The details of Attila's western campaigns need not concern us here; none the less, it should never be forgotten that, in the summer of 451 and again in 452, the whole fate of western civilization hung in the balance. Had the Hunnish army not been halted in these two successive campaigns, had its leader toppled Valentinian from his throne and set up his own capital in Ravenna or Rome, there is little doubt that both Gaul and Italy would have been reduced to spiritual and cultural deserts, just as surely and just as completely as the Balkan peninsula was reduced by the Ottoman Turks a thousand years later. In 451 Attila crossed the Rhine, devastated the great frontier city of Metz with several other important garrison towns, and penetrated as far as the walls of Orleans. Before he could take the city, however, he was forced to turn back: an imperial army under the Roman general Aetius - the effective ruler of Gaul - was advancing from the east, strengthened by detachments of Visigoths and Burgundians, Bretons and Franks, all united for the first time against their common enemy; and though the ensuing battle, known sometimes by the name of the Catalaunian and sometimes by that of the Mauriac or Mauritian Plain,1 was indecisive insofar as both sides sustained immense losses and neither was left master of the field, it had the effect of halting the Huns' advance. On the following morning Attila gave the signal for retreat and departed for his Hungarian heartland, there to rest and consolidate until spring should bring new ardour to his men.
Early in 452 he launched his army upon Italy. The opening of the new campaign was hardly encouraging: Aquileia held out for three months against the Hunnish onslaught, and Attila was on the point of giving up the siege when, Jordanes tells us, he saw a flight of storks heading away from the city with their young. Crediting them with a degree of foresight which in our own day is more usually accorded to rats, he pointed them out to his troops as a sure sign that the city was doomed. Thus encouraged, the Huns flung themselves with renewed vigour into the attack; and soon afterwards, the ninth greatest metropolis in the Roman Empire was an empty shell. Concordia, Altino and Padua followed in quick succession. Vicenza and Verona, Brescia and Bergamo would have suffered likewise had they not immediately opened their gates at the conqueror's approach - as would Pavia and Milan, where Attila triumphantly set up his court in the imperial palace. These last cities were not put to the torch like those of the Veneto; they were, however, mercilessly sacked, and many of their leading citizens taken into captivity.
This time the King of the Huns was carrying all before him. Aetius, who had assumed command in Italy, had no friendly barbarian tribes on whom to call, as he had had in Gaul the previous year. The imperial army alone stood no chance against the advancing multitude and there was, it seemed, nothing to prevent Attila from marching on Rome - the consequences of which would have been infinitely more terrible than anything ever contemplated by the relatively civilized, Christian, Alaric. And yet, at the very point of departure for his advance down the
1 The old chroniclers differ as to the site of the battle as well as its name. Hodgkin, after a careful analysis of all available evidence, plumps for Mery-sur-Seine, some twenty miles north-west of Troyes; if he is right - which he probably is - the actual fighting is most likely to have taken place in the broad, flat plain immediately to the south, between Mery and Estissac.
peninsula, he suddenly halted; and historians have been speculating ever since as to precisely why he did so.
Traditionally, the credit has always been given to Pope Leo the Great who, accompanied by two imperial dignitaries of the highest rank, travelled from Rome to meet Attila on the banks of the Mincio - probably near Peschiera, where the river issues from Lake Garda - and somehow persuaded him to advance no further; but the pagan Hun would not have obeyed the Pope out of mere respect for his office, and the question remains: what inducements was he offered in return? A substantial tribute is the likeliest answer - together, perhaps, with the hand of Honoria and an appropriate dowry. But there is another possibility: Attila, like all his race, was incorrigibly superstitious, and the Pope may well have reminded him of how Alaric had died almost immediately after the sack of Rome, pointing out that a similar fate was known to befall every invader who raised his hand against the holy city. The Huns themselves may also have been partly responsible for persuading their leader to retire: we have evidence to suggest that, after their devastation of all the surrounding countryside, they were beginning to suffer from a serious shortage of food, and that disease had broken out within their ranks. A final consideration was that troops were beginning to arrive from Constantinople, sent by Marcian to swell the imperial forces. A march on Rome, it began to appear, might not prove quite so straightforward as had first been thought.
