There Where I Have Passed the Grass Will Never Grow Again

Attila entertains–as imagined by a 19th- century artist. Feedloader (Clickability)

He called himself flagellum Dei, the scourge of God, and fifty-fifty today, one,500 years after his claret-drenched death, his proper name remains a byword for brutality. Ancient artists placed peachy stress on his inhumanity, depicting him with goatish beard and devil's horns. Then as at present, he seemed the prototype of an Asian steppe nomad: ugly, squat and fearsome, lethal with a bow, interested importantly in looting and in rape.

His real name was Attila, King of the Huns, and even today the mention of information technology jangles some atavistic panic bong deep within civilized hearts. For Edward Gibbon—no great admirer of the Roman Empire that the Huns ravaged repeatedly betwixt 434 and 453 A.D.—Attila was a "savage destroyer" of whom it was said that "the grass never grew on the spot where his horse had trod." For the Roman historian Jordanes, he was "a man born into the world to shake the nations." As recently as a century ago, when the British wanted to emphasize how vicious and how united nations-English their opponents in the Showtime Globe State of war had grown—how very far they had fallen brusk in their sense of accolade, justice and fair play—they called the Germans "Huns."

Yet in that location are those who recall we have much to acquire from a people who came obviously from nowhere to force the mighty Roman Empire nigh to its knees. A few years ago now, Wess Roberts made a bestseller out of a book titled Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun past arguing that—for blood-spattered barbarians—the Huns had enough to teach American executives almost "win-directed, have-charge direction." And Bill Madden reported, in his biography of George Steinbrenner, that the i-time owner of the New York Yankees was in the habit of studying Attila in the promise of gaining insights that would prove invaluable in business. Attila, Steinbrenner asserted, "wasn't perfect, merely he did have some good things to say."

Even serious historians are prone to ponder why exactly Attila is so memorable—why it is, as Adrian Goldsworthy observes, that there have been many barbarian leaders, and notwithstanding Attila'due south is "one of the few names from antiquity that still prompt instant recognition, putting him alongside the likes of Alexander, Caesar, Cleopatra and Nero. Attila has become the barbaric of the aboriginal earth."

The Hun empire at its summit, superimposed on mod European borders. The gauge position of Attila's capital is marked by the star. Map: Wikicommons.

For me, this question became firsthand just last calendar month, when an quondam friend e-mailed out of the blue to ask: "Was A the H all bad? Or has his reputation been unfairly traduced in the course of generally rubbishing everything from that menstruation that wasn't Roman?" This odd request was, he explained, the product of the recent birth of twins. He and his married woman were because the name Attila for their newborn son (and Berengaria for their daughter). And while it may help to explain that the mother is Greek, and that the name remains popular in some parts of the Balkans, the more I mulled over the problem, the more than I realized that there were indeed at least some nice things to be said near Attila the Hun.

For one matter, the barbaric leader was, for the most part, a man of his word—by the standards 0f his time, at to the lowest degree. For years, he levied annual tribute from the Roman Empire, only while the toll of peace with the Huns was considerable—350 pounds of solid gold a yr in 422, rise to 700 in 440 and eventually to 2,100 in 480—it did buy peace. While the tribute was paid, the Huns were quiet. And though about historians agree that Attila chose not to press the Romans harder considering he calculated that it was far easier to have their money than to indulge in risky armed forces action, information technology is not hard to think of examples of barbarians who extracted tribute and then attacked regardless—nor of leaders (Æthelred the Unready springs to mind) who paid upwardly while secretly plotting to massacre their tormentors. It might exist added that Attila was very much an equal-opportunity sort of barbaric. "His main aim," notes Goldsworthy, "was to profit from plunder during warfare and extortion in peacetime."

An 1894 engraving of Attila from Charles Horne'southward Great Men and Famous Women, an image adjusted from an antiquarian medal. In depicting Attila with horns and goatish physiognomy, the engraver stressed the diabolical aspects of his grapheme.

More compelling, possibly, is the high regard that Attila always placed on loyalty. A abiding characteristic of the diplomatic relations he maintained with both the Eastern and the Western portions of the Roman Empire was that any dissident Huns found in their territories should be returned to him. In 448, Attila showed himself ready to get to war against the Eastern Empire for failing to comply with one of these treaties and returning but five of the 17 Hun turncoats that the king demanded. (It is possible, that the other dozen fled; our sources indicate that the fate of those traitors unlucky enough to be surrendered to Attila was rarely pleasant. Ii Hun princes whom the Romans handed over were instantly impaled.)

It would be incorrect, of course, to portray Attila equally some sort of beacon of enlightenment. He killed Bleda, his own brother, in guild to unite the Hun empire and dominion it alone. He was no patron of learning, and he did society massacres, putting entire monasteries to the sword. The Roman historian Priscus, who was part of an embassy that visited Attila on the Danube and who left the only eyewitness business relationship that we have of the Hun male monarch and his capital, saw regular explosions of rage. Nonetheless, it is difficult to know whether these storms of anger were genuine or simply displays intended to awe the ambassadors, and in that location are things to admire in the respect that Attila accorded Bleda's widow—when Priscus encountered her, she held the post of governor of a Hun village. The same writer observed Attila with his son and noted definite tenderness, writing: "He drew him close… and gazed at him with gentle optics."

Huns charge at the Battle of Chalons–as well known equally the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields–fought near Paris in 451.

