The Scourge of God

In Attila’s case, the reason he is remembered, I believe, is because of the threat he represented and the immense sacrifice that was required to stop him. Simply put, if Attila had not been defeated at the Battle of Chalons (also known as Maurica, for a Roman crossroads, or the Battle of Nations or the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields) the remnants of Roman civilization preserved by the Christian Church would have been extinguished. The rise of Western Europe would have taken far longer, or it might have been simply absorbed by Islamic or Byzantine civilization, and the planet’s history of exploration, conquest, and development would have played out far differently. The fact that Pope Leo helped persuade Attila to retreat from Italy in 452, which was trumpeted by the Church as a miracle, obviously added to the barbarian’s legend. The more menacing Attila seems, the more miraculous the pope’s success appears. Similarly, in the Nordic and German legend the Nibelungenlied, Attila is the basis for the character of Etzel, evidence of how he passed from history into song. In that saga, Etzel is the King of the Huns who the vengeful widow Kriemhild marries and who murders on her behalf: playing a role in story not too different, perhaps, from his role in life. The story of great Eastern invasion echoes and reechoes in Western literature, down to Tolkien’s use of it in The Lord of the Rings. The Avars would come in the seventh century, the Magyars in the tenth, the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the Turks would besiege the gates of Vienna in the seventeenth century, and the Soviets would conquer in the twentieth. Attila’s story resonates so strongly because it is, in part, Europe’s story.

This opinion of the importance of Attila, argued by Gib-bon in his classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and in the nineteenth century by historians such as Edward Creasy in his book Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, is not as popular among modern historians today. Scholars make their reputation by debunking the theories of their predecessors, and some argue that, unlike Genghis Khan, Attila essentially failed as both conqueror and empire maker. To them, Chalons was but an episode in a long saga of Roman decay and the Huns a people who vanished like smoke. All that Flavius Aetius, “the Last of the Romans,” achieved at the battle, they contend, was brief continuation of a dying status quo. That Aetius let Attila survive and retreat would seem to make the campaign of 451 even less significant.

Added to this dismissal is disbelief that the Battle of Chalons-sur-Marne (which actually is believed to have occurred closer to present-day Troyes, France) was anything near the titanic struggle portrayed by ancient and medieval historians. These chroniclers suggest numbers engaged of five hundred thousand to a million men, and a death count of one hundred sixty thousand to three hundred thousand soldiers. Such estimates indeed seem fantastic, prone to the hyperbolic exaggeration of the early Dark Ages. Modern scholars routinely cut estimates of the numbers engaged and casualties inflicted in some ancient battles (but not others, for reasons never clear to this author) to a tenth or less, simply out of disbelief in such staggering figures.

I endorse a view somewhere between these ancients and moderns. Just as believers in Christianity argue that something happened after Jesus’ death to spark a new religion, however improbable the Resurrection is for some to swallow, so I suggest that something so set Attila’s campaign in Gaul apart from the ordinary barbarian invasion that the memory of it reverberates to the present day. “The fight grew fierce, confused, monstrous, unrelenting-a fight whose like no ancient time has ever recorded,” wrote the late ancient chronicler Jordanes. “In this most famous war of the bravest tribes, one hundred sixty thousand men are said to have been slain on both sides.” The writer Idiatus puts the number killed at three hundred thousand.

Given that the total casualties of the American Civil War’s bloodiest single day, at Antietam, were twenty-three thousand, such a number seems improbable in the extreme.