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This is a draft of an article that was published in a slightly different
form in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. All citations should
be to the published version and not to this draft.
ATTILA THE HUN AND THE BATTLE OF CHALONS
by Arther Ferrill
No one represents the unbridled fury and savagery of bar-
barism as much as Attila the Hun. Even in the twentieth cen-
tury one of the worst names that could be found for the Germans
was to call them Huns. Attila, as the greatest Hun leader,
is the stereotypical sacker of cities and killer of babies.
In his own day he and his Huns were known as the "Scourge of
God," and the devastation they caused in Gaul before the great
Battle of Chalons in 451 AD became a part of medieval folklore
and tradition.
The clash at Chalons was one of those rare monumental
conflicts, pitting against one another two of the towering
figures of Late Antiquity, the fierce and passionate Attila
and the noble Ae?tius, sometimes called "the last of the Ro-
mans." By 451 Aetius had been the foremost general in the
Roman Empire for many years, and he was also the chief polit-
ical adviser to the Emperor of the West, Valentinian III. In
the previous forty years the once great Empire had suffered
staggering setbacks, especially in the West. Ae?tius had done
more than anyone else to keep what remained of the Roman world
strong and prosperous.
Despite Ae?tius' efforts, when Attila crossed the Rhine
with the Huns in 451, he threatened a tottering relic of pow-
er. The Western Roman Empire had already been ravaged by
Visigoths, Vandals, Suebi, Alamanni, Burgundians and other
barbarian tribes. Visigoths had an independent kingdom in
Aquitaine, and Vandals occupied North Africa with a capital
at Carthage. Roman rule in many parts of Gaul and Spain was
merely nominal. Although Aetius had waged his own personal
fight against the tide of the times, he had not been able to
hold back the wave of invasions that had rolled over the West
ever since Alaric and the Visigoths had sacked the city of
Rome in 410.
One of the most fascinating features of the story of At-
tila and the Huns is that the background to their potent pen-
etration of Roman Gaul and the decisive Battle of ChE?lons is
every bit as spellbinding as the actual combat itself. Al-
though parts of the story are nearly incredible, the evidence
for it is reasonably good--as good, at least, as evidence ever
is for the fifth century AD. It is a tale of lust for sex and
power, for money and land, and the principal actors are as
colorful as any who ever lived.
The Huns themselves were a people of mystery and terror.
Arriving on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the late fourth
century, riding their war horses out of the great steppes of
Asia, they struck fear into Germanic barbarians and Romans
alike. Some scholars believe that they had earlier moved
against the Chinese Empire but were turned away and swept to-
wards Rome instead. As they approached the Black Sea and con-
quered the Ostrogoths, they also drove the Visigoths across
the Danube into the Roman Empire and caused the crisis that
led to the astounding defeat of the Roman army under the Em-
peror Valens at Adrianople in 378 AD.
Those early Huns, using the traditional tactics of mount-
ed archers, seemed like monsters from the darkness to their
more civilized contemporaries. The Roman historian Ammianus
Marcellinus, writing at the end of the fourth century, de-
scribed their savage customs and elaborated on their military
tactics:
The nation of the Huns...surpasses all other barbarians
in wildness of life....And though [the Huns] do just bear
the likeness of men (of a very ugly pattern), they are
so little advanced in civilization that they make no use
of fire, nor any kind of relish, in the preparation of
their food, but feed upon the roots which they find in
the fields, and the half-raw flesh of any sort of animal.
I say half-raw, because they give it a kind of cooking
by placing it between their own thighs and the backs of
their horses....
When attacked, they will sometimes engage in regular
battle. Then, going into the fight in order of columns,
they fill the air with varied and discordant cries. More
often, however, they fight in no regular order of battle,
but by being extremely swift and sudden in their move-
ments, they disperse, and then rapidly come together
again in loose array, spread havoc over vast plains, and
flying over the rampart, they pillage the camp of their
enemy almost before he has become aware of their ap-
proach. It must be owned that they are the most terrible
of warriors because they fight at a distance with missile
weapons having sharpened bones admirably fastened to the
shaft. When in close combat with swords, they fight
without regard to their own safety, and while their enemy
is intent upon parrying the thrust of the swords, they
throw a net over him and so entangle his limbs that he
loses all power of walking or riding.
