The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  The old rank of centurion still existed in some units, including those that still carried the title legio. However, the familiar legion of the early empire, numbering up to seven thousand men and divided into cohorts and centuries, had ceased to exist by the fifth century, and units that still carried that title were no different from the other smaller units, often called numeri – many with nominal strengths of perhaps a thousand or five hundred men – that formed the building blocks of the late Roman army. The role of the centurion in commanding a company-sized unit was now taken by a tribune, who as we have seen could either be a young officer or a veteran promoted from the ranks. The prevalence of veterans as unit commanders would have placed a particular onus on a newly appointed tribune with no field experience, his men being less deferential to his social status than they might have been in the early empire and expecting him to earn their respect the hard way through leadership in battle.

  ‘Tribune’ is best understood not as an actual rank but as a title meaning ‘commander of a unit’, the relative status of the tribune being determined by the unit involved – so that the tribune of a limitanei numerus, perhaps 80 or 100 men, would be understood as junior to the tribune of an equus comitatenses or a pedes homoerari, respectively an elite cavalry guard unit and a larger infantry unit of hundreds of men. In modern terms, a tribune might be the equivalent of anything from a platoon to a battalion commander, from lieutenant to lieutenant-colonel. For lower ranks, the many titles attested in late antiquity for junior NCOs and private soldiers could represent a collation from different time periods, as suggested above, though like the modern British army there may have been different titles for the same rank according to specialized roles or traditions within that unit, similar to sapper, gunner, trooper, fusilier, rifleman or Guardsman. In this novel I refer to private soldiers by their most commonly attested title, pedes, literally ‘foot soldier’, or milites.

  Weapons

  The armour and weapons of the Roman soldier had also changed dramatically from the early empire. Gone were the lorica segmentata plate armour, bare legs and sandals of the legionary; soldiers were now more likely to wear chainmail, tunics and trousers, an image that to us would appear more medieval than Roman. The short thrusting gladius sword and the pilum spear of the legionary had been replaced by an array of weapons that sometimes reflected the barbarian origins of their users, including the composite bow. Sword types that had been copied by Germanic smiths centuries before from Greek, Etruscan and early Roman examples, and had then evolved to suit barbarian fighting tactics – such as the long sword from a fifth-century warrior’s grave in Hungary that illustrates this novel – had in turn become the basis for late Roman swords; weapons technology had thus come full circle by the middle of the fifth century AD, when soldiers fighting for Rome were pitted against barbarian invaders as never before, in a confrontation where Roman military might and the reputation of Rome in her heyday could no longer be counted on to hold sway against a man who saw himself as the next emperor of the known world.

  Organization

  The army of the early empire can be divided broadly into legionaries – citizen-soldiers – and auxiliaries, men from the new provinces who would be awarded Roman citizenship after a term of service; it also included irregular units from newly allied frontier tribes, the foederati. After the emperor Caracalla granted universal citizenship to free men within the empire in AD 212 the distinction in status between legionaries and auxiliaries became blurred, though the legions continued in their role as units garrisoned within the provinces ready for deployment, and the auxiliaries as frontier units.

  The reforms of the emperors Diocletian and Constantine did away with this old army structure, replacing the legions with comitatenses, literally ‘companions’, and the frontier units with limitanei, border troops. These new units broadly continued the distinction in role between the legionaries and auxiliaries, but there were big changes in internal organization, particularly between the legions and the comitatenses. The legions had been large units of five thousand men or more, with the esprit de corps of a modern regiment but a tactical role more akin to that of a brigade; they were suited to the set-piece battles typical of the late Republic, for example during the Punic Wars. The comitatenses, by contrast, comprised units of about eight hundred or a thousand men, more like a modern battalion.

