Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  Am left to weep, and sing their fall ...

  Thus I, Priscus of Panium, in my ninetieth year, with crabbed and arthritic hand lay down my pen, in my simple cell in the Monastery of St Severinus.

  I have a small gold coin on my desk before me. It is the only gold I own. It is beaded round the rim, crudely stamped with a stylised eagle, wings outspread, and it was given to me by the man they once called the Scourge of God. He now lies buried and silent along with the rest of the dead. When I go under the earth in my turn, perhaps the monks will find it and wonder at it, and keep it safe in the sacristy as a treasure. Or perhaps they will melt it down for cloison-work or foil for an illuminated Bible. Perhaps this gold from the hand of a pagan king will become leaf in a page of the Gospels. Ironies are many and nothing remains unchanged, not even gold.

  At evening I can close my eyes peacefully in this Italian monastery amid the delicate tracery of stone carvings, silent but for the soft slap of sandals and the whisper of brown woollen habits over worn flagstones. Here the seven offices of the day are kept with a serene regularity for which I am thankful in a world given over to darkness and chaos. In a kingdom much tattered and torn, much threatened by the darkness beyond, but under the rule of a Christian King, Odoacer, I can give thanks with the rest of them for the triumph of Christendom.

  Neither Attila’s insatiable appetite for ruin, nor Rome’s own great, monolithic sternness, but a gentler way than either survived those evil days. Here where the quiet, sandalled brothers tend their vines and their olive trees, and bend to cut the wheat with their wooden-handled sickles, and the goatbells tinkle from the surrounding hillsides. Here indeed is another way, which I for one think might be true civilisation ...

  But who is to say that those who thought differently, and fought for a different way, were not heroes, too? Mine is only one version. God when he walked on earth provoked many versions.

  And so in memory of these things, and of that man whom I think the noblest as well as the last of the Romans - at one time my recalcitrant pupil - I leave these scraps of history to posterity. I know that posterity seems to me now, in this year of Our Lord 488, a dark and uncaring place, where the scrolls and books of the histories of past ages will be regarded as so much tinder for kindling a fire. The light of learning is going out across Europe.

  Yet, although it seems to me likely that posterity will not care what I write, and that the name of Aëtius, the noblest Roman, will be lost in the scattered leaves of the coming years, which name should be as widely known as Alexander, or Hannibal, or Caesar - yet it is for him that I have written.

  There is a shy and rather simple lad of eighteen or so who lives with us here in the monastery. A lay brother with a shock of golden curls called Romulus, who loves nothing better than to help the monks in the vegetable garden, and to feed the chickens and the goats. He has a little herbarium all his own, filled with coriander and parsley and chives. He loves to grow beans and lentils, radishes, lettuces, and is very fond of the humble, heavy-cropping turnip. Once, he sat on the imperial throne of Rome, and wore the purple - but that was long ago, and in another world.

  Never again will an emperor sit in purple upon the throne, nor stand beneath his yellow parasol on the steps of the Capitoline to greet another Roman army returning south in triumph amid the sound of brazen trumpets and thumping drums, down the Flaminian Way, past the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Column of Marcus Aurelius, winding up the Capitoline Hill to the Temple of Jupiter. Never again will the sunlight dance upon the bronze helmets of the cavalry as their horses champ upon the Field of Mars, nor senators gossip and plot in the vast Baths of Caracalla, lounging over the chessboard or strolling among the shops and gardens, libraries and sculpture gardens of that thirty-three acre Palace of Water. What use have barbarians for libraries and baths?

  Nor will fathers take their sons up the pine-clad Palatine, past Domitian’s Domus Augusta, to see the cave where the monster Cacus once dwelt, nor the fig tree beneath which Romulus and Remus were suckled. Never again will a quarter of a million Romans roar in the Circus Maximus as the chariots race and swerve round the spina, nor in the Colosseum at the feats of the gladiators and wild beasts. Rome’s far-famed Insula of Felicula, sixteen storeys high, is vanished into rubble, and how long will it be before another such wonder is built, tier on tier?

  Europe is a land of log-cabins and mud huts now, of grass-grown roads, crumbling aqueducts, passing war-bands playing crude games with handfuls of coloured mosaic in the ruins of fallen villas. Whatever is done can always be undone. Already the Forum itself, where Cicero and Caesar once spoke, is the abode of wildcats. The Rostra is ruined which was once decorated with the beaks of captured ships; and, yes, with the severed head and hands of Cicero too. Rome was never perfect, but we loved her.