Obviously, when the Huns first appeared on the edges of
the Roman Empire, they made a strong impression, but after
their initial threats they settled down along the Danube, par-
ticularly in the Great Hungarian Plain, and for almost fifty
years they served the Romans as allies more often than they
attacked them as enemies. In return, the Eastern Emperor,
beginning in the 420's, paid them an annual subsidy. On the
whole, this uneasy relationship worked well although there
were times when the Huns threatened to intervene directly in
imperial affairs.
The decisive turn of events came with the accession of
Attila as King of the Huns. The new ruler was much more ag-
gressive and ambitious than his predecessors had been, and ar-
rogance sometimes made him unpredictable. There is a story
that he claimed to own the actual sword of Mars, and that other
barbarian chiefs could not look the King of the Huns directly
in the eyes without flinching. Attila was a striking figure,
and Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire offered a famous description of the person-
ality and appearance of the Hun, based on an ancient account:
His features, according to the observation of a Gothic
historian, bore the stamp of his national origin...a
large head, a swarthy complexion, small, deep-seated
eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard,
broad shoulders, and a short square body, of a nervous
strength, though of a disproportioned form. The haughty
step and demeanour of the king of the Huns expressed the
consciousness of his superiority above the rest of man-
kind; and he had a custom of fiercely rolling his eyes,
as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he in-
spired....He delighted in war; but, after he had ascended
the throne in a mature age, his head, rather than his
hand, achieved the conquest of the North; and the fame
of an adventurous soldier was usefully exchanged for that
of a prudent and successful general.
At the outset of his reign (sometime after 435) Attila
demanded more money, and the Eastern Emperor, Theodosius II,
obligingly doubled the annual subsidy. For various reasons,
however, the new king began in the late 440's to look to the
West as the main area of opportunity for the Huns. For the
next decade and a half after his accession Attila was the most
powerful foreign potentate in the affairs of the Western Roman
Empire. His Huns had become a sedentary nation and were no
longer the horse nomads of the earlier days. The Great Hun-
garian Plain did not offer as much room as the steppes of Asia
for grazing horses, and the Huns were forced to develop an
infantry to supplement their now much smaller cavalry. As one
leading authority has recently said, "When the Huns first ap-
peared on the steppe north of the Black Sea, they were nomads
and most of them may have been mounted warriors. In Europe,
however, they could graze only a fraction of their former
horse-power, and their chiefs soon fielded armies which re-
sembled the sedentary forces of Rome." By the time of Attila
the army of the Huns had become like that of most barbarian
nations in Europe. It was, however, very large, as we shall
see, and capable of conducting siege operations, which most
other barbarian armies could not do effectively.
In any event the Hunnic invasion of Gaul was a huge un-
dertaking. The Huns had a reputation for cruelty that was not
undeserved. In the 440's one of Attila's attacks against the
East in the Balkans aimed at a city in the Danubian provinces,
Naissus (441-42). It was located about a hundred miles south
of the Danube on the Nischava River. The Huns so devastated
the place that when Roman ambassadors passed through to meet
with Attila several years later, they had to camp outside the
city on the river. The river banks were still filled with
human bones, and the stench of death was so great that no one
could enter the city. Many cities of Gaul would soon suffer
the same fate.
After securing a strong position on the Roman side of the
Danube the Huns were checked by the famous Eastern Roman
general, Aspar, as they raided Thrace (442). Then, in 447,
Attila descended into the Balkans in another great war against
the East. The Huns marched as far as Thermopylae and stopped
only when the Eastern Emperor, Thodosius II, begged for terms.
Attila accepted payment of all tribute in arrears and a new
annual tribute of 2,100 pounds of gold. The Huns were also
given considerable territory south of the Danube. One source
says of this campaign, "There was so much killing and blood-
letting 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." This strong victory in the
East left Attila free to plan the attack on the West that
culminated in the invasion of Gaul.
Another of the great barbaric chieftains of the age,
Gaiseric, King of the Vandals, played a role in the prelude
to Chalons. He urged Attila to attack the Visigoths in the
West because of the hostility between Vandals and Visigoths.
