Attila the Hun Part 1: The Sword of Mars

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It's July the 27th, 27th, 1900.

We are in Bremerhaben, on Germany's North Sea coast.

Gulls fly overhead.

The sea laps at the dock.

From the port, the clanging sounds of industrial machinery carry on the breeze.

In a few short minutes, three troop carriers will set sail.

transporting the German East Asian Expeditionary Corps all the way to Beijing.

Their task to put down the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising by the Chinese against their European colonizers.

At 12.45 p.m., a wooden platform is rigged on the dock.

The few thousand troops make their way out of the passenger terminal.

They duly assemble for inspection.

Standing to attention, each man resists the urge to steal a glance at their illustrious well-wisher,

because none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II is here today.

In military dress, the German emperor stalks the line of soldiers.

Then he climbs the dais.

It's customary to mark the troops' departure to China with some words of encouragement.

One section of the Kaiser's speech will go down in history as an unforgettable piece of tub-thumping rhetoric.

If you come before the enemy, he will be defeated.

No quarter will be given.

Prisoners will not be taken.

Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited.

Just as a thousand years ago the Huns, under their king Attila, made a name for themselves.

One that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend.

So may the name Germany be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.

Kaiser Wilhelm has just made the connection between his soldiers and Attila the Hun,

a king from the ancient past.

Why?

Attila the Hun was a fearsome leader from the east who rode westward into Europe, conquering and plundering as he went.

Now the Kaiser wants to bring the story full circle.

He wants his soldiers of the West to turn Attila's methods back on the peoples of the East.

Henceforth, the Germans will have a new nickname, the Hun.

Germany's enemies will seek to weaponize it.

particularly during World War I.

The slogan, beat back the Hun, will be emblazoned on US government posters.

Nonetheless, many in the German ranks will wear the sobriquet with pride.

And what is the chief virtue of Attila the Hun, as Kaiser Wilhelm sees it on this July day in 1900?

What is the quality that he wants his own men to exhibit?

It is sheer and utter ruthlessness.

Clearly, Attila the Han doesn't fit neatly into modern definitions of dictator, but in many ways he has provided a model for more recent emulators.

Kaiser Wilhelm was not the first, nor the last, world leader to evoke him.

The Kaiser's speech at Bremerhaden captures how Attila came to be remembered in the West.

From the last days of ancient Rome and on through the centuries, Attila became the embodiment of the other.

He was the threat from the east incarnate, a dangerous and terrifying foreigner, someone to be feared and admired.

That's the mythology.

What about the history?

As we'll discover, the Huns emerged out of the Eurasian steppe in the twilight of the Roman Empire.

They arrived in Europe with little warning.

Attila's forces leveled cities with high-tech weaponry.

They displayed superior military tactics, enslaving Europeans by the thousands.

There are considerable gaps in our knowledge of who Attila really was and what he actually did,

but we know just enough to project our fears onto him and for them to stick.

The question for us today is:

who is the real man behind the nightmares?

From Neuser,

this is the story of Attila the Hun,

and this

is real dictators.

A pivotal question continues to beguile archaeologists and historians.

Where exactly did the Huns originally come from?

Some suggest Kazakhstan or elsewhere in Central Asia.

The 18th-century French scholar Joseph de Guigne was the first to propose that the Huns are a remnant of the Zhongnu Empire or Confederation north of China.

Peter Heather is professor of medieval history at King's College London and author of The Fall of the Roman Empire, A New History.

The Zhongnu are a confederation.

I mean, it's a whole series of nomad societies pulled together into a larger political unit.

And it's perfectly possible that our Huns were part of that unit.

On the other hand, the Zhongnu were last heard of at the end of the second century AD on the fringes of China, and there are plenty of other nomads who weren't part of the Zhongnu Confederation that they might be descended from.

The Zhongnu have also been mooted by some historians as possible ancestors of Chinggis Khan's Mongols.

But all we can say with real confidence is that the Huns originally hail from east of the Volga River.

the great waterway that cuts through central and southern Russia until it wends its way to the Caspian Sea.

And we know that the Huns are barbarians, a loaded Roman term for non-Romans.

Also, crucially, the Huns are nomads, a roaming population concerned primarily with rearing livestock.

