FOOTNOTES:
[13] See my “Ravenna; a Study” (Dent), 1912.
[14] So Jornandes who asserts that Aquileia was so utterly destroyed “ita ut vix ejus vestigia ut appareant reliquerint.”
IX
ATTILA’S HOME-COMING
Such was the return, such was the failure of Attila. He had looked to hold the world in fee; he returned for the last time across the Danube his desire unaccomplished, his hopes dead. He had struck first the East and perhaps ruined it, but he had failed to take Constantinople. He had struck Gaul and left its cities shambles, but he had not destroyed the armies of Aetius. He had desired Rome for his plunder and his pride, but Leo had turned him back before he crossed the Po. Every attack had ended in a long retreat; if he brought ruin to a hundred Imperial cities, at last he but achieved his own. He returned to his wooden stockade in the heart of Hungary with all his hopes unfulfilled, all his achievements undone, a ruined man.
That he did not realise his failure is but to emphasise the fact that he was a Barbarian. To him, doubtless, destruction and booty, ruin and loot seemed the end of war, he had not even in this his last hour begun to understand what the Empire was. And so if we ask ourselves what in reality the enormous energy of the Hunnish onslaught achieved in the first half of the fifth century, we are compelled to answer, nothing; nothing, that is, consciously and directly. Unconsciously and indirectly, however, the restless brutality of Roua and of Attila brought to pass these two great and even fundamental things; it was the cause of the passing of Britain into England, and it founded the republics of the lagoons which were to produce Venice the Queen of the Adriatic.
Of all this, of his failure as of those strange achievements, Attila was wholly unaware. He came home like a conqueror to his wooden palace in the midst of a great feast prepared for him, to be greeted as Priscus describes he had been greeted before, on his return from the ruin of the East and his failure to reach Constantinople. He had made the West his tributary; he was laden with the gold and the spoil of northern Italy. It was enough for him, and so he made ready with joy to marry yet another wife, to add yet one more to his concubines; not that Honoria who would have been the sign of his victory, but one rather a prey than a prize, pitiful in her youth and helpless beauty, Ildico, or as the German legends call her Hildegrude, perhaps a Frankish or a Burgundian princess.
It is said, we know not with how much truth, that upon that long and last retreat as he crossed the river Lech by Augsburg an old woman with streaming hair, a witch or a sorceress, cried out to him thrice as he passed, “Retro Attila!” It is part of the legend which makes so much of his history.
Upon the night of his last orgy or wedding he had feasted and drunk beyond his wont and he was full of wine and of sleep when he sought the bed of the beautiful and reluctant Ildico, the last of his sacrifices and his loot. What passed in that brutal nuptial chamber we shall never know. In the morning there was only silence, and when his attendants at last broke into the room they found Attila dead in a sea of blood, whether murdered by his victim or struck down by apoplexy cannot be known. It is said that Ildico had much to avenge—the murder of her parents and her brothers as well as her own honour.
From that dreadful, characteristic chamber the Huns bore the body of their King, singing their doleful uncouth songs, to bury him in a secret place prepared by slaves who were duly murdered when their work was accomplished. Jornandes has preserved or invented for us the great funeral dirge which accompanied the last Barbarian rite. It celebrated Attila’s triumphs over Scythia and Germany which bore his yoke so meekly, and over the two Emperors who paid him tribute.
He left no memorial but his terror written in the fire and smoke of burning cities, and that tradition of “frightfulness” to which Kaiser Wilhelm II first appealed to his troops on their departure for China, and which he is practising upon the body of Europe to-day. For upon his death Attila’s vast and barbaric hegemony fell to pieces. Enormous revolts broke it in sunder, and e’er many years had passed the very memory of it was forgotten.
“Kingless was the army left:
Of its head the race bereft.
Every fury of the pit
Tortured and dismembered it.
Lo, upon a silent hour,
When the pitch of frost subsides,
Danube with a shout of power
Loosens his imprisoned tides:
Wide around the frighted plains
Shake to hear his riven chains,
Dreadfuller than heaven in wrath,
As he makes himself a path:
High leap the ice-cracks, towering pile
Floes to bergs, and giant peers
Wrestle on a drifted isle;
Island on ice-island rears;
Dissolution battles fast:
Big the senseless Titans loom,
Through a mist of common doom
Striving which shall die the last:
Till a gentle-breathing morn
Fires the stream from bank to bank,
So the Empire built of scorn
Agonized, dissolved and sank.”