A generation earlier Gaiseric's son had married the daughter
of Theodoric I, King of the Visigoths, but in 442 the Roman
Emperor Valentinian III agreed to the betrothal of his daugh-
ter to Gaiseric's son, and the Visigothic princess was re-
turned to her people with her nose and ears inhumanly
mutilated. From that time on the enmity of Vandals and Visig-
oths was great, and when Attila did cross the Rhine, the
Visigoths joined Aetius against the Huns, but the Vandals
stayed out of the war.
Two other considerations proved especially important.
One was the death of the Eastern Emperor Theodosius II, who
fell from his horse and died in 450. His successor, Marcian
(450-7), took a hard line on barbarian encroachment in the
Balkans and refused to pay Attila the usual subsidy. The fury
of the Hun was monstrous, but he decided to take out his wrath
on the West, because it was weaker than the East,and because
one of history's most peculiar scandals gave Attila a justi-
fication for war with the Western Emperor. Honoria, Emperor
Valentinian's sister, had been discovered in 449 in an affair
with her steward. The unfortunate lover was executed, and
Honoria, who was probably pregnant, was kept in seclusion. In
a rage she smuggled a ring and a message to the King of the
Huns and asked Attila to become her champion. He treated this
as a marriage proposal and asked for half of the Western Em-
pire as her dowry. So when he crossed the Rhine, he could
claim that he merely sought by force what was his by right of
betrothal to Honoria.
After massive preparations Attila invaded the Rhine with
a large army of Huns and allied barbarian tribes. In his force
was a sizable body of Ostrogoths and other Germanic warriors,
including Burgundians and Alans who lived on the barbarian
side of the frontier. The Franks were split between pro- and
anti-Roman factions. As early as April Attila took Metz, and
fear swept through Gaul. Ancient accounts give figures that
range between 300,000 and 700,000 for the army of the Huns.
Whatever the size, it was clearly enormous for the fifth cen-
tury AD. Some of the greatest cities of Europe were sacked
and put to the torch: Rheims, Mainz, Strasbourg, Cologne,
Worms and Trier. Paris fortunately had the advantage of hav-
ing a saint in the city and was spared because of the minis-
trations of St. Genvieve.
After he secured the Rhine, Attila moved into central
Gaul and put OrlCAans under siege. Had he gained his objec-
tive, he would have been in a strong position to subdue the
Visigoths in Aquitiane, but Ae?tius had put together a formi-
dable coalition against the Hun. Working frenetically, the
Roman leader had built a powerful alliance of Visigoths, Alans
and Burgundians, uniting them with their traditional enemy,
the Romans, for the defense of Gaul. Even though all parties
to the protection of the Western Roman Empire had a common
hatred of the Huns, it was still a remarkable achievement on
Ae?tius' part to have drawn them into an effective military
relationship.
Attila had not expected such vigorous action on the part
of the Romans, and he was too wise to let his army be trapped
around the walls of Orleans, so he abandoned the siege, ac-
cording to one source, on June 14. This gave the Romans and
their allies the advantage in morale as the Huns withdrew into
the open country of the modern Champagne district of France.
There on the Catalaunian Plains (some believe closer to Troyes
than to Chalons) a great battle was fought, probably about
June 20. Attila seems to have been shaken by his sudden re-
versal of fortune. Uncertain of victory and in the confusion
of retreat, on the day of the battle he stayed behind his lines
in the wagon laager until afternoon. It is likely that he
planned to begin fighting late enough in the day to fall back
under darkness of night should that prove necessary. He did
finally move up his army in battle order.
On the right wing of the Hunnic army Attila stationed the
bulk of his Germanic allies. The Ostrogoths fought on the
left, and in the center Attila took position with his best
troops, the Huns. On the other side Aetius decide to put his
least reliable troops, the Alans, in the center to take what-
ever assault Attila directed towards them. The Visigoths were
placed on the Roman right, and the Romans themselves took the
left. Aetius clearly hoped to execute a double envelopment,
hitting hard against the two weak flanks of Attila's army
while fighting a defensive, holding action in the center.
When the Romans on the left were able to seize some high ground
on the flank of the Hunnic right wing during an initial skir-
mish, they gained a considerable advantage.
