Attila: the Huns at the gates of Rome
The ruler of the Huns holds both halves of the empire in fear, is checked on the Catalaunian Fields and dies on his wedding night; his realm falls apart.
Attila rules the Huns from 434, at first with his brother Bleda and, from 445, having killed him, alone. From his camp on the Danube he takes tribute in gold from Constantinople and ravages the Balkans; the envoy Priscus, who visited his court, left the only portrait: short, broad-chested, eating from a wooden plate while the guests eat from silver. In 451 he marches into Gaul, and on the Catalaunian Fields the Roman Aetius and the Visigoths stop him; in 452 he ravages the north of Italy but turns back after meeting Pope Leo I—because of plague and hunger in the army, historians think, and not only because of the pope’s words. In 453 Attila dies at a feast on the night of yet another wedding; his sons cannot hold the subject peoples, and within a year the realm of the Huns falls apart. The Church will call him the "scourge of God", and Germanic epic the Etzel of the Nibelungenlied.
Sources
Documents of the period
- Priscus of Panium, fragments of the embassy to Attila — the court of Attila and his appearance
- Jordanes, On the Origin and Deeds of the Goths — the Catalaunian Fields and the death on the wedding night
Scholarship
- history of the late Roman empire — the dating to 434–453 and the reasons for leaving Italy
Basis: documents and evidence.