by Ross Laidlaw
Attila:The Scourge of God
Ross Laidlaw
Ross Laidlaw
Attila: The Scourge of God
HISTORICAL NOTE
In AD 376, exactly a hundred years before the end of the Western Roman Empire, an extraordinary thing happened. An entire German nation, the Visigoths, assembled on the banks of the River Danube pleading for permission to cross the river into the Roman Empire. The reason: a terrible race of mounted nomad-warriors, the Huns, had suddenly fallen on them from the east with such ferocity and in such overwhelming numbers that the Goths were forced to seek safety across the Roman frontier. Entry was granted, and all might have been well; the Goths would probably have settled peacefully as workers on the land and recruits for the legions. But exploitation by corrupt Roman1 officials (for example, when reduced to starvation the Goths were given dogmeat in exchange for their sons sold into slavery) provoked the Goths into rebellion. In 378, at Adrianople in Thrace, they destroyed a huge Roman army, killing the Eastern emperor, Valens. (The empire had recently been split into two halves, with capitals at Milan and Constantinople.) This was Rome’s worst disaster since Cannae, where in 216 BC her forces had been massacred by Hannibal.
The danger passed, thanks to firm but diplomatic handling of the Goths by Theodosius I, Rome’s last great soldier-emperor. The empire, apparently strong and secure once more, was briefly re-united at the end of his reign, but when he died in 395 it was divided — this time permanently — between his feeble sons, Honorius (West) and Arcadius (East).
With the strong hand of Theodosius removed, inherent weaknesses showed up, and the West plunged into crisis. The Goths, under their leader Alaric, broke out and proceeded to ravage the Balkans and invade Italy. Stilicho, the West’s brilliant Vandal general, defeated Alaric time and again but always let him escape, perhaps out of reluctance to finish off a fellow German. Then, on the last day of 406, disaster struck. A vast host of German tribesmen — Vandals, Suevi, Burgundians, etc. — crossed the frozen Rhine, then poured across Gaul and into Spain. Distracted by grandiose plans to wrest the Balkans from the Eastern Empire, Stilicho failed to intervene; as a result, he fell from power and was executed. Alaric then re-invaded Italy, and in 410 captured Rome itself, only to die within the year. (The Goths soon withdrew from Italy, taking with them Honorius’ sister Galla Placidia, who was captured when Rome fell; she was eventually sold back to the Romans for half a million measures of wheat.) Denuded of troops by a usurper, Britain was instructed by Honorius to fend for itself against the depredations of Saxons, Picts, and Scots (from Ireland).
At this critical juncture for the West, the situation was stabilized and to some extent reversed by a remarkable Roman general, Constantius. His policy of persuading the German tribes to settle peacefully as federates in the provinces they had invaded had considerable success; so much so that in 421 Honorius appointed him co-emperor as Constantius III, and sanctioned his marriage to Placidia, by whom he had a son, the future Emperor Valentinian III, and a daughter, Honoria, whose scandalous involvement with the Hun king, Attila, very nearly brought the Western Empire to a premature end. (Plans for recovering Britain were indefinitely shelved.)
Unfortunately, Constantius died within months of receiving the purple. But his great work, to try to preserve the empire by forging a state of harmonious co-existence between the Romans and their German ‘guests’ (as the federates were euphemistically termed), was to be carried on by another Roman general with vision, Flavius Aetius. Their task was complicated by a religious problem. Catholic Christianity was now the official religion of the Roman state. The Germans settled within the Empire were also Christians, but of a different brand — Arian. Arianism held that Christ the Son was inferior to God the Father, a doctrine in tune with the Germans’ paternalistic society. In the eyes of Romans this made them heretics, and therefore beyond the pale.
