The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

by Peter Heather

  7

  ATTILA THE HUN

  FOR OVER A DECADE, from 441 to 453, the history of Europe was dominated by military campaigns on an unprecedented scale – the work of Attila, ‘scourge of God’. Historians’ opinions about him have ranged from one end of the spectrum to the other. After Gibbon, he tended to be viewed as a military and diplomatic genius. Edward Thompson, writing in the 1940s, sought to set the record straight by portraying him as a bungler. To Christian contemporaries, Attila’s armies seemed like a whip wielded by the Almighty. His pagan forces ranged across Europe, sweeping those of God-chosen Roman emperors before them. Roman imperial ideology was good at explaining victory, but not so good at explaining defeat, especially at the hands of non- Christians. Why was God allowing the unbelievers to destroy His people? In the 440s, Attila the Hun, spreading devastation from Constantinople to the gates of Paris, prompted this question as it had never been prompted before. As one contemporary put it, ‘Attila ground almost the whole of Europe into dust.’1

  The Loss of Africa

  ATTILA BURSTS into history as joint ruler of the Huns with his brother Bleda. The pair inherited power from an uncle, Rua (or Ruga; still alive in November 435).2 The first recorded east Roman embassy to Attila and Bleda was sent sometime after 15 February 438, and it is likely that the brothers came to power only at the end of the 430s, possibly as late as 440. Their debut brought changes of policy, as new regimes usually do. Initial contacts with Constantinople led to a decision to renegotiate the existing relationship between the two parties. Their representatives met outside the city of Margus on the Danube in Upper Moesia (map 11). The fifth-century historian Priscus treats us to this detail:3 ‘the [Huns] do not think it proper to confer dismounted, so that the Romans, mindful of their own dignity, chose to meet [them] in the same fashion, lest one side speak from horseback, the other on foot.’

  The salient feature of the new agreement was an increase in the amount of the annual subsidy paid to the Huns, from 350 pounds of gold to 700. The treaty also agreed the terms under which Roman prisoners might be returned and where and how markets would be conducted; also, that the Romans would receive no refugees from the Hunnic Empire. But the new terms, despite the increased payments, did not satisfy the Huns’ new leaders. Shortly afterwards at a market, probably in winter 440/1, Hunnic ‘traders’ suddenly produced their weapons and seized the Roman fort in which the market was being held, killing the guards as well as some of the Roman merchants. According to Priscus, when a Roman embassy complained, the Huns retorted that ‘the bishop of Margus had crossed over to their land, and searching out their royal tombs, had stolen the valuables stored there.’ But our episcopal Indiana Jones was only a pretext. Taking the opportunity to raise the issue of refugees once again, Attila and Bleda threatened war if such Hunnic refugees as the Romans then held (and the bishop) were not immediately handed over. When they weren’t, the Huns waited for the campaigning season, then crossed the Danube in force and took forts and cities along the frontier, including the major Roman military base at Viminacium.

  At this point, the Bishop of Margus began to panic, and did a deal with the Huns to hand over his city if they would drop their accusations against him. Attila and his brother jumped at the chance to secure another strongpoint and to exploit the opportunities its capture presented. Margus was the key that opened up the great Roman military road across the Balkans, and the Huns were quick to besiege the next key point along it: the city of Naissus (modern Ni). At Naissus the road divides, one branch leading more or less due south to Thessalonica, the other running south-east via Serdica (Sofia) to Constantinople. This was a crossroads worth the taking, and, for once, we have a lengthy account (courtesy of Priscus) of the siege that followed:

  When . . . a large number of [Hunnic siege] engines had been brought up to the wall . . . the defenders on the battlements gave in because of the clouds of missiles and evacuated their positions; the so-called rams were brought up also. This is a very large machine. A beam is suspended by slack chains from timbers which incline together, and it is provided with a sharp metal point and screens . . . for the safety of those working it. With short ropes attached to the rear, men vigorously swing the beam away from the target of the blow and then release it . . . From the walls the defenders tumbled down wagon-sized boulders . . . Some [rams] they crushed together with the men working them, but they could not hold out against the great number of machines. Then the enemy brought up scaling ladders . . . The barbarians entered through the part of the circuit wall broken by the blows of the rams and also over the scaling ladders . . . and the city was taken.

