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trailer for Attila the Hun
Attila the Hun used to boast that where his horse had trod, the grass never
grew again. Curiously enough, this closely echoes a comment by Lemmy, when
he formed Motörhead. “We’re the kind of band that, if we moved in next door,
your lawn would die.” However, while Lemmy and his leather-clad cohorts no
doubt left a certain amount of untidiness behind them in hotel bedrooms on
their various European tours – unmade beds, brimming ashtrays, empty cans of
Special Brew and so forth – it could hardly compare with that of Attila,
Scourge of God. Even 16 centuries later, his name continues to haunt the
western imagination. Have you heard of Aquileia? In Roman times, it was one
of the greatest cities in Italy. After Attila’s visit, you would barely know
where it had stood – no more than a heap of stones, a terrible testament to
his awesome destructiveness. Would he have treated Rome the same way, had he
captured it? The consequences for western civilisation are barely
imaginable. It might simply have come to an end.
As it was, much of the world was well and truly pitched into the Dark Ages:
the only time in our history, so far, when history itself seems to have
juddered to a halt, then collapsed backwards into myth. One moment, circa
AD400, you have vast cities populated by elegant women and fussy
bureaucrats, with street lighting, mains drainage, traffic regulations. By
AD500, at least in Britain, the slate is wiped so clean, we hardly know what
was going on. Mead halls in dark forests, horned warriors in bearskins,
sorcery and sacrifice, Arthur and Beowulf, legends and ghosts – who knows?
History is mute, and the irresponsible imagination rushes in to fill the
gaps.
So many grand historical stories lose their lustre on closer examination.
Agincourt was just a big mud wrestle between about 25 men, Wellington won
his victory at Waterloo using mostly Dutch and Germans, Catherine the Great
didn’t really die having sex with a horse, and so on. All very dry and
disappointing. With Attila, however, the history lives up to the myth. This
truly was an apocalyptic period that decided the fate of the world,
populated by characters of Shakespearian ambition, passion, hubris and
vengefulness.
There was the icy and commanding Galla Placidia, daughter, wife, sister and
mother of emperors, and power behind the imperial throne for 30 years. She
needed to be. Emperors in those last days seemed to compete with each other
for feeble-mindedness. Honorius, her brother, spent most of his time tending
his pet chickens, while, as a chronicler wrote, “the fragile frame of the
world” was collapsing around him. Meanwhile, her daughter Honoria was so
generous with her favours that she became pregnant by her chamberlain,
Eugenius, then tried to assassinate her brother, the emperor Valentinian,
and have Eugenius crowned instead. And there was Master General Aëtius, at
one time a Hun hostage, “last of the Romans”, loyal to a world already gone,
the only commander courageous enough to face Attila. The analogies with our
own times are startling, if you want to find them: a monolithic western
empire threatened by a rising power in the east, alien and barely
comprehensible...
With such richness to draw on, the surprise isn’t that there is a new
television movie, but that there haven’t been far more. Hollywood’s last
stab was Sign of the Pagan, back in 1954, with Jack Palance – Slavic high
cheekbones, sardonic smile, biceps of steel – not at all bad as Attila.
In Gareth Edwards’s version for the BBC, Rory McCann has a beefy presence in
the title role, but ideally he should look Turkish-Mongolian.
Tommy Lee Jones (Anglo-Cherokee) would be okay, if 20 years younger, or
Charles Bronson (Lithuanian-Tatar), if still alive. But Edwards’s mini-film
obviously didn’t have the budget of a Gladiator or a Lord of the Rings, and
it’s an ingenious effort on a shoestring.
The history is solidly reliable, and the epic geographical scale of the story,
from the limitless steppes of Scythia (Ukraine, more or less) to the high
passes of the Carpathians, the mighty land walls of Constantinople to the
“vasty fields of France”, are conjured credibly enough using only bits of
Bulgaria, some of whose stunning but little-known scenery looks like
“Monument Valley in a forest”, Edwards says. He added some techno-wizardry,
working mostly in his bedroom. “My desk is right next to my bed. That was
the cheapest bit to do.”
