Ancients Behaving Badly (2009–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - Attila the Hun - full transcript
A marauding barbarian with a reputation as one of history's monsters, even today Attila's name is a synonym for savagery.
NARRATOR: Attila the Hun.
They call him the scourge of
God. He lays waste to everything in
his path.
He was a thug, he was an
extortionist, and he was a murderer.
The Attila stories are horrific, but
come from people with an ax to grind: his
enemies.
It's now possible to reveal the
truth behind the tales.
Investigators will search out the real Attila,
putting events in his life to scientific
tests.
Archeological evidence will
reveal how just looking at the
Huns scared the wits out of their enemies.
And a psychiatrist will put
Attila on the couch,
all to reveal if he was as evil
as he's described...
And how he stacks up against
other Ancients Behaving Badly.
He's a marauding barbarian with a
reputation as one of history's monsters.
Even today, the name "Attila
the Hun" is a synonym for savagery.
To understand Attila better, psychiatrist
David Mallott will study his behavior.
Is Attila the Hun an empire
builder, or is he a criminal
and a thug?
Attila would be placed on a
unique behaving badly psychograph
to reveal how he compares to other
tyrants from history, like Genghis Khan and
Caligula.
He has a terrifying rap sheet. He makes
Hannibal Lecter look like Mother Teresa.
In the French city of Rheims,
he goes to church and beheads
the archbishop.
He sets out to become this
terrifying, barbaric figure, and
he achieves it.
He wipes out a whole culture... man,
woman and child... for riches and gold.
Attila is a mass murderer,
a pillager, a plunderer,
terrorizing savage.
He slaughters an entire Roman
army. >> The man is utterly, utterly
ruthless.
And he executes deserters in
the most bloodthirsty way imaginable.
ARYA: For Attila, loyalty is
everything and betrayal, he's
going to punish that with such
brutality you'd wish you'd never been born.
The horror stories go on and
on, depicting a level of
savagery that's hard to believe.
Perhaps it's because they're
written by the Romans, his sworn enemies.
MANN: It's very hard to get
an accurate image of the Huns
because the evidence is so one-sided.
Romans are entirely
prejudiced against the Huns.
This is what the Roman writer
Marcellinus had to say about them.
"They are totally ignorant of the distinction
between right and wrong, a wild race,
consumed with the passion to
pillage, rob and slaughter."
So it's two thumbs down for the Huns.
But can the Roman historians be trusted?
Some answers may lie in Attila's childhood.
The record is sketchy.
The historian Priscus, writing
during Attila's life, says he
is born somewhere on the
Hungarian plain around 406 AD.
He is the younger of two
brothers and a member of the
Hun royal family.
The world that he grew up in
was one of grasslands,
of tents, of horses, of wagons,
of horse archery.
It's the Huns' home base,
but they leave little here for
the archaeologists.
No permanent structures,
no coins, no monuments.
Understanding Attila,
who he is, is very, very
difficult, because of the lack
of resources, a lack of evidence.
It's like trying to grasp smoke.
The Romans took a malicious stab at describing
the Huns. They weren't into political
correctness.
The Roman historian Ammianus
Marcellinus describes the Huns
in some detail.
He says "They have thick, squat,
broken, bent bodies.
They're prodigiously ugly.
They have a savage passion to
pillage, and from birth the
parents disfigure the faces of
their children."
So was Attila really some kind of horror
movie monster? Hard evidence from rare
archaeological sites has
produced startling results.
At Gyor in Hungry, an excavation has turned
up Hun skulls from the time of Attila.
What they found astonished them.
The skulls were deformed.
It was a widespread
custom among the Huns that they
deformed the skull of their children.
They put a bandage on the forehead
of the baby and wound around the head.
And the bandage was knotted very
tightly, and that's why the skull deformed.
So Marcellinus described them correctly.
And, to the Romans, their ethnic
origin added to their strange appearance.
ARYA: A large part of the
population of the Huns was, in fact, Asian.
This, combined with this
evidence we have for the
deformed skulls, gives further
weight to the descriptions of
them being terrifying, being
different, being savage.
(Thunder rumbling)
434 AD. At age 28, Attila
is crowned co-king of the Huns
alongside his older brother, Bleda.
They take control of a territory stretching
from Germany to Central Asia, and
from the Danube River to the Baltic Sea.