For some, or all, of these reasons - just which we shall never know, primary sources for the period being in lamentably short supply - Attila made the decision to turn back. A year later, during the night following his marriage to yet another of his already countless wives, his exertions brought on a sudden haemorrhage; and, as his life-blood flowed away, all Europe breathed again. While the funeral feast was in progress, a specially selected group of captives prepared his body for the grave, encasing it in three coffins - one of gold, one of silver and one of iron. Then, when it had been lowered into the earth and covered over, first with rich spoils of war and then with earth until the ground was level above it, all those involved in the burial ceremonies were put to death, so that the great King's last resting-place might remain for ever secret and inviolate.
And so it has done, to this day.
8
The Fall of the West
[455-95]
Hesperium Romanae gentis imperium , . . cum hoc Augustulo periit. . . Gotborum dehinc regibus Romam tenentibus.
The western Empire of the Roman people . . . perished with that little Augustus . . . the Gothic Kings occupying Rome thereafter.
Count Marcellinus
Some time in the middle of March 455 - it must have been on or about the Ides - the Emperor Valentinian III, who had deserted Ravenna to take up residence in Rome, rode out of the city to the Campus Martius, there to do a little archery practice and to watch the athletes exercising in the spring sunshine. Suddenly, as he paused by some laurel bushes, two soldiers of barbarian origin stepped out from behind them and ran him through with their swords - none of his court or bodyguard lifting, so far as we can gather, a finger in his defence. To a considerable extent, Valentinian could be said to have brought it on himself. Only a few months before, he had personally killed in very much the same way his magister militum Aetius, who had effectively ruled the West for the past thirty years, for no better reason than that the latter had planned to marry off his son to one of the Emperor's daughters; and the murdered man's friends and supporters had there and then determined on revenge.
Valentinian left no son; and the choice of the army fell on an elderly senator, Petronius Maximus, generally believed to have been the grandson of the usurper Maximus who had been crushed by Theodosius the Great. As a young man he had had an outstanding career, having been Consul for the first time at the age of thirty-eight and Praetorian Prefect of Italy six years later; but he was now well past his prime, and if - as was popularly rumoured - he had bribed his way to power, he soon had cause to regret it: almost at once, he found the cares of Empire in the fast-disintegrating West too much for him. He showed, too, a deplorable lack of both political judgement and human sensitivity, first by refusing to punish the murderers of his predecessor and accepting them instead into the circle of his personal friends,1 and secondly by insisting on immediately taking the widowed Empress Eudoxia as his wife. Eudoxia
- now thirty-seven and, like her mother, one of the most beautiful women of her day - was still in deep mourning for her husband whom, despite his innumerable infidelities, she had genuinely loved; and she was horrified at the prospect of a marriage, against her will, to a tired old man nearly twice her age. Knowing that an appeal to Constantinople would have little chance of being answered, she th
erefore decided on a course of action similar to that chosen by her despairing sister-in-law Honoria a few years earlier: she invoked the assistance of a barbarian King.
So, at least, runs the traditional story. It does not, however, sound particularly convincing, and one of the only two chroniclers to report it
- John of Antioch - describes it as hearsay. A less romantic but, alas, more probable version claims that Eudoxia proved well able to look after herself and indignantly rejected the new Emperor's advances. In such an event she would have had no reason to appeal to King Gaiseric; and indeed the latter's subsequent invasion of Italy requires no explanation of this kind. Neither Alaric nor Attila had bothered to find pretexts for aggression: the reputation of Rome provided motive enough for any barbarian chieftain out for plunder. But the point hardly matters. Whatever the reason, the city was once again under threat - and this time from the last of the three formidable peoples that, during the fifth century, devastated so much of Europe: the Vandals.
