In 434 CE, two brothers inherited the leadership of the Hunnic confederation. Within eleven years, one of them would become the most feared man in the world.

Their names were Bleda (BLEH-dah) and Attila (AH-tih-lah). They were nephews of Rua (ROO-ah, also called Rugila), who had spent the previous decade consolidating Hunnic power and forcing Constantinople (the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire) to pay annual tribute of 350 pounds of gold. Rua had transformed the Huns from a loose swarm of raiding bands into a centralized extortion machine. His nephews would take the machine to its maximum output.

Bleda and Attila ruled jointly, which was consistent with the old steppe tradition of dual kingship (the Xiongnu left-wing/right-wing system, Chapter 2, was a distant ancestor of the practice). Their first act was the Treaty of Margus (435 CE), negotiated with the Eastern Roman Empire. The terms were punishing: Constantinople's annual tribute was doubled from 350 to 700 pounds of gold. All Hunnic fugitives sheltering in Roman territory were to be returned (some of them had already been baptized and given Roman citizenship, which the Huns did not care about). Trade between Huns and Romans was restricted to designated frontier markets. The Eastern Romans agreed to everything because the alternative was invasion.

For the next few years, the brothers managed the empire together. Then, around 445 CE, Attila murdered Bleda. The circumstances are murky. Roman sources hint at an assassination during a hunting trip. No Hunnic source explains it (the Huns, like the Xiongnu, left no written records of their own). The result was straightforward: Attila became sole ruler of the largest empire in Europe.

The parallel with Modu is striking and may not be coincidental. Modu killed his father to seize the chanyu title. Attila killed his brother to seize sole rule. Both were acts of calculated fratricide (or patricide) that eliminated a rival and concentrated power in a single ruthless leader. Whether Attila knew the story of Modu is unknowable. Whether the steppe political tradition normalized the killing of relatives who stood in the way of power is well documented. This was how steppe empires worked.

Attila's empire was centered on the Hungarian plain (the Pannonian Basin), the flat grassland in the middle of Europe that provided the same ecological conditions as the Mongolian steppe: open terrain, good pasture, space for horse herds. The Huns had been settling there since around 410 CE, and by Attila's time, the Hungarian plain had become the center of a multiethnic empire that stretched from the Rhine to the Ural Mountains.

The empire was not primarily "Hunnic" in population. It was a confederation of subjected peoples: Ostrogoths, Gepids, Rugians, Heruli, Scirians, various Slavic and Germanic groups, and remnants of the Alan and Sarmatian steppe peoples who had been absorbed earlier. The Huns were the ruling elite, the military core, and the source of political authority, but they were a minority ruling a majority of non-Hunnic subjects. This is exactly the pattern of the Xiongnu: a relatively small nomadic elite controlling a much larger multiethnic empire through military dominance and the redistribution of plunder and tribute.

The best description of Attila's court comes from Priscus (PRIS-kus), a Byzantine diplomat who visited the Hunnic capital in 449 CE as part of a Roman embassy. Priscus is one of the most valuable sources in late ancient history because he actually met Attila, ate at his table, and recorded what he saw. His account is detailed, eyewitness, and not entirely hostile (he seems to have been genuinely impressed by some aspects of Hunnic governance).

Priscus described Attila's capital as a large wooden compound on the Hungarian plain, with a great hall for feasting and separate buildings for Attila's wives and officials. It was not a city in any urban sense, but it was a permanent settlement, which marked a departure from pure nomadic life. Attila himself was described as short, with a flat nose, a thin beard, a broad chest, and small eyes. He ate plain food from a wooden plate while his guests feasted on gold and silver dishes. He wore simple clothing while his courtiers displayed elaborate finery. He listened to songs about his victories and wept at the sadness of the melodies. He was controlled in his anger but absolute in his authority.

The picture Priscus paints is of a man who affected simplicity as a display of power. Attila did not need gold plates to prove he was the most powerful man in Europe. He proved it by having everyone else eat from gold plates while he used wood. The asceticism was theater, and it was effective.

Attila's method was extortion raised to state policy.

In 441 CE, while the Eastern Roman Empire was distracted by a war against the Vandals in North Africa and the Persians on the eastern frontier, Attila launched a devastating campaign across the Balkans. His army destroyed the Roman cities of Singidunum (modern Belgrade), Sirmium (SIR-mee-um, an important Roman military center), and Naissus (NY-sus, modern Nis in Serbia, the birthplace of Constantine the Great). The Huns advanced to within about 20 miles (32 km) of Constantinople itself before the massive Theodosian Walls (the triple fortification surrounding the eastern capital, the most formidable defensive structure in the ancient world) stopped them. The Huns could not besiege a well-fortified city. They had no siege engines, no engineering tradition, no patience for long investments. Their strength was the open field.

The Eastern Empire sued for peace. The Treaty of Anatolius (447 CE) tripled the annual tribute to 2,100 pounds of gold and imposed a massive back-payment of 6,000 pounds of gold for years of unpaid tribute. The Eastern Romans also evacuated a strip of territory five days' journey wide south of the Danube, creating a buffer zone. Constantinople, the richest city in the world, was paying protection money to a man who lived in a wooden hall on the Hungarian plain.

Then Attila turned west.

In 450 CE, a Roman princess gave Attila his excuse. Justa Grata Honoria (ho-NOR-ee-ah), sister of the Western Roman Emperor Valentinian III, was trapped in an engagement she did not want. She secretly sent her ring to Attila along with a request for help. Attila interpreted (or claimed to interpret) the ring as a marriage proposal and demanded half the Western Empire as dowry.

The claim was transparently absurd, and Attila probably knew it. But it provided a legal pretext for invasion, and Attila was a man who appreciated useful pretexts.

