VTHE ATTACK UPON THE WEST
In turning from the East, where he did not like the look of Marcian, to the West, where the weak and sensual Valentinian, then thirty-one years old, seemed to offer himself as a prey, the universal robber needed a pretext for his attack. The matter of the plate of Sirmium he had either forgotten or he feared that concerning it he would be met and satisfied. He needed a bone of contention which it would be impossible for Valentinian to yield. He found it in Honoria, the Emperor’s sister.
It will be remembered that in 435, fifteen years before, this wild and passionate girl, in disgrace at Constantinople, had sent her ring to Attila and had offered herself to him, to be his bride, as her mother had been the bride of Adolphus, the successor of Alaric. For fifteen years the Barbarian had forgotten this romantic proposal, and though he had kept her ring he had made no overtures or demandsof any sort for the lady. Upon the death of Placidia in 450 he recalled the affair, and at once sent a message to Valentinian claiming both Honoria and her property as his, and with her a half of the Western Empire. He asserted that he learned with the greatest surprise that his betrothed was on his account treated with ignominy and even imprisoned. For his part he could see nothing unworthy in her choice which in fact should have flattered the Emperor, and he insisted that she should at once be set at liberty and sent to him with her portion of the inheritance of her father, and the half of the Western Empire as her dowry.
To this amazing proposition Valentinian made answer that Honoria was already married, and that therefore she could not be the wife of the Hun, since unlike the Barbarians the Romans did not recognise polygamy or polyandry; that his sister had no claim to the Empire which could not be governed by a woman and was not a family inheritance. To all this Attila made no reply; only he sent Honoria’s ring to Ravenna and persisted in his demands.
The insincerity of Attila’s claims, the fact that they were but a pretext, is proved bythis that suddenly he dropped them altogether and never referred to them again. Honoria was as utterly forgotten as the plate of Sirmium. He tried another way to attain his end, became suspiciously friendly, swore that the Emperor had no friend so sure as he, the Empire no ally more eager to serve it.
The truth was that a pretext for attack far better than the withholding of Honoria had suddenly appeared. The province of Africa had been lost to the Romans by the invasion of the Vandals who were now governed by a man not unlike Attila himself, Genseric. It is true he was not a pagan like the Hun, but he was an Arian, and he had gathered under his banner all the Barbarians that surged among the ruins of the Roman cities of Africa. Genseric had married his son to the daughter of Theodoric, King of the Visigoths, but as this alliance did not bring him all he hoped, he returned the girl to her father minus her ears and her nose, which he had cut off. Fearing lest Theodoric should invoke the aid of the Empire against him for this unspeakable deed, Genseric had sought the alliance of Attila. A new vision opened before the Hun; he saw a new alliance, if not a new suzerainty, offered him with whose aid he might attackthe Empire both north and south, so that while he descended upon the richest of the European provinces of Rome—Gaul, Genseric should fall upon Italy herself. In this scheme for the final loot of the West Attila was still further encouraged by the fact that the Franks, the most warlike of the Barbarian tribes in Europe (that which was destined first to become Catholic and later to refound the Empire), were in anarchy by reason of the death of their chief, whose inheritance was in dispute between his two sons. The elder of these had appealed to Attila for his assistance, while the younger had turned to Rome and had become indeed the protégé, if not the adopted son, of the great Roman general Aetius. This young man at Aetius’ suggestion went to Rome to petition the Emperor, and there Priscus saw him “a beardless boy, his golden hair floating on his shoulders.”
Here was a quarrel after Attila’s own heart. The Vandals should invade Italy from Africa, he would fall upon Gaul, the passages of the Rhine being opened for him by the Franks. He forgot all about Honoria. At once he sent a message to Valentinian informing him of his determination to attack the Visigoths and bidding him not to interfere. The Visigoths,he declared, were his subjects, subjects who had escaped from his dominion, but over whom he had never abandoned his rights. He pointed out too how dangerous they were to the peace of the Empire, on whose behalf, as much as on his own, he now proposed to chastise them.
Valentinian replied that the Empire was not at war with the Visigoths, and that if it were it would conduct its own quarrels in its own way. The Visigoths, said he, dwelt in Gaul as the guests and under the protection of the Roman Empire, and in consequence to strike at them was to strike at the Empire. But Attila would not hear or understand. He insisted that he was about to render Valentinian a service, and then, confirming us in our opinion that his object was merely loot, sent to Theodoric bidding him not to be uneasy, for that he was about to enter Gaul to free him from the Roman yoke.
At the same time that the Visigoth received this message he also received one from Valentinian, greeting him as the “bravest of the Barbarians,” and bidding him resist “the tyrant of the universe” who, like the modern Prussian, “knows only his necessity, regards whatever suits him as lawful and legitimate, and is determinedto bring the whole world under his domination.” Theodoric, in much the same position as modern Belgium, according to Jornandes, cried out, as King Albert might have done in August last: “O Romans, you have then at last your desire; you have made Attila at last our enemy also.” But the Romans were as little to blame or able to help it as England or France. Attila, “the tyrant of the universe,” had prepared and was intent upon war. All Theodoric could do was to be ready to defend himself.