There's a rhythm to these nomads in existence.

You will need probably lowland areas in the winter, which would be too hot and dry in the summer, and then you move your animals to to hopefully adjacent, because it's hard on the animals to food too far, are plants in the summer, where once the snow has disappeared, there's plenty of grazing there.

So the movement in the nomad life is generally cyclical, and it's not over massive distances.

And even in the 20th century, some of those patterns are still there.

The Kazakhs only get sedentarized by Stalin in the 1930s, for instance.

That lifestyle tends to generate patterns of wealth that are quite fragile, and that's all dependent on animal numbers, and those can go up and down very dramatically, very quickly.

So you don't tend to have very strong or very stable social and political hierarchies in this world.

Close detail about the Huns' origins and lifestyle is hard to come by.

Even what language they spoke remains a mystery.

This is largely because they didn't have their own way of writing, or at least not one that survived.

And there is no solid record of how the Huns measured time, making it very difficult to locate individuals before European accounts begin.

Literacy in mid-first millennium AD is very limited.

More settled barbarian societies close to the Roman world, they have runic inscriptions.

But there's no sign of them producing long written texts before they start coming actually inside the Roman world.

To bring the Huns into focus, we must rely on archaeological evidence and a handful of ancient accounts written by outsiders, chiefly two outsiders drawn from the ranks of their enemies, a man called Priscus and another called Jordanes.

Priscus was an Eastern Roman diplomat and historian from Greece.

He met Attila personally.

His account now exists only in fragments.

Jordanes was a Goth, or man of Gothic descent, who converted to Christianity.

He was writing around 100 years after the death of Attila.

Priscus is generally considered the more reliable of the two, but unsurprisingly, both these sources are full of the biases and judgments of their authors.

Central to the world view of these Roman authors is the idea of civilization.

The Romans have a very specific understanding of what civilized is.

Human beings are this odd, strange, composite entity which combines both a rational mind and soul and an irrational body.

The civilized rational mind will control the irrational body or vice versa.

So what's other

about the Huns, barbarians in general, but the Huns in particular, is that they are completely irrational.

The physical is totally in in control.

Humanity, according to the Romans, is divided into levels.

The Romans themselves, of course, are the civilized cream of the crop.

Below them are two lower ranks.

Then there were barbarians, and then there were real barbarians who are these nomads with no settled abodes, no agriculture.

The nomads are the absolute other.

They're the mirror image inverse of what the civilized ought to be.

And of course, there's no real corrective in the sense that the Huns themselves don't write anything, so we don't have anything directly from them apart from physical remains.

In the Roman version of events, Attila is the villain of the peace.

It should be said that his wave of destruction was hardly out of place in this period and was largely in keeping with the behavior of the Roman Empire itself.

Julius Caesar's campaign in Gaul between 58 to 50 BC led to an estimated one million dead and one million enslaved.

Without seeking to justify the atrocities Attila committed, it's helpful to keep the context in mind.

The Huns begin to head west into Europe sometime in the late 300s AD.

But what is it that encourages this nomadic population to make this concerted move?

It's very dangerous for nomads to move.

They're taking huge risks with their herds if they move out of the regular cyclical grazing pattern and somewhere else.

They don't do it unless they absolutely need to,

or if there is a huge opportunity that's presenting itself.

I think there are two basic possibilities.

One is political developments.

We see the building of very large confederations and

those built up by incorporating lots of other nomads into them.

That's one possibility.

The other is certainly climatic and there has been quite recently the last five years or so ice core evidence.

from the Arctic.

You drill down in the Arctic and you can get down to the right chronological layers for the late fourth century, which strongly suggests that the third quarter of the fourth century was a period of substantial drought.

And that would, of course, generate intense competition for grazing amongst nomads.

It's certainly quite plausible now to think of a climatic dimension to the kick-starting of Hunnic movement westwards into Europe.

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By the 410s to 420s AD, the Huns have made it to the Great Hungarian Plain.

This forms the majority of modern-day Hungary.

It's the westernmost part of the Eurasian steppe, the immense area of grassland that stretches as far east as the Pacific Ocean.

Setting up shop here in Europe, the Huns appear clearly on the Romans' radar.

And it doesn't take long for them to clash.