  In the past, this passage aroused a great deal of suspicion. It contains obvious references to the most famous ancient siege account of them all: Thucydides’ narrative of the siege of Plataea in 431 BC at the start of the Peloponnesian War. Traditionally, to draw such parallels would be taken as a sign that the whole story was fabricated. But ancient authors were expected to show off their learning, and audiences always enjoyed spotting the allusions. There is no need to dismiss the entire siege as fantasy, just because Priscus borrowed a few phrases from a well known historian.4 We know, anyway, that Naissus was taken by the Huns in 442.

  In their first campaign against the east Roman Empire, Attila and Bleda had shown that they had the military capacity to take fully defended front-rank Roman fortresses. They may have gained Margus by stratagem; but Viminacium and Naissus were both large and well fortified, and yet they had been able to force their way in. This represented a huge change in the balance of military power between the Roman and non-Roman worlds in the European theatre of war. As we have seen, the last serious attack on the Balkans had been by Goths between 376 and 382; and then, although they had been able to take smaller fortified posts or force their evacuation, large walled cities had been beyond them. Consequently, even though at times hard-pressed for food, the cities of the Roman Balkans had survived the war more or less intact (see Chapter 4). The same was true of western Germania. When Roman forces were distracted by civil wars, Rhine frontier groups had on occasion overrun large tracts of imperial territory: witness the Alamanni in the aftermath of the civil war between Magnentius and Constantius II in the early 350s. All they had done then, though, was occupy the outskirts of the cities and destroy small watch-towers. They did not attempt to take on the major fortified centres such as Cologne, Strasbourg, Speyer, Worms or Mainz, all of which survived more or less intact.5 Now, the Huns were able to mount successful sieges of such strongholds.

  No source records the origins of this skill. Did they bring it with them from over the steppe, or was it a recent development? Siege techniques were hardly needed against the Goths and other groups north of the Black Sea – accounts of Hunnic fighting from the 370s concentrate on their skill in open combat as mounted archers. But if our Huns had been part of the old Hsiung-Nu confederation (see pp. 148-9), the latter had certainly needed to mount sieges in making war on the Chinese Empire. By the late antique period, in addition, even the more obscure steppe groups needed to take the rich fortified cities along the Silk Road, or at least apply pressure on them. So the capacity to mount a plausible siege would have been important in this context too.6 On the other hand, by the 440s the Huns had been in the employ of Aetius certainly, and quite possibly of Constantius before him, so that close observation of the Roman army could easily have been the source of their knowledge – in other eras, Roman techniques and weaponry had quickly been adopted by non-Romans. As recently as 439, Hunnic auxiliaries had been part of the western Roman force that had besieged the Goths in Toulouse, and would have seen a siege at first hand. On balance, I think it slightly more likely that the Huns’ capture of Viminacium and Naissus represented the deployment of a newly developed skill. And just as important for successful siege warfare was the availability of manpower. Men were needed to make and man machines, to dig trenches and to make the final assault. As we shall see later in this chapter, even if the designs for s
iege machinery did come from old knowledge, it was only recently that manpower on such a scale was available to the Huns.

