By Charles L. Mee Jr.
When Pope Leo the good rode out of Rome in 452 A.D. to satisfy Attila the Hun, he had no palms, no military, no armor, no bodyguards, no nice retinue of ambassadors and advisers, enhance males and quarter experts. He went out simply with a number of fellow churchmen using along him and 2 lesser officers of the enfeebled and fading Roman Empire.
Attila got here to the come upon on the head of a giant, well-armed, battle-hardened military of Huns on horseback. the 2 males met simply because Attila and his fans, having plundered the northern Italian peninsula, have been on their means south, with the obvious purpose of sacking Rome. Leo's activity used to be to cajole Attila to not plunder and burn the guts of Western civilization.
Here, during this short-form ebook through award-winning writer Charles L. Mee, Jr., is wonderful tale of that fateful stumble upon and its aftermath.
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Sample text
They moved, perhaps in search of better pastures, toward the west. Naturally enough, they encountered the resistance of their neighbors as they went, and they set off a succession of wars. According to Ammianus, they made their “violent way amid the rapine and slaughter of the neighboring peoples” as far west as the banks of the Don River itself. There they met, killed, and plundered the Alans, joined in alliance with some of the survivors, and sent others of the Alans fleeing ahead to the west, where they attacked the Goths, and the Goths, in their turn, fell upon their neighbors.
We “may” believe Priscus, says the skeptical Otto Maenchen-Helfen, a scholar who spent much of his life gathering every bit of evidence he could find about the Huns for a book he never finished writing. But, to Maenchen-Helfen, this story about the sacred sword sounds suspiciously like a combination of a folktale and a passage from Herodotus (“the Scythians worship Ares in the form of a scimitar”). In other ancient texts, notes Maenchen-Helfen, the Scythians are replaced by other tribes. ” It may be that the Huns had taken over an old Iranian cult.
By the time of Leo, however, it was no longer possible to draw entirely distinct lines between the inhabitants of the empire and the foreigners, to discover a distinct ancient Roman Empire neatly walled off from a distinct array of barbarians. Since the late second century, the Germanic tribes had been providing a good many recruits for the Roman army, and the lines between Romans and barbarians had begun to blur. Beginning in the late 300s, these already indistinct lines began to shift and break even further.