The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  The circumstances that prompted the emperor Diocletian’s reforms were a massive breakdown in this administrative system during the third century AD – a period that saw more than thirty emperors in as many years, as well as increased barbarian pressure on the frontiers and an economic collapse that threatened both the supply of food for the army and the bullion needed for their pay. Rather than attempting to reconstitute the old system, Diocletian and his advisers created a tighter structure based around smaller provinces arranged into ‘dioceses’. The old province of Africa Proconsularis, for example, became the three provinces of Byzacena, Zeugitana and Tingitana; Britain became Britannia Prima and Britannia Secunda. Most dramatically, Diocletian divided the empire into West and East, with a ruling tetrarchy made up of a senior ‘Augustus’ and a junior ‘Caesar’ in each. By so doing he paved the way for Constantine to create the new imperial capital on the Bosporus and for the shift in Italy away from Rome to Milan and Ravenna, which became the new administrative hubs of the West. As well as being a matter of administrative practicality, Diocletian’s division recognized deep-seated social, economic, linguistic and religious differences between East and West, and eventually led to their formal creation as separate empires in AD 386. By the time of this novel, therefore, soldiers in the western army would have been swearing allegiance not to a ‘senior’ emperor in Constantinople, but rather to their own emperor in the new western capital of Milan.

  The later Roman emperors often seem to us to have been more autocratic and despotic than their predecessors. Partly this was a consequence of greater state control of economic activities, including the production of foodstuffs and equipment for the army as well as the obligation for people to stick with their occupations, making many jobs hereditary by law. Another factor was the shift in focus to the East, where the tradition of semi-deified kings was more deeply embedded. Whereas in Rome the emperor and his family had been a visible presence, in Constantinople and the new capitals in Italy the imperial court was more remote and regal. This remoteness is embodied in the statue of Constantine erected in his new basilica in the forum in Rome: colossal, highly stylized and gazing to the heavens rather than to the people, ironically commissioned just as he was about to renounce pagan religion and the imperial cult. If we look at the coin portraits of the western emperors over the following century the picture is varied, with some showing the gritty realism of soldier-emperors for whom despotism meant being hard-nosed and brutal, rather than depicting any kind of elevated self-image. Problems arose through attempts at dynastic succession where weak emperors were propped up by men of nefarious ambition; capable army commanders such as Stilicho and Aetius could spend more time battling court intrigue than staving off barbarian invasion. This as well as dynastic strife was to play a major part in the undoing of the Roman West as an administrative entity in the fifth century AD.

  Christianity

  A huge change in late antiquity was brought about by the emergence of Christianity as the state religion. Its adoption was born out of war – a vision in battle had caused the emperor Constantine to convert to Christianity, leading to its acceptance by the state on his death in AD 331. Christianity appeared to offer much to the common people that pagan Roman religion did not. In its earliest form, three centuries before Constantine, Christianity was less a religio – in the original Latin meaning of the word, an ‘obligation’ – than it was a course of moral teaching, more philosophical, interactive and relevant to day-to-day life than pagan religion. It was inclusive, welcoming all into its fold, whereas pagan religion at the state level had been exclusive and remote, restricting participation in ritual to the priests and the privileged. At a time when whimsical cruelty was commonplace, the Judaeo-Christian tradition offered a code of morality that had little precedent in the classical world; there had been no equivalent to the Ten Commandments in pagan Rome, only obligations to sacrifice and worship and threats of divine retribution against those who failed to do so. Christianity attracted the downtrodden by showing them how to gain strength by living an overtly moral life, and thus offered consolation to less privileged people who were severely restricted in the ancient world in their scope for social betterment or material gain.

  It would be mistaken, though, to think that those in power in Rome who made Christianity the state religion were swayed by these factors. For Constantine the Great it was more a matter of realpolitik than personal revelation, despite his claim to have ‘seen the light’ in the battle against his rival Maxentius in AD 312. Constantine would have known how the Sassanid rulers in Persia – Rome’s arch-rivals in the East – had used monotheism to their advantage, harnessing the Zoroastrian religion to strengthen their own power base. Already the Roman emperors in the third century had encouraged the worship of Sol Invictus, ‘invincible Sun’, similar to the worship of the sun god in ancient Egypt, and had aligned it with the imperial cult. In doing so they paved the way for the transition to the single Judaeo-Christian God after AD 331.

  The conversion to monotheism lost the emperor his divine status, the basis for the imperial cult – he could no longer be a god – but that was swiftly replaced by the notion of the emperor as divinely appointed, as Christ’s chosen one, equal to the Apostles. As a result, the early Christian emperors could be even more godlike in their behaviour than their predecessors, some of them exerting this new image powerfully, but the weaker ones existing as little more than symbols, living remotely in their palaces, puppets in the hands of the strongmen who really ran the empire.