  All these things will soon be forgotten in this new world. Never again will the great grain ships ply their way through the salt furrows from Libya and Egypt, never again will the harbour at Ostia resound with the cries of merchants and traders from halfway round the world, bringing copper and tin and Silurian gold from Britain, glass and leather from the Levant, gems and spices from far Ceylon. Never again these things, for they are all done now. Yet as we can begin to discern, most strangely, Rome was a world both lost and won. Her soul was not destroyed, but miraculously lives on, in other bodies, other forms. She was the mother who died in childbirth - a long, agonising century of labour, her off spring the stern but gentle faith of Europe’s new, barbarian kingdoms. Any other triumph would have been much worse; and it was for this that so many fought and died to defeat the pagan darkness of the Hun.

  Everything in the human world must vanish and nothing shall remain, though some there are who cannot change but are caught in time like insects in amber, trapped and killed there in its bright, clear, mindless gum, for ever loyal to a world they do not realise has gone. Such was the last and noblest Roman of them all ...

  The People are moving on, over the endless plains, stumbling in the cracked earth, about their covered ears the ancient songs of penitence and ash. Songs of grief and the graveside, the young buried before the old, children buried by their parents, and sorrow immeasurable at the right way of nature overturned by war and famine and pestilence. Broken temples, falling towers, clouds of brickdust, bricks coloured like dried blood, hard-baked in the ancient ovens of Babylon, Nineveh and Tyre ...

  They will come at last to a green valley, those pestilence-stricken multitudes, the Angel of History always at their back, harrying them, her sword blazing cruel and bright as the sword of the cherubim at the gates of Eden. They will look out on that pleasant valley of quiet streams and pastures, and they will begin to build again. Oh, the pity of it, and the grandeur.

  The very stone of their building destined to fall again, their house never safe, their building never done, they will never know rest from heaven’s weathering. Their buildings will always fall, they will always build again, they will never surrender. They will never stop wandering, searching, over the endless plains, a storm that will not cease. It is mankind itself that is the storm, god-driven, god-haunted mankind, most pitiful, most magnificent of all creation.

  They will never despair, though their proudest towers are burned to ashes, though their cities are inundated by the waters of the deep, though plague and famine encompass them round, though the sun burn them by day and the frost chill them by night, though the day holds its labours and the night its terrors, though they are but so many small, weak, naked, biped creatures, so many little parcels of mortal flesh, and death walks beside them daily. They will never lose hope, walking on resolute into the coming storm which is their own reflection, unbowed, undismayed, undefeated. They were made to suffer and to endure, to fall and to triumph, and never to surrender.

  Among all the wonders of the earth, most wonderful is man. So I salute him, recognising him as made by the very hand of the Living God, in the tragedy of his fate and in the greatness of his heart.

&n
bsp; Hic finis Historiae Prisci Panii, Anno Domini 488

  TIME LINE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Readers may want to know how much of this trilogy is fact. The short answer is, a lot. Obviously it’s a work of historical imagination rather than straight history, but many of the details are authentic, from the scandalous character of the Princess Honoria and her pre-marital pregnancy, to the Emperor Honorius’ obsession with his pet chickens, to Attila’s magnificently scornful treatment of the clumsy Byzantine assassination attempt and the fifty pounds of gold.

  Where I have invented, I have at least tried to stay within the bounds of possibility in the story’s most important details. For instance, although there’s no evidence for Attila having spent time in Rome as a hostage, we do know that Aëtius was a hostage in the camp of the Huns, where it seems almost certain he must have met and known Attila. Furthermore, it was very common for barbarian client kings to send their sons to Rome for a year or two, partly as a promise of peaceful intentions, and partly for them to be ‘civilised’. The Vandal princes Genseric and Beric were both hostages in Rome, so it seems perfectly feasible for Attila to have been too.

  To list the sources for every fact in this trilogy would be impracticable, and pretty dull reading too; but if you want to know more about this tempestuous, apocalyptic period in the history of the west, here are the books I enjoyed most when researching: Peter Heather’s recent The Fall of the Roman Empire is a lively and readable survey of the 5th century as a whole; John Julius Norwich’s Byzantium: The Early Centuries is informative and a lot of fun, packing in plenty of sly gossip along the way. (My favourite Byzantine Emperor is Constantine Copronymus, literally ‘Constantine Shit-Name’, on account of his having shat in the font at his own infant baptism, poor little chap. Unfortunately this was a good three centuries after Attila, so there was no way I could justifiably squeeze it in.)

