‘I am Attila,’ laughed Attila grimly. ‘Scourge of God. What mortal could stand against God’s scourge?’ He spared Troyes. In battle, near Châlons, Aetius halted Attila, the Roman-Visigoth troops trapping the Hun in a circle of wagons. Attila, refusing to be taken alive, prepared for the traditional nomad’s self-immolation on a bonfire of wooden saddles. But the Huns got lucky, killing the Visigoth king, who was burned right there on his own saddle-pyre. Aetius did not wish to destroy the Huns, for that would leave him at the mercy of the Goths.
At dawn, Attila was amazed to find the Romans had gone – and he led his horde back to Hungary.
In 452, he invaded Italy, successfully taking Milan, but disease ravaged the Hun forces, which withdrew, consoled with Roman gold. The following spring, the polygamous Attila married a new bride, Ildico. After a hard-drinking wedding banquet, he staggered to bed where he haemorrhaged and drowned in his own blood.* Ildico awoke to find herself covered in blood and Attila dead beside her. The next day, ‘when a great part of the morning was spent, the royal attendants suspected foul play and, after a great uproar, broke down the doors’, wherein, wrote Priscus, they found the king with no wounds, blood everywhere and the beautiful girl ‘with downcast face weeping beneath her veil’. Ildico had unknowingly saved Europe, but she is never mentioned again: she may have been sacrificed and buried with Attila.
Soon after Attila’s death, a young Thracian swineherd of Scupi (Skopje) named Justin escaped from raiding barbarians to set off for Constantinople, where he arrived with nothing more than the rags he wore and some bread but managed to get a job among the Excubitors – the security unit that guarded the Sacrum Cubiculum, the octagonal bedchamber of the emperor.
Constantinople was now one of the biggest cities in the world, ruled by its emperors from the Mega Palation – Great Palace – linked by secret passageways to the hippodrome and forum. Enriched by the agricultural wealth and tax income of Egypt, Syria, Greece and the Balkans, administered by a sophisticated court and civil service, often directed by the castrated chief chamberlain, the Great City had an increasingly Greek-speaking population of 500,000* whose twin obsessions were soteriology – the quest for salvation – and sport. Their Christianity was viciously divided between Christological sects, while the prizes of the hippodrome, where contests could be watched by 100,000, were ruthlessly competed for by five chariot-racing teams, each sporting a different colour, that, in modern terms, were a mix of sports fanatics, soccer hooligans, mafiosi and paramilitary. The emperors called themselves the vicegerents of God, and, apart from their plenitude and panoply of monarchy, the only real tests of God’s approval were domestic order, the absence of natural disaster and victory in war, particularly against nomads in the Balkans and the Shah of Persia.
Justin, the Illyrian peasant boy, distinguished himself against the Persians before returning to the palace as
At this point, the emperor was Anastasius, a sexagenarian courtier who struggled to cope with the latest Christological controversy and his own succession. In July 518, as Anastasius, now aged eighty-seven, sank, Justin and his nephew Justinian were at the centre of the court intrigues. Sacred emperors were meant to be above grubby ambition since only someone who did not covet the purple could deserve it. But Justin had Justinian, now in his thirties, do the dirty work. Amantius, eunuch provost of the bedchamber, gave Justin a bounty to bribe the guards to back his candidate, but instead Justinian diverted it to win support for his uncle. When the emperor died, Justin was given the task of announcing his death to the hippodrome, where Justinian rallied the crowd to demand a general. But there were two; fighting broke out between the supporters of Justin and his rival. Justinian was almost killed but finessed his uncle’s acclamation. In the imperial box, the eunuchs handed over the regalia of an emperor to Justin, who then addressed the crowd. This was how emperors were made in Constantinople.
Emperor Justin, around sixty years old, was experienced but uneducated; Justinian, aged thirty-six, was ‘short with a good chest, a good nose, fair-skinned, curly-haired, handsome’, wrote a contemporary, John Malalas, ‘round-faced with receding hair, florid complexion with greying hair and beard’. He was the obvious heir, but all leaders loathe their own mortality, and the idea that anyone is qualified to succeed them. Justinian almost fell into disfavour – for the sake of love.
