The Age of Attila Fifth-Century Byzantium and the Barbarians

246 Pages·1961·3.84 MB·English

by  C.D. Gordon

www.facebook.com/groups/med.historY Salah Zyada
m
LTTDL
I rü U U U UïIFïX
Fifth-Century Byzantium and the Barbarians
BY <• D* G O R D ON
Foreword by Arthur E. R. Β oak
The University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor
© ©
www.facebook.com/groups/med.historY Salah Zyada
DESIGNED BY GEORGE LENOX
COPYRIGHT © BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN I960
SECOND PRINTING 1961
PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS AND SIMULTANEOUSLY
IN TORONTO, CANADA, BY AMBASSADOR BOOKS LIMITED
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 60-5019
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, NEW YORK
.facebook.com/groups/med.historY
To R. Κ. G.
Uli debetur et a me gratia maior.
www.facebook.com/groups/med.historY Salah Zyada
www.facebook.com/groups/med.historY Salah Zyada
Foreword
by Arthur E. R. Boak
DURING THE FIFTH CENTURY the writing of con-
temporary history in the western part of the Roman world
was limited virtually to the compilation of meager chronicles.
In the East on the other hand, a sequence of historians writ-
ing in Greek maintained the literary tradition of the Classical
and Hellenistic periods and consciously sought to link the
present with the past by adding to the works of their prede-
cessors substantial narratives of their own times. Thus, they
recorded the death throes of the Western Empire and the
desperate yet in the end successful struggle for survival by
its Eastern counterpart.
Unfortunately, the remains of these fifth-century histories
consist of fragments of varying length preserved in works of
writers of a later age. But such as they are, they constitute an
indispensable source for our interpretation of the history of
the critical period in which they were written. Professor Gor-
don has made the bulk of the fragments available for the first
time in English translation. He has supplied an introduction
that facilitates their interpretation and linked them together
with short supplementary narratives in such a way as to pre-
sent a fairly continuous account of the outstanding military
and political developments from the death of the Emperor
Theodosius I in 395 to the conquest of Italy by Theodoric
the Ostrogoth in 493.
Since these fragments were preserved by later writers of the
Eastern Empire, who quoted them for various reasons, it is
only natural that they should be passages which deal for the
most part with persons or episodes that affected the East
rather than the West. But this emphasis on the East probably
reflects the original character of the Greek histories of the
fifth century, for their authors wrote from the standpoint of
vii
viii FOREWORD
residents of the Eastern Empire and tended to treat at greater
length the happenings of which they had more direct and
more detailed information. Events in the West seem to have
been discussed in proportion to their importance for the East,
especially for the relations existing between the two empires.
The theme which dominates the secular history of the
period is the struggle of the Romans against the barbarians—
if we may use the latter term to describe all of the foreign
enemies of the two empires, even though many of them had
made considerable advances in civilization, particularly under
stimulus of their contacts with the Romans themselves. We
see both empires beset from within as well as from without.
Along their northern frontiers from Britain to the Caucasus
tribes were poised for assault upon the imperial defenses
whenever the slightest hope of being able to break through
appeared. Within the frontier line of defense were other
peoples who had settled there with Roman assent as autono-
mous military allies supported by Roman subsidies, but whose
rulers sought to win better lands and ever greater independ-
ence for their followers at the expense of their nominal over-
lords. In addition, there were both individuals and sizable
bands under their own chiefs enrolled in the imperial armies—
for the most part composed of barbarian mercenaries, many
of whom held the highest military commands under the
emperors and only too often sought to take over control of
the government. The historians do not disguise the fact that
the empires depended for their existence upon barbarian
arms and that their main problem was how to make use of
and at the same time control their mercenaries and allies.
Although most of these barbarians were of Teutonic origin,
potentially the greatest menace to East and West alike dur-
ing the earlier and middle parts of the fifth century came
from the Huns, particularly when they were firmly united
under the rule of Attila (445-53). These terrible warriors not
only drove other barbarians to seek refuge within the empires
and forced still others to follow them in their attacks upon
the Romans, but they themselves raided far and wide on Ro-
man territory and imposed crushing tribute on the West as
FOREWORD ix
well as on the East. And yet we find bands of Huns serving as
mercenaries under the Roman standards. In one of the length-
ier fragments we have a vividly drawn picture of Attila at the
height of his power—and of the barbaric splendor in which
he lived—from the pen of the historian and official Priscus,
who visited him as a member of an embassy sent by the East-
ern emperor, Theodosius II. From Priscus and other writers
one gains the impression that on various occasions Attila
could have overrun either or both empires had he pressed his
attacks against them. That he refrained seems to have been
due partly to a wish to preserve such a rich source of tribute
in gold, partly to a mistrust of the influence of the civilized
urban life led by those whom he considered to be his military
inferiors. His sudden death in 453 was a factor of major im-
portance in the survival of the empire in the East.
Against the background of the barbarian pressure these his-
torians describe a condition of almost incredible weakness
and confusion in the imperial governments themselves. We
see weak and incompetent emperors, dominated by corrupt
and ambitious favorites, unable to distinguish between useful
and ruinous policies, rewarding loyalty with treachery, success
with assassination. The palaces are hotbeds of intrigue—min-
isters against generals, members of each service against their
colleagues, with palace eunuchs playing a sinister role. Honest
and efficient public servants are so rare as to be singled out