Thus began one of the Western world's greatest and most
decisive battles. All the sources agree that it was a costly
one in human lives: cadavera vero innumera ("truly countless
bodies"), is the way one ancient author puts it. Attila
struck hard against the Alans in the Roman center. As he drove
them back the Romans on his right moved down in a sharp attack.
The forward momentum of the Huns in the center exposed their
flank to an attack by Theodoric, King of the Visigoths, and
as night fell, the Huns had taken a beating though losses on
both sides were extraordinary. Attila retreated to the safety
of his laager, and the archers of the Huns kept the Romans at
bay. Theodoric had lost his life in the battle.
In fact at this point the battle was over. Some on the
Roman side wanted Ae?tius to resume the fighting the next day,
but he chose not to. Perhaps he wanted to leave Attila with
his forces, though battered, still intact in order to keep the
barbarians of Gaul united behind Rome. In any event, he en-
couraged the new King of the Visigoths to hurry back to
Aquitaine to secure his accession to the throne. Attila began
his withdrawal back across the Rhine and was able to effect
it easily. Many have criticized Aa?tius for making things too
easy for the Huns, for not destroying their army, but it is
not necessary to introduce political considerations to ex-
plain the Roman commander's motives. Militarily he did the
right thing. The sources make it clear that the Roman alli-
ance also took heavy losses at Chalons, and Attila was merely
a wounded tiger. He continued to have considerable military
power. Although the Hun had been beaten in a bloody battle,
it was probably wise for Aetius to allow his savage foe a line
of retreat. To have driven Attila the Hun out of the Empire
was satisfaction enough. It is true that in the following
year Attila invaded Italy and caused much suffering before he
withdrew, but if he had launched a successful counterattack
in Gaul the whole course of Western history might have been
changed. Unlike most other barbarians of the age, the Huns
were not Christians, and their respect for the Graeco-Roman
Christian civilization of the Late Empire was much more lim-
ited even than that of Visigoth and Vandal.
For various reasons twentieth century "scientific" his-
torians have minimized and even ridiculed the concept of "de-
cisive battles". There is a widespread belief that human
events are rarely determined on the battlefield. In the nine-
teenth century Edward Creasy's book, The Fifteen Decisive Bat-
tles of the World (originally published in 1851) became a best
seller and exercised considerable influence. (Incidentally
Creasy included the Battle of Chalons on his list.) But the
early twentieth century saw a change. Hans Delbru?ck totally
ignored Chalons in his monumental History of the Art of War
Within the Framework of Political History (1920-21), and one
of the foremost authorities on the Late Roman Empire, J.B.
Bury, refused, as some others have done, even to call it by
its traditional name:
The Battle of Maurica [Chalons] was a battle of nations,
but its significance has been enormously exaggerated in con-
ventional history. It cannot in any reasonable sense be des-
ignated as one of the critical battles of the world....The
danger did not mean so much as has been commonly assumed. If
Attila had been victorious...there is no reason to suppose
that the course of history would have been seriously altered.
To be sure, the exact location of the battle has been
disputed and is in doubt. In that general area of modern
France it has been a favorite occupation of retired colonels
to spend their weekends looking for evidence of the battle-
field. But there are many extremely important ancient battles
whose exact locations are uncertain: Plataea, Issus, Cannae,
Zama, and Pharsalus, to name but a few. Considering the pau-
city of ancient evidence uncertainty of that sort is to be
expected, and it can hardly be used as evidence that the bat-
tles were not important. As to exaggerating the danger of
Attila and the Huns, why were they less dangerous than Hanni-
bal and the Carthaginians or Alaric and the Visigoths?
It is true that the threat of the Huns to Rome had not
been entirely removed by Aa?tius' victory at Chalons. Though
beaten and forced to retreat across the Rhine, Attila still
had a powerful force, and he had not learned his lesson. The
next year (452) he crossed over the Alps and moved down into
Italy, launching another great invasion that terrorized the
inhabitants of the Western Roman Empire. In some ways this
second invasion of the West was even more savage than the
first. The city of Aquileia at the tip of the Adriatic was
wiped off the face of the earth. The fugitives from that piti-
ful city are supposed to have fled into the lagoons of the
Adriatic and to have founded the new city of Venice. Much of
the Po Valley--Milan, Verona, and Padua--was devastated and
depopulated. The Hun had pillaged and destroyed Northern It-
aly! Aa?tius found it much more difficult to persuade Visig-
oths and Alans to help in the defense of Italy than he had a
year earlier in organizing them to protect Gaul.
