3.
To return to Attila:—this extraordinary man is the only conqueror of ancient and modern times who has united in one empire the two mighty kingdoms of Eastern Scythia and Western Germany, that is, of that immense expanse of plain, which stretches across Europe and Asia. If we divide the inhabited portions of the globe into two parts, the land of civilization and the land of barbarism, we may call him the supreme and sole king of the latter, of all those populations who did not live in cities, who did not till the soil, who were hunters and shepherds, dwelling in tents, in waggons, and on horseback.[9] Imagination can hardly take in the extent of his empire. In the West he interfered with the Franks, and chastised the Burgundians, on the Rhine. On the East he even sent ambassadors to negotiate an equal alliance with the Chinese Empire. The north of Asia was the home of his race, and on the north of Europe he ascended as high as Denmark and Sweden. It is said he could bring into the field an army of 500,000 or 700,000 men.
You will ask perhaps how he gained this immense power; did he inherit it? the Russian Empire is the slow growth of centuries; had Attila a long line of royal ancestors, and was his empire, like that of Haroun, or Soliman, or Aurunzebe, the maturity and consummation of an eventful history? Nothing of the kind; it began, as it ended, with himself. The history of the Huns during the centuries immediately before him, will show us how he came by it. It seems that, till shortly before the Christian era, the Huns had a vast empire, from a date unknown, in the portion of Tartary to the east of Mount Altai. It was against these formidable invaders that the Chinese built their famous wall, 1,500 miles in length, which still exists as one of the wonders of the world. In spite of its protection, however, they were obliged to pay tribute to their fierce neighbours, until one of their emperors undertook a task which at first sight seems an exception to what I have already laid down as if a universal law in the history of northern warfare. This Chinese monarch accomplished the bold design of advancing an army as much as 700 miles into the depths of the Tartar wilderness, and thereby at length succeeded in breaking the power of the Huns. He succeeded;—but at the price of 110,000 men. He entered Tartary with an army 140,000 strong; he returned with 30,000.
The Huns, however, though broken, had no intention at all of being reduced. The wild warriors turned their faces westward, and not knowing whither they were going, set out for Europe. This was at the end of the first century after Christ; in the course of the following centuries they pursued the track which I have already marked out for the emigrating companies. They passed the lofty Altai; they gradually travelled along the foot of the mountain-chain in which it is seated; they arrived at the edge of the high table-land which bounds Tartary on the west; then turning southward down the slopes which led to the low level of Turkistan, they found themselves close to a fertile region between the Jaxartes and the Oxus, the present Bukharia, then called Sogdiana by the Greeks, afterwards the native land of Timour. Here was the first of the three thoroughfares for a descent southwards, which I have pointed out as open to the choice of adventurers. A portion of these Huns, attracted by the rich pasture-land and general beauty of Sogdiana, took up their abode there; the main body wandered on. Persevering in their original course, they skirted Siberia and the north of the Caspian, crossed the Volga, then the Don, and thus in the fifth century of the Christian era, as I just now mentioned, came upon the Goths, who were in undisturbed possession of the country. Now it would appear that, in this long march from the wall of China to the Danube, lasting as it did through some centuries, they lost hold of no part of the tracts which they traversed. They remained on each successive encampment long enough (if I may so express myself) to sow themselves there. They left behind them at least a remnant of their own population while they went forward, like a rocket thrown up in the sky, which, while it shoots forward, keeps possession of its track by its train of fire. And hence it was that Attila, when he found himself at length in Hungary, and elevated to the headship of his people, became at once the acknowledged king of the vast territories and the untold populations which that people had been leaving behind them in its advance during the foregoing 350 years.
Such a power indeed had none of the elements of permanence in it, but it was appalling at the moment, whenever there was a vigorous and unscrupulous hand to put it into motion. Such was Attila; it was his boast, that, where his horse once trod, there grass never grew again. As he fulfilled his terrible destiny, religious men looked on with awe, and called him the "Scourge of God." He burst as a thunder-cloud upon the whole extent of country, now called Turkey in Europe, along a line of more than five hundred miles from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Venice. He defeated the Roman armies in three pitched battles, and then set about destroying the cities of the Empire. Three of the greatest, Constantinople, Adrianople, and another, escaped: but as for the rest, the barbarian fury fell on as many as seventy; they were sacked, levelled to the ground, and their inhabitants carried off to captivity. Next he turned round to the West, and rode off with his savage horsemen to the Rhine. He entered France, and stormed and sacked the greater part of its cities. At Metz he involved in one promiscuous massacre priests and children; he burned the city, so that a solitary chapel of St. Stephen was its sole remains. At length he was signally defeated by the Romans and Goths united at Chalons on the Marne, in a tremendous battle, which ended in 252,000, or, as one account says, 300,000 men being left dead on the field.
Irritated rather than humbled, as some beast of prey, by this mishap, he turned to Italy. Crossing the Alps, he laid siege to Aquileia, at that time one of the richest, most populous, and strongest of the cities on the Hadriatic coast. He took it, sacked it, and so utterly destroyed it, that the succeeding generation could scarcely trace its ruins. It is, we know, no slight work, in toil and expense, even with all the appliances of modern science, to raze a single fortress; yet the energy of these wild warriors made sport of walled cities. He turned back, and passed along through Lombardy; and, as he moved, he set fire to Padua and other cities; he plundered Vincenza, Verona, and Bergamo; and sold to the citizens of Milan and Pavia their lives and buildings at the price of the surrender of their property. There were a number of minute islands in the shallows of the extremity of the Hadriatic; and thither the trembling inhabitants of the coast fled for refuge. Fish was for a time their sole food, and salt, extracted from the sea, their sole possession. Such was the origin of the city and the republic of Venice.