Attila the Hun

Attila ruled the Huns for two decades and was called the Scourge of God. He and his brother Bleda inherited the leadership around 434 of a confederation that had come out of the steppe and now dominated central Europe from the Danube to the Baltic, ruling Goths, Gepids and others as subject peoples. The brothers negotiated a treaty with the Eastern Roman Empire doubling the annual tribute to seven hundred pounds of gold. Attila killed Bleda around 445 and ruled alone. His method was extraction rather than conquest. He invaded the Balkans in 441 and again in 447, destroying Naissus, Serdica and dozens of other cities, defeated the eastern armies repeatedly, and raised the tribute to over two thousand pounds a year — but did not take Constantinople, whose walls his forces could not breach, and did not annex the territory. The historian Priscus, who dined at his court in 449 as part of an embassy that included an assassination plot, describes him eating from a wooden plate and drinking from a wooden cup while his guests ate off silver. In 450 Honoria, the sister of the western emperor, sent him her ring to escape a marriage, and he claimed her and half the western empire as a dowry. He invaded Gaul in 451 and was checked by Aetius and the Visigoths at the Catalaunian Plains — the only serious reverse he suffered — and invaded Italy in 452, where famine, disease and a papal embassy turned him back. He died in 453 of a haemorrhage on his wedding night, and the confederation dissolved within a few years.

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