  Whatever its origins, the barbarians’ capacity to take key fortified centres was a huge strategic shock for the Roman Empire. Impregnable fortified cities were central to the Empire’s control of its territories. But, serious as the capture of Viminacium and Naissus was, what mattered most at this moment was that the Huns had picked their first fight with Constantinople at exactly the point when the joint east-west expedition force was gathering in Sicily to attempt to wrest Carthage from the Vandals. As we noted earlier, much of the eastern component for this expedition had been drawn from the field armies of the Balkans, and of this, no doubt, the Huns were well aware. Information passed too freely across the Roman frontier for it to be possible to hide the withdrawal of large numbers of troops from their normal stations.7 I suspect that by raising the annual tribute so readily at the start of the reign of Attila and Bleda to 700 pounds of gold, the authorities in Constantinople were trying to buy a big enough breathing space for the African expedition to be launched. If so, they spectacularly failed. Instead of being bought off, the Huns decided to exploit the Romans’ temporary weakness farther, and so, with havoc in mind, hurled their armies across the Danube. The authorities in Constantinople thus had no choice but to withdraw their troops from Sicily; and after the unprecedented loss of three major bases – Viminacium, Margus and Naissus (although the latter had probably not yet fallen when the orders were given) – it’s hard to blame them. The Hunnic army was now poised astride the great military road through the Balkans and pointing straight at Constantinople. Without going anywhere near North Africa, Attila’s first campaign had forced the two halves of the Empire to abandon a project of the utmost importance. The Huns had dealt a strategic blow to the Roman world whose consequences were every bit as wide-ranging as the one dealt by the Persians two centuries before. But the history of Attila the Hun doesn’t end here, of course. He had a long agenda, and in the course of the next decade both halves of the Roman Empire were to feel its force.

  Porphyrogenitus

  THE INITIAL strategic effect upon the west of the increasing Hunnic aggression in the 440s is clear enough, but other aspects of the reign of Attila are less certain. Illiterate when they first hit the fringes of Europe in the 370s, the Huns remained so seventy years later, and there are no Hunnic accounts of even the greatest of their leaders. Our Roman sources, as always, are much more concerned with the political and military impact of alien groups upon the Empire than with chronicling their deeds, so there are always points of huge interest, particularly in the internal history of such groups, that receive little or no coverage. As in the case of Olympiodorus for the first two decades of the fifth century, we are left bemoaning the loss of the history of one particular Roman author: a man called Priscus (already quoted in this book), who came from the town of Panium in Thrace. Again, however, we have been lucky, because some substantial extracts from his history have been preserved in the works of an underemployed tenth-century Byzantine emperor by the name of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.

  Porphyrogenitus, Greek for ‘born in the purple’, gives us a strong clue to this medieval emperor’s predicament. He was born in 905, son of the emperor Leo VI ‘the Wise’, who died when Constantine was only seven. The tenth century was a time of imperial expansion, as the political unity of the Islamic world collapsed, leaving some easy pickings for Byzantine armies on its borders in Asia Minor and the Near East. Military success brought regular distributions of booty and estates, which in turn threw up a self-confident and ambitious officer class in Constantinople, who squabbled amongst themselves for political power. Constantine, however, had the useful quality of actually having been born into the purple. This made him an excellent vehicle for conferring legitimacy on the latest successful general, whether through marriage alliance or by elevating him to the position of co-emperor. But this was where the trouble lay. So powerful did his protégés become that it was only in the last fourteen years of his life, between 945 and 959, that Constantine was nominally in sole control of the Empire, and even then he was little more than a figurehead.8 In its long stretches of political insignificance punctuated by occasional memorable moments, his reign resembled that of the emperor Honorius, whose travails concerned us in Chapters 5 and 6. But where Honorius, as far as we know, did little with his spare time apart from worrying about the next usurpation, Constantine VII devoted himself to culture with a capital C. In particular, he was concerned that Byzantium had lost touch with its classical heritage.