for exceptional praise. Standards of public conduct certainly
had not improved with the Christianizing of the empire.
Little is said directly of economic conditions, but the huge
sums of gold paid by the Eastern Empire as tribute to the
Huns are faithfully recorded, and we are told of the ruin of
many persons under the heavy exactions of avaricious finance
ministers. And the defense which Priscus offers of the adminis-
tration of justice in the East is by no means as convincing to
modern ears as he claims that it was to a Roman refugee liv-
ing among the Huns.
The fragments have a dramatic quality because they deal
with the great personalities whose aims and actions were de-
termining the course of events. Foremost among these are the
χ FOREWORD
three outstanding barbarian chieftains: Alaric the Visigoth,
Attila the Hun, and Theodoric the Ostrogoth, with whom we
should perhaps associate Gaiseric the Vandal. Others also,
although somewhat less prominent, played roles of great sig-
nificance. Such were the barbarians Stilicho and Ricimer, the
Romans Constantius and Aëtius, and even the grand cham-
berlains Eutropius and Chrysaphius. We see, too, the influ-
ential part taken in public affairs by women of the imperial
households, for example, by the much-married Galla Placidia
in the West and by the Empress Pulcheria and the intriguing
Verina in the East.
One looks in vain for any discussion of the reasons for the
fall of the empire in the West or the survival of its Eastern
counterpart. But for the first, the factual narrative is self-
explanatory. An inept military policy, ineffectual rulers, a lack
of native military manpower, all in the face of unceasing
barbarian attacks, made the collapse inevitable. As for the
East, we see that the extinction of the dynasty of Theodosius
the Great gave an opportunity for the appointment of a series
of forceful energetic emperors, that a source of military
strength with which to combat the Teutonic mercenaries was
found within the Empire, that two indomitable foes, Alaric
and Theodoric, were diverted from the East to the West, and
that the capital of the Empire in the East, Constantinople,
proved an impregnable refuge and base for military operations.
All these factors were of prime importance for the survival of
the East. Yet chance, too, played its part in the providential
death of the most formidable of the enemies of the Empire,
Attila the Hun.
Preface
THE FIFTH CENTURY of our era saw far-reaching politi-
cal changes in the Mediterranean world. When the century
began the Roman Empire controlled directly very nearly the
whole area it had dominated at its widest extent, and, though
under two rulers, was still a single entity from Yorkshire to
the Upper Nile and from Portugal to the Caucasus. When the
century ended all western Europe and western Africa were
under the control of more or less independent Teutonic
kings. Many thousands of these Teutons had been settled in
restless semidependence within the empire before 400, and
after 500 many of their kingdoms were still nominally held
at the discretion of the ruler of Constantinople—Africa, Italy,
and parts of Spain were even subsequently brought for a time
again under direct Roman rule by Justinian in the sixth cen-
tury. Nevertheless, the western regions of the empire were in
this century very largely permanently alienated from the do-
minions which the Roman emperor could say he really ruled.
It is a great loss that not one competent contemporary his-
torian for the period has been preserved intact. As a result the
modern investigator is forced to rely on ecclesiastical historians
of dubious veracity who only incidentally mention secular
affairs, on very sketchy chroniclers, many of them of a later
date, on a subsidiary literature primarily nonhistorical, and on
tantalizing fragments of historical writings the chief part of
which has been long lost.
The dearth of adequate source material and the virtual
absence of any source material whatever with pretentions to
literary merit have long turned historians away from this cen-
tury. Certainly, the writings of Julian the Apostate and Am-
mianus in the fourth century and of Procopius and Justinian's
legal works in the sixth have attracted scholarship toward
their centuries to the comparative neglect of the fifth. Further-
more, the spectacle of decay and defeat which this century
xi
xii PREFACE
presents is not one that has appealed to ages prior to our own
—which in many respects is better able than most to under-
stand the spirit of the fifth century.
But today the rapid decline in the knowledge of Latin and
Greek has cut off even the educated reader from this fascinat-
ing period, so similar to our own. He must rely on such
epitomes as general histories provide—and even they are not
so common as they might be—or on learned works based on
authors he cannot check. To remedy this to a slight extent
the translations on which this book is based give the reader
with little or no Greek, a chance to see for himself how the
writers nearest to the events described their age and its mo-
mentous tragedies. With very few exceptions (noted in Ap-
pendix B) all the passages here translated have, to the best of
my knowledge, never appeared in full in English or any
other modern language, though paraphrases and summaries of
most of them are, of course, included in general histories of
the period.
I have tried to tell the story of this tragic period as nearly
as possible in the words of contemporary or near contemporary
authors, linking the pitiful fragments of history left to us by
only such connective and introductory material from many
scattered sources of less general interest as seemed necessary
to give a coherent and complete narrative. The choice of
authors I have translated is fairly obvious considering the
custom of that age of one historian continuing the work of
his predecessor. In that way Olympiodorus, Priscus, and
Malchus overlap very little and together give a continuous
history of most of the century. To them I have added the short
summary of Candidus which throws additional light on the
court history of Leo's and Zeno's reigns. All these men were
more or less contemporaries of the events they describe, but
the last author, Joannes Antiochenus, lived considerably later
and my excuse for including the excerpts from his work per-
taining to the years from 408-91 is that, as most scholars agree,
he made wide use of the other authors, often indeed, it seems,
copying them verbatim. Thus his work probably contains