IITHE HUNS AND ATTILA

The people called the Huns, “scarcely mentioned in other records,” are fully described by that Ammianus Marcellinus[3]whom I have already quoted. He lived at the end of the fourth century, was a Roman historian born of Greek parents at Antioch, and after fighting in Gaul, in Germany and the East, settled in Rome and devoted himself to history. He describes the Huns as “living beyond the Sea of Azov on the borders of the Frozen Ocean.” And adds that they were a people “savage beyond all parallel.” He then gives us the following careful description of them:—

“In their earliest infancy deep incisions are made in the cheeks of their boys[4]so that when the time comes for the beard to grow the sprouting hairs may be kept back by thefurrowed scars, and therefore they grow to old age as beardless as eunuchs. At the same time all have strong and well-built limbs and strong necks; they are indeed of great size, but so short-legged that you might fancy them to be two-legged beasts, or the figures which are hewn out in a rude manner with an axe on the posts at the end of bridges.[5]

“They do, however, just bear the likeness of men (horribly ugly though they be), but they are so little advanced in civilisation that they make no use of fire, nor of seasoned food, but live on roots which they find in the fields, or on the half raw flesh of any animal which they merely warm a little by placing it between their own thighs and the backs of their horses.

“They do not live under roofed houses but look upon them as tombs and will only enter them of necessity. Nor is there to be found among them so much as a cabin thatched with reed; but they wander about over the mountains and through the woods training themselves to bear from their infancy the extremes of frost and hunger and thirst.

“They wear linen clothes or else the skinsof field mice sewn together, and this both at home and abroad. When once such a tunic is put on, it is never changed till from long decay it falls to pieces. Their heads are covered with round caps and their hairy legs with goat skins and their shoes which are ignorant of any last are so clumsy as to hinder them in walking.

“For this cause they are not well suited for infantry; but, on the other hand, they are almost one with their horses, which are poorly shaped but hardy; often they sit them like women. In truth they can remain on horseback night and day; on horseback they buy and sell, they eat and drink, and bowed on the narrow neck of their steeds they even sleep and dream. On horseback too they discuss and deliberate. They are not, however, under the authority of a king, but are content with the loose government of their chiefs.

“When attacked they sometimes engage in regular battle formed in a solid body and uttering all kinds of terrific yells. More often, however, they fight irregularly, suddenly dispersing, then reuniting and after inflicting huge loss upon their enemy will scatter over the plains hither and thither, avoiding afortified place or an entrenchment. It must be confessed that they are very formidable warriors....

“None of them ploughs or even touches a plough-handle; for they have no settled abode, but are alike homeless and lawless, continually wandering with their waggons which indeed are their homes. They seem to be ever in flight.... Nor if he is asked can any one tell you where he was born; for he was conceived in one place, born in another far away, and bred in another still more remote.

“They are treacherous and inconstant and like brute beasts are utterly ignorant of the distinction between right and wrong. They only express themselves with difficulty and ambiguously, have no respect for any religion or superstition, are immoderately covetous of gold, and are so fickle and cantankerous that many times in a day they will quarrel with their comrades without cause and be reconciled without satisfaction.”[6]

Such were the people who according to Ammianus were “the original cause of allthe destruction and manifold calamities” which descended upon the Roman Empire, in the fifth century of our era.

Fifty-six years before they began directly to menace civilisation and the Roman Empire, they had, as we have seen, in 376A.D., driven the Goths before them to the first of those famous assaults upon the frontiers of the Roman world. They themselves, utter barbarians as they were, attempted then no direct attack upon our civilisation, though in 396 they crossed the Caucasus, raided Armenia and as Claudius notes, “laid waste the pleasant fields of Syria.” In 409, however, Alaric being then intent on Italy, they crossed the Danube and pushed on into Bulgaria, Uldis, their chief, boasting in true Barbarian fashion, “All that the sun shines upon I can conquer if I will.” It was the first claim of the Barbarian, vocal and explicit, to “a place in the sun”—someone else’s place. Uldis’ boast, however, had been but the prelude to his flight and fall. Amid the welter of Barbarians less barbarous than he, Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi, Alani, the Hun in fact was unable to do much more than drive them on. When they had passed into the Empire, into Gaul and Spain and Africa, he, worse than them all, was free at last tothreaten Christendom and its capitals, Constantinople and Rome.

It was not till the two brothers Attila and Bleda ascended the Hunnish throne, if throne it can be called, in the year 423, that the Huns really became immediately and directly dangerous to civilisation.

That civilisation already half bankrupt and in transition had, as we have seen, been bewildered and wounded by the actual incursion of Barbarian armies south of the Danube and the Rhine, nay within the heart of the Empire, within reach of Constantinople, within the very walls of Rome. It was now to be assaulted by a savage horde, wholly heathen, intent on murder and rape, loot and destruction.