There had been steppe nomads intruding onto the fringes of Europe in recorded Roman time, previously in the first century BC and AD as well.

We had some others, but this is the sort of biggest nomadic intrusion within living memory and within recorded memory.

The lower Danube is a wide river that winds through the Balkans in southeastern Europe.

It is the Roman equivalent of a motorway.

On this early 5th century day, as on any other, it's busy with boats transporting merchants and their cargo.

But many of these waterborne men of business have nervous looks on their faces, because, picturesque though it may be, this river is actually a tense, militarized frontier.

Weaving among the merchant vessels, sleek warships patrol up and down.

These shallow-bottomed, oar-powered craft are the speedboats of their time.

Roman special forces need to be able to land swiftly on the riverbank to repair defenses, or deal with barbarian raiders.

Beyond the southern bank, extending away as far as the eye can see, are the Danubian limes, a formidable chain of watchtowers, forts, and camps filled with twitchy Roman soldiers.

Legionaries.

who anxiously scan the horizon for the dust clouds that will tell them that the Huns are coming.

The first warnings came in the last quarter of the fourth century.

Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman military officer and historian, had recorded how a hitherto unknown race of men has appeared from some quarter of the earth, uprooting and destroying everything in its path.

Thousands of hungry and needy people started to arrive on the eastern border of the Roman Empire, seeking sanctuary.

These people were mostly Goths, Germanic nomads themselves.

They were the lucky ones.

Many of their kin had been forcibly conscripted into the Hun army.

For now, the Huns' incursions into the Roman sphere of influence have been sporadic, if bloody.

But the Romans have failed to see the warning signs.

Perched on the Hungarian plain, the Huns are building their own empire, forming one of the largest barbarian hordes the world has ever seen.

There's enough grazing in the Great Hungarian Plain for enough horses for about 10,000 Huns.

And I don't think there were ever any more than that.

Attila's armies are several tens of thousands sometimes, but apart from the Hunnic corps, it's all these Goths.

and Rugi and Swavy and Sky.

It's all these Germanic-speaking former Roman clients that have been brought in.

They're able to create this confederation in the first place.

Well, once it's created, then I think it is the size of it and the power of it that is so important and why it becomes a major challenge to Roman armies in the fifth century.

You know, no one has ever united this much of the non-Roman world into one entity before.

This isn't the Roman Empire of the movies.

By now, in in the early to mid-400s, this is an empire riven in two.

It's been divided into a stronger Eastern Empire and a relatively weaker western part.

Both are plagued by poor leadership, inflation, climate change, and the threat of barbarian intrusions.

The western capital remains Rome, for now.

The eastern capital is Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, Turkey.

It's a very complicated context.

You've got two halves of the Roman Empire, each with its own political leadership structures, and the quality of relations between the two halves of the Roman Empire is not constant.

Sometimes they're closer, sometimes they're more or less hostile to one another.

It really depends.

That was actually one dimension of Hunnic leadership that you had to master to be successful.

It is on the Hungarian plain, possibly, that Attila is born.

With such sparse source material, we don't know when exactly Attila comes into the world.

Perhaps the year 395 or 406.

We don't know much about his childhood, whether he had loving or abusive parents.

We do know that he grows up with at least one brother, Bleda.

Theirs is the most powerful family in the Hunnic Empire.

The boy's uncles, Ruga and Okta, are in charge.

And later, as young men, Attila and Blader will become dual kings.

This is another element of the Huns' otherness.

Their kingship.

Originally, the Huns don't seem to have had any traditional named leaders.

But when they arrive in Europe, They begin to adapt to European customs.

They start to consolidate power under quadruple kings, dual monarchs, and finally, as we shall see, under single, all-powerful rulers.

Our sort of first serious take on the leadership of the Huns comes in about 410 when a Roman ambassador called Olympiodorus visits the Hunnic main body, I think, in Central Europe, somewhere around Hungary.

And they have a series of ranked kings at that point.

So there's several kings, and they have a ranked order between them.

And it perfectly well reflects the steppe nomadic life because the groups have to be dispersed.

You can't concentrate all the animals and all the people because then you overgraze, the animals die, the people die.

So you tend to be very dispersed, which means that you won't have a very centralized leadership.

