The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome
By Christopher Kelly
(W.W. Norton, 350 pp., $26.95)
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age To the Present
By Christopher I. Beckwith
(Princeton University Press, 472 pp., $35)
The extraordinary reputation of Attila and his Huns requires an explanation, because they had so much competition. Their apogee, until Attila's death in 453, came just after the invasions that were extinguishing the Roman Empire in the west: the invasions of Germanic Alamanni, Burgundians, Ripuarian Franks, Salian Franks, Gepids, Greuthungi and Thervingi Goths, Heruli, Quadi, Rosomoni, Rugi, Sciri, Suevi, Taifali, and the original Vandals, as well as Alan horsemen of Iranic origin and probably Slavic Antae as well. Yet it is the Huns who are more vividly remembered than any of them, including Alaric's Goths, who in 410 had the historical distinction of being the first to sack Rome since the Gaulish raid of 387 B.C.E. (and to loot the accumulated wealth of centuries of empire); and more vividly remembered than the proverbial Vandals, who later inflicted greater damage by cutting off North Africa's grain supply to Italy.
It was the same at the time. In the writings of their contemporaries, the Huns were singled out as the most dangerous of the barbarians, even before Attila rose to power to unify the Hun clans and harness more numerous Germanic camp-followers. Ecclesiastical writers identified the Huns with the ancient Massagetae and Ezekiel's Magog, and the Goths with his Gog, and trembled for the fate of the world. Secular writers rightly feared for the survival of the empire once Attila arrived on the scene. Even in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, the comparatively illiterate ones, Attila's name keeps appearing in the scattered writings that have reached us: the Old English poem "Widsith" ("I visited Wulfhere and Wyrmhere ... when the Gothic army with their sharp swords had to defend their ancestral seat against Attila's host"); the Icelandic Old Norse poem "Lay of Hloth and AngantFDr," in which Attila is Hloth's grandfather; the Volsunga Saga, in which Attila is killed by Gudrun, who had been forced to marry him, a story derived from the older Atlakvida, "The Lay of Atli," or from the longer version in Atlamal hin groenlenzku, the "Greenland Ballad of Atli"--Attila's fame had reached even that most remote of places, Ultima Thule. The far better known Nibelungenlied retains a folk memory of Attila's massacre of the Burgundians of King Gundahar in 437: as Wagner fans know, the murdered Siegfried's vengeful wife Kriemhild marries Etzel/Attila king of the Huns, and bloody mayhem ensues. Ekkehard of St. Gall's Waltharius is far more fortunate: given as a hostage to Attila, Waltharius wins great renown as a warrior in his service, before fleeing with much gold from his court.
All this created a huge problem for the greatest scholar who ever studied Attila and the Huns, the seriously multilingual Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, on whom Christopher Kelly must still rely, and also for Edward Thompson, the author of the standard but now dated English-language work on the subject, The Huns, which appeared in 1948. The former was a sophisticated neo-Marxist and the latter a crudely Stalinist Marxist (at one point he rather hilariously attacks Roman magnates as class enemies), but both accepted the widely fashionable Marxist notion that individuals are ultimately insignificant as compared to historical processes. They adhered also to the theory of successive historical stages, according to which the later-stage "slave-owning empire" could have nothing to fear from earlier-stage "pastoral" Huns.
Thompson, who first usefully deployed the Latin and Greek evidence--notably the writer Priskos of Panium, who spent much time at Attila's court--dealt with the problem by strenuously arguing that Attila was a small-time extortionist and bungler whose forces were largely destroyed in 451, when he attempted his only great offensive into what is now France, and was intercepted by the Roman-Visigothic coalition assembled by Aetius. (The latter is the leading contender for the role of "the last Roman.") Thompson did not explain how Attila was able to invade northern Italy in the following year with a formidable force. Even the infinitely more sophisticated Maenchen-Helfen--whose posthumous The World of the Huns exploited the extensive Russian-language literature on Central Asia and nomadism, as well as the extant archaeological evidence and his own ethnographic research in Tuva--compared Attila to the ephemeral Gothic warlord Theodoric Strabo, known as "the Squinter," who extorted two thousand pounds of gold from the eastern emperor Leo in 473.
The facts are otherwise. The Huns were a mere herd of clans before Attila made himself their sole ruler, after killing his brother Bleda. Out of these clans he created a powerful if rudimentary state that sent and received envoys, and was organized enough to mount long-range expeditions. His father had been a chief, even a paramount chief perhaps, but it was by his own wits that Attila became much more than that--a charismatic king, or rex, the Roman title for a barbarian ruler of substance.
Christopher Kelly's book is a semi-popular work, unlike his essential Ruling the Later Roman Empire. It includes at least one implausible story because it is too good to leave out--the marriage offer supposedly sent to Attila by the emperor's disgruntled sister Honoria--and it excludes at least one essential research advance, but Kelly's book is certainly not unscholarly and it does present more than enough evidence to show that Attila's talents mattered a great deal. He had the political ability to unify under his undisputed command not only the naturally fissiparous Huns (nomads must diverge to find pastures), but also a great many Goths, Gepids, Heruli, Alans and even dissident Romans. When Attila died, the Hun power quickly fell apart.
Very active diplomatically--unlike modern barbarians, he respected diplomatic immunity--Attila was able to manage relations successfully with both the consolidating Constantinople branch of the empire and its disintegrating western branch. (The empire was still one; only its administration was divided. ) Above all, Attila had the strategic ability to magnify his power by combining military action with skillful diplomacy--he always found a legalistic justification for his demands. And to these talents he added terror, or the propaganda of the deed, as with the utter destruction of the great fortress-city of Aquileia at the northeastern passage into Italy, which gained him the surrender of rich Milan and many other cities.
In our day, many historians do not have a problem with Attila or any other "Great Man of History." They accept the very personal role of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the rest in shaping history, "bottom-up" history notwithstanding; and so they can accept Attila's importance as a historical factor as their Marxist predecessors could not. But they have a terrific problem with the Huns, and the reason for this is simple. It is the nullification of military historiography in contemporary academia. "Strategy" exists in a few government or political science departments, but such "strategists" steer clear of military history. The academic consensus that all wars are pointless apparently extends also to the study of their history.
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