Attila and His Conquerors: A Story of the Days of St. Patrick and St. Leo the Great

by Elizabeth Rundle Charles

For in Ethne’s heart alone nothing could quench the hope that Marius would yet return.

Still came in, day after day, the tidings of mourning, lamentation, and woe. The long resistance of Aquileia had enraged the Huns to madness; and her capture and destruction had apparently awakened in them an insatiable thirst for blood and ruin. For the time even plunder seemed subordinate to mere wild waste and ravage. Week by week came the cry of cities sacked and burned and laid waste for ever; Concordia, thirty miles from Aquileia, and Altinum.

Then followed another phase of horror. The mere blind fury of revenge seemed at last assuaged; and the hideous savage hordes entered on another stage of devastation; the lust of plunder and of drunken orgies seemed to revive and gain the upper hand. The rich plains of Lombardy had been laid waste, the flourishing cities of the coast had been blotted from the earth, and now the great cities of the interior, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Pavia, and finally Milan, appalled by the fate of Aquileia, opened their gates, and from these came the tidings how the Huns, “bacchabantur,” were holding hideous revels and orgies there night and day. Meanwhile Rome herself had virtually no walls to defend, no gates to open. Rome, with her temples and palaces, each as a city within itself, lay absolutely defenceless and bare before the Tartar hordes.

The thunder-cloud drew nearer and nearer, and more and more the Aventine household realized their utter helplessness. It was reported that Aetius was on the point of taking flight with the Emperor. But still Leo stood firm, still the prayers went up from the basilicas. More and more the mother, the sister, and the bride seemed to find themselves most at home in the ancient churches of the catacombs, by the tombs of the martyrs of the early days, as the darkness deepened around them; until, at last, faint rumours began to creep into the city, of debate and division in the camp of Attila himself. The spell of Rome began to work; too much, his chieftains began to feel, was staked on the life of one man. The last royal life that had braved the great enchantress, the great queen City, had paid the penalty of victory by death. If Attila were to fall as Alaric had fallen, some began dimly to feel, who would hold his unwieldy empire, his hordes of many divided tribes, together? Moreover, the inevitable curse of polygamy was in Attila’s own house. Which of all the sons of his many wives would win the allegiance of these disorganized hosts? The great defeat and slaughter of the previous year, the Hunnenschlacht, on the plains of Châlons, could not have been forgotten; and something stronger than defeat in battle was doubtless beginning to dissolve the terrific forces of dissolution from within. Cruelty and lust and violence cannot create or unite; man remains human through all; and the avenging of such crimes must eventually grow out of the crimes themselves. No inspiring loyalty, no sacred memories or hopes, no great purpose of patriotism or even of conquest, held that vast horde together; nothing but only that one gigantic will. And if Attila hurled his life against Rome and conquered, and fell, like Alaric, what would become of his Huns? Probably, moreover, this hesitation and division of purpose began to invade the heart and will even of Attila himself.

At length the echo of these debates and divisions penetrated faintly to Rome itself, and vague suggestions began to be made of sending an embassy to Attila himself, entreating peace.

But if such an embassy were possible, who would risk themselves to be the ambassadors? Ambassadors had been sent before to Attila from the Eastern empire with a secret mission of assassination, and he had discovered it; and the ambassadors had barely escaped, through a rare generosity, with their lives. Who would venture on such an embassy from the Western empire, with such a memory of treachery confronting them? It was no mission for a soldier,—a message of abject submission and supplication;—yet to venture on it demanded more courage than any battle-field.

There could have been but one name on the lips and in the hearts of all, the name of the man whom Rome had waited for those forty days so many years before to make him her leader and bishop. There was not a hope but in Leo; not a man besides who could be trusted with such a mission, or would undertake it.

And Leo did not fail. He went; and with him two distinguished civilians—Avienus, once a consul, and Tregetius, a prefect, to propitiate Attila by two high official names,—mere names then, and long since, forgotten names, save as adjuncts to Leo. In this embassy, once more the names of the Emperor, “the Senate and People of Rome,” were united, not in a decree but a supplication; the parody of a People and Emperor and the shadow of a Senate. But the ambassador was a true Roman and a Christian, a genuine man and a living saint. And Attila had shown that he recognized a true man when he encountered him, and would listen to a saint when he saw him.