The Scourge of God

How could the armies of late antiquity supply, move, and command such numbers? And yet something extraordinary happened at Chalons. Ancient armies, particularly barbarian ones, required none of the complex supply we take for granted today: Great numbers might indeed have been assembled for a season’s campaigning. What American would believe in the days before Pearl Harbor that by 1945, the United States-with half its present population-could afford to have enlisted sixteen million men and women under arms? Or that the Soviet Union could absorb twenty million dead in that war and still be counted one of the winners? Or that at Woodstock, New York, half a million young people would assemble for an outdoor rock concert in the rain?

People do extraordinary things. Attila’s greatest battle was probably one of them, though its precise details will never be known. Even its location is vague. Personal inspection of the beautifully rolling countryside between Chalons and Troyes showed a hundred places that fit the vague details of hill and stream described by Jordanes. French military officers have made a hobby of looking for the battlefield, without success. This imprecision is not unusual. The exact site of many decisive ancient battles such as Cannae, Plataea, Issus, and Zama are not known. The ancients didn’t make battlefields into parks.

We are hampered because our primary sources about the Huns are so meager. There are three that seem primary. One is the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote of the early Huns. Another is Olympiodorus of Thebes, whose account of a visit to the Huns was lost but who was used as a source in the surviving accounts by other ancient historians. A third is Priscus of Panium, who accompanied the ill-fated embassy, with its assassination plot, to Attila.

He is the inspiration (though the real historian was older and better connected) for Jonas. It is probably a lost fragment of Priscus that provides the later Jordanes with a vivid word picture of Attila: “Haughty in his carriage, casting his eyes about him on all sides so that the proud man’s power was to be seen in the very movement of his body . . . He was short of stature with a broad chest, massive head, and small eyes.

His beard was thin and sprinkled with gray, his nose flat, and his complexion swarthy, showing thus the signs of his origins.”

What was the Hun homeland? We don’t know. Some scholars put their starting point as far east as Mongolia, others on the steppes of Russia. Their origin was a mystery to the Romans, but legend has them appearing on the world stage after following a white deer across the marshes at the Straits of Kerch into the Crimea.

So, what in this novel is “true”? All the principal characters, with the exception of Jonas, Ilana, and Skilla, are real-life historical figures. I’ve invented details of their lives and words to fit my story, but their general role is fairly accurate.

My depiction of the embassy to Attila and the campaign of 451 roughly follows the occasionally confusing account we have from Priscus and other historians. The “facts” include a possible conspiracy by the Huns and King Sangibanus to betray Aurelia (Orleans), and Attila’s desperate construction of a funeral pyre after the awful battle. Yet even the most basic points, such as whether Orleans was really besieged, or whether Attila really built the pyre, are recorded in some accounts but not in others. Such are the problems of the history of late antiquity.

To research this book I’ve not only read what accounts we have but also retraced Attila’s likely invasion route in Europe. I visited museums, looked at surviving artifacts, and did my best to bring back to life a period of extremely complex politics and culture. The task is not easy because no nation wants to claim the Huns. Even the Hungarian National Museum, while it does have a single room briefly discussing this mysterious people, declines to point out that its nation’s name stems from them. While Attila is still a popular name in Hungary and Budapest even premiered a rock opera about the famed king in 1993, the country prefers to date its origin from the Magyars.

Yet what a pity that records are not more complete! Recent studies have tended to cast “barbarians” in a more favorable light. Perhaps the Huns deserve better. And my suspicion is that the reality of that tumultuous time was far stranger than what I have imagined. It must have produced true stories, now lost, of conflict and heroism as fascinating as those in the Wild West. How people must have struggled to keep their footing on the cracking ice of the Roman Empire!