  He conceived a maniacal project to preserve classical learning by assembling excerpts from all the great works of antiquity: ‘Given the immensity of these writings which it is tiring even to think about and which seems generally overwhelming and heavy, [I] thought it a good idea to break it up and organize it in order to make more widely available everything it contains that is useful,’ he tells us in the preface to one of his volumes. A grand total of fifty-three were planned, with titles as disparate as Excerpts concerning Victories and Excerpts concerning Nations. We know the titles of twenty-three of the volumes, but all or parts of only four survive.9 These alone fill six hefty tomes in the best modern edition, and it has been estimated that this is only one thirty-fifth of Constantine’s original project. The only title to survive the Middle Ages in full was a single manuscript of number twenty-seven, Excerpts concerning Embassies. This was divided into Embassies from the Romans to Foreigners and Embassies from Foreigners to the Romans. And even this volume survived only by a whisker. The original manuscript was destroyed in a fire in the Escorial Palace library in Madrid in 1671, but not, thankfully, before it had been copied.10 Both halves of volume twenty-seven contain extensive extracts from Priscus’ history, leaving us for ever in Constantine’s debt. Without them, our knowledge of Attila would be almost non-existent.

  There is one more point to note. The titles of Constantine’s volumes were accurate, if not pithy, and Excerpts concerning Embassies deals with precisely that. Military and other information may well be mentioned incidentally, but the main focus of the extracts is diplomacy. Consequently, while we are very well informed about negotiations between Attila and Constantinople, in which – as we shall see in a moment – Priscus himself played a major role, we are underinformed about the operations of the Hunnic war machine and the internal politics of the world that produced it. Much of this was presumably (and in part, demonstrably) well covered in Priscus’ lost text. But what we need, and don’t have, is Constantine’s lost Excerpts concerning Big Battles between the Romans and Foreigners, should he have written such a volume. One of the lost volumes was entitled Excerpts concerning Victories, but, given that the Huns kept winning, this probably didn’t contain much from Priscus. While we have much of his wonderful account of Romano-Hunnic diplomacy, then, we have to scrabble around in much lesser texts for details of Attila’s campaigns and other aspects of his reign.

  How Are the Mighty Fallen

  ANCIENT LOGISTICS being what they were, the east Roman contingent to the expeditionary force bound for North Africa in 441, though withdrawn from Sicily in the same year, was not back in the Balkans in time to save Constantinople from the humiliation of having to make peace after the fall of Naissus in 442. We don’t know the exact terms, as Constantine VII’s flunkeys extracted no relevant fragment from Priscus’ history, but its outlines are clear enough from references to it in later negotiations. As you might expect, the annual subsidy went up again: a plausible guess would be 1,400 pounds of gold per annum – in 447 it went up to 2,100 pounds, which would make 1,400 the halfway point (before the attacks of 441/2 it stood at 700). The figure also has to be high enough for arrears of 6,000 pounds to have built up by 447. Other than that, the Hunnic leadership continued to bang on about fugitives and Roman prisoners, and these issues were no doubt also settled to the Huns’ advantage.11

  The working methods of Constantine VII mean that Pr
iscus’ narrative outline of the 440s has been lost beyond recovery, so that the surviving fragments of diplomatic history have to be arranged chronologically according to information from other sources. In this case, reconstruction turns on the degree of credibility to be accorded the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, who wrote in the ninth century. If you broadly accept his narrative construction, and the fragments of Priscus are arranged accordingly, you come to the conclusion that, after the engagements of 441/2, Attila mounted two further successful attacks upon east Roman forces in the Balkans: one in 443, when a Roman army was defeated in the Chersonesus, and a second in 447, when the Huns threatened the walls of Constantinople. Theophanes’ credibility has been convincingly undermined, however, by Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen.12 This extraordinary historian of the Huns spent many months in 1929 living with Turkish-speaking nomads in northwest Mongolia, and was equally at home in Greek and Latin, Russian, Persian and Chinese. Add to this a capacity for detailed observation and a logical mind. Maenchen-Helfen wasn’t the first to assault Theophanes’ credibility, but he did do the ultimate demolition job. He was able to show that Theophanes wrote one catch-all entry on the Huns in the era of Attila, placing everything that happened in the year 449/50, even though he was actually dealing with materials covering the whole of the 440s. Refracting the evidence through Maenchen- Helfen’s lens, and comparing it with everything else we know, it becomes apparent that there were not two more wars between Attila and the east Romans after 442, but only one, in 447 (map 11).13