The discovery of a rich fifth century Hun hoard in Pietrosa, Romania, strongly suggests that the Hun king permitted his subjects to enrich themselves, merely it is to Priscus that nosotros owe much of our evidence of Attila's generosity. Surprised to exist greeted in Greek by one "tribesman" he and his companions encountered on the Hungarian obviously, Priscus questioned the human being and discovered he had once been a Roman subject and had been captured when Attila sacked a city of the Danube. Freed from slavery by his Hun master, the Greek had elected to fight for the "Scythians" (as Priscus chosen the Huns), and now protested that "his new life was preferable to his old, complaining of the Empire'due south heavy taxes, decadent government, and the unfairness and cost of the legal system." Attila, Priscus recorded, likewise employed two Roman secretaries, who served him out of loyalty rather than fear, and even had a Roman friend, Flavius Aëtius, who lived among the Huns as a hostage for several years. Aëtius used the military skills he learned from them to become a highly practiced horseman and archer, and, eventually, one of the leading generals of his solar day.

Most surprising, maybe, the Hun king was capable of mercy—or at least cool political calculation. When he uncovered a Roman plot confronting his life, Attila spared the would-exist assassin from the hideous fate that would take awaited any other homo. Instead, he sent the would-exist assassin back to his paymasters in Constantinople, accompanied by annotation setting out in humiliating detail the discovery of the Roman scheme–and a demand for farther tribute.

Attila remained a threat to both the Western and the Eastern Empires, nevertheless. His armies reached as far southward every bit Constantinople in 443; between 450 and 453 he invaded France and Italy. Oddly, but arguably creditably, the latter ii campaigns were fought—so the Hun king claimed—to satisfy the honor of a Roman princess. Honoria, sister of the Western emperor, Valentinian Iii, had been sadly disappointed with the husband that her brother had selected for her and sent her appointment ring to Attila with a request for assist. The king chose to interpret this act as a proposal of marriage, and—demanding one-half the Western Empire every bit a dowry—he fought ii encarmine campaigns in Honoria'due south proper name.

Of all Attila's better qualities, though, the i that nigh commends him to the modernistic mind is his refusal to be seduced by wealth. Priscus, again, makes the point most clearly, relating that when Attila greeted the Roman ambassadors with a banquet,

tables, large enough for three or four, or even more, to sit at, were placed side by side to the table of Attila, so that each could take of the food on the dishes without leaving his seat. The attendant of Attila entered first with a dish full of meat, and behind him came the other attendants with breadstuff and viands, which they laid on the tables. A luxurious repast, served on silverish plate, had been made ready for us and the barbaric guests, but Attila ate cipher simply meat on a wooden trencher. In everything else, too, he showed himself temperate; his loving cup was of wood, while to the guests were given goblets of gold and silver. His apparel, besides, was quite unproblematic, affecting simply to be clean. The sword he carried at his side, the latchets of his Scythian shoes, the bridle of his horse were non adorned, similar those of the other Scythians, with gold or gems or anything costly.

So lived Attila, male monarch of the Huns—then he died, in 453, age probably about 50 and still refusing to yield to the temptations of luxury. His spectacular demise, on one of his many wedding nights, is memorably described by Gibbon:

Before the king of the Huns evacuated Italian republic, he threatened to return more dreadful, and more implacable, if his bride, the princess Honoria, were non delivered to his ambassadors…. Even so, in the mean while Attila relieved his tender anxiety, past adding a beautiful maid, whose name was Ildico, to the list of his innumerable wives. Their marriage was historic with barbaric pomp and festivity, at his wooden palace across the Danube; and the monarch, oppressed with wine and slumber, retired, at a late hour, from the feast to the nuptial bed. His attendants continued to respect his pleasures, or his quiet, the greatest office of the ensuing day, till the unusual silence alarmed their fears and suspicions; and, afterward attempting to awaken Attila by loud and repeated cries, they at length bankrupt into the majestic apartment. They constitute the trembling bride sitting by the bedside, hiding her confront with her veil…. The king…had expired during the night. An avenue had all of a sudden burst; and equally Attila lay in a supine posture, he was suffocated by a torrent of claret, which instead of finding a passage through his nostrils, regurgitated into the lungs and stomach.

The king, in short, had drowned in his own gore. He had, Gibbon adds, been "glorious in his life, invincible in death, the father of his people, the scourge of his enemies, and the terror of the world." The Huns buried him in a triple coffin—an fe exterior concealing an inner silver catafalque which, in plough, masked ane of golden—and did it secretly at night, massacring the prisoners whom they had forced to dig his grave so that it would never be discovered.

Attila's people would not threaten Rome once again, and they knew what they had lost. Gibbon puts it all-time: "The Barbarians cutting off a office of their hair, gashed their faces with unseemly wounds, and bewailed their valiant leader as he deserved. Not with the tears of women, but with the blood of warriors."

Sources

Michael D. Blodgett. Attila, Flagellum Dei? Huns and Romans, Conflict and Cooperation in the Belatedly Antique World. Unpublished PhD thesis, Academy of California at Santa Barbara, 2007; Edward Creasy. The Xv Decisive Battles of the Western Earth, From Marathon to Waterloo. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851; Edward Gibbon. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Basle, JJ Tourneisen, 1787; Adrian Goldsworthy. The Fall of the Due west: The Death of the Roman Superpower. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009; Christopher Kelly. The Terminate of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome. New York: WW Norton, 2010; John Homo. Attila the Hun: A Barbarian Leader and the Fall of Rome. London: Bantam, 2006; Denis Sinor, The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia. Cambridge: Loving cup, 2004.

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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nice-things-to-say-about-attila-the-hun-87559701/

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