In 451 CE, Attila led his multiethnic army (Hunnic cavalry, Gothic infantry, Gepid warriors, and assorted subject peoples) into Gaul (modern France). The invasion triggered the most consequential battle of the late ancient world.

The defense was organized by Flavius Aetius (ay-EE-shus), the last great Roman general of the West, and his biography is one of history's great ironies. Aetius had spent his youth as a hostage among the Huns (just as Modu had spent his youth as a hostage among the Yuezhi, six centuries earlier). He had used Hunnic mercenaries throughout his career to fight Rome's enemies. He spoke the Hunnic language. He understood Hunnic tactics. And now he was the man who had to stop the Huns from destroying the Western Roman Empire.

Aetius assembled a coalition army of Romans and Visigoths (the same Visigoths who had been driven into the empire by the Huns seventy-five years earlier and had since been settled in southwestern Gaul). The Visigothic king Theodoric I (thee-OD-or-ik) agreed to fight alongside his old Roman enemies because Attila was a threat to everyone.

The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (also called the Battle of Chalons, fought somewhere in the Champagne region of northeastern France in June 451 CE) was enormous, chaotic, and indecisive. Both sides suffered heavy casualties. Theodoric I was killed. Attila reportedly built a pyre of horse saddles inside his camp, prepared to throw himself on the flames rather than be taken alive, but he was never forced to use it. After a day of inconclusive fighting, Attila withdrew eastward.

The battle's significance is debated. Some historians consider it one of the most important battles in European history, arguing that a Hunnic victory would have destroyed the last remnants of Roman civilization in the West. Others argue that Attila's logistics were already stretched and that he would have withdrawn regardless. What is clear is that the Catalaunian Plains was the first time Attila's army had been stopped in an open battle, and the psychological impact was enormous.

Attila was not discouraged. In 452 CE, he invaded Italy.

His army crossed the Alps and descended into the Po Valley, sacking Aquileia (ah-kwi-LAY-ah, the great Roman fortress city at the head of the Adriatic, destroyed so thoroughly that it never recovered), Milan, Padua, and other northern Italian cities. Refugees from the destruction fled into the marshy lagoons at the head of the Adriatic, where they joined existing fishing settlements (the lagoon communities predated Attila's invasion) that would eventually become Venice. The most famous city in Italy traces its origin to people running from Attila.

Then Attila stopped. He advanced to the Mincio River (MIN-chee-oh) in northern Italy, and there he met Pope Leo I (LEO), who had traveled north to negotiate. According to the Christian tradition, Leo persuaded Attila to withdraw through the sheer force of papal authority, aided by a divine vision of Saints Peter and Paul threatening the Hunnic king with destruction if he advanced on Rome.

The real reasons for Attila's withdrawal were almost certainly more practical. His army was weakened by disease (plague was raging in Italy in 452). His supply lines were stretched across the Alps. Eastern Roman reinforcements were threatening his Pannonian base. And the Italian countryside, already ravaged by famine, could not support his army. Leo's embassy may have provided Attila with a face-saving excuse to withdraw from a campaign that was already failing. But the legend of papal intervention endured, and it became one of the foundational stories of papal authority in medieval Europe. Sometimes the political utility of a story matters more than its accuracy.

Attila withdrew to his capital on the Hungarian plain.

He died the following year, and the manner of his death was as dramatic as his life.

In 453 CE, Attila celebrated his marriage to a young Gothic woman named Ildico (IL-dih-koh). He feasted and drank heavily. The next morning, his attendants found him dead in his wedding bed, drowned in blood from a massive nosebleed. (Or possibly from internal hemorrhaging, or poisoning, or esophageal varices, depending on which modern diagnosis you prefer.) Ildico was found alive beside him, weeping.

His warriors mourned him in the steppe tradition. They slashed their faces with knives so that "the greatest warrior would be wept in blood, not tears." He was buried in a triple coffin of gold, silver, and iron, and the servants who dug the grave were killed to prevent anyone from finding and desecrating it. His burial place has never been found.

Attila died at roughly 47 years old (his exact birth date is unknown), having ruled for nineteen years. In that time, he had extracted more gold from the Roman Empire than any foreign power in history, destroyed dozens of Roman cities, invaded Gaul and Italy, been compared to the wrath of God by terrified Christians (the epithet "Flagellum Dei" (flah-JEL-um DAY-ee), the "Scourge of God," became attached to his name, though the earliest secure written attestation comes from later centuries (possibly Jordanes in the sixth century)), and built an empire that stretched from the Rhine to Central Asia.

And his empire died with him. Because personality-driven empires always do.

Cross-civ check: Attila's campaigns (~434–453 CE) fall in the last decades of the Western Roman Empire (which would formally end in 476 CE, just twenty-three years after Attila's death). In the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, Constantinople was thriving behind its Theodosian Walls. In China, the Northern and Southern dynasties were locked in their own centuries-long division. In Mesoamerica, the great city of Teotihuacan was at its height. In India, the Gupta Empire was entering its decline. The Huns were not an isolated phenomenon but part of a broader pattern: across Eurasia, the great classical empires of antiquity were fragmenting under pressure from nomadic peoples, internal divisions, and economic contraction. The steppe was winning, everywhere, simultaneously. The parallel between India and the West is particularly striking: in the very decade that Attila was devastating Gaul and Italy, the Gupta emperor Skandagupta was repulsing the first major Hephthalite incursion on India's northwestern frontier. Two empires, both under steppe pressure in the same decade — the West could not hold, India held for a generation longer (Gupta Empire Ch 7).

Xiongnu & Huns

The Steppe After the Scythians

Modu Chanyu

The Humiliation at Baideng

Emperor Wu Strikes Back

The Split

The Westward Migration

Attila

After Attila