  Reducing the size of the units made the field army more mobile and flexible, better suited to a range of actions against barbarian invaders who might be less likely to engage in set-piece battles. But the main reason for the change may have had little to do with field tactics, and more to do with the emperor’s security; legionary commanders intent on threatening the imperial purple could call on the loyalty of large bodies of men, whereas smaller units loyal to their own commanders might be more difficult for a usurper to marshal and easier for the emperor to keep under control.

  Confusingly, as we have seen, some units continued to be called legions – for example, Legio II Adiutrix and Legio XX Valeria Victrix. However, these appear to have been legions in name only, and probably represent a conscious attempt to retain some continuity of tradition from the earlier formations in order to boost morale and recruitment. A comparison could be made in the British Army today with the retention of the name The Black Watch, the old Royal Highland Regiment, for a battalion of the recently formed Royal Regiment of Scotland, meaning that the traditions and symbols are retained even though the Black Watch has ceased to exist as a regiment.

  Along with the new organization came new structures of command. Gone were the old legates, the commanders of legions, with armies in the field being led by consuls or members of the imperial family. The frontier limitanei were now led by a dux, the origin of our word ‘duke’, or by the lesser comes, ‘count’. The comitatenses field armies were commanded by a magister, and the army as a whole by the magister militum, the emperor’s right-hand man and in effect the second-in-command of the Roman Empire.

  To further bolster their security the emperors marshalled a special comitatenses force as their personal army, taking strength away from the provincial armies in the process, and replaced the old Praetorian Guard with a new elite palace guard, the praepecti comitatente. This decision to prioritize the emperor’s security over provincial and frontier defences counterbalanced the tactical advantages of the new comitatenses organization, and was to be a weakness that helps to explain the western empire’s vulnerability to invasion during this period.

  Recruitment

  The army of the early empire was largely a volunteer force, continuing the tradition of the citizen-army of the Republic and including soldiers from martial backgrounds in the newly formed provinces. To be a legionary was an honourable and esteemed occupation, and could lead to the all-important grant of land on retirement; to be an auxiliary was a route to citizenship. Crucially, soldiers were paid well enough for salary to be an incentive to recruitment as well, allowing a man to save enough to develop his plot of land on retirement and to provide for a family, improving his social standing and the prospects of betterment for his children.

  Much of this picture had changed by the late empire. The grant of universal citizenship under Caracalla in AD 212 reduced the incentive for men to join as auxiliaries. The third-century crisis, a time of anarchy that saw more than thirty emperors in as many years, saw successive emperors debase the silver coinage until soldiers’ pay was nearly worthless. Even after a gold standard was recreated, the pay for soldiers in the fourth and fifth centuries was notoriously irregular and often non-existent; soldiers instead came to depend on the emperors or on affluent commanders for lump-sum handouts, a system that could allow the loyalty of an army to be bought by the emperor or an opposing faction at a time when the army should have been independent of politics and marshalling all of its resolve against the barbarian threat.

  As this would suggest, the traditional basis for volunteer recruitment had largely disappeared by the fourth century, and many
of the comitatenses and limitanei were soldiers under some form of compulsion – some of them in lieu of tax, whereby a father might send one of his sons to the army as a substitute for his dues in cash or goods-in-kind. As with any conscript army, morale and esprit de corps were not to be taken for granted; fewer men would have fought for the glory of Rome than was the case with their legionary ancestors, and there would have been plenty of cynics and individualists. Yet it is sometimes those men in a conscript army under duress of war who prove the most capable and imaginative soldiers, so conscription in the late Roman army was not necessarily a weakness. However reluctant they may have been to begin with, conscripts could develop resolve in the face of total war where their homes and families were threatened – as was certainly the case in Italy after the sack of Rome by the Goths in AD 410 – as well as a pride in their ability and in that of their units. The greatest loyalties of these men would have been to their comrades and to commanders who had fought alongside them and earned their respect, reinforcing the devolved, small-unit focus of the late Roman army, in contrast to the legions of old.