By comparison with the Goths and the Huns, the Vandals had little direct impact on the Byzantine Empire; they will not, in consequence, occupy much space in this book. Suffice it to say here that they were a Germanic tribe, in creed fanatically Arian, who had fled westward from the Huns at the end of the previous century and, after invading and laying waste a large area of Gaul, had settled in Spain in 409. There they had remained until 428, when the newly crowned King Gaiseric led his entire people - probably some 160,000 men, women and children — across the sea to the North African coast. (Already, it will be noted, the Vandals possessed a fleet - the only barbarians to do so.) A treaty concluded with Valentinian by which the Vandal state was acknowledged as part of
1 According to Procopius {History of the Wars, 111, iv) it was Maximus himself who had been responsible for Valentinian's murder, the Emperor having violated his wife shortly before. But Procopius (who was born in about 500) is, at least in the opinion of Gibbon, 'a fabulous writer for events which precede his own memory".
the Empire proved short-lived; in 439 Gaiseric tore it up and declared an independent autocracy - similarly, a step that no other barbarian ruler had ever taken. Some time later he added Sicily to his dominions. By now, having established his capital at Carthage, he was the undisputed master of the whole western Mediterranean.
Thus, whether or not he ever received an appeal from Eudoxia, he would have been able and willing to answer one; and Valentinian had been less than three months in his grave when the Vandal fleet put to sea. In Rome, the reaction to the news was one of panic. The Emperor, cowering in his palace, issued a proclamation - not, as might have been expected, calling upon all able-bodied men to rally to the defence of the Empire, but announcing that anyone who wished to leave was free to do so. He need not have bothered. Already the terrified Romans were sending their wives and daughters away to safety, and the roads to the north and east were choked with carts as the more well-to-do families -and indeed all those with objects of value that they wished to preserve from Vandal clutches - poured out of the city.
Such spirit as was shown was directed less against the invaders than against Petronius Maximus himself. He too had resolved upon flight; but his subjects, who held him responsible for all their woes, were determined that he should not escape. On 31 May, with the Vandal fleet already approaching the Italian coast, the palace guard mutinied, fell upon their hopeless master, killed him, dismembered the body and flung the pieces into the Tiber. He had reigned for just seventy days; and three days after his death King Gaiseric stepped ashore at Ostia. For the fourth time in less than half a century, a barbarian army stood at the gates of Rome.
Had it not been for Pope Leo, who had turned back Attila on the banks of the Mincio three years before, it would have been the fifth; and now once again the Pope set out for the barbarian camp to plead on behalf of his city. This time he was on far weaker ground: Gaiseric was already on the threshold of his objective, his men were healthy and well-fed, and he had no advancing army in his rear. On the other hand, though an Arian, he was at least a Christian - and as such might be expected to show some respect for the papal dignity. Leo's mission was not entirely successful - that would have been too much to hope - but neither was it a total failure. The Vandal refused to be thwarted of his plunder; he promised, however, that there would be no killing, no torturing to discover the location of hidden treasure and no destruction of buildings, public or private. It may, perhaps, have been cold comfort; but it was better than nothing.
And so the gates were opened, and the barbarian horde passed into an unresisting city. For fourteen relentless days they quietly and systematically stripped it of its wealth: the gold and silver ornaments from the churches, the statues from the palaces, the sacred vessels from the Jewish synagogue, even the gilded copper roof - or half of it - from the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Everything was carted to Ostia, loaded into the waiting ships and taken off for the enrichment of Carthage. Their work done, Gaiseric and his men departed in good order, forcing Eudoxia and her two daughters to accompany them1 and leaving a desecrated and humiliated city behind. True to their word, however, they had left the people and the buildings unharmed. They had behaved like brigands, certainly; but not, on this occasion, like Vandals.
