Princess Honoria and Attila the Hun
Below the fold: climbing vines, birds and deer - mosaic symbols of heavenly glory at Ravenna
A Late Roman fairy tale: a true story
It came to pass, in the Year of Grace four hundred and fifty-two, in the days of the waning of the Western Empire, its glory dimmed like the embers of a great fire, there lived a princess named Justa Grata Honoria1. She was no daughter but sister to the Emperor Valentinian, ruler of the West, an heir of noble lineage, yet her heart was restless within the gilded walls of the palace.
Now, Honoria was not as other women of the court. Though the blood of emperors ran through her veins, she bristled against the chains of duty and the cold hand of imperial expectation. In the palaces of Ravenna, where marble gleamed, mosaics glittered and courtiers schemed and whispered, Honoria longed not for the safe path laid before her by others but for freedom, wild and fierce, and she set her sights on the wildest and fiercest of all men: Attila himself.
But the will of the Emperor was law, and Valentinian, fearing scandal and sedition in uncertain times, had resolved to bind his sister to a man of no consequence, a senator named Herculanus, whose spirit was as dry as parchment and whose ambition was no more than a flickering candle. To Honoria, this was a sentence worse than exile, and so her heart turned toward rebellion.
Thus it was that Honoria, in the secrecy of her chambers, devised a perilous plan. Taking parchment and pen, she wrote to the one man whose name struck terror into the heart of the empire, Attila, King of the Huns, the Scourge of God.
Her words were few but heavy with meaning, and with the letter, she sent a golden ring, whether as a token of marriage or a plea for aid, none living can now say. But the message crossed rivers and plains, passing from hand to hand until it reached the tent of Attila himself.
When the barbarian king, who would humble an emperor, beheld the letter and the ring, he did not laugh, nor did he cast it aside. Instead, he saw in it a sign, for the gods - or so he believed - often spoke through the folly of men and the boldness of women. He declared to his warlords that the Roman princess had offered herself as his bride, and with her, half the Western Empire as dowry!
The court of Ravenna was thrown into uproar when the news reached Valentinian. The Emperor’s face burned with rage, and he vowed to spill his sister’s blood for such treachery. But the Empress Mother, Galla Placidia, wise and tempered by years of storm and strife, stood between the Emperor and his sister, and through her pleas, Honoria’s life was spared. Yet her freedom was taken, and she was banished into the shadows of the court, never again to stir the currents of empire.
But Attila was not so easily dismissed.
“I claim what is mine,” he declared, and his voice was like thunder across the plains, and his own men trembled. With the letter as his warrant, he gathered his horsemen, and the earth itself groaned in fear beneath the hooves of the horses as they rode westward. He would have Rome, or at least, what gold and glory it could still yield.
Yet the fates, in their twisted weaving, did not grant Attila his Roman bride nor the empire he hungered for. His armies ravaged Gaul and crossed the Alps into northern Italy, but famine, plague, and the prayers of saints - or so the legends tell - turned him back.
Honoria, the restless princess, passed into the mists of forgotten years. No chronicler recorded her end. Some say she lived in quiet exile, her spirit broken. Others whisper that she died still cursing the chains that had bound her.
But her name, though nearly lost to time, lingered like a faded thread in the great tapestry of Rome’s decline. For in her boldness - or her folly - Honoria had stirred the wrath of the last great barbarian king, and in doing so, set loose forces that even the crumbling walls of empire could no longer contain.
So ends the tale of Honoria and Attila, of a princess who sought her freedom and a king who saw an empire within his grasp. Such are the turns of fate, where the hand of a woman and the will of a warlord can shake the bones of a dying world.
The Scourge of God: The Tale of Attila the Hun
Attila’s own attire was simple, affecting only to be clean. The sword by his side, the knots of his shoes, the bridle of his horse, were not adorned, like those of other Scythians, with gold or gems or anything costly.
Account by the Byzantine diplomat Priscus, who visited Attila’s court in 449 as part of an Eastern Roman embassy from Theodosius II
This week we talked about the mysterious island of Torcello, the very first to be settled in the Venetian lagoon, by Veneti-Roman people from the mainland fleeing the onslaught of the barbarians, most prominently, Attila the Hun. But though his name is still notorious, what do we know of him, his origins and ambitions in the latter days of the Western Empire?
Of the kings, barbarians, and conquerors of history - Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, Alaric, and William the Norman - the name Attila will forever be spoken with a mixture of awe and dread. For in the twilight years of the Western Roman Empire, when the marble facades of its great buildings were cracking and its legions grew thinly stretched, there rose a warlord so fierce that even the Romans, long accustomed to battle, called him the Scourge of God.
The text of this video is from Priscus’ account of his embassy to the Hunnic king.
In the fifth century after the birth of Christ, the empire of the Latin West staggered like an old man, its borders, once strong as iron, now broke and crumbled more with each passing year. The Goths had already sacked Rome, Vandals swept through Roman North Africa, and Visigoths carved kingdoms from its lands. Yet none caused greater terror than the horsemen of the steppes; the Huns, whose arrows darkened the sky and whose horses’ hooves shook the earth.
Attila was not the first of the Huns, mounted warriors from the Steppes of Central Asia, but he was the mightiest. In the vast plains beyond the Danube, he rose as their king in the 5th century, uniting the warring clans under his iron will. His presence was said to command both fear and loyalty. He was not a man of empty boasts. Where Attila rode, kingdoms crumbled.
