Attila's Rise to Power

The decisive turn of events came with the accession of Attila as King of the Huns. The new ruler was much more aggressive and ambitious than his predecessors had been, and arrogance sometimes made him unpredictable.

One of the most feared and notorious barbarians of all time, Attila is believed to be of distant Mongol stock, he ravaged much of the European continent during the 5th century AD. Apparently Attila was as great a menace to the Teutonic tribes people as he was to the Romans.

There is a story that he claimed to own the actual sword of Mars, and that other Barbarian chiefs could not look the King of the Huns directly in the eyes without flinching. Attila was a striking figure, and Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire offered a famous description of the personality and appearance of the Hun, based on an ancient account:

His features, according to the observation of a Gothic historian, bore the stamp of his national origin . . . a large head, a swarthy complexion, small, deep-seated eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, and a short square body, of a nervous strength, though of a disproportioned form. The haughty step and demeanor of the king of the Huns expressed the consciousness of his superiority above the rest of mankind; and he had a custom of fiercely rolling his eyes, as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he inspired....He delighted in war; but, after he had ascended the throne in a mature age, his head, rather than his hand, achieved the conquest of the North; and the fame of an adventurous soldier was usefully exchanged for that of a prudent and successful general.

At the outset of his reign (sometime after 435) Attila demanded more money, and the Eastern Emperor, Theodosius II, obligingly doubled the annual subsidy. For various reasons, however, the new king began in the late 440's to look to the West as the main area of opportunity for the Huns. For the next decade and a half after his accession Attila was the most powerful foreign potentate in the affairs of the Western Roman Empire. His Huns had become a sedentary nation and were no longer the horse nomads of the earlier days. The Great Hungarian Plain did not offer as much room as the steppes of Asia for grazing horses, and the Huns were forced to develop an infantry to supplement their now much smaller cavalry. As one leading authority has recently said, "When the Huns first appeared on the steppe north of the Black Sea, they were nomads and most of them may have been mounted warriors. In Europe, however, they could graze only a fraction of their former horsepower, and their chiefs soon fielded armies which resembled the sedentary forces of Rome." By the time of Attila the army of the Huns had become like that of most barbarian nations in Europe. It was, however, very large, as we shall see, and capable of conducting siege operations, which most other barbarian armies could not do effectively.