But the next time that a Roman ambassador gives us a detailed look at the Huns is actually Priscus in the 440s, by which time all these ranked kings have disappeared and we have a clearly unified central kingship amongst the Huns.

I'm sure all these ranked kings didn't go voluntarily.

They have been eliminated.

This only becomes possible if a very successful king can start throwing around extraordinary wealth.

But we'll get to that.

Coming from a prominent family, it's fair to assume that Attila and Blader learn horsemanship as young boys.

At a tender age, they're instructed as to how to wield a sword and use a bow.

It also seems likely that Attila and Bleda have a childhood acquaintance of particular renown.

He will go on to play a pivotal role in the power struggles between the Romans and the Eastern Hordes.

His name is Aetius.

Aetius is the son of a major politician.

of the Western Empire in the 410s and early 420s.

And what's very interesting about him is that he is sent to the Huns as a hostage while a young man.

This is before Attila is in charge, but not before Attila was likely to be alive.

So there's every chance that they would have encountered one another.

Aetius is a high status hostage amongst the Huns.

He knows his way around the Huns.

You don't lock up hostages.

They circulate around at your court.

They're there.

They're not in prison somewhere.

That's not what people did with hostages.

So he's right in the Hunnic mix in the late 410s, early 420s.

He then returns to the West Roman political orbit and he makes himself the dominant Generalissimo.

As the three boys grow up, Attila and Blader will remain in contact with Aetius.

Chroniclers like Priscus would have you believe that the world is split into civilized Romans, barbarians, and uber-barbarians like the Huns.

But the reality on the ground is rather more mixed.

When Aetius is released by the Huns and returns home, he duly takes up his place among the Roman elite.

But there are regular internecine conflicts in the Western Empire, and on more than one occasion, Aetius is forced to flee the imperial court.

On each occasion, he heads back east to his Hun acquaintances.

In the early 420s and again in the early 430s, Aetius storms back into Italy to battle his Roman rivals.

And he does so at the head of a mercenary Hun army, an army which likely includes Attila and Blada.

You heard that right.

The Roman Aetius attacks fellow Romans with the help of the Huns.

That's how fractured the Roman Empire has become.

Eventually, the power that Aetius wields with a Hun legion at his back is enough to see him installed as commander-in-chief of the Western Roman army.

Attila and Blader will live to regret this promotion, but for now, everything's hunky-dory between them.

Aetius asks his mercenary pals, formidable warriors that they are, to do one last job for him.

It will go down in the annals as a singular act of butchery.

The ancient city of Borbetomagus, known today as Wurms, sits at the heart of modern-day Germany.

In the 400s, it's home to the Burgundians.

They are a Germanic tribe who've settled here on the western Roman border.

Their king, Gunther, is nominally an ally of Rome.

But Gunther clearly has ambitions above his station.

His men have been raiding Roman territory of late, even backing a pretender to the Western Imperial throne.

From where Aetius is standing, this simply won't do.

Such impertinence weakens the Empire's grip on its peripheral territories.

So, Aetius makes a request of the Huns.

He asks them, for a price, of course, to punish the Burgundians for the trouble they're making.

Attila and Blader don't need much persuading.

At dusk, a sentry patrols the city walls of Bobetamagus.

The sun is setting over the forest skyline.

The sentry pauses for a moment to warm his hands at a brazier.

Turning his gaze back out over the meadow, His stomach plummets.

In the middle distance, he sees a posse of men on horses, an advanced party.

Their distinctive appearance shakes him to his core.

Some of the Huns have huge, protuberant skulls, deformities resulting from deliberate cranial modification in infancy.

He recognizes their small, tough steeds and revolutionary composite bows.

These warriors can unleash volley after volley of arrows while on the move.

with devastating accuracy and from a great distance.

The sources are saying that it is the revolutionary military capacity of these mounted archers that is making the difference.

You're fighting from horseback, you're firing from horseback, and the gap between your arm and the horse's neck is limited.

So the Huns have bigger bows than their predecessors, but they're asymmetric.

You make the top part longer.

And no one's ever made one to see what effect that would have.

I take it it makes it more powerful.

Maybe the Huns did have extra range compared to some of their predecessors as horse archers.

