Attila and the Huns

by Edward Hutton

That move, which has been so strongly condemned, would seem in any right apprehension of what followed to have saved what could be saved out of the foreseen and perhaps inevitable débâcle. Constantinople remained till 1453 the secure capital of the Eastern Government and of a Roman civilisation; it endured, and in more than one critical period held up the citadel of the West—Italy—in its hands.

It may be that nothing could have secured the West; that the foundation of Constantinople saved the East is certain. Because the West was the weaker and the richer, because the name of Rome was so tremendous, the West, as we know, bore the full brunt of the Barbarian assault. That assault was a much looser and more haphazard affair than we have been wont to believe. The West was rather engulfed than defeated. For a time it was lost in a sea of barbarism; that it emerged, that it rearose, and that we are what we are, we owe to the foundation of Constantinople and to the Catholic Church.

I say that the Empire was rather engulfed than defeated. Let us consider this.

In the year 375 the frontiers were secure; nevertheless before then the defence had failed. Long before then it had become obvious that the vast hordes of Barbarians beyond the Rhine and the Danube could not be held back if anything should occur to drive them on. If they came on they would have to be met, not beyond, or even upon the rivers, but within the Empire itself.

If anything should occur to drive them on.... In the year 375 this befell. Ammianus Marcellinus, the contemporary Roman historian, writing of the incursions of the Barbarians, asserts that all the evils which befell the Empire at that time were due to one people—the Huns. In the year 375 the Huns were finally victorious over the Goths who in 376 in utter despair appealed to the Eastern Emperor Valens for protection. “Suppliant multitudes of that warlike nation,” we read of the Goths, “whose pride was now humbled in the dust, covered a space of many miles along the banks of the Danube. With outstretched arms and pathetic lamentations they loudly deplored their past misfortunes and their present danger; acknowledged that their only hope of safety was in the clemency of the Roman Government; and most solemnly protested that if the gracious liberality of the Emperor would permit them to cultivate the waste lands of Thrace they would ever hold themselves bound by the strongest obligations of duty and gratitude to obey the laws and guard the tenets of the republic.” Their prayers were granted and their service was accepted by the Imperial Government. They were transported over the Danube into the Roman Empire. In some ways this act and its date 376 are among the most momentous in the history of Europe.

Undisciplined and restless this nation of near a million Barbarians suddenly introduced into civilisation was a constant anxiety and danger. Ignorant of the laws they had sworn to keep, as well as of the obligations and privileges of civilisation, the Goths were at the mercy of their masters, who exploited them without scruple, till driven to madness they revolted and began the fatal march through Moesia, entering Thrace at last not as the guests of the Empire but as its victorious enemy. They encamped under the walls of Hadrianople which presently they besieged, laying waste the provinces; and it was not till Theodosius had ascended the Imperial throne that they were successfully dealt with, forced to submit, and settled in Thrace and Asia Minor.

But such a result could not endure. The Barbarians but awaited a leader, and when he appeared, as he did in the person of Alaric, after the death of Theodosius, they turned on Constantinople itself, which they were able to approach but not to blockade. In 396 Alaric marched southward into Greece; from Thermopylae to Sparta he pursued his victorious way, avoiding Athens rather from superstition than from fear of any mortal foe. Early in 396, however, Stilicho, who was later to win such fame in the Italian campaign, set sail from Italy, met Alaric in Arcadia, turned him back and seemed about to compel his surrender in the prison of the Peloponnesus. In this, however, he was not successful. Alaric was able to cut his way out and by rapid marches to reach the Gulf of Corinth and to transport his troops, his captives and his spoil to the opposite shore. There he succeeded in negotiating a treaty with Constantinople whereby he entered its pay and was declared Master General of Eastern Illyricum. This befell in 399.

The intervention of Stilicho, successful though it had been, had proved one thing before all others; the political separation of the East and the West. The sailing of Stilicho and his army was the intervention of the West to save the East, for it was the East that was then in danger. The West was betrayed. The East made terms with the Barbarian and employed him. It behoved the West to look to itself, for it was obvious that the East would save itself at last by sacrificing the West.

The West was ready. A scheme of defence had been prepared which, as we shall see, was the best that could in the circumstances have been devised. With a directness and a clarity worthy of Rome the advisers of Honorius, then in Milan, determined to sacrifice everything if need be to the defence of the European citadel, of Italy that is; and, after all, considering the position of Alaric in Illyricum, it was that which was chiefly threatened. If it fell it was certain that the whole of the West must collapse.

The problem before the advisers of Honorius was not an easy one. To solve it with certainty enormous sacrifices were necessary, but to solve it meant the salvation of the world. It was therefore determined to abandon the Rhine and the Danube, for already Alaric was within those lines. It was determined—and this was the decisive thing—to abandon the Alps, to make, that is to say, Cisalpine Gaul, or as we say the Lombard Plain, the battlefield, and to hold Italy proper along the line of the Apennines. I have examined and explained this strategy at length elsewhere;[2] here it is only necessary to say that its amazing success justified a policy so realistic.