In AD 423 (when this story begins) Honorius died without issue, and this immediately created a power vacuum. The Eastern emperor, Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius, renounced his claim to the Western throne, backing instead the next legitimate heir, Valentinian, the infant son of Constantius III and Galla Placidia. (The empress and her little son were then the guests of Theodosius in Constantinople.) Meanwhile, a usurper, Iohannes, had proclaimed himself emperor at Ravenna, which had become the Western capital. Accompanied by Placidia and Valentinian, an expedition was despatched from Constantinople to depose Iohannes, who appealed for help to Aetius. Anxious to prevent Placidia coming to power as regent for Valentinian — something he saw as potentially disastrous for the West — Aetius agreed to back Iohannes. With a large force raised from among his friends and allies across the Danube, the Huns (among whom he had lived as a hostage when a boy), Aetius set out for Italy. As spring wore towards summer in the fateful year of 425, the two armies converged in a collision course upon Ravenna.
1 From AD 212 all free inhabitants of the empire were accounted Romans.
PART I
RAVENNA
AD 423-33
PROLOGUE
Cursing, Titus Valerius Rufinus slapped at a mosquito which had bitten the back of his neck. Even here, a hundred feet up on the roof of Ravenna’s Basilica Ursiana, Bishop Ursus’ new cathedral, the pests were active. Eastwards, the angry red disc rising above the Mare Adriaticum threatened another day of scorching heat. The towers of the imperial palace suddenly glowed in the early rays, followed by the crenellations of the city walls, the topmost arches of the aqueduct that Emperor Trajan had built three centuries before, and the cupolas of the churches that were everywhere replacing the pagan temples. The banks of mist that always seemed to shroud the place partially shredded away, revealing the great causeway that connected the city to its port of Classis three miles to the south-east and to the sprawling suburb of Caesarea in between. All around stretched a dreary landscape of marshes and lagoons, its monotony broken only by clumps of bog-willow, isolated vineyards, and the glittering line of the Fossa Augusta, the mighty canal joining the city to the River Po.
Soon, twinkling flashes from armour and weapons, threads of smoke from cooking-fires, and the faint blare of trumptes told Titus that the enemy encampment — dispersed throughout the buildings, squares, and smallholdings of Caesarea — was astir. An hour crawled past. Then the enemy force, cavalry from the Eastern Empire, commanded by Aspar, son of the veteran general Ardaburius, began to form up on the causeway. Extending an arm with fist bunched, Titus began to make a rough estimate of numbers: fifty horsemen between two knuckles; ten, twenty, thirty ranks. . The more distant formations merged into a gleaming blur, making an accurate count impossible, but he thought the total could not be less than five thousand, perhaps nearer ten.
Muted by distance to a tinny bray, trumpets sounded. Like a monstrous caterpillar, the vast column began to creep along the causeway towards the city. When they were five or six hundred paces from the walls Titus was able to pick out the various types of cavalry in the van: catafracti armoured head to toe, looking strangely unhuman; clibanarii in hooded chain-mail coats; light cavalry armed with javelins, unprotected save for small round shields and helmets; horse archers, and various intermediate types. All these impressions Titus stored away in his head, using the old Ciceronian trick of ‘memory palaces’: an imagined suite of rooms, each containing a segment of information which a walk through the suite would instantly recall.
Time to move. Filing into the city through the Aurean Gate would slow the column, as would its exit via the Ariminum Gate. But every second Titus could shave from his journey back to base to deliver his report would gain his commander, General Aetius, precious time to prepare for the battle that now seemed inevitable.
Titus c
lambered back down through the trapdoor giving access to the roof, and down a ladder to a platform supported by scaffolding, where artisans were finishing a wall mosaic. It showed Christ enthroned on a globe of the world, separating the sheep from the goats at the Day of Judgement. The face was wonderfully depicted, its expression combining tenderness with strength, compassion with power. Momentarily overcome with emotion, Titus knelt before the image and made the sign of the cross. (A pagan for almost all of his young life, Titus had recently converted to the new faith.) Feeling strangely comforted and strengthened, he descended more ladders to the floor. A subdeacon, who had smuggled Titus into the cathedral, was waiting at the foot of the scaffolding. The pair hurried through the vast building with its five naves, fifty-six marble columns, and glorious mosaics glowing blue and gold in the dim light. The cleric unlocked the great double doors.
‘Farewell, my son.’ He pressed into Titus’ hand a Chi-Rho amulet, the crossed Greek letters symbolizing the Christians’ faith. ‘Let Christ and His holy angels have you in their keeping, and may Fortune favour your enterprise.’