Less than two years after the death of Valentinian, in late January or early February 457, the Eastern Emperor Marcian followed him to the grave; and with Marcian the male Theodosian line - of which, through his marriage to Pulcheria, he must be counted an honorary member -came to an end. Such moments of dynastic exhaustion were always dangerous for the Roman Empire. Theoretically, the Augustus was still chosen by the army; if the diadem had long appeared to be almost hereditary, this was only because so many Emperors had followed the practice of nominating their sons and having them formally recognized during their own lifetimes. Marcian, without male issue, had nominated no one. Pulcheria would doubtless have saved the situation as before had she been alive; but she had died - a few months after Attila - in 453.2 Her two younger sisters (who had in any case never involved themselves in affairs of state) had both predeceased her. The throne, in short, seemed emptier than it had since the death of Julian; and the people of Constantinople looked to the army to fill it - or, more precisely, to its chief: the magister militum per orientem, Aspar.
Aspar had first distinguished himself as long ago as 424, when he had been a member of the expedition to Ravenna which had deposed Johannes and placed young Valentinian on the throne. Eight years later, in 432, he had commanded the army sent out by Theodosius to North Africa to
Eudoxia was to remain seven years at Carthage. Only in 462, after repeated requests by Leo, was she permitted to return to Constantinople with her daughter Placidia - wife of the Roman senator (and later, briefly, Emperor) Olybrius. The other sister, Eudocia, Gaiseric had married off to his son Huncric.
She left all her immense wealth to the poor - a bequest which Marcian, to his eternal credit, faithfully carried out.
reinforce the local legions and, it was hoped, turn the tide against the Vandal invasion; despite his failure, his reputation for leadership and personal courage had remained undiminished. Since then he had served as Consul, and his sons had been Consuls in their turn; he now bore the title 'First of the Patricians', and would in fact almost certainly have succeeded Theodosius instead of Marcian - who, when he had first arrived in Constantinople, penniless, from Thrace, had joined Aspar's domestic staff and remained a member of it for nearly twenty years - but for two things: he was an Alan - a member of that formerly nomadic, pastoral Germanic clan that in 370 had been driven by the Huns from its homeland beyond the Black Sea - and, like nearly all the Christian barbarians, an Arian.
There could, in consequence, be no question of Aspar's own succession. Like the Frankish general Arbogast, however - whose position in the West had been strikingly similar sixty-four years before - he was quite content to be a kingmaker. Significantly, his choice fell on another of his underlings -the steward
of his own household, an orthodox Christian from the province of Dacia named Leo. The legions obediently acclaimed their new Emperor and raised him on their shields according to tradition; but now, for the first time, a second ceremony was instituted. On 7 February 45 7, in the course of a solemn mass in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Leo was formally crowned by Patriarch Anatolius - a clear reflection of the increased importance of the Patriarchate since the Council of Chalcedon and at the same time a sign that the old order was beginning to change: away from the venerable military traditions on which the Empire had been founded and towards that religious, mystical concept of sovereignty which was to grow ever more insistent as the centuries went by.
Leo had little formal education; he possessed, on the other hand, a full measure of good sound common sense and - equally important -a mind of his own; if Aspar had thought that he was placing a puppet on the throne of Byzantium, he soon found himself mistaken. A furious dispute between the two broke out within weeks of Leo's accession - probably over his refusal to appoint one of Aspar's sons to a position of high emolument - and was further exacerbated by the Emperor's determination to clip the wings of the dangerously powerful Germanic element in the State, of which Aspar was the outstanding representative. In pursuance of this policy, he resolved to purge the army of Germans and to reconstruct it around a nucleus of Isaurians, a tough mountain folk hailing from a wild region of the Taurus south of Iconium and Lystra, around the basin of the Calycadnus river. Aspar, equally determined to preserve the status quo, fought back; and the rivalry between Emperor and general soon became the principal leitmotiv of Leo's reign.
The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 Page 19
