Theodoric the Goth | Page 9

433, and after twelve years the death of Bleda (who
was perhaps murdered by order of his brother) left Attila sole wielder
of the forces which made him the terror of the world. He dwelt in rude
magnificence in a village not far from the Danube, and his own special
dominions seem to have pretty nearly corresponded with the modern
kingdom of Hungary. But he held in leash a vast confederacy of
nations--Teutonic, Sclavonic, and what we now call Turanian,--whose
territories stretched from the Rhine to the Caucasus, and he is said to
have made "the isles of the Ocean", which expression probably denotes
the islands and peninsulas of Scandinavia, subject to his sway. Neither,
however, over the Ostrogoths nor over any of the other subject nations
included in this vast dominion are we to think of Attila's rule as an
organised, all-permeating, assimilating influence, such as was the rule
of a Roman Emperor. It was rather the influence of one great
robber-chief over his freebooting companions. The kings of the
Ostrogoths and Gepidæ came at certain times to share the revelries of

their lord in his great log-palace on the Danubian plain; they received
his orders to put their subjects in array when he would ride forth to war,
and woe was unto them if they failed to stand by his side on the day of
battle; but these things being done, they probably ruled their own
peoples with little interference from their over-lord. The Teutonic
members of the confederacy, notably the Ostrogoths and the kindred
tribe of Gepidæ seem to have exercised upon the court and the councils
of Attila an influence not unlike that wielded by German statesmen at
the court of Russia during the last century. The Huns, during their
eighty years of contact with Europe, had lost a little of that utter
savageness which they brought with them from the Tartar deserts. If
they were not yet in any sense civilised, they could in some degree
appreciate the higher civilisation of their Teutonic subjects. A Pagan
himself, with scarcely any religion except some rude cult of the sword
of the war-god, Attila seems never to have interfered in the slightest
degree with the religious practices of the Gepidæ or the Ostrogoths, the
large majority of whom were by this time Christians, holding the Arian
form of faith. And not only did he not discourage the finer civilisation
which he saw prevailing among these German subjects of his, but he
seems to have had statesmanship enough to value and respect a culture
which he did not share, and especially to have prized the temperate
wisdom of their chiefs, when they helped him to array his great host of
barbarians for war against the Empire.
From his position in Central Europe, Attila, like Alaric before him, was
able to threaten either the Eastern or the Western Empire at pleasure.
For almost ten years (440-450) he seemed to be bent on picking a
quarrel with Theodosius II., the feeble and unwarlike prince who
reigned at Constantinople. He laid waste the provinces south of the
Danube with his desolating raids; he worried the Imperial Court with
incessant embassies, each more exacting and greedy than the last (for
the favour of the rude Hunnish envoy had to be purchased by large gifts
from the Imperial Treasury); he himself insisted on the payment of
yearly stipendia by the Emperor; he constantly demanded that these
payments should be doubled; he openly stated that they were nothing
else than tribute, and that the Roman Augustus who paid them was his
slave.

These practices were continued until, in the year 450 the gentle
Theodosius died. He was succeeded by his sister Pulcheria and her
husband Marcian, who soon gave a manlier tone to the counsels of the
Eastern Empire. Attila marked the change and turned his harassing
attentions to the Western State, with which he had always a sufficient
number of pretexts for war ready for use. In fact he had made up his
mind for war, and no concessions, however humiliating, on the part of
Valentinian III., the then Emperor of the West, would have availed to
stay his progress. Not Italy however, to some extent protected by the
barrier of the Alps, but the rich cities and comparatively unwasted
plains of Gaul attracted the royal freebooter. Having summoned his
vast and heterogeneous army from every quarter of Central and
North-eastern Europe, and surrounded himself by a crowd of subject
kings, the captains of his host, he set forward in the spring of 451 for
the lands of the Rhine. The trees which his soldiers felled in the great
Hercynian forest of Central Germany were fashioned into rude rafts or
canoes, on which they crossed the Rhine; and soon the terrible Hun
and his "horde