Attila
king of the Huns
byname Flagellum Dei (Latin: Scourge of God)
died 453
Main
king of the Huns from 434 to 453 (ruling jointly with his elder brother
Bleda until 445). He was one of the greatest of the barbarian rulers who
assailed the Roman Empire, invading the southern Balkan provinces and
Greece and then Gaul and Italy. In legend he appears under the name
Etzel in the Nibelungenlied and under the name Atli in Icelandic sagas.
Attacks on the Eastern Empire.
The empire that Attila and his elder brother Bleda inherited seems to
have stretched from the Alps and the Baltic in the west to somewhere
near the Caspian Sea in the east. Their first known action on becoming
joint rulers was the negotiation of a peace treaty with the Eastern
Roman Empire, which was concluded at the city of Margus (Požarevac). By
the terms of the treaty the Romans undertook to double the subsidies
they had been paying to the Huns and in future to pay 700 pounds (300
kilograms) of gold each year.
From 435 to 439 the activities of Attila are unknown, but he seems to
have been engaged in subduing barbarian peoples to the north or east of
his dominions. The Eastern Romans do not appear to have paid the sums
stipulated in the treaty of Margus, and so in 441, when their forces
were occupied in the west and on the eastern frontier, Attila launched a
heavy assault on the Danubian frontier of the Eastern Empire. He
captured and razed a number of important cities, including Singidunum
(Belgrade). The Eastern Romans managed to arrange a truce for the year
442 and recalled their forces from the West. But in 443 Attila resumed
his attack. He began by taking and destroying towns on the Danube and
then drove into the interior of the empire toward Naissus (Niš) and
Serdica (Sofia), both of which he destroyed. He next turned toward
Constantinople, took Philippopolis, defeated the main Eastern Roman
forces in a succession of battles, and so reached the sea both north and
south of Constantinople. It was hopeless for the Hun archers to attack
the great walls of the capital; so Attila turned on the remnants of the
empire’s forces, which had withdrawn into the peninsula of Gallipoli,
and destroyed them. In the peace treaty that followed, he obliged the
Eastern Empire to pay the arrears of tribute, which he calculated at
6,000 pounds of gold, and he trebled the annual tribute, henceforth
extorting 2,100 pounds of gold each year.
Attila’s movements after the conclusion of peace in the autumn of 443
are unknown. About 445 he murdered his brother Bleda and thenceforth
ruled the Huns as an autocrat. He made his second great attack on the
Eastern Roman Empire in 447, but little is known of the details of the
campaign. It was planned on an even bigger scale than that of 441–443,
and its main weight was directed toward the provinces of Lower Scythia
and Moesia in southeastern Europe—i.e., farther to the east than the
earlier assault. He engaged the Eastern Empire’s forces on the Utus
(Vid) River and defeated them, but he himself suffered serious losses.
He then devastated the Balkan provinces and drove southward into Greece,
where he was only stopped at Thermopylae. The three years following the
invasion were filled with complicated negotiations between Attila and
the diplomats of the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II. Much
information about these diplomatic encounters has been preserved in the
fragments of the History of Priscus of Panium, who visited Attila’s
headquarters in Walachia in company with a Roman embassy in 449. The
treaty by which the war was terminated was harsher than that of 443; the
Eastern Romans had to evacuate a wide belt of territory south of the
Danube, and the tribute payable by them was continued, though the rate
is not known.
Invasion of Gaul.
Attila’s next great campaign was the invasion of Gaul in 451. Hitherto,
he appears to have been on friendly terms with the Roman general Aetius,
the real ruler of the West at this time, and his motives for marching
into Gaul have not been recorded. He announced that his objective in the
West was the kingdom of the Visigoths (a Germanic people who had
conquered parts of the two Roman empires) centred on Tolosa (Toulouse)
and that he had no quarrel with the Western emperor, Valentinian III.
But in the spring of 450, Honoria, the Emperor’s sister, sent her ring
to Attila, asking him to rescue her from a marriage that had been
arranged for her. Attila thereupon claimed Honoria as his wife and
demanded half the Western Empire as her dowry. When Attila had already
entered Gaul, Aetius reached an agreement with the Visigothic king,
Theodoric I, to combine their forces in resisting the Huns. Many legends
surround the campaign that followed. It is certain, however, that Attila
almost succeeded in occupying Aurelianum (Orléans) before the allies
arrived. Indeed, the Huns had already gained a footing inside the city
when Aetius and Theodoric forced them to withdraw. The decisive
engagement was the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, or, according to
some authorities, of Maurica (both places are unidentified). After
fierce fighting, in which the Visigothic king was killed, Attila
withdrew and shortly afterward retired from Gaul. This was his first and
only defeat.
In 452 the Huns invaded Italy and sacked several cities, including
Aquileia, Patavium (Padua), Verona, Brixia (Brescia), Bergomum
(Bergamo), and Mediolanum (Milan); Aetius could do nothing to halt them.
But the famine and pestilence raging in Italy in that year compelled the
Huns to leave without crossing the Apennines.
In 453 Attila was intending to attack the Eastern Empire, where the
new emperor Marcian had refused to pay the subsidies agreed upon by his
predecessor, Theodosius II. But during the night following his marriage,
Attila died in his sleep. Those who buried him and his treasures were
subsequently put to death by the Huns so that his grave might never be
discovered. He was succeeded by his sons, who divided his empire among
them.
Priscus, who saw Attila when he visited his camp in 448, described
him as a short, squat man with a large head, deep-set eyes, flat nose,
and a thin beard. According to the historians, Attila was, though of an
irritable, blustering, and truculent disposition, a very persistent
negotiator and by no means pitiless. When Priscus attended a banquet
given by him, he noticed that Attila was served off wooden plates and
ate only meat, whereas his chief lieutenants dined off silver platters
loaded with dainties. No description of his qualities as a general
survives, but his successes before the invasion of Gaul show him to have
been an outstanding commander.
E.A. Thompson
Encyclopaedia Britannica
