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saved. If, as we have a right to suppose, Aetius had no direct part in
this achievement, both he and Marcian were probably indirectly
responsible for it and in fact had far more to do with it than Leo.
Were the Roman armies nothing, then, or the Byzantine threat
against Attila’s communications only a dream?
Not so. Attila retreated because like another Barbarian he “could
do no other,” and even so he dared not retrace his way over the
Julian Alps, for Marcian was already in Moesia, and ready and
anxious to meet and to punish him. He retreated instead upon that
Verona which he had ruined, crossed the Alps there, and after
pillaging Augsburg, was lost, as it proved for ever, in the storm of the
north and the darkness of his Barbary.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] See my “Ravenna; a Study” (Dent), 1912.
[14] So Jornandes who asserts that Aquileia was so utterly
destroyed “ita ut vix ejus vestigia ut appareant reliquerint.”
IX
ATTILA’S HOME-COMING
Such was the return, such was the failure of Attila. He had looked
to hold the world in fee; he returned for the last time across the
Danube his desire unaccomplished, his hopes dead. He had struck
first the East and perhaps ruined it, but he had failed to take
Constantinople. He had struck Gaul and left its cities shambles, but
he had not destroyed the armies of Aetius. He had desired Rome for
his plunder and his pride, but Leo had turned him back before he
crossed the Po. Every attack had ended in a long retreat; if he
brought ruin to a hundred Imperial cities, at last he but achieved his
own. He returned to his wooden stockade in the heart of Hungary
with all his hopes unfulfilled, all his achievements undone, a ruined
man.
That he did not realise his failure is but to emphasise the fact that
he was a Barbarian. To him, doubtless, destruction and booty, ruin
and loot seemed the end of war, he had not even in this his last hour
begun to understand what the Empire was. And so if we ask
ourselves what in reality the enormous energy of the Hunnish
onslaught achieved in the first half of the fifth century, we are
compelled to answer, nothing; nothing, that is, consciously and
directly. Unconsciously and indirectly, however, the restless brutality
of Roua and of Attila brought to pass these two great and even
fundamental things; it was the cause of the passing of Britain into
England, and it founded the republics of the lagoons which were to
produce Venice the Queen of the Adriatic.
Of all this, of his failure as of those strange achievements, Attila
was wholly unaware. He came home like a conqueror to his wooden
palace in the midst of a great feast prepared for him, to be greeted
as Priscus describes he had been greeted before, on his return from
the ruin of the East and his failure to reach Constantinople. He had
made the West his tributary; he was laden with the gold and the spoil
of northern Italy. It was enough for him, and so he made ready with
joy to marry yet another wife, to add yet one more to his concubines;
not that Honoria who would have been the sign of his victory, but one
rather a prey than a prize, pitiful in her youth and helpless beauty,
Ildico, or as the German legends call her Hildegrude, perhaps a
Frankish or a Burgundian princess.
It is said, we know not with how much truth, that upon that long
and last retreat as he crossed the river Lech by Augsburg an old
woman with streaming hair, a witch or a sorceress, cried out to him
thrice as he passed, “Retro Attila!” It is part of the legend which
makes so much of his history.
Upon the night of his last orgy or wedding he had feasted and
drunk beyond his wont and he was full of wine and of sleep when he
sought the bed of the beautiful and reluctant Ildico, the last of his
sacrifices and his loot. What passed in that brutal nuptial chamber
we shall never know. In the morning there was only silence, and
when his attendants at last broke into the room they found Attila
dead in a sea of blood, whether murdered by his victim or struck
down by apoplexy cannot be known. It is said that Ildico had much to
avenge—the murder of her parents and her brothers as well as her
own honour.
From that dreadful, characteristic chamber the Huns bore the body
of their King, singing their doleful uncouth songs, to bury him in a
secret place prepared by slaves who were duly murdered when their
work was accomplished. Jornandes has preserved or invented for us
the great funeral dirge which accompanied the last Barbarian rite. It
celebrated Attila’s triumphs over Scythia and Germany which bore
his yoke so meekly, and over the two Emperors who paid him tribute.
He left no memorial but his terror written in the fire and smoke of
burning cities, and that tradition of “frightfulness” to which Kaiser
Wilhelm II first appealed to his troops on their departure for China,
and which he is practising upon the body of Europe to-day. For upon
his death Attila’s vast and barbaric hegemony fell to pieces.
Enormous revolts broke it in sunder, and e’er many years had
passed the very memory of it was forgotten.
I
AMMIANI MARCELLINI RERUM GESTARUM LIBER XXXI