aftershock: in 376, imperial authorities reported a flood tide of Germanic refugees spilling into Roman territory, fleeing in panic from a horde of unknown warriors on horseback. Then the Huns crossed the Danube and all hell broke loose.
The Romans were not overly alarmed at first. They had, by now, become painfully accustomed to barbarian raids on their lands, and would usually gather their people into their walled cities, stock up on supplies, pull up the drawbridge and wait for the barbarians to lose interest or be chased away by the legions. No barbarian tribe had ever bothered to master the siege technology necessary to penetrate city walls.
The Huns were different: they used siege towers and gigantic, swinging battering rams to smash their way into Roman cities at will. At every step they introduced new tactics and technologies that made redundant the old Roman ways of waging war. Their most brilliant innovation was the composite bow – a weapon not carved from a single shaft of timber, but constructed from separate sections of wood, sinew and bone plates, which delivered much more kinetic energy to the arrow than a longbow. Hunnish warriors were highly skilled horse archers, able to adeptly manoeuvre, turn, reposition and fire. No one, it seemed, could beat them in open battle.
The Huns defeated every army they attacked and took every city they besieged. The Romans could find no answer to the Hunnish terror. Their very sight inspired primordial fear: the heads of Hunnish children were bandaged from birth, in such a way that the bones of the skull were flattened, which distorted and elongated the cranium. In the eyes of the Romans, they looked like monsters from hell.
IN 434, THE LEADERSHIP of the Hunnic tribes passed to two princes: Attila and his br
other Bleda. The brothers were to rule jointly, but Attila was clearly the senior figure. A Roman ambassador described him as ‘short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey; and he had a flat nose and tanned skin, showing evidence of his origin’.
The dominion of the Huns now extended from Central Asia to Germany, and their armies were poised on the empire’s doorstep. But Attila and Bleda had no desire to conquer the Romans and burden themselves with the business of running a complex imperial bureaucracy. It was far safer and simpler to make the Romans their clients and squeeze them for gold. Every time the Romans tried to wriggle out of this extortionate relationship, Attila and Bleda would send their men across the Danube, laying waste to Roman cities and settlements until the emperor cried ‘Enough!’ Then, just to make sure the lesson was learnt, the Huns would double the annual indemnity.
The histories record that sometime in 445 Bleda was killed, most likely assassinated at the direction of his brother, who became sole ruler of the Hunnic tribes. Theodosius, hoping to exploit the confusion among the Huns, refused to pay the annual indemnity. Attila retaliated by launching another invasion of the Balkans. Although the Romans had had four years to dig in and strengthen their lines of defence, the Huns, once again, ran over them. A major, bloody battle was fought at the River Utus and the Roman army of Thrace was defeated and scattered. The road to Constantinople was now wide open to Attila.
Then, at this dangerous moment, an earthquake rippled across Constantinople, shaking down whole sections of the Theodosian Walls. Fifty-seven towers were brought to the ground and huge gaping spaces opened up between them. The Romans held their nerve: the emperor ordered his Praetorian prefect Constantinus to begin repairs immediately. The prefect mobilised the factions from the Hippodrome into labour battalions to repair the broken defences. Working day and night with desperate speed, the walls were restored and reinforced, the gates repaired and the towers rebuilt. A third line of defence, a trench, was excavated in front of the outer wall to stall Attila’s siege engines. All of this was accomplished in an astonishingly short sixty days. The workers chiselled comments into the stonework, taking pride in their achievement.
Siege armies could only advance slowly, so the repairs were completed well before Attila and his Huns could come close to the city. Attila had no interest in throwing his precious army against the reinforced, rock-solid, triple-layered walls of Constantinople. It was never his intention to ‘take’ the city anyway. He didn’t see Constantinople as a prize to be won; to him, the city was more like a complex machine, plugged into international trade routes that could reliably deliver wagon-trains filled with gold to him. Why would he want to pull that apart? Invading the eastern empire was Attila’s way of reminding the Romans that it was in everybody’s interest for them to pay the annual indemnity. So instead of putting the city to siege, Attila simply skirted around Constantinople and destroyed two nearby Roman armies.
Theodosius sent his ambassador Priscus to make peace with Attila. Priscus later recorded his observations of the ‘Scourge of God’ among his court:
All the seats were ranged down either side of the room, up against the walls. In the middle Attila was sitting on a couch with a second couch behind him. Behind that a few steps led up to his bed, which for decorative purposes was covered in ornate drapes made of fine linen, like those which Greeks and Romans prepare for marriage ceremonies . . . The eldest son was sitting on Attila’s own couch, right on the very edge, with his eyes fixed on the ground, in fear of his father. A lavish meal, served on silver trenchers, was prepared for us and the other barbarians, but Attila just had some meat on a wooden platter, for this was one aspect of his self-discipline. For instance, gold or silver cups were presented to the other diners, but his own goblet was made of wood. His clothes, too, were simple, and no trouble was taken except to have them clean.
The Romans wearily agreed to hike up the annual indemnity to 2100 pounds of gold; they would also have to come up with the six thousand pounds that were still in arrears.
The famous arrogance of the Romans had truly been laid low. The rampaging Huns had placed the emperor into the role of a shopkeeper, forced to hand over protection money to the local leg breakers.
