Attila and the Huns

by Edward Hutton

At the same time that the Visigoth received this message he also received one from Valentinian, greeting him as the “bravest of the Barbarians,” and bidding him resist “the tyrant of the universe” who, like the modern Prussian, “knows only his necessity, regards whatever suits him as lawful and legitimate, and is determined to bring the whole world under his domination.” Theodoric, in much the same position as modern Belgium, according to Jornandes, cried out, as King Albert might have done in August last: “O Romans, you have then at last your desire; you have made Attila at last our enemy also.” But the Romans were as little to blame or able to help it as England or France. Attila, “the tyrant of the universe,” had prepared and was intent upon war. All Theodoric could do was to be ready to defend himself.

Attila prepared to attack the West, but the same problem confronted the defenders then as yesterday, namely, by which road that attack would come. The Hun thundered against the Visigoths, but on this very account Aetius, like the French, thinking more subtly than the enemy, remained uncertain whether after all Italy would not be the victim rather than Gaul. He was wrong, like his representatives of to-day; the Barbarian was a barbarian, he believed in his own boasts.

An enormous army of every kind of Barbarian was gathered upon the Danube and in the provinces to the south of that river. This host may have numbered anything from half a million men upward; it was not less than half a million strong. Each tribe had its chief, among which the two most famous were the kings of the Gepidae and the Ostrogoths; but all alike trembled before Attila, who had thus beneath his hands the most formidable and numerous hosts that had ever yet threatened civilisation. It was barbarism itself in all its innumerable multitude which was about to fling itself upon Gaul.

The plan of Attila—if plan it can be called—was well chosen. Gaul was more easily attacked than Italy and was little less essential to the future of Roman civilisation. It was then, as it has been ever since, the very heart of Europe. To destroy it was to destroy the future.

Gathering his innumerable peoples upon the borders of the Danube, Attila divided his armies into two parts. The first army was to march to the Rhine by the right or southern bank of the Danube, by the great Roman military way, past all the Roman fortresses of the frontier of the Empire, each of which was to be destroyed as it advanced. The second army was to march by the left or northern bank of the Danube, and to meet the first near the sources of that river where, in the great forests of Germany, the two armies were to provide themselves with the materials necessary for their transport into Gaul. There, while they hewed down the trees in thousands, they were met by the Franks who had deserted or killed their young king the protégé of Aetius, and now flocked to his brother under the standard of Attila; certain of the Thuringians and the Burgundians also made common cause with them.

The chief business immediately before Attila was the passage of the Rhine, and it was in order to furnish material for bridges for this purpose that his armies had hewn down the trees by thousands in the ancient “Hercynian” forest. That passage would perhaps have been impossible and certainly very difficult if it had been contested. It was not contested, and to understand the reason why, we must understand the political condition of Gaul.

In the course of the last half-century the great province of Gaul had suffered grievously, though not so grievously as Britain, which had almost lost its identity, nor so hopelessly as Africa, which was completely lost to civilisation. What had happened was this: all the further parts of Gaul had fallen into the occupation of the Barbarians as well as that violated corner enclosed on the west by the Jura, where the Burgundians had established themselves. In northern Gaul, in what we now call Picardy, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Franks were settled, the Salian Franks to the west about the cities of Tongres, Tournay, Arras, Cambrai, Amiens; the Ripuarian Franks to the east on either side the Rhine about Cologne, Mentz, Coblenz and Treves. To the south of the Salian Franks the Saxons held the coast and the lower reaches of the Seine, to the south of them lay Armorica, as far as the Loire, an isolated province of Bretons to the south of them as far as the Pyrenees, occupying all Aquitaine were the Visigoths under Theodoric. Central Gaul, however, with its cities of Metz, Strasburg, Troyes, Langres, Orleans, Lyons, Vienne, Arles, Narbonne, and the town of Lutetia or Paris, remained within the Roman power and administration which though in decay and very largely clericalised, as we shall see, was still a reality.

If Attila was bent on chastising the Visigoths it was obviously across this still Roman and Christian province of Central Gaul that he must march, and experience both in the East and the West had taught the Imperial Government that such a march meant the complete ruin, devastation and depopulation of every city on the way. The natural frontiers of Gaul upon the East were and are the Rhine and the mountains. To hold them is the safety of Gaul, to lose them is destruction. Unfortunately, the Rhine could not be held against Attila. It could not be held because the chief crossing place at Confluentes (Coblenz) was in the power of the Franks, while a secondary crossing at Augst, now a village between Bâle and Mulhouse, was in the power of the Burgundians. Those gates were flung wide, and it was through them that Attila at last entered the heart of the West.

Confluentes (Coblenz) stood at the junction of the Moselle with the Rhine, and thence upon the left of the Moselle a great Roman road ran south-west to Augusta Treverorum (Treves), whence a whole series of roads set forth to traverse Gaul in every direction. From Confluentes, too, running north along the left bank of the Rhine, a road pushed on northward through Bonn to Cologne, whence again a great highway ran west and south across what is now Belgium and Picardy. This would seem to have been the main route of Attila’s advance. At the southern entry at Augst his armies could await, meet and perhaps cut off or defeat any attack from Italy.