  As well as the ‘direct-entry’ officers – young tribunes of aristocratic background – the remaining professional aspect of the Roman army lay in the continued voluntary recruitment of soldiers from regions with strong martial traditions, particularly Pannonia near the Danube and the northern Balkans, and above all in the influx of barbarians who had recently been Rome’s enemies. In the early empire, offering newly pacified enemies favourable terms of service in the army had been a way of Romanizing the natives and giving them an outlet for martial fervour that might otherwise lead to unrest and rebellion. In the late empire, by contrast, the Germanic warlords newly settled by treaty in Gaul and Spain had not been defeated or disarmed, and saw service in the Roman army as an admirable occupation for their sons as well as a means of defending their own newly acquired territory against further barbarian threat. Barbarians in the Roman army could range from units of foederati on the frontiers, some of them little more than roving bands of warriors, to officers up to the rank of army commander, something unheard of in the early empire.

  The warrior abilities of those men of barbarian background, as well as of the toughened, cynical conscripts from Italy and the old provincial heartlands, helps to explain the extraordinary resilience of the Roman army in its final battles in the West; these were battles won less by strategy and manoeuvre than by the ability of the individual soldier to stand up to a ferocious enemy in hand-to-hand combat, the nub of any reconstruction of warfare at this pivotal period in ancient history.

  Sources for the Novel

  The ‘Sword of Attila’ is a genuinely attested artefact, as described by Priscus of Panium in the quote at the beginning of this novel. Priscus, who is a character in the story, is our main source for Attila and the Huns in the fifth century AD, and virtually everything that can be said about Attila derives either from his surviving account or from later sources that can be attributed to him. Priscus was born at Panium on the Propontis Sea near Constantinople in about AD 420, and with his friend Maximinus – a young army officer – went to the court of Attila on behalf of the eastern emperor Theodosius in AD 449, only two years before Attila’s great offensive in the West. Priscus was a scholar first and foremost, the author of works of rhetoric as well as extensive histories of the eastern empire and of Attila, and the surviving text on his expedition to Attila provides one of the most vivid first-hand narratives to come down to us from classical antiquity. From him we learn details of the Huns for which there is no other evidence, in, for example, his descriptions of the ‘seamless’ wooden construction of Attila’s fortress, the ritual scarring of a warrior’s cheeks, and the role of the shaman. Priscus also gives a sense of the huge complexity of this period, a time of continuous intrigue and machinations in the courts both of the eastern empire of Theodosius and the western one of Justinian.

  Because the Huns were a nomadic people and only ever built in wood, if at all, the archaeological evidence for them is very limited other than through the chance finds of burials. Some of these have produced skeletons of men and women whose skulls show clear signs of flattening, resulting in the description of Huns as having sloping foreheads in this novel. One outstanding discovery was a burial found in 1979 close to the Benedictine monastery of Pannonhalma, not far from Budapest. Among the finds were magnificent gold-foil horse trappings, the basis for Mundiuk’s horse decorations described in the prologue of this novel, as well as the beautiful sword that appears on the cover of this book, its grip surrounded by decorated gold bands and the scabbard also embellished with gold.

  It is clear that Hun swordsmiths were highly skilled craftsmen, and that veneration for the sword was deeply rooted; almost a thousand years before Priscus, the Greek historian Herodotus described how the Scythians worshipped their god of war in the form of an iron sword, set up on a mound made of brushwood, and how not only cattle and horses but also captured enemies were sacrificed in front of these altars: ‘… they cut their victims’ throats and collected the blood, and carried it to the top of the mound and poured it over the sword. At the foot of the altar they cut the right arm and shoulder from the body, and tossed them in the air, each arm left to lie where it fell. The torsos lay separately’ (Histories, 4.62).

