Who was Attila the Hun?

The Huns before Attila

The Huns rode out of the steppe north of the Black Sea around 370, mounted archers the Romans barely knew. They drove the Goths over the Danube, the chain that ended in the Roman disaster at Adrianople in 378 (why Rome fell). By the early 400s their kings ruled from the plains of today’s Hungary. Attila, born around 406, was a nephew of King Rua; his name may be Gothic for little father. When Rua died in 434, Attila and his elder brother Bleda took over together. Around 445 Attila had Bleda killed.

Gold from Constantinople

His first victim was the Eastern Empire. At Margus, on the Danube, the brothers negotiated on horseback, Hun fashion, and made Constantinople double its yearly tribute to 700 Roman pounds of gold. In the 440s they broke through the frontier and took Singidunum, today’s Belgrade, and Naissus, Constantine’s birthplace. The peace of 443 cost the East 6,000 pounds of gold at once and 2,100 a year. Constantinople paid, but its walls never fell to him (why the East survived).

A Greek envoy, Priscus, dined at his court in 449. The guests ate from silver plates; Attila ate meat from a wooden one and drank from a wooden cup. Jordanes, drawing on Priscus, describes a short, broad-chested man with a large head, small eyes and a thin graying beard.

Gaul, Italy and the pope

In 450 Honoria, sister of the western emperor Valentinian III, sent Attila her ring with a plea for help against a forced marriage. He read it as a proposal and demanded half the Western Empire as dowry. In 451 he invaded Gaul, where the Roman general Aetius and the Visigoths fought him to a standstill on the Catalaunian Plains. In 452 he turned on Italy and razed Aquileia; tradition says refugees fleeing to the lagoon islands helped found Venice.

Near Mantua, on the river Mincio, he met an embassy led by Pope Leo I, and turned back. Prosper of Aquitaine, a churchman, gives Leo all the credit. The Spanish chronicler Hydatius points to famine and disease in the Hun army and to an eastern Roman force striking the Hun homeland. Either way, Attila never took Rome.

Why the Scourge of God?

The title is not from his lifetime. It grew in later Christian legend, which made Attila an instrument of divine punishment. The idea behind it is biblical: the prophets described foreign conquerors as tools in God’s hand, and Isaiah says it of Assyria.

Alas Assyrian, the rod of my anger, the staff in whose hand is my indignation! I will send him against a profane nation, and against the people who anger me I will give him a command to take the plunder and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.

Writers of Attila’s own century read the invasions the same way. Salvian of Marseille argued around 440 that the barbarians were winning because Roman sins deserved it.

Death on his wedding night

In 453 Attila married a young woman named Ildico. The morning after the feast his attendants broke down the door and found him dead without a wound, the bride weeping beneath her veil. Jordanes says a nosebleed had choked him as he lay drunk on his back. He was buried at night in three coffins, of gold, silver and iron. His sons fought over the inheritance, the subject peoples revolted, and within a few years his empire was gone. Legend kept him alive as Etzel in the German Nibelungenlied and Atli in the Norse sagas.