Your Crossword Is Wrong!

Recently someone I knew was working on a crossword puzzle, and one of the prompts was “sacker of ancient Rome”, three letters across.

The answer was “Hun”.

Which is wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong! The Huns never sacked Rome.

The Huns did, however, sack a lot of the western Roman Empire. In the 400s AD, the western Roman Empire had entered its final decline, with a lot of its former territory getting carved up into new barbarian kingdoms. The Huns were a group of Eurasian nomads, and were indirectly one of the causes of the collapse of the western Empire. Their migration westward had inspired a lot of terrified tribes to flee westward to get away from them. Those terrified tribes became the barbarian invasions that overran much of the western Empire – but the Huns were still coming from the east. Under the leadership of their king Attila, the Huns became even more formidable, capable of taking walled and fortified cities, which was traditionally difficult for nomad horsemen to do.

Anyway, the Romans and their Visigothic allies had previously repulsed the Huns at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 AD. Attila returned the next year and essentially destroyed northern Italy, and his army pushed towards Rome. Emperor Valentinian III sent envoys to meet with Attila at the River Po, and one of the envoys was Pope Leo I.

No one exactly knows what happened next.

According to one story, when Attila looked at Pope Leo, he saw Saint Peter and Saint Paul flanking the Pope in all their holy radiance, with drawn swords in their hands, promising Attila that he would die if he entered Rome. So impressed was Attila that he turned his army around and left Italy, and Leo was credited as the savior of the city.

The truth is probably somewhat more prosaic. Attila’s army was running out of supplies since Italy had already suffered a bad famine before Attila had burned down most of the northern half of the peninsula. In addition, a serious disease, probably dysentery, was spreading through Attila’s army.  The eastern Roman Emperor had sent an army to attack the Huns’ current homelands beyond the Danube, and Attila needed to go deal with them. Another account says that Attila’s advisors feared that Attila might suffer the same fate as the Visigothic king Alaric, who died shortly after sacking Rome a little over forty years earlier. There is a good chance that Attila was superstitious in a way that is hard for the modern mind to grasp, but until the start of modern science in the universities of the Middle Ages, people generally did not distinguish between natural and supernatural causes for events. Considering Alaric’s fate might not have been outlandish for him.

Pope Leo was also a man of great intelligence and charisma. Perhaps he simply pointed out all these facts to Attila, and the Hunnic king, knowing that he was overextended and potentially in trouble, decided that the possibility of divine wrath was an acceptable face-saving excuse to turn around.

We will never know what happened at that meeting, but whatever the reason, Attila turned his army around and left Italy without attacking Rome. The new eastern Emperor had stopped paying tribute to the Huns, and Attila planned to deal with him next, but died of a nosebleed on his wedding night in 453 AD. Attila’s sons immediately embarked on a civil war with each other, and the Huns’ empire fell apart in short order.

So the Huns never sacked Rome. Granted, a lot of other people did in the 400s AD, but the Huns never did. And that crossword puzzle annoyed me so much that I just wrote 600 words about it. 🙂

-JM