THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 218

The Huns Invade Both Empires

14-12. The Huns Invade Both Empires

Such was the state of the Western Empire, when the threatening cloud of Huns on the horizon began to grow thicker and darker, until in 451 it finally burst. Till 440 the Huns, settled along the Danube, had not molested the Empire, but had, on the contrary, served steadily as mercenaries in the army of the West; and it had been by their aid that Aetius had been able to pursue his policy of the reconquest of Gaul. But after 440 a change begins to take place. The subtle Gaiseric, anxious to divert attention from his own position in the south, begins to induce the Huns to attack the Empire on the north; while at the same time a movement of consolidation takes place among the various tribes, which turns them into a unitary State under a single ambitious ruler. After the death of King Rua, to whom Aetius had fled for refuge in 433, two brothers, Attila and Bleda, had reigned as joint sovereigns of the Huns; but in 444 Attila killed his brother, and rapidly erecting a military monarchy began to dream of a universal empire, which should stretch from the Euphrates to the Atlantic. It was against the Eastern Empire that the Huns, like the Goths before them, first turned their arms.

Impelled by Gaiseric, they ravaged Illyria and Thrace to the very gates of Constantinople, in the years 441 and 442; and the Anatolian Peace of 443 had only stayed their ravages at the price of an annual Hungeld of over 2,000 pounds of gold. But it was an uneasy peace which the Eastern Empire had thus purchased; and in 447 Attila swept down into its territories as far as Thermopylae, plundering 70 cities on his way. After this great raid embassies passed and repassed between the Court of Attila and Byzantium, among others the famous embassy (448) of which the historian Priscus was a member, and whose fortunes in the land of the Huns are narrated so vividly in his pages. Marcian, who was made of sterner stuff, stoutly refused the tribute. At this crisis, when the wrath of Attila seemed destined to wreak itself in the final destruction of the Eastern Empire, the Huns suddenly poured westward into Gaul, and vanished for ever from the pages of Byzantine history.

It has already been seen that under the influence of Aetius the relations of the Western Empire to the Huns had been steadily amicable, and indeed that Hunnish mercenaries had been the stay and support not only of the private ambitions of the patricius but also of his public policy. The new policy of hostility to the Empire, on which Attila had embarked in 441, seems for the next ten years to have affected the East alone. During these ten years, the history of the Western Empire is curiously obscure: we hear nothing of Aetius, save that he was consul for the third time in 446, and we know little, if anything, of the relations of Valentinian III to the Huns. We may guess that tribute was paid to the Huns by the West as well as by the East; we hear of the son of Aetius as a hostage at the Court of Attila. We know that, during the campaign of 441-442, the church plate of Sirmium escaped the clutches of Attila, and was deposited at Rome, apparently with a government official; and we know that in 448 Priscus met in Hungary envoys of the Western Empire, who had come to attempt to parry Attila's demand for this plate. To this motive, which it must be confessed appears but slight, romance has added another, in order to explain the diversion of Attila's attention to the West in 451.

In 434 the princess Honoria, the sister of Valentinian III, had been seduced by one of her chamberlains, and banished to Constantinople, where she was condemned to share in the semi-monastic life of the ladies of the palace. Years afterwards, embittered by a life of compulsory asceticism, and snatching at any hope of release, she is said (but our information only comes from Byzantine historians, whose tendency to a "feminine" interpretation of history has already been noticed) to have appealed to Attila, and to have sent him a ring. Attila accepted the appeal and the ring; and claiming Honoria as his betrothed wife, he demanded from her brother the half of the Western Empire as her dowry. The story may be banished, at any rate in part, as an instance of the erotic romanticism which occasionally appears in the Byzantine historiography of this century. We may dismiss the episode of the ring and the whole story of Honoria's appeal, though we are bound to believe (on the testimony of Priscus himself, confirmed by a Gaulish chronicler) that when Attila was already determined on war with the West, he demanded the hand of Honoria and a large dowry, and made the refusal of his demands into a casus belli. But there are other causes which will serve to explain why Attila would in any case have attacked the West in 451.

The Balkan lands had been wasted by the raids of the previous ten years; and Gaul and Italy offered a more fertile field, to which events conspired to draw Attila's attention about 450. A doctor in Gaul, who had been one of the secret leaders of the Bagaudae, had fled to his Court in 448, and brought word of the discontent among the lower classes which was rife in his native country. At the same time a civil war was raging among the Franks; two brothers were contending for the throne, and while one of the two appealed to Aetius, the other invoked the aid of Attila. Finally, Gaiseric was instigating the Huns to an expedition against the Visigoths, whose hostility he had had good reason to fear, ever since he had caused his son Huneric to repudiate his wife, the daughter of Theodoric I, and send her back mutilated to her father, some years before (445). The reason here given for hostility between the Vandals and the Visigoths, which only comes from Jordanes, is perhaps dubious; the fact of such hostility, resting as it does on the authority of Priscus, must be accepted.

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