From the slight eminence where Aetius had set up his headquarters in front of the Hun encampment, Titus watched the enemy deploy half a mile to his fore. Tinged with fear, excitement churned in his stomach. Aspar had chosen his position well, extending his forces in a triple line on a stretch of comparatively firm ground between swamps so that he could not easily be encircled. Protecting his flanks were the heavy cavalry — catafractarii and clibanarii — with the light cavalry and horse archers forming the centre. Well to the rear were parked the supply wagons. Titus looked behind him to where the Hun riders waited, an impatient, milling horde.
This was going to be exclusively a cavalry battle, he reflected, something virtually unprecedented in Rome’s long history, where until comparatively recently victories had been won by heavily armed legionaries. The transport ships carrying the Eastern infantry from Constantinople had been dispersed by a storm and their commander, Ardaburius, captured. On the Western side, barring a small Roman entourage, Aetius’ force was drawn from his allies beyond the Danube, the Huns. They were mounted archers, probably the most formidable light horsemen the world had ever seen.
Supremely skilled equestrians, whose marksmanship was unrivalled, Aetius’ Huns vastly outnumbered the Eastern cavalry. But, unlike Aspar’s tightly disciplined troops, they hardly constituted an army in the strict sense. None of the tribes making up the force owned allegiance to any of the others. And each warrior fought very much as an individual, totally lacking in loyalty to his fellow tribesmen and motivated solely by plunder and reward. Nevertheless, the Huns made terrible opponents. Nearly fifty years before, they had fallen on the Goths, one of the most warlike of the German tribes, forcing them to seek refuge within the Roman Empire.
After receiving Titus’ report on the strength and movement of the Eastern army, Aetius, then camped a few miles from Ravenna, decided to offer battle to Aspar. Realizing the futility of trying to fight a pitched battle in the swamps surrounding the city, he had moved north-west to less waterlogged terrain.
Accompanied by a knot of officers and tribunes, and, as always, wearing his dented cuirass and carelessly tied scarf, Aetius emerged from the command tent and joined Titus’ group of dispatch riders, scouts, and junior officers. A young man of middle height, the general radiated energy and confidence. He squinted at the sun, which was a quarter of the way through its arc, and shook his head wryly.
‘I’d like to hold things off until the ninth hour at least,’ he declared.1 ‘We’d have the sun behind us and those lobsters over there would be frying in their armour. But I’d never hold the Huns back that long.’ Smiling, he looked round the circle of faces. ‘So, gentlemen, unless anyone’s got a better plan I suggest we open the games. Bucinator, sound the advance.’
The trumpeter put his lips to the mouthpiece of his circular instrument and blew a series of sonorous blasts. The Hun horsemen trotted forwards: squat, powerfully built men with flat Asiatic faces, dressed in filthy skins and mounted on ugly but tough-looking brutes; each man carried a short recurved bow and densely packed quiver. Titus watched in awe as they flowed round the hillock on which the Romans stood, and rolled across the ground between the armies in an accelerating tide which seemed to extend to the horizon on either hand.
Despite their lack of formal organization, the Huns behaved as though animated by a collective will. In a precise cavalry manoeuvre which equalled anything a crack Roman ala could perform, the riders in the van broke right and left when a hundred paces from the East Roman front, then galloped parallel to the enemy, discharging dense clouds of arrows. Their place was immediately taken by the next wave of archers, so that the scene resolved itself into two vast whirlpools of horsemen revolving in front of the static ranks of Aspar’s cavalry. The expression ‘the sky darkened with arrows’ Titus had previously dismissed as exaggeration. Now he saw that it was true.