These mounted archers are good with spear and sword as well.

This cavalry is a blitzkrieg force.

They excel at hit-and-run attacks on enemy armies.

And they now fight alongside the press gang infantry of the tribes they've defeated along the way.

Borbet Omegas doesn't stand a chance.

The Huns attack.

They destroy the city.

And pretty much erase the Burgundian kingdom from the pages of history.

One source suggests that as many as 20,000 people die.

The mission assigned by Aetius has been completed, but Attila and Blader are only just getting started.

In the mid-430s, the brothers join in with their uncle, King Ruger's raids into the Eastern Roman Empire.

Mercenaries of the West one moment, enemies of the East the next.

These raids come to a pause when Ruger dies.

Legend has it he's struck down by a divine lightning bolt outside the gates of Constantinople before plague and heavenly fire wipe out his followers.

But no amount of spin doctoring by the Roman chroniclers can detract from the truth.

The Eastern Empire is in trouble, and the Huns are going from strength to strength.

But it's not until about the 430s that the Huns become straightforwardly a Roman opponent, rather than another sometime ally, sometime opponent.

And I suspect that that is a sign of the extent to which the Confederation building, as it were, has got out of control from a Roman point of view.

In fact, the late King Ruga's raids proved so successful that the Eastern Emperor, Theodosius II, is compelled to sue for peace.

Follow the Danube down through the Balkans, and eventually you reach the strategic fortress city of Margus, just east of modern-day Belgrade, Serbia.

It's the year 435 AD.

On one riverbank, Hun emissaries sit waiting on horseback.

They're here on behalf of Attila and Blada.

In the aftermath of Uncles Ruger and Oktar's demise, these brothers have ascended as dual kings.

Ruger may have taken a lightning bolt to the head, but Okta allegedly died from overeating.

Now together, Attila and Blader will oversee an empire that stretches all the way from modern-day Germany to Iran.

These Hun delegates are not here to barter with Theodosius' men.

They are here to impose terms.

Firstly, the Romans will hand over refugees who fled the Hun lands for the Empire.

In particular, two Hun princes with designs on Attila and Blader's thrones must be returned.

Secondly, The Eastern Empire must pay an annual tribute of 700 pounds of gold, worth about $4.5 million dollars today,

directly into the pockets of Attila and Blader.

The Huns' business model is changing.

They are no longer content to be paid by the Romans to do the empire's dirty work.

No, now they want to extract as much money out of their former employers as possible.

What they want from the Roman Empire is gold, and the amount of tribute payment goes up steadily with each Hunnic victory.

Emperor Theodosius has little choice but to comply.

The two parties sign a treaty.

As per its terms, the Romans duly hand over the two Hun princes, quaking in their boots.

Attila decides to make an example of them.

For any other challenges to his authority, this is what happens when you collude with Constantinople.

The princes are impaled alive on nine foot-long wooden stakes.

A thousand years later, another warlord, Vlad the Impaler, will adopt this method of killing as his own.

With each day that goes by, Attila and Blader are constructing a more and more fearsome force.

But the sheer size of the Hun military operation creates its own problems.

You're looking for opportunity between the two halves of the Roman Empire, and to exploit those opportunities, you're having to keep your Hunnic corps on board.

And you're also having to maintain control over restive subordinates, most of whom, you know, they didn't vote to join the Hunnic Empire.

They were subordinated either by conquest or intimidated into some kind of surrender.

What the Huns do is build a very effective war machine.

out of all these client princedoms or whatever, you know, Goths, et cetera, that they've brought into the Hunnic orbit.

But you have to use it.

It's not a political structure that can just stand still

because it's built on intimidation and prestige and a flow of wealth, which you then distribute as the manifest sign that you are the right leader.

You're kind of riding a tiger.

Yes, it's an incredibly effective war machine, but it can't stand still, so you are looking for targets.

The peace with Theodosius doesn't last long.

Attila and Bleda have spies in Constantinople.

Word filters back to the great Hungarian plain that the Eastern Emperor's army is preparing to sail for Sicily.

With Theodosius' army committed overseas, this is too big an opportunity to miss for the Huns.

In true dictator fashion, The brother kings stage a false flag incident.

The Treaty of Margus is declared void.