The contrast between the two attacks, the attack of Alaric and that of Attila, is very striking. To admire Alaric, even to defend him, is obviously not impossible, since so many historians have been found ready to do both. No voice unless it be Kaiser Wilhelm’s has ever been raised in behalf of Attila. Here was the Empire, Christendom; he fell upon it like a wild beast. At least the Goths were Christian—though Arian—the Huns were pagan heathen. At least Alarichad revered the Roman name and sought to assume it; Attila despised and hated it and would have destroyed it utterly. But if there is this moral contrast between the Gothic and the Hunnish attacks upon the Empire, militarily they are alike in this above all that both were directed first upon the East and were only turned upon the West after a sort of failure. Happily for us the attacks of Attila, while infinitely more damaging, were not nearly so dangerous as those of Alaric. The Empire was assaulted by an assassin; it was delivered.

The Roman system with regard to the Barbarians had long been established when Theodosius II ascended the Eastern throne. It consisted not only in employing Barbarians as auxiliaries—thus Uldis and his Huns had fought under Stilicho against Radagaisus at the battle of Fiesole; but in setting the different Barbarian tribes and races one against another. The Huns especially had been favoured by the Empire in this way, Stilicho knew them well and Aetius who was at last to defeat them upon the Catalaunian plains owed them perhaps his life in the crisis that followed the death of his rival Boniface in 433. But that policy, always dangerous, and the more so if it were inevitable, was alreadybankrupt. The dispersal through the provinces of the Goths, the Vandals, the Alani, Suevi and other tribes left the Empire face to face upon its northern frontier with the real force which had driven them on. In 432 we find Roua, King of the Huns, in receipt of an annual subsidy, scarcely to be distinguished from a tribute, of 350 pounds’ weight of gold. He it was who perhaps first broke the old Roman policy. When the Empire, according to its custom, made alliances with certain Barbarian tribes his neighbours, he claimed them as his subjects and immediately swore that he would denounce all his treaties with the Empire unless the Emperor broke off these alliances. Moreover, he demanded that all those of his subjects then within the Empire should be restored to him; for many had entered the Roman service to escape his harsh rule. These demands could not be ignored or refused. In 433 Theodosius was on the point of sending an embassy to treat with Roua, when he heard that he was dead and that his two nephews, still young men, Attila and Bleda, had succeeded him. It was they who received the Imperial ambassadors.

The conference met on the right bank of the Danube within the Empire, that is near theRoman town of Margus or Margum, a city of Moesia, where the Danube and the Morava meet. The place was known as theMargum planumon account of the character of the country, and was famous as the spot where Diocletian had defeated Carinus.[7]

The Byzantine historian Priscus has left us an account of this strange meeting. The Huns it seems came on horseback and as they refused to dismount the Roman ambassadors also remained on their horses. It was thus they heard the arrogant demands of the Hunnish kings: the denunciation by Theodosius of his alliance with the Barbarians of the Danube, the expulsion of all the Huns serving in the Imperial armies or settled within the Empire, an undertaking not to assist any Barbarian people at war with the Huns, and the payment by the Empire as tribute,tributi nomine, of seven hundred pounds’ weight of gold instead of the three hundred and fifty given hitherto. To all these demands the ambassadors were forced to agree as Attila insisted either upon their acceptance or upon war, and Theodosius preferred any humiliation to war. The famousconference of Margus was thus a complete victory for the Huns, a victory Attila never forgot.

That Theodosius was ready to accept any terms which Attila might insist upon is proved by the fact that he immediately delivered up to him his two guests, young princes of the Huns, and made no protest when Attila crucified them before the eyes of his ambassadors.

This act seems to symbolise at the outset the character of Attila and his reign. He was then, we may suppose, between thirty and forty years old, and although the younger always the master of his brother Bleda, whom he was soon to murder. Of the place of his birth we know nothing,[8]but he grew up on the Danube and there learned the use of arms, perhaps in the company of the young Aetius, who had been a Roman hostage of Roua and who was one day to conquer Attila. If we look for a portrait of him we shall unhappily not find it in any contemporary writer; but Jornandes, probably repeating a lost passage of some earlier writer, perhaps Priscus himself, tells us that he was short, with a mightychest, a large head, eyes little and deep-set, a scant beard, flat nose and dark complexion. He thrust his head forward as he went and darted his glances all about, going proudly withal, like one destined to terrify the nations and shake the earth. Hasty and quarrelsome, his words, like his acts, were sudden and brutal, but though in war he only destroyed, and left the dead unburied in their thousands for a warning; to those who submitted to him he was merciful, or at least he spared them. He dressed simply and cleanly, ate as simply as he dressed, his food being served on wooden dishes; indeed his personal temperance contrasted with the barbaric extravagance he had about him. Nevertheless he was a Barbarian with the instincts of a savage. Constantly drunk he devoured women with a ferocious passion, every day having its victim, and his bastards formed indeed a people. He knew no religion but surrounded himself with sorcerers, for he was intensely superstitious.[9]As a general he was seldom in the field, he commanded rather than led and ever preferred diplomacy to battle.[10]His greatestweapon was prevarication. He would debate a matter for years and the continual embassies of Theodosius amused without exhausting him and his patience. He played with his victims as a cat does with a mouse and would always rather buy a victory than win it. He found his threat more potent than his deed, and in fact played with the Empire which had so much to lose, very much as Bismarck played with Europe. Like Bismarck too his business was the creation of an Empire. His idea, an idea that perhaps even Roua had not failed to understand, was the creation of an Empire of the North, a Hunnish Empire, in counterpoise against the Roman Empire of the South, to the south that is of the Rhine and the Danube. For this cause he wished to unite the various Barbarian tribes and nations under his sceptre, as Bismarck wished to unite the tribes of the Germans under the Prussian sword. He was to be the Emperor of the North as the Roman Emperors were Emperors of the South. Had he lived in our day he would have understood that famous telegram of the Kaiser to the Tsar of Russia—“the Admiral of the Atlantic....”