  In other ways too the transition to state Christianity represented less of an upheaval than might be imagined. The old ‘Capitoline triad’, the gods Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, translated into the Holy Trinity of God, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Mater Magna became embodied in the Virgin Mary, and the many saints that soon proliferated in Italy and elsewhere took over from local pagan gods. The idea of priests as divinely ordained, as necessary intermediaries between the people and God, gave the clergy a status similar to the old priesthood, enhanced by the development of arcane rituals and liturgies that further set them apart from the common people. Christianity began to take on many of those features that had turned people away from pagan religion. As Constantine had foreseen, the inclusivity of Christianity – the size of its congregation – meant that the population could be controlled through the Church. Christian morality being rooted in poverty and abstinence suited an empire of high taxation, hereditary jobs and servitude that for many citizens bordered on slavery because, as Christians, these citizens were more likely to accept their lot. Far from being a transition to enlightenment after a cruel and amoral pagan past, Christianity became a means for a totalitarian administration to control and oppress a population that otherwise might collapse into anarchy and turn against the emperor.

  At the time of this novel, a hundred years after Constantine, many of the institutions of later Christianity were becoming well established, including the papacy, bishoprics and monasteries, the earliest of which were sited in the fortified rural villas characteristic of this period. The Roman dating system changed from ab urbe condita, ‘from the foundation of the city’, to anno domini nostri iesu, from the year of the birth of Our Lord, a date fixed by the Thracian monk Antesius. In the cities, a pressing need was for buildings large enough to take big congregations, to provide ‘Houses of God’. In Constantinople this need was met by the great church of Hagia Sophia, its domed form influencing the design of many churches in the East as well as the first mosques in the seventh century. In Rome, it was the old law courts or ‘basilicas’ – a term originally derived from the Greek for ‘king’, and meaning ‘palace’ – that provided the blueprint, their oblong colonnaded design with an apse at one end being seen in the early basilican churches such as St Peter’s. In addition, many pagan temples became churches – for example, the Pantheon in Rome – and other buildings such as the Colosseum were consecrated as holy places because of their association with early Christian martyrdom,
ironically ensuring their survival to modern times.

  Despite the earlier history of Christianity, before Constantine, as a persecuted religion, there was no systematic retribution against those who continued to practise pagan religion after AD 331; we would be wrong to project backwards to the Roman period a view conditioned by our picture of extreme religious intolerance by the western Church in the medieval period. On the whole, Christianity was attractive enough to the masses for forced conversion to be unnecessary. Pagan sacrifice was banned, but not polytheism. Pagan religion continued to have enough cachet for the emperor Julian ‘the Apostate’ in the mid-fourth century to return to polytheism and to persecute Christians during his reign. Of the four main historians of the fifth century, the earliest of them, Eusebius, was profoundly anti-Christian, blaming the woes of the empire on the rejection of the old gods and the adoption of Christianity. Among the Roman army, there can be no doubt that deeply embedded pagan practices continued, including the worship of gods traditionally favoured by soldiers such as Mithras, Isis and Sol Invictus.

  Within the Church, differences in the style of Christian worship were becoming increasingly apparent between East and West, resulting in the distinctions that exist to this day between the Church of Rome and that of Constantinople. As these differences became institutionalized, theologians became entangled in debate over matters of doctrine and practice that became increasingly obscure – a parallel to the sophistic tradition of philosophical debate in the late classical period, about style more than substance. Despite their often recondite nature, these debates resulted in ‘schisms’ that led to the adherents of one or another position being branded as heretics and persecuted, often to death; more Christians were killed by fellow believers in this way than were ever thrown to the lions by the pagan emperors; a dark side of Christianity in the West that was to blight its history for many centuries to come.

  St Augustine and Pelagius

  Two scholars in the early fifth century AD who figure in this novel stand out for their impact on early Christian thought, and on the relationship between Roman Christianity and the conduct of war in the final decades of the western empire. The first was Bishop Augustine of Hippo Regius in North Africa, later canonized as St Augustine; the second was a monk of probable British origin named Pelagius. We know a great deal about Augustine because his ideas became part of mainstream Christian thinking in the West through his two greatest written works, Confessions and City of God; Pelagius, on the other hand, was branded a heretic and nothing of his original writing survives.

  Augustine’s City of God can be seen as a response to the barbarian invasions of his lifetime as well as the endemic weakness he saw in the Roman state, leading him to dismiss earthly empires and assert that the only triumphant one would be the spiritual kingdom of the Church, his ‘City of God’. It was a position that would have found few followers among the army leadership looking for a militant church to provide a rallying point for troops on the ground, rather than one that had abandoned earthly matters and looked only to heaven. On the other hand, many of Augustine’s other assertions pleased the clergy and state because they served to strengthen the hold of the Church over the people, including his belief that bishops and priests were divinely ordained and that divine favour or ‘grace’ was a prerequisite of human action – that is, human action was something that required the intervention of priests and the rituals of the Church that were becoming established at this period.