The Most Serene Republic
ATTILA WAS BUSY making plans to hammer the western Roman empire when he received Princess Honoria’s letter, begging him to save her from a loveless marriage. The message also contained a jewelled ring as proof of her identity. Attila, not unreasonably, mistook this to be a marriage proposal, which he was pleased to accept. He fired off a message to Theodosius in Constantinople, demanding that Valentinian surrender half of the western Roman empire to him as a dowry for Honoria.
Exasperated, Theodosius wrote to his brother emperor in Ravenna, explaining the situation and advising him to hand over his sister to Attila. Valentinian flew into a rage and demanded that Honoria be executed for treason. Their mother, Galla Placidia, intervened and persuaded the emperor to send his sister into exile instead.
Valentinian replied to Attila, angrily denying that any form of marriage had been proposed. In return, Attila sent an envoy to insist that Honoria’s proposal was legitimate. She had written of her own free will, and they were, to all intents and purposes, properly engaged. Attila would soon be coming to claim his wife and ‘dowry’. It suited Attila to adopt the pose of a gallant suitor, flying to the rescue of an imperilled princess, when all along he had been looking for an excuse to invade the western empire. Honoria’s extraordinary letter had given him the perfect pretext.
And so in 451, Attila’s gigantic army surged across Gaul, taking city after city, until it reached the Atlantic coast. The Huns then turned south, but were stopped at Orleans by a coalition of Roman and barbarian armies led by the Roman general Aetius. The two armies clashed in a titanic battle on the plains of Catalaunum, east of Paris. The Romans held their position, and for the first time the Huns were pushed back. Attila lost his aura of invincibility.
Undaunted, Attila repeated his demand for Honoria’s hand and his share of the western empire. He led his army into northern Italy and sacked Milan and Verona. The ancient city of Aquileia was razed to its foundations. Local inhabitants fled the fury of Attila’s army by leaping into boats with whatever they could carry, and escaping to the marshy islands in the nearby lagoon. They reasoned, correctly, that the Hunnish horsemen would not bother to cross the water to chase them.
The merchants and fishermen on these muddy islands in the lagoon formed a prosperous community, untroubled by the raiding barbarians on the mainland. Trading posts, houses and wharves sprung up, and the merchants prospered. They laid foundations in the marshes by driving closely spaced timber poles into the mud until they hit bedrock, then sawing the trunks off at the top to make a flat surface. In this way they built grand houses, churches and public squares. The channels between the islands were shored up with embankments and turned into canals. And that is how the Most Serene Republic of Venice came into being, the accidental child of Attila the Hun.
ATTILA NEVER MOVED his army south of the River Po. The Italian peninsula was blighted with famine, which would have made provisioning for his army near impossible. So in 453 he withdrew back across the Danube without Honoria or his half-share of the western empire. A few months later he was dead.
There is some confusion over the cause of Attila’s death, although it does seem his end was suitably bloody. Attila had taken a new wife, a beautiful young woman named Ildico. There was a great wedding feast and Attila drank himself into a stupor. Later that night he was discovered in his wedding tent, choking on blood that was flowing from his nose and mouth. Modern medical analysts suspect the blood may have come from a burst haemorrhoid in his oesophagus, a common cause of death for alcoholics.
PRINCESS HONORIA’S FATE, after being sent into exile, is unknown to us. Professor Judith Herrin has offered a tantalising explanation for her outrageous letter to At
tila: it’s possible that she had met him decades earlier in Constantinople when she was a child. At that time, the teenage Attila had been sent to the city as a royal hostage to ensure his uncle, King Ruga, would comply with a peace treaty. His sojourn in the Great Palace coincided with a visit from Galla Placidia, accompanied by her five-year-old daughter Honoria. Did they notice each other? Did the exotic Hunnish prince excite the young princess’s imagination? Attila eventually escaped the gilded cage of Constantinople. Herrin wonders if he was fixed thereafter in Honoria’s mind as a symbol of power and freedom.
AFTER ATTILA’S DEATH, the unity of the Hun tribes broke down and they receded back into the great Eurasian steppe. Constantinople shuddered with relief. But from this time, the distant badlands of the north-east would continue to haunt the Roman imagination. They were left with the nagging worry that, somewhere within those oceans of long grass, might be other hordes of implacable heathens, hell-bent on the annihilation of their God-guarded city.
Rex Italiae
AS THE EASTERN EMPIRE shored up its defences, the western empire crumbled away. Britain was abandoned. North Africa and Spain were lost to the Vandals. Gaul, which had been a Roman province for nearly five centuries, fell to the Visigoths, the Burgundians and the Franks. In its final years, what remained of the western empire became little more than an Italian client state of its eastern counterpart.
Then in 410 Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths, an unthinkable horror for the empire’s loyalists. In Constantinople three days of mourning were declared. St Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, said, ‘My voice sticks in my throat . . . the city which had taken the whole world is itself taken’. Christians in the city blamed the pagans for bringing the wrath of God upon the city. Pagans blamed the Christians for betraying the empire’s allegiance to the old gods. Rome was sacked a second time by the Vandals in 455, and the gilt bronze tiles were torn away from the Temple of Jupiter.*
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