Savages

The notion of the 'savage in all of us' is an ancient one, finding a place in European thought all the way from Plato to Conrad and beyond. Consider Montaigne's essay on cannibals, in which he says that the civilized Frenchmen of his generation during the Wars of Religion are more savage and more cannibal than all the warrior tribes of Brazil:

I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine...than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.

As for the dangers and paradoxes in the mission of imperial civilization one could do no better than heed the words of the eponymous hero of "Gulliver's Travels";

A crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not wither; at length a boy discovers land from the top-mast; they go on shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless people, they are entertained with kindness, they give the country a new name, they take formal possession of it for the king, they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial, they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more by force for a sample, return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a title of Divine Right. Ships are sent out at the first opportunity; the natives driven out and destroyed, their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free licence given to all acts of inhumanity and lust; the Earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: And this execrable crew of butchers employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people.

Who exactly, one has to ask, are the Yahoos and who are the Houyhnhnms? And is the savage no more than a response to savagery? Yes, the Yahoos are Swift's satire on a depraved humanity. But what of the Houyhnhmns who, in the midst of their wisdom and cultivation, discuss the possibility that the Yahoos should 'be exterminated from the face of the Earth’?

Yes, there are lots of questions and no easy answers.

Attila and the Empire of the Will

There is little doubt that Attila was skilled, both as a soldier and more generally as the ruler of a great Hun confederation. He was also rampaging and brutal, though given the nature of his rule, and the peoples he ruled over, he had little alternative. Despite justifiable Roman fears of the Hun threat, not all of the contemporary assessments of Attila are perhaps as negative as one might assume. Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, a Roman historian, describes him thus;

Of middle height, he was manly in apperance and well made, neither too frail nor too heavy; he was quick of wit and agile of limb, a very practiced horseman and a skilful archer; he was indefatigable with a spear. A born warrior; he was renowned for the arts of peace, without avarice and little swayed by desire, endowed with gifts of the mind, not swerving from his purpose for any kind of evil instigation. He bore wrongs with utmost patience and loved labour. Undaunted by danger, he was excelled by none in the endurance of hunger, thirst and vigil.

Others who knew him remarked that he was not himself greedy for plunder. When he was visited by a Roman diplomatic mission it was noted that he drank from a simple wooden bowl, as might be used by the lowest of his followers.

What he did have a taste for, though, was power; and he was utterly ruthless in maintaining his position at the head of a great barbarian alliance, that included not only his own Huns but also Ostrogoths, Gepids, Franks, Rugians, Sciri, Burgundians and Thuringians. And the only way that he could maintain his hold, and ensure their loyalty, was by finding fresh opportunities for plunder and yet more plunder. His empire, in other words, was an alliance for robbery and destruction. It was also an 'Empire of the Will', so to say, for reasons that should become a little clearer as I proceed.

So, in his quest for plunder, Attila was drawn over the borders of the Roman Empire, first in the east, where he raided in 440, 442 and again in 447. The object was not to conquer but to draw out all of the sources of wealth, so much so that by 450 the Empire was close to economic exhaustion. The whole destructive, and it might be said, self-destructive campaign, continued, first in Gaul and then in Italy, where the waves were broken. Of this John Julius Norwich has written;

Had the Hunnish army not been halted in these two successive campaigns, had its leader toppled Valentinian from his throne and set up his own capital in Ravenna or Rome, there is little doubt that both Gaul and Italy would have been reduced to spiritual and cultural deserts, just as surely and just as completely as the Balkan peninsula was reduced by the Ottoman Turks a thousand years later. ("Byzantium. The Early Centuries", 1988, p. 157)

In the end this great threat came to nothing for one simple reason: Attila was a man caught between two worlds; that of the barbarian nomads, and that of the settled urban world of the Romans. He needed war simply to survive, though old fashioned mounted archery was no longer enough. To take the great cities of the empire he needed siege equipment; he needed to keep their populations under control; to build an administration; to make laws. He did none of these things, and never rose to the real challenge of imperial rule, unlike, say, Genghis Khan, with whom otherwise he mighty stand comparison. In the end the vast Hunnish empire simply imploded on Attila's death in 453, leaving little more than a savage memory.

The true victors are those who create history: Attila was just passing through.