For awhile it appeared that Italy would be lost to the
invaders, but actually Attila's position was weaker than the
Romans realized, undoubtedly because of the serious losses he
had suffered the previous year at ChE?lons. There is a famous
tradition that Pope Leo I met Attila in Northern Italy at the
confluence of the Minicio and the Po and persuaded him to
leave Italy with a display of eloquence and a show of elabo-
rate sacerdotal robes. There occurred, according to legend,
one of the most famous miracles in the history of Christian-
ity--St. Peter and St. Paul appeared to Attila threatening him
with instant death if he ignored the urgings of Leo.
In an act that added immeasurably to the influence of the
fledgling papacy, an obliging Attila led his army out of It-
aly. It was probably not so much the influence of Leo as the
fact that his troops were short of supplies that motivated the
great barbarian leader. There had been a famine in Italy in
450-51, and logistical support had never been a strong point
for barbarian armies. Also a plague swept through the army
of the Huns, and the Eastern Emperor Marcian sent an army
across the Danube to strike into the heartland of the Huns'
territory. When these factors are added to the disastrous
loses the year earlier at Chalons, it is obvious why Attila
was able to see merit in the humanitarian arguments of Pope
Leo.
In any event, the great Hun spared Rome and withdrew from
Italy. Twice in successive years, at Chalons and in Northern
Italy, the menace of the Huns had proved incapable of bringing
the Western Empire to its knees. Perhaps Rome's last great
service to the West was to serve as a buffer between the Asi-
atic Huns and the Germanic barbarians whose destiny was to lay
the medieval foundations of the modern, western nations. Ae-
tius had been blamed by many Italians for not having destroyed
Attila and the Huns in Gaul, but "the last of the Romans" had
contributed substantially to the ruin of the once proud bar-
barian nation. Its place in the pages of history was over.
In the next year after the retreat from Italy Attila died
an appropriately barbarian death. He took a new, young, beau-
tiful bride, a damsel named Ildico, though he already had a
coterie of wives. The wedding day was spent in heavy drinking
and partying, and the King of the Huns took his new bride to
bed that night in drunken lust. The next morning it was dis-
covered that he had died--drowned in his drunkenness in his
own nosebleed. The new bride was found quivering in fear in
the great man's bedquarters. The empire of the Huns dissi-
pated nearly as quickly as its most famous leader. In 454 the
Ostrogoths and other Germanic tribes revolted against the
Huns, and the sons of Attila, who had quarreled among them-
selves, could not deal with the crisis. In the words of Bury,
the Huns were "scattered to the winds."
Even in the last days of the Roman Empire in the West it
was still possible for the imperial general Aetius to mobilize
a major military force in defense of Gaul. During his ascen-
dancy in the 430's, 40s and early 50s Rome had lost much, par-
ticularly to the Vandals in North Africa, yet had remained
powerful enough to thwart the ambitions of Attila the Hun.
Naturally, there was jealousy and rivalry between Aa?tius and
his superior, the Emperor Valentinian III. The General's suc-
cess against the Huns and his effective treatment of the
Visigoths in Gaul actually helped to make him unnecessary any
longer, and in 454 Valentinian killed him personally with the
imperial sword. One of the Emperor's advisers said, "You have
cut off your right hand with your left." The next year two
of Ae?tius' followers killed the Emperor, and within a gener-
ation, by 476, there would no longer be a Roman Emperor in the
West. Ae?tius was truly "the last of the Romans."
Recommended Readings
There are many excellent books on the Late Roman Empire
and on the Huns. I list several of the most important ones
here, but their bibliographies contain many more specialized
works.
J.B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, 2 vols.,
London and New York (reprint of 1923 ed.).
Arther Ferrill, The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Mil-
itary Explanation, London and New York 1986
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, with Introduction, Notes and Appendices by J.B.
Bury, 7 vols., London 1909-14.
Thomas Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, 2 vols., 2nd ed.,
Oxford 1892.
A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284-602, 4 vols.,
Oxford 1964.
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns, Berkeley
1973.
E.A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns, Oxford
1948.