  If you can get hold of a copy, try Edward Creasy’s The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, from Marathon to Waterloo, first published in 1851 and still a cracking read. It’s where I first read in detail about the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields. And beyond that, there’s the daddy of them all: Edward Gibbon’s huge and magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, completed in 1788, and surely still the greatest single work of history. It looks intimidating, and the style is classical eighteenth century, but I still recommend it. It’s fantastically erudite and often very funny too, with all Gibbon’s malicious, feline ironies. There are good abridged versions around nowadays as well.

  There are two fascinating and haunting footnotes to the tale, which Priscus himself cannot have known. It was exactly a thousand years after the death of Attila, almost to the day, on 29th May 1453, that the great city of Constantinople finally fell to a foreign invader: the Islamic army of the Ottoman Turks. But although the religion of Mohammed was of course unheard of in Attila’s time, most historians are now agreed that the Huns themselves were of Turkic-Mongolian stock. And so it was their direct descendants who finally stormed the mighty Walls of Theodosius, where their fearsome ancestor had failed a millennium before.

  The last poignant footnote to the story comes as late as 1577. For eleven long centuries, Galla Placidia’s mummified body sat enthroned in robes of state within her mausoleum in Ravenna, as rigid and implacable in death as she was in life. You can still see her sarcophagus today, much the largest, between the smaller ones of Valentinian on the left and Honorius on the right. And then in 1577, some children stuck a lighted taper through the peep-hole, and the tinder-dry robes and body caught fire and burned away in seconds. Ashes to ashes, as they say, and dust to dust.

  WN.

  List of the Principal Place Names Mentioned in the Text, with their Modern Equivalents

  Modern equivalents marked with an *asterisk are approximations only

  Adrianople - Edirne, Thrace, European Turkey

  Aemona - Ljubljana, Slovenia

  Altai Mountains - mountain range in western Mongolia, sacred to the Huns and to many other peoples

  Aquileia - present-day city dates only from Middle Ages

  Aquincum - Budapest

  Argentoratum - Strasbourg

  Augusta Treverorum - Trier

  Aureliana - Orléans

  Azimuntium - in Thrace, precise location unknown

  Bononia - Bologna

  Britain - England and Wales

  Burdigala - Bordeaux

  Cameracum - Cambrai

  Carbonarian Forest - the Ardennes*

  Carnuntum - Petronell, Austria*

  Carthago Nova - Cartagena, Spain

  Catalaunian Fields - near Châlons in Champagne,

  France, precise location unknown

  Cisalpine Gaul - Lombardy

  Colonia Agrippina - Cologne

  Constantinople (also Byzantium) - Istanbul

  Corduba - Cordova

  Dacia - Romania

  Dumnonia - Devon

  Dyrrachium - Durrës, Albania

  Euxine Sea - the Black Sea

  Fiorentia - Florence

  Gades - Cadiz

  Gallia Narbonensis - southern France*

  Gaul - France

  Gessoriacum - Boulogne

  Hungvar - the Hungarian plain

  Illyricum - Croatia/Bosnia/Serbia/Albania*

  Isca Dumnoniorum, also Esca - Exeter

  Lauriacum - Enns, Austria

  Leptis Magna - Labda, Libya

  Londinium - London

  Lutetia - Paris

  Maeotis Palus - the Sea of Azov

  Marcianople - Devnya, Bulgaria

  Margus - Pozarevac, Serbia

  Massilia - Marseilles

  Mauretania - Morocco*

  Mediolanum - Milan

  Mediomatrice - Metz

  Mincius - River Mincio, Northern Italy

  Moesia - northern Bulgaria/Macedonia*

  Moguntiacum - Mainz

  Mosa - River Meuse

  Naissus - Nis

  Narbo - Narbonne

  Neapolis - Naples

  Noricum - Austria*

  Padus - River Po

  Panium - a humble and unremarked little town in Thrace

  Pannonia - Hungary*

  Parthia - Persia, Iran*

  Philippopolis - Plovdiv, Bulgaria

  Ratiaria - Archar, Bulgaria*

  Rhaetia - Switzerland

  Rhemi - Rheims

  Sardica - Sofia, Bulgaria

  Scythia - Russia, Ukraine*, Kazakhstan*, and all points east

  Sequana - River Seine

  Singidunum - Belgrade

  Sirmium - Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia

  Tanais - River Don

  Tingis - Tangier

  Tolosa - Toulouse

  Tornacum - Tournai

  Trajanopolis - Maroneia, Greece*

  Utus - River Vit, Bulgaria

  Vangiones - Worms

  Viminacium - Kostolac, Serbia