Attila:The Scourge of God

emperors (of whom Majorian, another former colleague of Aetius, alone showed any promise), the last of whom, Romulus Augustus (sic!) was deposed in 476, bringing to an end the Roman Empire in the West.

Gaiseric, who contributed more to the destruction of the West than any other individual, outlasted that empire by a single year. Like the Huns’, the Vandals’ legacy was entirely negative, their name linked for ever with cruelty and destruction. Two generations after Gaiseric’s death, they were routed by the East Roman army of Justinian and, like the Huns, wiped from the slate of history. (After Attila’s death, the Hun Empire rapidly disintegrated, leaving no mark on posterity except a memory of massacre and devastation with which the name of Attila, ‘the Scourge of God’ will ever be associated.)

Was the work of Aetius, then, all for nothing? By no means. Although he probably appeared too late on the scene to rescue the Western Empire, not only did he save Europe from Asiatic domination, but his career helped to make possible the future harmonious co-existence between Germans and Romans within the limits of the former empire. The Catalaunian Plains was the Western Empire’s greatest (although final) triumph. The victory was due to a new development of seminal importance: Romans and Germans combining to repel a common enemy. This contrasts with previous Roman policy towards federate ‘guests’: reluctant toleration and containment as with the Visigoths and Franks or, in the case of the Burgundians, military suppression. Henceforth, the political dynamic lay with the constructive interaction between the two peoples, a process which survived the dissolution of the empire itself.

The conversion of the Frankish king Clovis to Catholicism in 498 — an example followed eventually by other German monarchs — removed the last major barrier to co-operation between Germans and Romans. (Hitherto, the Franks, like other German tribes, had been Arian Christians, heretics in Roman eyes.) Aetius laid the foundation on which Theoderic (no connection with the Visigothic kings of that name) was able to build his successful Romano- German synthesis in Ostrogothic Italy. This, despite renewed conflict between the two peoples in the course of Justinian’s re-occupation of the West, was to prove a lasting achievement. From it developed European medieval civilization, embodied politically in the empire of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, whose heir is, arguably, the European Union.

The two thousand years of the Christian era have been significantly occupied by Rome. The Western Empire lasted almost a quarter of that period, the Eastern nearly three-quarters, surviving (admittedly in increasingly attenuated form) until 1453 — less than two generations before the birth of Henry VIII, which, in the long perspective of history, is the day before yesterday. Rome’s influence on architecture, law, languages, ideas, the arts, religion, government, etcetera, etcetera, has been immeasurable — and lasting. To take just one example: for nearly two centuries British India was ruled by classically educated young men, who took as their model for government that of Imperial Rome; on the whole, whatever one thinks of the morality of imperialism, they made a pretty good fist of running the subcontinent. Rome’s legacy has, in the main, been a noble one, whose preservation and transfer owes not a little to Aetius — ‘the last of the Romans’, as Procopius described him.

¹ This resulted in a second (and much more destructive than that of 410) Sack of Rome.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Regarding the history of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, we know pretty well what happened, but not always why or how it happened. This requires the writer of historical fiction to flesh out the skeleton of available fact with speculation as to the motivation and personality traits of real persons. For example, we don’t know if Attila planned to build a ‘Greater Scythia’, as I have suggested. But it is at least arguable that he might have done. Great military leaders have tended to harbour ambitions beyond the mere acquisition of plunder and territory — Alexander and Napoleon, for instance.

Such creative guesswork aside, I have, except in a few instances, kept to the known historical facts as closely as possible. (The story of Attila and Aetius is so extraordinary and dramatic in itself that it needs little in the way of embellishment.) The exceptions are as follows. The Burgundians have been relocated to Savoy a few years before this actually happened. My character Constantius is a conflation of two real persons of that name. Even Gibbon admits that the two Constantii ‘from the similar events of their lives might have been easily confounded’; so I don’t feel too guilty about uniting them. I have made him the key figure in Chrysaphius’ plot to have Attila murdered, rather than Edecon or Bigilas (Vigilius), the two agents most closely involved in the conspiracy. Ambrosius’ meeting with Germanus is conjectural, but certainly within the bounds of possibility when the difficulty in precisely dating events in Britain for this period, is borne in mind. According to some scholars (Winbolt, Musset, et al.), Ambrosius was active in the early to mid-fifth century; others (e.g., Cleary) place him late in that century. Like Aetius, Ambrosius Aurelianus (sometimes given as Aurelius Ambrosius), who is thought to have come from a consular family, has earned the epithet ‘the last of the Romans’. The estimated date of Germanus’ second visit to Britain (440-44) virtually coincides with that for the third appeal for help to Aetius (445), permitting, I think, a fictional conjunction. Irnac I have presented as a child rather than the young man whom Priscus saw. And Daniel, Constantinople’s ‘pillar-saint’, I have placed on his column ten years before he first sat on it. In addition, I have made a few minor changes to topography: part of the necropolis of Tarquinii (the Etruscans’ southern capital) has been translated a hundred miles north — but still within Etruria — to the valley of the Garfagnana; in Gaius’ transit of the Black Forest I have telescoped one or two features (for instance, bringing the Triberg Falls a few miles further south), and have relocated the Himmelreich from the western to the eastern end of the Hollenthal. The above changes were made in the interests of dramatic emphasis or rounded storytelling, and on that count are hopefully excusable.

As for sources, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (still the most vivid and readable general account), E. A. Thompson’s A History of Attila and the Huns, and The Later Roman Empire by my old lecturer, A. H. M. Jones, were essential background reading. Of the many books kindly lent to me by my co-publisher Hugh Andrew, the following were especially valuable: Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity, a series of papers edited by John Drinkwater and Hugh Elton; The Early Germans by Malcolm Todd; Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity; The Germanic Invasions by Lucien Musset; and — a real treasure — The Rome that Did Not Fall by Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell. Some primary sources that I found extremely useful were: Notitia Dignitatum, a list of senior army and civil posts with units, for both halves of the empire, compiled c. 400; The Histories of Ammianus Marcellinus, which gives a marvellous picture of the late Roman world in the period just before that of my story; Ptolemy’s Geographia; and excerpts from the Byzantine History of Priscus of Panium, which includes an eye-witness account of the Eastern embassy’s visit to Attila’s court.

R. L.

APPENDIX I

DID ATTILA REALLY DESERVE HIS SOUBRIQUET ‘THE SCOURGE OF GOD’?

The received understanding of Attila’s soubriquet Flagellum Dei, the Scourge of God, is of a ruthless barbarian leader heading a horde of bloodthirsty savages on a rampage through the Roman Empire. There is an undeniable element of truth in that image. To contemporaries, however, the epithet had a somewhat different meaning. Attila was seen as just retribution sent by God to chastise the Christian Romans for some (unspecified) collective fault or omission. Catastrophes, whether caused by man or nature, then tended to be regarded as the consequence of divine disapproval. Which perhaps lends a fresh perspective to the interpretation of Attila’s nickname. Had Attila been Christian instead of heathen, would he still have been seen as the Scourge of God? It’s a moot point. The Vandal monarch Gaiseric, who was Christian, and whose tally of destruction and atrocities was not so very inferior to Attila’s, was never known by anything other than his own