The body of Valens was never found. The Goths marauded through the Balkans while Burgundians, Saxons, Franks and Vandals penetrated the Roman borders. The fall of the Roman empire was more of a fragmentation, less an event than a transformation. The barbarians were already not so much at the gates as in the kitchen and bedroom: the empire’s borders were porous, its peoples and especially the army already a hybrid honeycomb of Romanized Christian barbarians. If the Romans were scared of the Goths, the Goths were even more terrified by what lay behind them.
Out on the steppes of Eurasia, a people called Huns were galloping westwards, and among them was the family of Attila. Originating far to the east on the vast grasslands, precisely where is unknown, they were not a single people but a federation of ferocious raiders and pastoral nomads. Their language is unknown too, but it was probably Turkic in origin. Their migration may have been connected to the splintering of the Xiongnu. Now living east of the Black Sea, the Huns were drawn westwards by meteorological changes, dynamic leadership, the need for new pastures and news of rich plunder. Remarkably symbiotic with their horses which they were first tied on to at the age of three, they had honed the horse archery of the steppes into a conquering machine that could fight in any season and cover vast distances. Each warrior travelled with two or three remounts, armed with their composite bows and iron-headed arrows, guarding families who travelled in big wagons, stopping to camp and cook around cauldrons, served by enslaved prisoners. In war, they advanced in units of a thousand or more, their recurve bows firing arrows at 125 miles per hour. ‘In five seconds 1,000 arrows could hit 200 of the enemy,’ writes John Man, ‘another 1,000 in the next five … a rate of 12,000 shots per minute, equivalent to ten machine-guns.’ Once their enemies were wounded, they lassooed them and dragged them off their feet or from their horses. Until the spread of gunpowder a thousand years later, such mounted archers were a deadly threat to sedentary societies.
They worshipped the sky god, Tengri, their shamans divining the future, but their kings also revered a numinous sword of war that enabled its bearer to rule the world. Their faces were scarred by grieving rituals, while Hunnish skeletons show that the skulls of some of their children, boys and girls, had been bound in order to create loaf-shaped crania – all of which horrified the Romans. A warlord named Rugila, along with his brothers Octar and Mundzuk, unified the Huns and others into a confederacy, conquering and co-opting the Ostrogoths and many other peoples, which suddenly galloped towards the Roman empire, which was at the time divided between the sons of Emperor Theodosius, one in Ravenna, the other in Constantinople.
Two extraordinary characters, one male, one female, were at the centre of this clash: one was a Hun, Rugila’s nephew, who became engaged to a Roman princess, and other was a Roman emperor’s daughter who married a barbarian king.
ATTILA AND EMPRESS PLACIDIA
Galla Placidia was the daughter of Emperor Theodosius, who had held the empire together for twenty stormy years. When he died, he left his two sons, his daughter and the empire in the care of a half-Vandal paladin named Stilicho. While the empire was divided between his sons, Stilicho fought barbarians on all fronts, among them a former Roman ally, Alaric, king of the Visigoths, whose ancestors had killed Emperor Valens and now invaded Italy. But in 408 the weak young emperor Honorius, jealous of Stilicho’s supremacy, had him executed – with disastrous consequences.
In 410, Alaric besieged Rome, forcing its citizens to starve and eat each other, then he sacked the city, smashing the urns of Augustus and Hadrian in their mausoleums – and leaving with a special prisoner, the emperor’s twenty-year-old sister Princess Placidia, whom he married to his son Ataulf. Placidia found herself queen of the barbarians who had destroyed Rome.
Yet the marriage was short. Ataulf was assassinated, and his successor humiliated Placidia, who was forced to walk through mocking crowds for ten miles before she was returned to her brother. Yet her life was an exercise in strength and survival. Now that she was safely back at court in Ravenna, Honorius married her in 417 to a general with whom she had two children, a daughter Honoria, as irrepressible as her mother, and a son. When Honorius died, she fled the ensuing chaos to join her nephew Theodosius II in Constantinople, negotiated military assistance for her cause, then presided over the expedition that restored her and her son, Valentinian III, to power in the west.