Attila prepared to attack the West, but the same problem confronted the defenders then as yesterday, namely, by which road that attack would come. The Hun thundered against the Visigoths, but on this very account Aetius, like the French, thinking more subtly than the enemy, remained uncertain whether after all Italy would not be the victim rather than Gaul. He was wrong, like his representatives of to-day; the Barbarian was a barbarian, he believed in his own boasts.
An enormous army of every kind of Barbarian was gathered upon the Danube and in the provinces to the south of that river. This host may have numbered anything from half a million men upward; it was not less thanhalf a million strong. Each tribe had its chief, among which the two most famous were the kings of the Gepidae and the Ostrogoths; but all alike trembled before Attila, who had thus beneath his hands the most formidable and numerous hosts that had ever yet threatened civilisation. It was barbarism itself in all its innumerable multitude which was about to fling itself upon Gaul.
The plan of Attila—if plan it can be called—was well chosen. Gaul was more easily attacked than Italy and was little less essential to the future of Roman civilisation. It was then, as it has been ever since, the very heart of Europe. To destroy it was to destroy the future.
Gathering his innumerable peoples upon the borders of the Danube, Attila divided his armies into two parts. The first army was to march to the Rhine by the right or southern bank of the Danube, by the great Roman military way, past all the Roman fortresses of the frontier of the Empire, each of which was to be destroyed as it advanced. The second army was to march by the left or northern bank of the Danube, and to meet the first near the sources of that river where, in the great forests of Germany, the two armieswere to provide themselves with the materials necessary for their transport into Gaul. There, while they hewed down the trees in thousands, they were met by the Franks who had deserted or killed their young king the protégé of Aetius, and now flocked to his brother under the standard of Attila; certain of the Thuringians and the Burgundians also made common cause with them.
The chief business immediately before Attila was the passage of the Rhine, and it was in order to furnish material for bridges for this purpose that his armies had hewn down the trees by thousands in the ancient “Hercynian” forest. That passage would perhaps have been impossible and certainly very difficult if it had been contested. It was not contested, and to understand the reason why, we must understand the political condition of Gaul.
In the course of the last half-century the great province of Gaul had suffered grievously, though not so grievously as Britain, which had almost lost its identity, nor so hopelessly as Africa, which was completely lost to civilisation. What had happened was this: all the further parts of Gaul had fallen into the occupation of the Barbarians as well as that violated corner enclosed on the west by theJura, where the Burgundians had established themselves. In northern Gaul, in what we now call Picardy, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Franks were settled, the Salian Franks to the west about the cities of Tongres, Tournay, Arras, Cambrai, Amiens; the Ripuarian Franks to the east on either side the Rhine about Cologne, Mentz, Coblenz and Treves. To the south of the Salian Franks the Saxons held the coast and the lower reaches of the Seine, to the south of them lay Armorica, as far as the Loire, an isolated province of Bretons to the south of them as far as the Pyrenees, occupying all Aquitaine were the Visigoths under Theodoric. Central Gaul, however, with its cities of Metz, Strasburg, Troyes, Langres, Orleans, Lyons, Vienne, Arles, Narbonne, and the town of Lutetia or Paris, remained within the Roman power and administration which though in decay and very largely clericalised, as we shall see, was still a reality.
If Attila was bent on chastising the Visigoths it was obviously across this still Roman and Christian province of Central Gaul that he must march, and experience both in the East and the West had taught the Imperial Government that such a march meant the complete ruin, devastation and depopulation of everycity on the way. The natural frontiers of Gaul upon the East were and are the Rhine and the mountains. To hold them is the safety of Gaul, to lose them is destruction. Unfortunately, the Rhine could not be held against Attila. It could not be held because the chief crossing place at Confluentes (Coblenz) was in the power of the Franks, while a secondary crossing at Augst, now a village between Bâle and Mulhouse, was in the power of the Burgundians. Those gates were flung wide, and it was through them that Attila at last entered the heart of the West.
Confluentes (Coblenz) stood at the junction of the Moselle with the Rhine, and thence upon the left of the Moselle a great Roman road ran south-west to Augusta Treverorum (Treves), whence a whole series of roads set forth to traverse Gaul in every direction. From Confluentes, too, running north along the left bank of the Rhine, a road pushed on northward through Bonn to Cologne, whence again a great highway ran west and south across what is now Belgium and Picardy. This would seem to have been the main route of Attila’s advance. At the southern entry at Augst his armies could await, meet and perhaps cut off or defeat any attack from Italy.
THE ATTACK OF ATTILA UPON GAUL AND THE RETREAT FROM ORLEANS
THE ATTACK OF ATTILA UPON GAUL AND THE RETREAT FROM ORLEANS
THE ATTACK OF ATTILA UPON GAUL AND THE RETREAT FROM ORLEANS
It was January when Attila set out, it was March when he found himself at last before the gates of Gaul upon the Rhine. The spring and summer lay all before him in which to ruin and to destroy what after all he could not understand.