Attila:The Scourge of God

name.

Judged by the standards of the ancient world, Attila may not have been quite the monster he appears to us. ‘Greatness’ in that world tended to be equated with scale of conquest, large numbers of enemy killed or enslaved being a bonus — vide Alexander ‘the Great’, Pompey ‘the Great’, et al. One condition of a Roman general’s being awarded a triumph was that enemy dead should number not less than five thousand. (Julius Caesar boasted of having slaughtered a million Gauls.) By this yardstick, Attila would certainly qualify as a legitimate contender for the palm of greatness! ‘Attila the Great’ — it sounds preposterous, but only perhaps because he left no legacy. Had the vast empire he built up endured, and not disintegrated immediately following his death, his reputation might today be very different. History, after all, is written by the winners.

On a personal level, Attila compares favourably with many supposedly ‘civilized’ Greeks and Romans. His legendary simplicity of dress and lifestyle (skin garments, wooden cup and platter) was in refreshing contrast to the ostentatious pomp and luxury of the imperial courts of Constantinople and Ravenna. Although his punishments could be cruel (crucifixion and impalement were favourite forms), he could — as befits magnanimous monarchs who are above acts of petty revenge — display mercy and forgiveness. For example, when Bigilas/Vigilius, the chief agent in the bungled conspiracy to assassinate Attila, was brought before him, the King disdained to punish the man as being so insignificant as to constitute no threat. This surely displays a certain nobility of character, which contrasts with the jealous vindictiveness of Valentinian III, who slew his chief general, Aetius, with his own hand, or the rancorous spite shown by the Empress Eudoxia in hounding the saintly John Chrysostom to his death.

Attila’s onslaught on first the Eastern then the Western Roman Empire, has created an indelible image of a power-hungry megalomaniac. The truth is that he had little choice. By inheriting the Hun throne, he became shackled to a juggernaut. The only way to hold the Hun nation together, and maintain personal power by rewarding his followers, was to wage war — incessant, successful war. Failure to maintain that momentum would have resulted in his swift replacement (and almost certain liquidation). So, by a (very) generous re-interpretation of history, Attila could be portrayed more as a man of his time and the prisoner of circumstances, than as the Scourge of God.

APPENDIX II

WHY DID THE EASTERN EMPIRE SURVIVE WHILE THE WESTERN DID NOT?

The West finally succumbed in 476, but the East survived for many more centuries. Why? A hundred years before the West’s collapse, Rome was still a mighty power with an immense army which, though stretched, was dealing capably with enemies on many fronts. These extended from the Rhine to the Euphrates, as Ammianus Marcellinus, an army officer turned historian, shows us in his Histories, that magnificent picture of the late Roman world, at a time when it was the West that was seen as the stronger of the two halves of the empire. In his vivid pages, the only hint of coming disaster lies in his account of the Battle of Adrianople (Hadrianopolis) and its immediate aftermath: a conflict (involving the destruction of East Rome’s army and the death of her emperor) whose effects, initially at least, seemed confined to the East. However, events in the next few decades were brutally to expose the true reality of the empire’s situation: the West had serious deep-seated weaknesses, not fully apparent till after the death of Theodosius I in 395, while the East was in fact far stronger and more stable than it seemed in 378, the year of Adrianople. These differences become clear if we compare the two halves of the empire in three areas.

First, the frontiers. The West, with its extremely long frontier — the whole of the Rhine and upper Danube — was far more exposed to barbarian inroads than the East, which only had the lower Danube to worry about. (Persia, on its eastern border — potentially a far greater threat than any barbarian federation — was a civilized power which on the whole kept its treaties.) Unlike the East, whose poorer Balkan provinces could serve as a buffer zone to absorb barbarian attacks, leaving the richer eastern and southern provinces inviolate behind an impregnable Constantinople, the whole Western Empire, bar Africa, could easily be penetrated by barbarians once they had crossed the boundaries. Also, the East became adept at passing on invaders to the West, once they had tired of plundering the Balkans. (Vide Alaric and the Visigoths.)

Second, the economy. The East was far wealthier and more productive than the West, which still had great tracts of forest and undrained bottom land. Moreover, wealth in the East (with its generally fair tax system, and well-to-do land-owning peasantry) was much more evenly distributed than in the West. Here, an immensely rich senatorial aristocracy lived lives of luxury in contrast to the great mass of the population, who existed dangerously close to subsistence level. Yet it was the poor — mostly agricultural labourers or smallholders — who had to shoulder an unfairly high proportion of the tax burden, in addition to paying rent to the great landowners from whom they leased their plots. Much territory in the West was lost to German invaders who, though most eventually settled down as federates, paid no tax. A shrinking tax base, difficulty in recruiting, and massive losses incurred in barbarian wars, made the task of putting a strong Roman army into the field increasingly difficult for the Western government. Signs of the growing disparity between the two halves of the empire were: in the West, disaffection and decline in patriotism, with many driven by poverty into flight to the estate of a powerful lord (relief from the tax-collectors traded for serfdom), outlawry, or open rebellion as in the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ of the Bagaudae; in the East, a much more homogeneous, prosperous, and stable population.

Third, the government. In the West, Rome’s curse of usurpation by ambitious generals or politicians lingered on: Firmus, Magnus Maximus, Eugenius, Gildo, Constantine III, Constans, Attalus, Jovinus, John (Iohannes) Petronius Maximus. Compare this with the situation in the East, where in the whole of the same period, 364–476, there were only two attempts at usurpation — by Procopius at the very beginning and Basilius at the very end — both of which were easily put down. In the East the civil service was staffed by efficient middle-class professionals, much less prone to graft than their Western counterparts. In the West, the sale of offices (suffragium) was endemic, tending to create a corrupt bureaucracy more concerned with lining its pockets than with serving the state. And the curial class, once the backbone of Western administration, had been demoralized and decimated by an ever-increasing workload imposed on it from Ravenna. In the East, all power was concentrated in Constantinople (like the status of Paris in France until very recently), with the civil service mandarinate, Senate (a service aristocracy, as opposed to the Western club of ‘grands seigneurs’), army, patriarchate, Emperor, and Consistory, combining to form a smooth-working administrative whole. Being forced to work in close proximity to each other, and thus able to establish a system of mutual checks and balances, none of the above entities could become dis-proportionately powerful. Instead, accountability, and co-operation between all state departments, received strong reinforcement. In the West, where the machinery of government was weaker and more fragmented, this did not happen.

Given the above differences, it is not difficult to see why the West — afflicted by administrative, economic, and social breakdown, and militarily too weak to stem barbarian encroachment — collapsed in 476, while the more prosperous and stable East was able to survive for another thousand years.

NOTES

Chapter 1

11 ‘The year of the consuls Asclepiodotus and Marinianus, IV Ides Oct.’ The Romans dated important events ‘from the founding of the city — ab urbe condita’ or AUC (753 BC), but for most dating purposes the names of the consuls for any given year were used, one from Rome, the other from Constantinople. Dating from the birth of Christ was introduced by one Dionysius Exiguus, only in 527. Dates within any given month were calculated by counting the number of days occurring before the next of the three