Perhaps this amazing act ought not to astonish us, for we have seen the like so often in Gaul. The acts of Anianus of Orleans, of Lupus of Troyes, should have prepared us for the supreme act of S. Leo the Great. That they have not done so is sufficient to prove to us that we have failed to understand the time. Moreover, this great embassy was not the first Leo had undertaken on behalf of the Imperial Court. During the pontificate of Sixtus III (432-40), when Leo was Roman Deacon, Valentinian III had sent him to Gaul to settle a dispute and bring about a reconciliation between Aetius their chief military commander in that province and Albinus the chief magistrate. Sixtus III died on August 19, 440, while Leo was in Gaul, and the ambassador was chosen as his successor.

The great Pope did not go alone upon this his last great mission, with him were two illustrious nobles, the Consul Gennadius Avienus, who after the Emperor was the greatest noble in the West, and the Prefect Trigetius. They set out from Rome by the Via Flaminia and met Attila as they had intended before he crossed the Po, on the Mincio near Mantua—in a place called the Campus Ambuleius. It was there one of the most grave and famous conferences that have ever been held in Europe met.

The ambassadors were all in official dress, Leo wore his pontifical vestments, the golden mitre, a chasuble of purple with the pallium. It was he who dealt with Attila, in what manner we know not, but with complete success. It was not the armies of Aetius after all that saved Italy, and with Italy all that was worth having in the world, but an old and unarmed man, Leo our Pope, for above him in the sky the Hun perceived, so he declared, the mighty figures of S. Peter and S. Paul; his eyes dazzled, he bowed his head. Yielding, he consented to retreat and evacuate Italy and the Empire. It is as though the new head and champion of civilisation, of Christendom, had declared himself. It was the Pope.

The terms of the treaty then made were doubtless shameful enough to old Roman ideas, for they certainly involved an annual tribute to the Hun, from whom, moreover, no indemnity was exacted for the ruin of the Transpadana. But the great fact of the situation created by Leo overshadowed all this; Italy, the soul of the West, was saved. If, as we have a right to suppose, Aetius had no direct part in this achievement, both he and Marcian were probably indirectly responsible for it and in fact had far more to do with it than Leo. Were the Roman armies nothing, then, or the Byzantine threat against Attila’s communications only a dream?

Not so. Attila retreated because like another Barbarian he “could do no other,” and even so he dared not retrace his way over the Julian Alps, for Marcian was already in Moesia, and ready and anxious to meet and to punish him. He retreated instead upon that Verona which he had ruined, crossed the Alps there, and after pillaging Augsburg, was lost, as it proved for ever, in the storm of the north and the darkness of his Barbary.

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.