Compressing an entire century into an hour of screen time – and the most
eventfully apocalyptic of all centuries, too, the 20th notwithstanding –
obviously means leaving stuff out. CGI can work miracles with battle scenes,
less so with plot and characterisation. The movie also rather underplays
culture and religion, pressed for time as it is, and perhaps mindful of a
modern audience. Yet when Attila and Aëtius finally faced each other at the
titanic battle of the Catalaunian Fields, in eastern Gaul, AD451, with every
nation from the Volga to the Atlantic under arms, what really took place was
a battle between classical, Christian civilisation and its permanent
obliteration. And, in the final act of this tragedy, both sides lost –
mutually assured destruction. Attila’s furious assault on the West was
brought to a bloody halt. He briefly invaded Italy the following year,
visiting hisvindictiveness on Aquileia and going slightly mad in the Palace
of the Caesars, in Milan, but his power was broken. For the Romans, too,
this was the last battle. After that, the western legions are heard of no
more, wiped out to a man. Rome never fought again.
Yet out of the carnage were born the Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe.
Rome was the mother who died in childbirth, you might say; and, like it or
not, we are all her children. No civilisation is perfect, and Rome certainly
wasn’t. But the alternative – the triumph of Attila – would have been so
much worse. As it was, in AD476, the last emperor, a curly-haired boy called
Romulus Augustulus (the irony of that name), was quietly deposed by the
Gothic warlord Odoacer, who then declared himself king of Italy. The empire
was at an end. Ancient prophecy had said Rome would endure 12 centuries plus
six lustra, or 30 years. And Rome was founded in 753BC.
Never again would the emperor stand beneath his yellow parasol on the steps of
the Capitoline to greet the legions returning south in triumph down the
Flaminian Way. Never again would the sunlight dance on the bronze helmets of
the cavalry as their horses champed on the Field of Mars, nor senators
gossip and plot in the vast Baths of Caracalla, lounging over the chessboard
or strolling among the shops and libraries and sculpture gardens of that
33-acre palace of water. Never again would the great grain ships ply their
way from Libya and Egypt, nor the harbour at Ostia resound with the cries of
merchants and traders from halfway around the world, bringing copper and tin
from Britain, glass and leather from the Levant, gems and spices from
Ceylon. Never again would a quarter of a million Romans roar in the Circus
Maximus as the chariots raced and swerved around the spina. Rome’s
astonishing apartment blocks, such as the Insula of Felicula, supposedly
towering 16 storeys high beside the Pantheon, fell into rubble again, and
Europe was once more a landscape of log cabins, overgrown roads and passing
war bands playing crude games with handfuls of coloured mosaic in the ruins
of fallen villas.
The barbarians, and Attila supreme among them, had done their work. But, as it
turned out, Rome was a world that was both lost and won. Any visitor to
Washington will know how overwhelmingly Roman it feels at times. The city
they boastfully hailed with “ Ave, Roma Immortalis!” turned out to be just
that: immortal. Of the Huns – their language, their gods, even the
meaning of the name Attila – hardly a shred remains.
Attila the Hun is on BBC1 on Wednesday at 9pm; the second book in William
Napier’s trilogy, Attila: The Gathering of the Storm, is out now. The final
instalment appears in May The Hun we love to hate
The Hun we love to hate
Everyone has heard of Attila the Hun, but cold facts are few and far between.
We don’t know when or where he was born; you have to argue about when he
came to power. The Huns wrote nothing, and our surviving Roman sources give
only limited insight even into the strategies of Attila at war. So how on
earth can he be put on television in the form of a docudrama that is
supposed to be both dramatically and historically satisfying? Two large
bodies of material – one historical, the other archeological – provide the
answer.
The best historical information comes from a Byzantine historian called
Priscus, a contemporary of Attila. His full text history was lost in the
Middle Ages, but in the 10th century, a figurehead Byzantine emperor with
not enough to do, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, made excerpts from it for
a book entitled On Embassies, and that is precisely what we have: a series
of excerpts dealing with diplomatic contacts between Constantinople and
Attila. Byzantines, in the classical tradition, could never write about
foreigners – “barbarians” – in unslanted fashion. “Barbarian” was code for
people belonging to less rational societies than their own God-perfected
variety, so barbarians always had to show the expected characteristics of
inferiority. Yet, for all their problems, the longest-surviving fragments
deal with an embassy to Attila on which Priscus himself served.