He was a man born into the world to shake the nations, the scourge of all lands, who in some way terrified all mankind by the dreadful rumours noised abroad concerning him. He was haughty in his walk, rolling his eyes hither and thither, so that the power of his proud spirit appeared in the movement of his body. He was indeed a lover of war, yet restrained in action, mighty in counsel, gracious to suppliants and lenient to those who were once received into his protection.
Short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey; and he had a flat nose and swarthy skin, showing evidence of his origin.
Jordanes, a 6th c. Byzantine historian, citing Priscus
At first, his wrath was turned eastward, against the glittering cities of Byzantium. Instead of fighting, the Emperor Theodosius II paid him wainloads of gold in tribute2, hoping to buy peace. Yet peace with Attila could not last, and soon, his gaze shifted westward, where the Western Roman Empire - weak and divided - lay ripe for plunder.
In 451 Attila did the unthinkable, and crossed the Rhine with a vast horde into the oldest Roman province, Gaul. Cities fell like wheat before the scythe - Metz, Reims, and Orleans trembled under his onslaught. But at the Catalaunian Plains, Attila finally met serious resistance. Romans under the general Flavius Aetius made alliance with the Visigoths, once Rome’s enemies, who now stood side by side. The battle was fierce and terrible and in the end Attila was forced to retreat. But this was only a pause before the next storm.
The Barbarian and the Pope
In the following year, 452, Attila turned southward and aimed his wrath into the heart of Italy. He crossed the Alps, descending into the fertile plains. The city of Aquileia was besieged and destroyed so utterly that, it was said, no stone stood upon another. Verona and Milan opened their gates in fear, and further south Rome itself, though a ghost of its former glory, stood vulnerable.
But before Attila could march upon the Eternal City, in a story that will be told forever, the Scourge of God was met by the embassy of God. At the head of a column of clerics, rode Pope Leo I, a man unarmed but clothed in spiritual authority. The legend tells that Leo, standing alone before the warlord, spoke not with threats but with a voice of calm conviction. No record comes to us of the exact words between pope and warlord.
Whatever the truth, in an extraordinary, historic moment, as a nascent western Christendom stood on the verge of being slaughtered in its crib, Attila, the Flagellum Dei, Fear of the World and Scourge of the Nations, withdrew. He pulled back all his forces from the Italian peninsula and returned to his base of power in the Hungarian plains, the central hub of his empire.
Some say that Attila, hardened as he was, saw in Leo’s face a vision of Saints Peter and Paul, warning him to turn back. Others suggest that famine, disease, and the strain on his army was forcing his hand. The fact that the Eastern Roman Emperor Marcian - who had stopped the tribute payments - was reportedly mobilising forces across the Danube, threatening Attila’s base in the east, might also have had something to do with it.
Attila’s death
Despite the nature of his life’s work, Attila’s story did not end in battle. In the early months of 453, as he celebrated a new marriage - one of many - Attila drank deep into the night. By morning, he was found dead, blood pooling at his bedside. Some say he perished from a burst blood vessel. Others, in darker whispers, speak of poison or betrayal. His warriors, grieving, ensured his tomb would never be found. They buried him in secret, beneath a river whose waters they diverted and then returned, washing away all trace.
Jordanes wrote in the 6th century, working from earlier sources:
On the following day, when a great part of the morning was spent, the royal attendants suspected some ill and, after a great uproar, broke in the doors. There they found the death of Attila accomplished by an effusion of blood, without any wound, and the girl with downcast face weeping beneath her veil. Then, as is the custom of that race, they plucked out the hair of their heads and made their faces hideous with deep wounds, that the renowned warrior might be mourned, not by effeminate wailings and tears, but by the blood of men…
When they had mourned him with such lamentations, a strava, as they call it, was celebrated over his tomb with great revelling. They gave way in turn to the extremes of feeling and displayed funereal grief alternating with joy. Then in the secrecy of night they buried his body in the earth. They bound his coffins, the first with gold, the second with silver and the third with the strength of iron, showing by such means that these three things suited the mightiest of kings; iron because he subdued the nations, gold and silver because he received the honours of both empires. They also added the arms of foemen won in the fight, trappings of rare worth, sparkling with various gems, and ornaments of all sorts whereby princely state is maintained. And that so great riches might be kept from human curiosity, they slew those appointed to the work—a dreadful pay for their labour; and thus sudden death was the lot of those who buried him as well as of him who was buried.
Thus passed Attila, Scourge of God, who had brought the Western Roman Empire to its knees and wrested tribute from Byzantium. In the years that followed, his empire crumbled as swiftly as it had risen, for it was bound by fear, not loyalty.
In the long night of the empire’s fall, few figures loomed larger. To the Romans, he was apocalypse made flesh. To the Huns, he was the great unifier. And to history, he remains the warlord who rode to the edge of Rome’s heart, only to turn away at the moment of triumph.
Such is the way of empires and kings; some fall by the sword, others by the weight of their own legends.
Starting with the tale of Justa Grata Honoria, the Roman princess whose desperate plea to Attila the Hun nearly rewrote the empire’s fate. We know these names, Attila especially, but what do we know about them?
In the paid section of today’s half-and-half post for free and paid members, we’re going to talk a bit about some of the symbols, particularly animals, that you see in the great Late Antique mosaics of Ravenna, using a few of the photos I was able to get at San Vitale on Monday afternoon this week.
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