The bishop of Margus, they claim, has crossed into their lands and ransacked royal Hun tombs.

They then issue an ultimatum.

The emperor must hand over said bishop and pay yet more tribute.

Or else.

With such unreasonable demands, the ensuing negotiations falter, giving the Huns their precondition to attack.

In around 442 AD, AD, the Hun brothers target the fortress city of Nysos,

modern-day Nish in Serbia.

It's a symbolic target.

Nassus was the birthplace of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor.

Now the pagan Huns are setting out to destroy it.

The decision is strategic too.

There are a great number of roads emanating from Nassus.

One leads to Constantinople.

and this road to the capital is no ordinary Roman highway.

It is a via militaris, a 24-foot-wide super-highway.

Control of this would give any invader a direct route to the gates of one of Europe's wealthiest cities.

The great walls of Nassus have withstood barbarian invasions for at least 200 years.

The city houses a mighty garrison and is protected on one side by a river, with the few crossing points in Roman hands.

But Attila and Blader have been scheming.

The Huns have a plentiful supply of prisoners of war.

This workforce is deployed to build a pontoon bridge out of timber.

Across this bridge, the Huns maneuver their siege towers.

On top of these stand the fearsome Hun archers.

Their job is to clear the battlements.

Behind them come iron-pointed battering rams.

rams.

Finally come the scaling ladders.

The Roman historian Priscus describes the scene.

From the walls the defenders tumbled down wagon-sized boulders.

Some rams were crushed together with the men working on them, but they could not hold against the great number of machines.

The city was taken.

There's no sign of any other barbarian grouping of this era having the capacity to mount successful large-scale sieges of well-defended Roman centers.

And the Huns do that several times.

I suspect that it reflects this unprecedented quantity of military manpower that the Huns have put together.

Successful siege warfare is so much about manpower, about digging trenches, about slowly pushing them up to the walls, about undermining and all the rest of it.

Six years later, the bones of the dead will still litter the riverbank.

With the ruins of Nassau still smouldering, a rumor begins to circulate among the Huns.

The sword of God, or, as the Romans will call it, the sword of Mars, has been found.

We know little about the Huns' religion or their worldview, but their belief in this fabled blade is a rare fragment of Hun mythology that does survive in more recent Hungarian legend.

The story goes that one day a Hun herdsman comes upon an injured heifer.

He follows the trail of blood from the animal.

At the trail's end, he finds the sword of God buried in the ground.

He digs it up and takes it straight to Attila.

When Attila clasps the hilt, he has a vision.

A A divine revelation that he now holds the power to win every war before him, becoming ruler of the entire world.

In this new paradigm, there is no room for dual kingship.

Attila must be the sole monarch now.

Brother Blader had better get out of his way.

It's not recorded when exactly the brothers turn on each other,

but when tensions reach boiling point, the fight is short, brutal, and decisive.

The chronicler Jordanes claims that Attila murders Blader on a hunting trip.

We will never know exactly what happened,

but it's clear that by the mid-440s, Attila is sole king of the Huns.

He has assumed the role without causing a civil war, and Blader has simply vanished from history.

We might expect Attila to ruthlessly eliminate all vestiges of his brother's house, but an act of mercy, or perhaps statecraft, displays a wilier side to him.

Blader had taken multiple wives.

Attila spares the most senior of these spouses.

He even allows her to remain ruler of her own village.

With power and loyalty shored up at home, Attila takes another textbook dictatorial step.

He will build his own cult of personality, entwining his own legend with that of the sword of Mars.

And what better way to show that the prophecy of omnipotence is true than to capture Constantinople?

Any traveller to Constantinople in the 400s will gasp in awe at what they see, hear, and smell.

They will quickly run out of superlatives.

The new rome second rome or even new jerusalem take your pick is a city of three to four hundred thousand people enormous in the context of the time

it's surrounded by the sparkling blue water of the bosphorus and defended by miles of walls with watchtowers and gates the mouth of its harbor is guarded by a great metal chain

It's easy to understand why Hun kings like Ruga and Attila seem obsessed with attacking Constantinople.

It's the metropolis that bridges two continents.

Sacking it will make the position of any Hun king unassailable.

It will also open the way for their horsemen to ransack Asia Minor and pillage the treasures of Parthia.