The archeological material has become available only in the past 40 years or
so – a huge amount of cemetery evidence from the heartland of Attila’s
empire on the Great Hungarian Plain. It, too, poses problems. Pretty much
all the graves are of individuals clothed in long-established Germanic
fashion, and we know large numbers of these people were indeed part of the
empire. How do a Byzantine historian and a bunch of dead Germans allow
Attila the Hun to be brought to television?
The archeology tells us the Hunnic empire did not consist solely, or even
mainly, of Huns. They formed its core, but surrounding that was an
innumerable catalogue of subject groups, the vast majority of them Germanic
speakers. And from the historical sources (above all, Priscus), we know it
was the incorporation of all these other people – between the Huns’ first
arrival on the fringes of Europe in c AD375 and the time of Attila himself
in c AD440 – that created the war machine his career so effectively
exploited. Without so many allies, Hunnic power could never have grown so
far or so fast.
Archeology and history also show what the point of all this effort actually
was. Priscus records that Attila wanted only gold, not land or sovereignty.
This is confirmed by the Continued on page 6
graves. In Attila’s time, gold in vast quantities was suddenly, and regularly,
deposited in the graves of Rome’s central European neighbours: saddle
pommels shaped like gold eagles, gold-plated horse bits, brooches, weapons
inlaid with gold. If you think the TV Huns are well endowed with bling, this
reflects reality and marks the huge change in the amount of wealth sloshing
around in central Europe.
From Priscus, it also emerges that the Romans consistently attempted to
undermine Hunnic control over their allies. As they were the basis of Hunnic
military strength, this tactic made perfect sense. How dangerous it was,
potentially, for the Huns shows up in events after Attila’s death in 453. As
his sons quarrelled, one group after another asserted its independence, to
such an extent that the Huns disappeared as a militarily significant force
by 469. So, although the Hun was a great conqueror, he was riding a tiger.
His war machine had to be used or it might break apart. It is this essential
truth that is the heartbeat for the TV portrayal.
How did Attila manage to stay on the tiger’s back? He certainly operated a
cult of personality. A piece of weaponry, found by chance, was portrayed as
the sword of Mars, sent to Attila by the gods as proof that he was destined
to conquer. He also dressed simply and ate from plain wooden dishes.
Surrounded by the bling of his henchmen, less must indeed have been more:
the man destined by the gods to conquer had no need to show off. This is
reasonably easy to portray on TV, as is his ruthlessness, another key trait.
As Priscus witnessed, impalement was the punishment for pretty much every
crime. Ruthlessness also shows up in the killing of Bleda, the brother with
whom Attila originally shared power. Priscus doesn’t say why they fell out,
but a quarrel over how and where to deploy the Hunnic war machine (the line
taken on TV) is a persuasive suggestion.
How did Attila treat his key supporters? All the gold in the graves strongly
suggests he operated a stick-and-carrot approach towards his subjects.
Hunnic military domination built and maintained the empire, but some of its
internal contradictions were smoothed over by redistributing its loot. As
long as the victories kept rolling in, this could generate a degree of
consent to Attila’s rule. Priscus’s embassy found one of Bleda’s wives still
in a position of local power after her husband’s death: noncombatant status,
then, was respected. Dinner with Attila was also well ordered, with the
henchmen in their assigned positions; some were given highly responsible
tasks, such as watching over Attila’s sons in action. This kind of treatment
generated genuine loyalty. Unknown to Priscus at the time, his embassy was
only a front for an attempt on Attila’s life, which failed because the
henchman targeted by the Byzantines spilled the beans to his lord. Attila’s
lieutenants could not easily be turned.
What does all this tell us about the real Attila, and the secrets of his
success? Not as much as we would like, but enough to take us far beyond the
two-dimensional image of barbarian conqueror. He was a leader who astutely
analysed the Hunnic war machine and had the confidence and personal
qualities to harness it to maximum effect, though the extent to which he was
driven by necessity cannot be underestimated. The Hunnic empire could not
stand still. If its different components were not mobilised against Rome,
they would start fighting each other or their Hunnic masters. So, if
Attila’s leadership had any particular secret, it was surely the one
mastered by so many politicians. To ride the tiger successfully, the key
thing is to do it with such panache that the audience forgets it is even
there.
Dr Peter Heather is professor of medieval history at King’s College London and
was adviser on the making of the film