It was the business of Theodosius to prevent the realisation of this scheme, nor did he hesitate to break the treaty of Margus to achievethis. His emissaries attempted to attach to the Empire the Acatziri, a Hunnish tribe that had replaced the Alani on the Don. Their chief, however, fearing for his independence, or stupidly handled, sent word to Attila of the Roman plot. The Hun came down at the head of a great army, and though he spared the Acatziri, for their chief was both wily and a flatterer, he brought all the Barbarians of that part within his suzerainty and, returning, soon found himself master of an Empire which stretched from the North Sea to the Caucasus, and from the Baltic to the Danube and the Rhine, an Empire certainly in extent comparable with that of Rome.

It was in achieving this truly mighty purpose that Attila exhibits two of his chief characteristics, his superstition and his cruelty.

It seems that the ancient Scythians on the plain to the east of the Carpathians had for idol and perhaps for God a naked sword, its hilt buried in the earth, its blade pointed skyward. To this relic the Romans had given the name of the sword of Mars. In the course of ages the thing had been utterly forgotten, till a Hunnish peasant seeing his mule go lame, and finding it wounded in the foot, on seeking for the cause, guided by the blood,found this sword amid the undergrowth and brought it to Attila who recovered it joyfully as a gift from heaven and a sign of his destined sovereignty over all the peoples of the earth. So at least Jornandes relates.[11]

The other episode exhibits his cruelty. In founding his empire Attila had certainly made many enemies and aroused the jealousy of those of his own house. At any rate he could not remember without impatience that he shared his royalty with Bleda. To one of his subtlety such impatience was never without a remedy. Bleda was accused of treason, perhaps of plotting with Theodosius, and Attila slew his brother or had him assassinated; and alone turned to enjoy his Barbary and to face Rome.

FOOTNOTES:[3]In the thirty-first book of his History of Rome: see Appendix I.[4]The Prussian student is even to-day famous for the scars on his face inflicted in the duels at the Universities.[5]Cf. the physique of the ordinary Prussian at its most characteristic in Von Hindenberg, who really seems to have been hewn out of wood.[6]It was a modern and famous German who not long since declared that the Prussians were such quarrelsome and disagreeable brutes that it was only their propensity to drink beer and that continually that mollified them sufficiently to be regarded as human beings.[7]It is curious to remember that this first encounter of Attila with the Imperial power took place in what is now Servia only fifty miles further down the Danube than Belgrade.[8]It has been suggested that his name Attila is that of the Volga in the fifth century and that therefore he was born upon its banks; but as well might one say that Roua was born there because one of the ancient names of that river was Rha.[9]For all this see Appendix: Jornandes,R. Get., 35 and especially for his dress and food, Priscus,infra.[10]Cf. Jorn.,R. Get., 36: “Homo subtilis antequam arma gereret , arte pugnabat....”[11]See Appendix, Jornandes,R. Get., 35.

[3]In the thirty-first book of his History of Rome: see Appendix I.

[4]The Prussian student is even to-day famous for the scars on his face inflicted in the duels at the Universities.

[5]Cf. the physique of the ordinary Prussian at its most characteristic in Von Hindenberg, who really seems to have been hewn out of wood.

[6]It was a modern and famous German who not long since declared that the Prussians were such quarrelsome and disagreeable brutes that it was only their propensity to drink beer and that continually that mollified them sufficiently to be regarded as human beings.

[7]It is curious to remember that this first encounter of Attila with the Imperial power took place in what is now Servia only fifty miles further down the Danube than Belgrade.

[8]It has been suggested that his name Attila is that of the Volga in the fifth century and that therefore he was born upon its banks; but as well might one say that Roua was born there because one of the ancient names of that river was Rha.

[9]For all this see Appendix: Jornandes,R. Get., 35 and especially for his dress and food, Priscus,infra.

[10]Cf. Jorn.,R. Get., 36: “Homo subtilis antequam arma gereret , arte pugnabat....”

[11]See Appendix, Jornandes,R. Get., 35.

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