By ARCHDEACON FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.
(REIGNED 434-453)
[Illustration: Attila.]
The Goths were "improvable barbarians;" but the Huns whom Attila led
to ravage the fair peninsula were mere Tartar savages of the lowest
stamp.
All the other invaders of Italy were of Teutonic origin, but the Huns
were Mongols--of such perfect hideousness that Jornandes regarded them
as the offspring of witches and demons. Attila, son of Mundzuk, "the
scourge of God," resembled his soldiers in his flat, swarthy features,
deep-set, fierce, rolling black eyes, and stunted figure. The Huns
were uncivilizable savages, who might harry a continent, but neither
under Attila, nor Genghis, nor Timour, could ever found an organized
kingdom. This terrific and brutal little Kalmuck, with his bead-like
eyes, this skin-clad devourer of raw flesh, delighted to lay waste
whole empires with fire and sword, and to terrify the world. In 434 he
became king of the Huns with his brother Bleda. In 445 Bleda died,
possibly by murder; and in 445 Attila, now sole king of the Huns,
invaded the Eastern Empire, and ravaged it even to the gates of
Constantinople. He was only bought off from destroying it by an
enormous tribute. The infamous plot to assassinate him by the
treachery of Edecon, who was one of his counsellors, was discovered
and foiled, and Attila sent message after message filled with insults
to Theodosius II. In 451 his vast army moved westward, and devastated
Gaul. It was met in the Mauriac plain and defeated by AEtius in the
tremendous battle of Chalons, after a carnage among the most frightful
that the world has ever seen. The Huns were only saved from final
destruction by the heroic boldness of Attila. He had a vast hill of
saddles and other spoils erected, and declared his determination to
burn himself alive rather than be taken captive. He led back his
shattered host to Pannonia, and there in his wooden palace meditated
revenge. In the one authentic glimpse which we get of his mode of
life, we see him at a banquet, while his nobles and warriors caroused
and burst into peals of laughter at the buffooneries of an idiot and a
jester. But the Hunnish king sat grave and silent, caressing the
cheeks of the boy Ernak, his favorite son, whom the augur pointed out
as the heir of his destinies.
In 452 he once more put his myriads in motion and invaded Italy. Every
where the land was as the garden of Eden before him; behind him it
was a desolate wilderness. Encouraged by the omen of some storks
leaving their nest, he stormed and destroyed Aquileia, and, razing
city after city into heaps of blackened ruins, advanced to Milan,
boasting that "where his horses' hoofs trod the grass never grew."
Rome awaited with trembling a fate which seemed to threaten
unprecedented catastrophe. But in this awful crisis the Pope, Leo I.,
showed himself the true _Defensor civitatis_. He headed a splendid
embassy to the camp of Attila. Already Leo had helped to trace with
firm hand the deep lines of Christian orthodoxy which were accepted by
the Church at the fourth great OEcumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451
as her final utterance as to the true Godhead, the perfect Manhood,
the invisible yet distinct union of both Godhead and Manhood, in the
person of her Lord. Now Leo showed what miracle could be achieved by
the irresistible might of weakness. Attila's god was a naked iron
sword of gigantic size, which had been accidentally found by a
herdsman and presented to him, but which he palmed off on his nation
as the authentic sword of the Scythian war-god. Yet he was easily
overawed by the majesty of religion. He scorned the guilty, corrupt
courtiers of Constantinople, but he almost trembled before a holy man.
Already in 451 he had spared the defenceless city of Troyes at the
entreaty of its bishop, St. Lupus, and had asked the benefit of his
prayers. And when he gazed on the calm countenance, noble presence,
and dauntless demeanor of Pope Leo, an awful dread fell upon him.
Alaric had conquered Rome, but Alaric had died immediately afterward.
How if it would be so with Attila? He yielded, he retired; he said--or
perhaps he said--that he could conquer _men_, but that the wolf
(Lupus) and the lion (Leo) had learnt how to conquer him. The tide of
brutal and barbarous invasion was rolled back again, and the world and
the city saw that while the Emperor Valentinian had been ready to fly,
the Pope Leo was not afraid to advance, and that "when the successor
of Caesar had been proved useless, the successor of St. Peter had been
a very present help." Indirectly Attila was the strengthener of the
Papacy, and the founder of Venice. That stately and gorgeous city owes
its origin to the Italians who fled in terror before the brutal Huns
from ruined Padua to the islands and lagoons at the mouth of the
Piave.
In retiring, Attila had demanded once more the hand and dower of
Honoria, the disgraced sister of Theodosius II. But in 453 he added a
beautiful maiden, Ildico, to his innumerable wives. He retired from
the banquet after a deep carouse, and in the morning was found dead
amid a flood of gore by which he had been suffocated, while Ildico sat
weeping beneath her veil by the dead king's bedside. He died as a fool
dieth; and his warriors gashed their cheeks and wept tears of blood,
and gave him a splendid burial. And his name passed into legend as the
King Etzel of the Niebelungen Lied, and Alti of the Saga. But his
"loutish sons" quarrelled among themselves. The Teutons, Goths,
Gepidae, Alani, and Heruli reasserted their independence in the great
victory of Netad in Pannonia in 454; and though the Huns left their
name in Hungary, henceforth the empire of Attila became mere
"drift-wood, on its way to inevitable oblivion."