After about an hour, the Huns withdrew out of bowshot to breathe their horses, and the results of the encounter could be observed. They were unimpressive. Judging from the windrows of shafts scattered to their fore, the Hun arrows had bounced harmlessly off the armour of the Eastern heavy cavalry. Elsewhere, the barrage seemed to have been mainly absorbed by the centre’s bucklers, which now resembled giant hedgehogs. On Aspar’s side, casualties were light: here and there a fallen horse or rider, with a trickle of wounded filtering back to the field hospital. Lacking armour or shields, the Huns had come off worse, the row of corpses marking the line of their attacking van testimony to the efficacy of the Eastern horse archers. Now, at the start of May, it was still too early in the year for the Huns’ grass-fed horses to be in peak condition, especially as the wetlands of the Po basin yielded scant pasture for fodder. The East Romans, on the other hand, had enough grain in their supply wagons to keep their horses fit and in the field for a long period.
‘This is no good,’ said Aetius, sounding remarkably unperturbed. ‘As long as Aspar holds that formation, we could keep on charging him all day and get nowhere.’ He raised his hands in mock supplication. ‘Ideas, gentlemen. Give me ideas. Well, come on — I’m waiting.’
‘Surely sir,’ volunteered a grizzled duke, ‘if we kept on attacking, we’d wear them down eventually, even if it meant heavy losses on our side. The Huns being so many, you’d scarcely feel the difference.’
‘Brilliant, Marcus, quite brilliant,’ responded Aetius with affectionate sarcasm. He clapped the veteran on the shoulder. ‘Huns aren’t Romans, you old dunderhead. You can’t tell them what to do. They want immediate results, and if they don’t get them they pretty soon lose interest. And then handling them becomes a major problem. We Romans may think of them as ballista-fodder, but I suspect your average Hun takes a rather different view. Their horses are in poor condition, remember. I don’t know how many charges they’ve got left in them; not a lot, I should guess.’ He looked round the group expectantly. ‘Any other suggestions?’
There was a silence, which began to stretch out uncomfortably, when Titus suddenly found himself speaking. ‘If there were only some way to take them in the rear, sir. I know those marshes on their flanks look impenetrable, but if we could find a way through. .?’ He broke off self-consciously, realizing that, as possibly the most junior person present, he might be speaking out of turn. ‘My father pulled off something on those lines at Pollentia,’ he pressed on gamely, ‘against Alaric’s Goths.’
‘And saved the day for Flavius Stilicho, as I recall,’ added Aetius approvingly. ‘Full marks, young Titus. I was about to make the same suggestion. The Huns are at their deadliest when they can outflank an enemy, so it’s definitely worth a try. Right, we’ll make a reconnaissance. Groom, saddle Bucephalus. Titus, Victorinus, mount up. Marcus, keep the Huns in leash till I get back.’
‘Right, let’s head for home,’ Aetius said to his two companions. He dashed sweat from his face. ‘At least we tried.’
Making a wi
de circuit to the enemy’s right flank, they had managed, with considerable difficulty, to pick a passage through the mosquito-ridden hell of the swamp, eventually emerging on firmer ground several miles to the rear of Aspar’s lines. What had been just feasible for a tiny party was clearly impossible for a large body of horsemen.
‘Sir, look!’ exclaimed Victor, a normally phlegmatic Batavian youth. He pointed to four horsemen in the distance, probably an Eastern scouting-party. Three, judging by their javelins and small round shields, were light horse, while the fourth had no shield and so was probably a heavy cavalrymen to stiffen the patrol. Spotting the West Romans, the four immediately spurred to intercept them.
‘Run for it, lads,’ ordered Aetius.
As the three urged their mounts to a gallop, they were presented with a dilemma. They could only hope to outdistance their pursuers by keeping to the firm ground away from the marsh. But this course must eventually bring them dangerously close to Aspar’s lines. The problem was resolved unexpectedly.
The chase had continued for some time, with the West Romans beginning to draw away, when a cry from Victor in the rear made the other two pull up. Encountering a swampy patch, he had become mired. He had dismounted and was tugging desperately at the bridle, but the horse had sunk almost to the hocks and was stuck fast.
‘Leave it!’ shouted Aetius, racing back accompanied by Titus. Reining in close to the edge of the bright green surface of the bog, he leapt to the ground and extended a hand towards Victor, now himself in some difficulty.
‘Ride on, sir,’ urged Victor. ‘Don’t put yourself at risk. I’ll give myself up.’