THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 219
The Victory at Chalons and the Death of Attila
14-13. The Victory at Chalons and the Death of Attila
When the Huns poured into Gaul in 451, the position of the Western Empire seemed desperate. It was perhaps a little thing that a terrible famine (obscenissima fames) had devastated Italy in 450. Far more serious was the absence of any army with which Aetius might confront the enemy. For the last twenty-five years he had relied on Hunnish mercenaries to fight his battles; and now, when he had to fight the Huns themselves, he was practically powerless. Everything depended on the line which the Visigoths would take. If they would combine with Rome in the face of a common danger, Rome was saved: if they stood aloof, and waited until they were themselves attacked, Rome could only fall. Attila was cunning enough to attempt to sow dissension between the Visigoths and the Romans, writing to assure either that the other alone was the object of his attack; but his actions were more eloquent than his words. After crossing the Rhine, somewhere to the north of Mainz, he sacked the Gallo-Roman city of Metz.
The Romans now awoke to the crisis: Aetius hastened to Gaul, and collected on the spot a motley army of mercenaries and foederati. Meanwhile, as the Romans looked anxiously to the Visigoths, Attila moved on Orleans, in the hope of acquiring possession of the city from the Alans who were settled there, and so gaining a base of operations against the Goths. The move shewed Theodoric I his danger; he rapidly joined his forces with those of Aetius, who now at last could draw breath; and the two together hastened to the defence of Orleans.
Finding Orleans too strongly guarded, Attila checked his advance, and retired eastwards; the allies followed, and near Troyes, on the Mauriac plain, was engaged bellum atrox multiplex immane pertinax. The great battle was drawn; but its ultimate result was the retreat of the Huns, after they had stood their ground in their camp for several days. The battle is often called the battle of Chalons. Contemporaries speak of it as engaged in campis Catalaunicis, but this means in the plains of Chalons (Champagne), not at Chalons itself. The battle was actually fought at a point on the road between Sens and Troyes, a few miles in front of Troyes. We are assured by more than one of our authorities, that the camp might have been stormed, and the Huns annihilated, but for the astute policy of Aetius. Perhaps he desired to keep his hands free to renew once more his old connexion with the Huns; perhaps he feared the predominance of the Visigoths, which would have followed on the annihilation of the Huns. At any rate he is said to have induced the new Gothic king Thorismud — Theodoric I had been killed in the battle — to withdraw at once to his territories, by representing forcibly to him the need of securing his succession against possible rivals at home. A bridge was thus built for Attila's retreat; and Aetius was able to secure for himself the booty, which the retreating Huns were forced to relinquish in the course of their long march.
The significance of the repulse of Attila from Gaul by the joint forces of the Romans and the Goths has already been discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The repulse was no decisive crisis in the history of the world: the Empire of Attila was of too ephemeral a nature to be crucially dangerous; and his attack on the West was like the passing of a transitory meteor, which affected its destinies far less than the steady and deliberate menace of the policy of Gaiseric. But the meteor was not yet exhausted; and Italy had to feel in 452, what Gaul had experienced in 451. Attila now marched from Pannonia over the Julian Alps: Aquileia fell, and the whole of the province of Venetia was ravaged. Passing from Venetia into Liguria, the Huns sacked Milan and Pavia; and the way seemed clear across the Apennines to Rome itself. Aetius, with no troops at his command, was powerless; a contemporary writer, Prosper Tiro, failing to understand that the successes of the previous years had only been won by the aid of Goths, blames the Roman general “for making no provision according to the manner of his deeds in the previous year; failing even to bar the Alpine passes, and planning to desert Italy together with the Emperor.”
In truth the position was desperate; and it remains one of the problems of history why the Huns refrained from attacking Rome, and retired instead to the Danube. Tradition has ascribed the merit of diverting Attila from Rome to Pope Leo I; the Liber Pontificalia tells how Leo “for the sake of the Roman name undertook an embassy, and went his way to the king of the Huns, and delivered Italy from the peril of the enemy.”
It is indeed true that the Emperor, now resident in Rome, joined with the senate in sending to Attila an embassy of three persons, one of whom was Pope Leo, and that soon after the coming of this embassy Attila gave the signal for retreat. It may be that the embassy promised Attila a tribute, and even the hand of Honoria with a dowry; and it may be that Attila was induced to listen to these promises, by the unfavourable position in which he began to find himself placed. His army was pressing for return, eager perhaps to secure the spoils it had already won, and alleging the fate of Alaric as a warning against laying hands on Rome. His troops, after all their ravages, were suffering from famine, and an Italian summer was infecting them with fever; while the Eastern Emperor, who had been occupied by the Council of Chalcedon and the problem of Eutychianism in the year 451, was now despatching troops to the aid of Aetius.
Swayed, perhaps, by these considerations, Attila listened to the offers of the embassy, and returned home; and there he died, in the year after his Italian campaign.
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