  It was this latter point that put Augustine at odds with Pelagius, who argued that human actions did not need divine or priestly guidance and that people could behave according to their own free will. Pelagius’ thinking may reflect an undercurrent of individualism in the spiritual life of Roman Britain and the old Celtic world of north-west Europe, among people attracted to the teachings of Jesus when they first reached Britain in the early empire but who were less amenable to the Roman Church as it later developed. The legacy of this distinctive north-west European tradition, at odds with the Roman Church, can be seen a thousand years later in the Protestant revolution and the spread of non-conformism in Europe and beyond. The development of religious thinking in the fifth century therefore has a direct bearing not only on military strategy at the time – on whether or not an ‘earthly’ empire was worth fighting for – but also on our understanding of the Christian world today.

  The Roman Army in the Fifth Century AD

  The late Roman army was very different from the Republican army of my previous novel in this series, Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage. The danger in looking at past eras where generalization seems possible, such as ancient Rome, is to foreshorten them and apply one well-documented image – of soldiers, of lifestyle, of building types – to the entire period, when in fact huge expanses of time are involved; the six-hundred-year period between the siege of Punic Carthage in the second century BC and the Hun invasions of the fifth century AD is almost exactly the same span of time as that between the Battle of Agincourt and the present day. The changes we see in the late Roman army partly reflect the developments we should expect to see over such a long time period, but they also owe much to the reforms under the emperors Diocletian and Constantine mentioned above.

  In many respects we know less about the late Roman army than we do about its Republican predecessor. For the army in the second century BC we have the extensive military treatise of Polybius, whereas none of the fifth-century AD historians whose work survives were themselves soldiers or much interested in military detail. The Notitia Dignitatum, a fourth-century AD catalogue of offices in the Roman Empire, tells us much about the upper structures of command but little about organization at the unit level. Unlike in the earlier empire, there are few tombstones in late antiquity inscribed with details of a soldier’s military career, and little accumulation of archaeological and inscriptional evidence from forts where occupation by individual units had been sustained over long periods. Moreover, fewer sieges and battles of late antiquity were outright victories for the Romans, and even those that were are rarely recorded in eyewitness accounts or in more than a few lines of text, often with no detail of the tactics or units involved.

  Again, because of our tendency to foreshorten, to draw together fragmentary evidence that is in fact quite widely dispersed in time – even in the context of the late Roman army in the West, we are talking about a period of a century and half, from Constantine the Great to the fall of the western empire in AD 476 – some modern accounts of the late Roman army can present a bewilderingly complex picture, whereas if we were to know the picture in detail at any one point in time it might seem more orderly and rational. What the apparent diversity of ranks and unit titles does show, particularly as we move into the fifth century, is an army rapidly evolving and reshaping in response to external threat, internal discord and the increasing incorporation of barbarian units within its fold, all of it overshadowed by the knowledge that the army would soon have to face an enemy from the steppe-lands of Asia in a showdown as decisive as any in Rome’s long history.

  Our adjective ‘Byzantine’, meaning excessively detailed and complicated, comes from the name of the old Greek colony on the Bosporus where Constantinople was built, and the term ‘Byzantine’ is often used to refer to the eastern Roman Empire from its creation in the fourth century AD until Constantinople finally fell to the Turks in 1453. At first glance the late Roman army might seem ‘Byzantine’ in its organization, over-administered and paralleling the complexity of the new provincial governance created in the fourth century. However, delve deeper, come closer to the soldiers themselves, and it is possible to see how this picture might give a misleading impression of its effectiveness as a fighting force. In many respects the early imperial army was more tightly controlled and less flexible, with the legions having something of the intractability of European infantry regiments in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If we leave aside the apparent complexity of higher-level organization, we can see an army in the
fifth century where greater tactical responsibility was devolved to smaller units, with more flexibility given to commanders at a lower level and more initiative expected from the individual soldier. It was this that gave the late Roman army its strength, and this is something I have tried to bring across in this novel.

  Officers and Other Ranks

  Gone in large measure was the ‘cursus honorum’, the succession of military and civil offices that formed a fixed career structure for a Roman of senatorial or equestrian rank in the early empire. In the early fifth century the sons of aristocrats would still be ‘commissioned’ as junior officers, but only after having gone through tribune school. Whereas the officer academy of the second century BC in my first novel in this series was conjectural, the schola militarum in the late empire is attested historically, a forerunner of modern academies such as Sandhurst and West Point. A crucial difference from my earlier academy is that students in the schola militarum included many former ‘non-commissioned’ officers, men who had been recommended by the magister of their field army or the dux of their frontier unit, meaning that the officer corps of the late Roman army included more men risen from the ranks than had been the case in the early empire. This gave a very different flavour to army service, where any milites could aspire to high command and where many of the soldier-emperors and magisteres milites were themselves men of humble origin who had risen up the ladder through military merit rather than through privilege of birth.