“They are treacherous and inconstant and like brute beasts are utterly ignorant of the distinction between right and wrong. They only express themselves with difficulty and ambiguously, have no respect for any religion or superstition, are immoderately covetous of gold, and are so fickle and cantankerous that many times in a day they will quarrel with their comrades without cause and be reconciled without satisfaction.”[6]
Such were the people who according to Ammianus were “the original cause of all the destruction and manifold calamities” which descended upon the Roman Empire, in the fifth century of our era.
Fifty-six years before they began directly to menace civilisation and the Roman Empire, they had, as we have seen, in 376 A.D., driven the Goths before them to the first of those famous assaults upon the frontiers of the Roman world. They themselves, utter barbarians as they were, attempted then no direct attack upon our civilisation, though in 396 they crossed the Caucasus, raided Armenia and as Claudius notes, “laid waste the pleasant fields of Syria.” In 409, however, Alaric being then intent on Italy, they crossed the Danube and pushed on into Bulgaria, Uldis, their chief, boasting in true Barbarian fashion, “All that the sun shines upon I can conquer if I will.” It was the first claim of the Barbarian, vocal and explicit, to “a place in the sun”—someone else’s place. Uldis’ boast, however, had been but the prelude to his flight and fall. Amid the welter of Barbarians less barbarous than he, Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi, Alani, the Hun in fact was unable to do much more than drive them on. When they had passed into the Empire, into Gaul and Spain and Africa, he, worse than them all, was free at last to threaten Christendom and its capitals, Constantinople and Rome.
It was not till the two brothers Attila and Bleda ascended the Hunnish throne, if throne it can be called, in the year 423, that the Huns really became immediately and directly dangerous to civilisation.
That civilisation already half bankrupt and in transition had, as we have seen, been bewildered and wounded by the actual incursion of Barbarian armies south of the Danube and the Rhine, nay within the heart of the Empire, within reach of Constantinople, within the very walls of Rome. It was now to be assaulted by a savage horde, wholly heathen, intent on murder and rape, loot and destruction.
The contrast between the two attacks, the attack of Alaric and that of Attila, is very striking. To admire Alaric, even to defend him, is obviously not impossible, since so many historians have been found ready to do both. No voice unless it be Kaiser Wilhelm’s has ever been raised in behalf of Attila. Here was the Empire, Christendom; he fell upon it like a wild beast. At least the Goths were Christian—though Arian—the Huns were pagan heathen. At least Alaric had revered the Roman name and sought to assume it; Attila despised and hated it and would have destroyed it utterly. But if there is this moral contrast between the Gothic and the Hunnish attacks upon the Empire, militarily they are alike in this above all that both were directed first upon the East and were only turned upon the West after a sort of failure. Happily for us the attacks of Attila, while infinitely more damaging, were not nearly so dangerous as those of Alaric. The Empire was assaulted by an assassin; it was delivered.
The Roman system with regard to the Barbarians had long been established when Theodosius II ascended the Eastern throne. It consisted not only in employing Barbarians as auxiliaries—thus Uldis and his Huns had fought under Stilicho against Radagaisus at the battle of Fiesole; but in setting the different Barbarian tribes and races one against another. The Huns especially had been favoured by the Empire in this way, Stilicho knew them well and Aetius who was at last to defeat them upon the Catalaunian plains owed them perhaps his life in the crisis that followed the death of his rival Boniface in 433. But that policy, always dangerous, and the more so if it were inevitable, was already bankrupt. The dispersal through the provinces of the Goths, the Vandals, the Alani, Suevi and other tribes left the Empire face to face upon its northern frontier with the real force which had driven them on. In 432 we find Roua, King of the Huns, in receipt of an annual subsidy, scarcely to be distinguished from a tribute, of 350 pounds’ weight of gold. He it was who perhaps first broke the old Roman policy. When the Empire, according to its custom, made alliances with certain Barbarian tribes his neighbours, he claimed them as his subjects and immediately swore that he would denounce all his treaties with the Empire unless the Emperor broke off these alliances. Moreover, he demanded that all those of his subjects then within the Empire should be restored to him; for many had entered the Roman service to escape his harsh rule. These demands could not be ignored or refused. In 433 Theodosius was on the point of sending an embassy to treat with Roua, when he heard that he was dead and that his two nephews, still young men, Attila and Bleda, had succeeded him. It was they who received the Imperial ambassadors.
The conference met on the right bank of the Danube within the Empire, that is near the Roman town of Margus or Margum, a city of Moesia, where the Danube and the Morava meet. The place was known as the Margum planum on account of the character of the country, and was famous as the spot where Diocletian had defeated Carinus.[7]
The Byzantine historian Priscus has left us an account of this strange meeting. The Huns it seems came on horseback and as they refused to dismount the Roman ambassadors also remained on their horses. It was thus they heard the arrogant demands of the Hunnish kings: the denunciation by Theodosius of his alliance with the Barbarians of the Danube, the expulsion of all the Huns serving in the Imperial armies or settled within the Empire, an undertaking not to assist any Barbarian people at war with the Huns, and the payment by the Empire as tribute, tributi nomine, of seven hundred pounds’ weight of gold instead of the three hundred and fifty given hitherto. To all these demands the ambassadors were forced to agree as Attila insisted either upon their acceptance or upon war, and Theodosius preferred any humiliation to war. The famous conference of Margus was thus a complete victory for the Huns, a victory Attila never forgot.
That Theodosius was ready to accept any terms which Attila might insist upon is proved by the fact that he immediately delivered up to him his two guests, young princes of the Huns, and made no protest when Attila crucified them before the eyes of his ambassadors.