The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, 451

Attila had spent the spring of 451 burning his way west across Gaul, the Huns and their subject peoples with him. He failed at Orléans, and he was withdrawing when the army Rome had gathered caught him in Champagne, in the open country called the Catalaunian Plains, on the twentieth of June.

The army that saved Rome was barely Roman.

That is not rhetoric. Look at what stood on that field under Aetius: Visigoths, who had sacked Rome forty-one years earlier. Franks. Burgundians, whom Aetius had personally broken fifteen years before. Alans, whose loyalty was so doubtful that he placed them in the centre specifically so they would be pinned between allies and could not leave. Armoricans, Saxons, Sarmatians, Riparian Franks. And a Roman field army that was mostly not made of Romans either.

Aetius had spent his career fighting most of the people standing beside him. He had spent years of his youth as a hostage among the Huns and knew Attila personally, and had used Hunnic troops in his own wars more than once. The coalition he assembled that spring was made entirely of people with excellent recent reasons to want each other dead, and it held together for one day.

Attila is supposed to have consulted his soothsayers on the morning of the battle and been told he would lose but that the enemy commander would fall. He believed it enough to delay his attack until the afternoon, so that if the day went badly there would not be much day left to lose it in.

They fought for a ridge. Both sides went for the high ground on the right of the field and the coalition got there first, and the Huns attacked uphill into it, which is not what Hunnic armies were built to do. Theodoric’s Visigoths came in on the Hunnic left and broke it, and pressed so far that Attila himself was nearly taken and had to fall back into his own wagon laager.

And Theodoric, an old man who had ruled the Visigoths for thirty-three years, went down in his own victorious charge. The accounts differ on how: a spear, or thrown from his horse and trampled by his own men. The second version is the one that gets repeated, and it is the one I would repeat.

Attila expected to be finished in the morning. He is said to have built a pyre of saddles inside his laager so he could burn himself rather than be taken. Nobody came. Aetius let him go.

Why is the argument that has run for fifteen hundred years. The version that persuades me is the simplest: Aetius had just watched the Visigoths win the battle, and a Visigothic army in Gaul with no Huns left to balance it was a worse problem than Attila. So he told Thorismund, Theodoric’s son, to hurry home and secure his father’s throne before his brothers took it, which was true and was also exactly the advice that removed the Visigoths from the field. The coalition dissolved within days.

Then the arithmetic. Attila invaded Italy the next year and died in 453. Aetius, who had held the West together for two decades and had just saved it, was summoned to a routine audience in 454 and the Emperor Valentinian III drew a sword and killed him personally, with his own hand, in his own palace. Somebody afterwards told Valentinian he had cut off his right hand with his left. The Emperor was murdered himself six months later by two of Aetius’s retainers. Rome was sacked by the Vandals within the year.

Twenty-five years after the Catalaunian Plains there was no Western Emperor at all.

So here is what they bought with that afternoon, and I want it stated precisely, because the songs about this battle usually say saved the world and stop. They bought twenty-five years. The people who bought it were mostly enemies of the thing they saved. And the man who assembled them was killed by the state he did it for, in a room, by a man who owed him everything.

I took Theodoric on the field, and I took Aetius in the palace three years later, and I want you to know that as far as I am concerned those were the same death, and only one of them is on anybody’s list of battles.