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Attila the Scourge of God and the Fall of Rome
File under underappreciated guitarists: Marco Pirroni played on this song above, well on the whole “Kings of the Wild Frontier” album. Unbeknownst to me, he also played on the first two Sinead O’Connor albums. Here they are live making wonderful sounds together. Talk about underappreciated, she’s playing a 12 string acoustic on a number of songs here. Jesus, what a talented, smart, beautiful, fucking tough as nails broad she was.
The great steppes of the Eurasian land mass stretch east to west twice the length of the United States. For thousands of years, these vast grasslands produced a whirlpool of nomadic peoples and their herds defining the history of Europe, China, India, and the Middle East. In Kenneth Harl's great book, Empires of the Steppes, one story he tells is of Attila the Scourge of God, so he was christened centuries later by Medieval Europe, and the fall of Rome.
Over centuries, the Huns made their way west from the Mongolian steppe, their language a Western Turkish dialect. They first came to the awareness of Rome by pushing Germanic tribes outside the empire's eastern borders into the empire itself, then pushing vast tribes of Goths across the Danube at the end of the 4th century.
The Huns settled on Danube’s eastern shore for the next half-century, interacting with Rome both peacefully and violently. The contemporary Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus described the Huns,
“From the moment of birth they made deep gashes in their children's cheeks, so that when in due course hair appears its growth is checked by the wrinkled scars; as they grow older this gives them the unlovely appearance of beardless eunuchs. They have squat bodies, strong limbs, and thick necks, and are so prodigiously ugly they might be two-legged animals, of the figures crudely carved from stumps which are seen on the parapets of bridges. Still their shape, however disagreeable is human... ”
In 432, Attila and his brother rose to power. Attila proved one of those figures where a civilization under their influence briefly shines like a supernova in the afternoon sky. Priscus, a Roman envoy to the Hun court, describes Attila,
“He was a man born to shake the races of the world, a terror to all lands, who in some way or other frightened everyone by the dread report noised about him, for he was 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 movements of his body. A lover of war, he was personally restrained in action, most impressive in counsel, gracious to supplicants, and generous to those to whom he had given his trust. 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 signs of his origin.”
Attila rose to the top not simply of a Hun nation, the use of the term nation here an anachronism of the highest order, but of a “powerful barbarian confederacy that could rival imperial Rome.” In 451, Attila marched into Roman Gaul with an army that was at most one-quarter Hun, the rest, varieties of Goths, Gauls, and Germanic tribes who had come under Hun rule in the previous half-century. However at this point, the Imperial Roman army was just as heavily comprised of non-Romans. In the ensuing great Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, the Roman magister militum (general) Aetius “placed his least reliable allies, Alans, in the center, and deployed Romans and Franks on his left to contest Attila's Germanic allies... The Visigoths on his right opposed the Ostrogoths on Attila's left. The battle lines looked more like a civil war among a who's who in the barbarian world than a clash of empires.”
“The Franks recklessly led the charge downhill, throwing axes on the run.” Sheesh, can you imagine running up the hill and staring at a big, fast moving, Frank ax coming straight at your head or chest? The battle of the “last Roman field army” ended up a draw. Attila retreated back across the Rhine. A year later, he invaded Italy, but declined going to Rome when it was his for the taking, just as Hannibal had demurred six centuries earlier. Legendarily, but doubtfully, Rome was saved by the intercession of the pope. Attila died the next year. The Huns would never again be the great force they had been under his rule, proceeding to melt into Europe.
Imperial Rome existed only a quarter century more. Harl writes,
“In the final four years of the Western Roman Empire, Odoacer, a general of the former Hun Empire, gained power as magister militum at the head of a band of Attila's unemployed Germanic veterans. Odoacer elevated to the throne the last two Western Roman emperors. The second, Romulus Augustulus, was ironically the son of Attila's secretary Orestes, who had entered Roman service after Attila's death. In 476, Odacer executed Orestes, forced the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus to abdicate, and ruled henceforth as king in Italy in the name of the Eastern emperor Zeno. The Western Empire had come to an ignominious end.”
The Eastern Empire would continue another thousand years before falling to another people of the steppes.
Historically, it's incredible to contemplate Rome's “last field army.” To that point, Rome had been continuously at battle for a thousand years, half that time as the great republic, both republic and empire continue to define the West today. The use of ignominious to describe Rome's end immediately brings you to the present and Rome's modern republican successor and its faltering Pax Americana. You might not be able to say the last couple decades of empire have been more bloody than those they followed, but it certainly feels increasingly chaotic. And without a doubt, the bleeding edge of the peace isn't as profitable as it once was fifty years ago for the Germans or Japanese, just ask the Ukrainians and Israelis. An ignominious end? History need not repeat itself, but looking at the leadership in Rome, errr DC, if you’re betting…
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