Attila:The Scourge of God

FORTY-ONE

Perhaps in compensation for his ineffectiveness as a ruler, Theodosius liked to ride large and spirited horses. It was as if he felt a need to demonstrate that here was a field, one not without an element of danger, in which he could display mastery. On the twenty-sixth day of the month named for Julius Caesar, in the year that the Third Peace of Anatolius was made, the Emperor, accompanied by a groom, was riding by the banks of the River Lycus, near the capital. After a spirited canter, as was his wont he dismounted and gave the reins to the groom, with instructions to walk the big bay stallion for a space and then return. Leaving his master resting by the waterside, the groom complied, but before rejoining the Emperor he made a small adjustment to the stallion’s saddle.

On remounting, Theodosius found the horse suddenly uncontrollable. It began to buck and rear violently. His desperate efforts to calm it and retain his seat proved vain, and Theodosius was hurled from the saddle, to land with a crash on boulders by the river’s edge. He tried to rise but his legs failed to respond. ‘My back,’ he whispered to the groom, ‘I think it’s broken.’ Before going to summon help, the groom removed from beneath the stallion’s saddle a tiny seed-capsule, scarlet, prickly, the fruit of a lowly shrub called ‘burning bush’.

When he heard the news, Aspar at once sent word to Marcian, a senator and distinguished army veteran, then hastened to attend the bedside of the dying Emperor. Theodosius lingered for two days before expiring, unlamented, in the fiftieth year of his age and the forty-third of his reign. One month later, a retired officer, Marcian, a modest, upright man who had given Aspar nineteen years of loyal service, was invested with the imperial purple. Renouncing the feeble policy of his predecessor, the first act of the new Emperor was to send, via his ambassador Apollonius, a polite but unequivocal message to Attila: the East would pay no further tribute to the Huns.