  Unfortunately for us, Priscus was no military historian, giving few details of campaigns and battles, and his surviving work contains nothing on the two huge contests that feature in this novel. Despite being the culmination of one of the most extraordinary military campaigns in history, the conquest of Roman Carthage by the Vandals under Gaiseric in AD 439 is known only from a few lines from other historians, none more than a sentence long. We fare better when it comes to what was probably the greatest military contest of classical antiquity, the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in AD 451 between the Romans and Visigoths on one side and the Huns and Ostrogoths and Gepids on the other, with numerous other allies on both sides representing most of the warlike peoples in Europe of the period. All modern accounts of the battle derive from the History of the Goths (‘Getica’) by Jordanes, a minor official in Constantinople in the mid-sixth century who based much of his work – including a history of Attila and the Huns – on lost volumes of Priscus. Jordanes’ account of the battle takes up over two thousand words, though there is much that is formulaic – a speech from Attila, for example, that must be fictional – and there are only a few topographical and tactical details, including the appearance of the central ridge, the disposition of the armies, the stream running with blood and the Goth king Theodoric’s fate, ‘… thrown from his horse and trampled underfoot by his own men … though some say he was slain by the spear of Andag of the host of the Ostrogoths, who were then under the sway of Attila’ (Getica, 40). He also tells us of the comet that was supposedly seen on the eve of the battle. In evaluating Jordanes as a historical source, it is important to remember not only that he was writing a century after the battle but also that his main source, Priscus of Panium, was neither an eyewitness to the battle himself nor a military historian.

  In the case of Carthage, the sheer humiliation of defeat and the absence of an eyewitness historian – such as a man like Polybius, who had watched the Roman conquest of Carthage almost six hundred years earlier – helps to account for the lack of written evidence from the Romans, with the Vandals themselves having no literary tradition. For the Catalaunian Plains, shock and exhaustion may have overwhelmed anyone attempting to describe the scene, though there were other factors. The main historians of the period whose work survives, men such as Priscus and Jordanes, were from Constantinople and were more focused on eastern affairs. In Ravenna and Rome, any cause for celebrating the battle, at best an ambiguous victory for the Romans, was soon lost in the march of history; Attila himself may no longer have been a threat, but only twenty-five years later in AD 476 his erstwhile Ostrogoth allies invaded Italy, took Ravenna and declared their chieftain Odoacer king, effectively ending the
Roman Empire in the West.

  The Catalaunian Plains probably lay in Champagne in northeastern France near Chalôns, a name by which the battle is sometimes known. For some, a clinching factor in this identification was the discovery nearby, in 1842 on the south bank of the river Aube, of a burial containing a skeleton with two swords and gold and silver ornaments datable to the fifth century AD – one of them a ring with the inscription HEVA, perhaps to be interpreted as described in chapter 13 of this novel – consistent with the grave goods of a Goth warrior chieftain. The idea that this may have been King Theodoric, hastily buried after the battle, was first mooted in the nineteenth century, and this is the basis for the scene in chapter 16 in this novel. You can see the so-called Treasure of Pouan today in the Musée Saint-Loup at Troyes.

  A central figure in this novel is Arturus, a renegade Briton with Roman blood who serves in the foederati in Gaul, works as an intelligence agent for the magister militum Aetius and then returns to Britain to lead his people against the invading Saxons. The decades after the Roman withdrawal from Britain in AD 410 have always seemed to me the most likely context for such a man, at a time of turmoil in Britain when the outcome of the invasions was uncertain – when a single charismatic leader on either side might have swayed the balance – and also when Gaul was probably awash with British veterans and adventurers, some of them with one eye on the situation back home. At the Catalaunian Plains, for example, it is impossible to believe that the armies of both sides did not include British mercenaries, some of them with legionary ancestry, fighting alongside Saxons, Angles, Jutes and men of all of the other warrior tribes whom their brothers and cousins were fighting against in the borderlands of Wales and western England. Whether Arturus really existed and was able to establish a kingdom, one lost to history but preserved in mythology, is another question in this shady but fascinating period of ancient history, at a time when modern Europe as we know it was being born.