It won't be plain sailing.

Constantinople is protected by the famous double line of the Theodosian walls.

These were built outside the original city wall that Emperor Constantine constructed when he founded the city, making three layers of stone in total.

Together, they're considered impregnable.

An earthquake in 447 AD puts that theory to the test.

With the defensive line badly damaged, everything is in place for Attila to strike.

First, the Hun king leads his army south, into modern-day Bulgaria.

Next, as far as we can tell, he levels the fortress city of Ratiaria,

headquarters of the Roman fleet that patrols the river Danube.

He then races down the Via Militaris, the military super-highway, to the capital.

The Huns and the Romans clash somewhere along the 120-mile length of the Utus River.

After his horse is slain under him, the Roman general in the field fights on, on foot, to the death.

Panic grips Constantinople as Attila advances by the day.

Priscus writes, The barbarian people of the Huns became so strong that they captured a hundred cities.

Most men fled from Constantinople.

Even the monks wanted to run away to Jerusalem.

There was so much killing.

and bloodletting that no one could number the dead.

the number of romans enslaved by the huns is hotly contested to this day

some researchers suggest that as many as 160 000 are captured

attila's advance heralds the end of hundreds of years of roman civilization in southeastern europe it will never fully return

Recent work by archaeologists has given us fascinating insights into the ways that city dwellers responded to Hun attacks.

Take, for example, Nicopolis Adistrum, in the northern part of modern-day Bulgaria.

Archaeological digs in the area have uncovered how the rich steadily abandoned their villas in the countryside, to retreat within the relative safety of the city walls.

With this influx of wealth from the surrounds into the city itself, the place became gentrified, the buildings got more ornate, the construction methods more elaborate.

But then the archaeologists made a further gruesome discovery.

A thick layer of burnt matter lining their dig trenches.

Evidence that the city was finally overwhelmed by the Huns around 447 AD.

With Constantinople seemingly at his mercy, something extraordinary and rather hard to explain happens.

Attila steps back from the brink.

He turns his men away before reaching the city gates.

Maybe the Huns' carts are full enough of treasure.

Perhaps it's a case of job done.

In 447, Emperor Theodosius does agree to pay Attila £6,000 of gold in arrears.

plus a further £2,100 every subsequent year.

It seems that from Attila's point of view, the wealth of the city can be acquired without actually having to overrun it.

I'm not sure they particularly want the city.

I don't know what they do.

I think it's all about diplomatic pressure.

Because if you look at the demands that the Hunnic leaders make, and Priscus records them in some detail, it's all for cash.

It's very clear that the Romans would pay, would promise to pay any amount to get rid of the Huns, and then often didn't actually pay it.

So you had to make them pay, but they did on occasion pay, and that does show up in the archaeological evidence.

In those Hunnic era burials from the mid-fifth century, you are dripping in gold, and that is all these Roman tribute payments.

An uneasy peace follows a new settlement with Theodosius.

The situation calms just enough for the Roman historian Priscus and a delegation of diplomats to begin an arduous journey north.

Their mission is to sit down and talk with Attila himself.

In a few short decades, the Huns have gone from being dismissed as barbarians to a rival power the Romans must court.

Priscus and his Roman delegation leave Constantinople and head northwest to Nassos.

Here they spend a particularly ghoulish night.

surrounded by the bones of those slaughtered during the siege six years earlier.

When they reach the Danube, gone are those elegant oar-powered Roman vessels.

In their place are barbarian ferrymen who convey the Romans to the other side in hollowed-out tree trunks.

Now Priscus is just a day's journey from Attila's current camp, but the Hun king has a plan to elongate the voyage.

Word reaches the Romans that they are to spend a further week on the road.

Only this time, they will be following Attila himself.

He wants to hold the talks in the northern part of his kingdom.

The Romans must also contend with certain diplomatic niceties, power plays.

They must always travel behind Attila, never in front of him.

If they end up camping anywhere near him, they must make sure never to pitch their tents on ground higher than his.

Finally, after a month of travel, they reach their destination.

The location of the Hun headquarters has been lost to history, but here, for the first time in his life, Priscus lays eyes on Attila the Hun.

