mourning Attila

Attila, dead of a burst artery on one of his countless wedding nights, 453 A.D., aged about 47. A vivid description of the reaction of his horde to the death:

“According to their national custom, the Barbarians cut off a part of their hair, gashed their faces with unseemly wounds, and bewailed their valiant leader as he deserved, not with the tears of women, but with the blood of warriors. The remains of Attila were enclosed within three coffins, of gold, of silver, and of iron, and privately buried in the night: the spoils of nations were thrown into his grave; the captives who had opened the ground were inhumanly massacred; and the same Huns, who had indulged such excessive grief, feasted, with dissolute and intemperate mirth, about the recent sepulchre of their king.”

My sense is that Gibbon does his best writing with major figures who cover 50 or more pages of the history. Otherwise, the sheer amount of information he has to cover in these volumes means that he is often jumping from one name to the next, and if you lose concentration for even a moment, then you are doomed to go back a few pages and start over again. But it’s hard to lose concentration when reading about Attila.

Would a Hun victory in Champagne in 451 have meant the total destruction of Western civilization? The debate continues, but many people think yes. The Huns were known for destroying cities so utterly that even the ruins were difficult to find, and it would have been hard to recover from either Rome or Constantinople simply being reduced to dust in the fifth century.