Titans of History

ATTILA THE HUN

406–53

He was a man born into the world to shake the nations, the scourge of all lands, who in some way terrified all mankind by the dreadful rumors noised abroad concerning him.

Jordanes, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths, 6th-century Goth historian

Attila, king of the Huns from 434 to 453, had a voracious appetite for gold, land and power. Defeated only once, he was the most powerful of the barbarian rulers who fed off the last vestiges of the crumbling Roman empire. According to legend, he carried the Sword of Mars, bestowed on him by the gods as a sign he would rule the world.

The Huns were a collection of tribes from the Eurasian steppes with a fearsome reputation (the Great Wall of China was built to keep them at bay). Basing themselves in what is now Hungary, they took advantage of the decline of the Roman empire during the 4th and 5th centuries to expand their territories, until, at its peak under Attila, their empire stretched from the River Danube to the Baltic Sea, encompassing large swathes of Germany, Austria and the Balkans.

Attila was said to be as ugly as he was successful: short, squat and swarthy with a large head, deep-set eyes, squashed nose and sparse beard. Aggressive and short-tempered, he was every inch a soldier, eating meat served on wooden dishes while his lieutenants ate assorted delicacies off silver plates. In the Hun tradition, he would often eat and negotiate on horseback, while at camp he was entertained by a fool, dwarf or one of his many young wives.

In 434, Attila’s uncle King Ruglia died, leaving Attila and his older brother Bleda in joint charge of the kingdom. The Roman empire had long since been divided into two, the eastern (also known as the Byzantine) empire being ruled in Attila’s time by Theodosius II. To avoid attack from the Huns, Theodosius had agreed to pay an annual tribute, but when he defaulted on payments, Attila invaded Byzantine territory, capturing and destroying several important cities, including Singidunum (Belgrade).

Following an uneasy truce negotiated in 442, Attila attacked again the following year, destroying numerous towns and cities along the Danube and massacring their inhabitants. The slaughter in the city of Naissus (in what is present-day Serbia) was so great that, several years later, when Roman ambassadors arrived there for negotiations with Attila, they had to camp outside the city to escape the stench of rotting flesh. Countless other cities endured a similar fate. According to one contemporary account: “There was so much killing and bloodletting that no one could number the dead. The Huns pillaged the churches and monasteries, and slew the monks and virgins … They so devastated Thrace that it will never rise again and be as it was before.” Constantinople was only spared because Attila’s forces were unable to penetrate the capital’s walls, so he turned instead on the Byzantine army, inflicting a crushing and bloody defeat. Peace came at the cost of repaying the tribute owed and tripling future payments. Then, around 445, Bleda was murdered, surely on his brother’s orders, leaving Attila in sole command of the kingdom. Another assault on the eastern empire followed in 447, as the Huns struck further east, burning down churches and monasteries as they went, and using battering rams and siege towers to smash their way into cities, which they again razed to the ground, butchering the inhabitants.

Attila’s only defeat came when he invaded Gaul in 451. His initial intention had been to attack the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse rather than to overtly challenge Roman interests in the area. In 450, however, Honoria—the sister of Valentinian III, the western emperor—appealed to Attila to rescue her from an arranged marriage to a Roman senator. Having received her engagement ring, Attila took this as a proposal of marriage and demanded half of Rome’s western empire as a dowry. When the Romans refused, Attila invaded Gaul with a massive army. In response, the Roman general Flavius Aetius combined his forces with the Visigoths to resist the Hun invasion. The rival armies clashed at Orléans, and in the ensuing Battle of Châlons (in modern Champagne), in which thousands of men from both sides were killed, the Huns were forced to retreat. It was one of the last great victories for the western empire but a pyrrhic one, for their forces were spent.

When the Huns invaded Italy in 452, Aetius was powerless to stop them. Mobile and rapacious, Attila’s armies sacked and burned yet more towns and cities, including Aquileia, Patavium (Padua), Verona, Brixia (Brescia), Bergomum (Bergamo) and Mediolanum (Milan). Only an outbreak of illness among Attila’s troops slowed his campaign, but by the spring he was on the verge of taking Rome itself, in which the western Roman emperor, Valentinian III, had taken refuge. It took a direct appeal from Pope Leo I to dissuade him from sacking the city, Attila agreeing to go no further south.

Attila’s death came in 453 after a night of heavy drinking following his marriage to another young bride. He suffocated in a pool of blood after suffering a heavy nosebleed while asleep. The soldiers who buried him were killed afterward, so that none of his enemies would ever be able to find and desecrate his grave.