He was short of stature, broad-chested, with a large head, small eyes, thin beard flecked with grey, snub nose, and the repulsive complexion of his forefathers.

We do have the first-hand account of somebody who met him in Priscus, which is just fabulous.

And he's not what you think he's going to be.

I remember I was historical advisor for a docu drama about Attila.

And the guy they picked to be Attila is the guy who then played the king's hand, I think, in Game of Thrones.

This enormous man

who was clearly picked to be as physically intimidating as absolutely possible, which is, of course, the image of Attila.

But that's not what Priscus describes.

Priscus's account continues.

While for the other barbarians and for us, there were lavishly prepared dishes served on silver platters, for Attila there was only meat on a wooden plate.

Gold and silver goblets were handed to the men at the feast.

whereas his cup was of wood.

His clothing was plain and differed not at all from that of the rest, except that it was clean.

Neither the sword that hung at his side nor the fastenings of his barbarian boots, nor his horse's bridle was adorned with gold or precious stones.

Priscus's description is absolutely fascinating in the sense that we know that the Hunnic nobles were all covered in bling, in staggering amounts of jewelry.

This is what they're all buried in.

This is what they all wore in life.

The wealth of their conquests is displayed on their person.

But what he describes of Attila is someone who dressed, he says in clean clothes, which might imply that the others weren't very clean, but plain, absolutely plain, simple plain linen, none of this kind of gold, silver stuff.

So it's clearly a cultivated image.

I'm so damn powerful.

I do not need all this spling to project power.

Look at me.

I can go plain.

And that shows you just how dominant I am.

Which I think is totally fascinating.

Priscus goes on.

His gait was haughty, his eyes darting here and there, so that this power and pride were apparent as he moved.

Yes, he was a lover of war, but he knew how to restrain himself.

He was excellent in counsel, sympathetic to supplicants, gracious to those who he received into his protection.

His nature was such that he always had great confidence.

The image that comes to my mind is much more Michael Corleone out of The Godfather.

It's brains, a lot of courage, but not this kind of wild, brash, charismatic courage like the older brother in The Godfather who gets himself killed by acting impulsively.

It is bravery matched with the application of brain power and not a small sense of humor either.

With dinner over, the much-trailed talks between Roman envoy and Hun king can begin.

Attila has made a series of demands, including for what in modern parlance would be termed a demilitarized zone, to sit between the Hun's domain and that of the Romans.

One minute Attila and his deputies play nice, the next minute hostile.

This unnerves the Romans, who know that any perceived slight will be used by Attila as an excuse to restart the war.

A war that Constantinople cannot afford, let alone win.

But then, another dramatic and rather bizarre twist.

In advance of Priscus's arrival, The Huns' spymasters discovered something.

A covert scheme.

An assassination plot designed to take out Attila.

Priscus was not involved, and nor is he accused of being.

As far as we can tell, he is oblivious to the whole thing.

Nonetheless, this was clearly a Roman conspiracy, Attila declares.

The perpetrators have been apprehended, and now he has dispatched a message of his own.

to Theodosius II.

In the coming days, a Hun delegation arrives in Constantinople.

Around the neck of one of them hangs a leather bag.

It contains the gold that the Roman emperor supposedly dispensed to the would-be assassins.

Another of the emissaries speaks directly to Theodosius.

He tells him that

he is the son of a nobly born father, and Attila too is of noble descent.

But whereas Attila has preserved his noble lineage, Theodosius has fallen from his and is Attila's slave, bound to the payment of tribute.

In attacking Attila covertly like a worthless slave, Theodosius has acted unjustly towards his better, whom fortune has made his master.

The look on the emperor's face is not recorded.

My.

How the tables have turned.

So Attila needs excuses.

He needs wars to fight.

He's looking for a reason to pick a fight.

The next targets available are going to be Gaul and/ Italy.

And they do try them both.

In the next episode,

a family bust-up at the Western Roman court sparks an extraordinary alliance as Attila gets engaged to the Emperor's sister.

The Huns storm through Gaul, penetrating deep into Western Europe and putting their king on a collision course with his old friend Aetius.

Will the Romans' fragile coalition hold,

or will the prophecy of the sword of Mars be realized?

That's next time, in the second and final part of the Attila story.

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