It's a lot of real estate. The brothers
want something else to go with it:
gold, and lots of it.
The best source is close at
hand, just across the Danube.
On this side you have
the Roman Empire, civilization,
everything that it stands for;
and on this side you have the
barbarians, the Huns,
and they're so close that they
can smell the loot.
Before you know it, the barbarians are
at the gates. Attila, Bleda and their men
sack one Roman town after
another, striking quickly and vanishing.
Sources say it's their skill on
horseback that gives the Huns
the edge over the Romans.
ARYA: These guys are glued
to the saddle.
These guys are riding with lightning speed.
And on the saddle they are
a force to be reckoned with,
using their arrows as they
attack and as they retreat.
Is this yet more Roman
hype or did Attila have a secret weapon?
The difference between the Hun
riders and the Romans was their saddles.
Unlike the Romans, the Hun
saddles had a high front and rear section.
The advantages for
this saddle is simply because
it gives you support to the
front, and it gives you very
good support to the back.
This allowed the rider to twist his
upper body and shoot in any direction.
CSORDAS: You're actually
almost fixed in the saddle.
That's the main difference.
With the rider locked in
place, his horse becomes a
multifunction weapons platform.
ARYA: This is a very
particular saddle that allows
them to fire from 360 degrees.
This is something that allows them to become
extremely versatile and better than their
opponents, and it really does
transform a pack horse or pack
animal into a sophisticated
fighting machine.
Attila becomes a 5th-century
terrorist, storming Roman
towns, raping, looting and
killing, and leaving them in flames.
His reputation quickly spreads
far and wide: this is a
marauder to be reckoned with.
But instead of fighting Attila
and his hordes, the Romans
decide to hire them as hit men.
Mercenaries.
Clearly, it's a case of keeping
your friends close and your enemies closer.
The Romans recognized the
military prowess of the Huns
and they promised them great
virtues if they'd come and fight for them.
Killing for money: it's
an offer Attila and brother
Bleda can't refuse.
In 437 AD, the Huns launch a
full-scale attack against the
Burgundians in modern-day France.
It turns into an atrocity.
Historical sources say Attila
slaughters the defenders then
turns on the women and children.
Twenty thousand die.
It's ethnic cleansing on an epic scale.
But why?
Is there any strategy to this bloodlust?
What's going on in Attila's head?
The slaughter of the
Burgundians by Attila
reinforces in my mind this view
that he's working for money.
There's no greater goal.
It's destruction for
destruction's sake out of pure
spite and hatred.
The Romans reward Attila
generously for wiping out the
Burgundians, perhaps not aware
that they've created a monster.
Attila takes the Roman gold and
realizes there's more, much
more, where that came from.
Once they succeed in getting one great payoff
from the Romans, they know that they can
come back for more, and again and again.
Sacking and slaughtering
two-bit tribes isn't enough for Attila.
He wants a bigger payoff, and
there's only one place to steal
that much from: the Romans.
NARRATOR: Rome hires Attila the Hun and his
brother Bleda to do its dirty work, giving
them gold for getting rid of
the empire's enemies.
But Attila and Bleda need more
to insure the loyalty of their Huns.
So they set out to do something
no barbarian had ever done before:
break into a fortified Roman city.
Attila basically wants to
extort money from the Roman
Empire.
In order to do that, he's got
to prove to the Roman Empire
that he's going to be a problem
if they don't give him that money.
So he basically needs to find a city
and destroy it. >> A city like Naissus,
in modern-day Serbia.
In 441 AD, Naissus is
strategically important to Romans.
It's an armed fortress.
But there's gold inside and
Attila wants it and nothing else.
He's a pillager, not an empire builder.
Attila's not interested in
taking cities.
He just wants to break down the
gate, get in there and trash
the city, then get out as fast as he can.
And the more people that get
killed in the process the
better it is for his reputation.
(Men hooting and hollering)
Attila and his brother
send in their crack troops on
horseback, and they're cut
down by the defending Romans.
They go to plan B.
According to Priscus, a Roman
diplomat from Attila's time,
it's simplicity itself: a tree.
Priscus records that the walls of
Naissus were destroyed by a battering ram.
Nothing subtle about Attila.
But could Attila and Bleda, illiterate nomads,
have built a ram powerful enough to smash
through a city wall?
This is a job for the SWAT team.
The Emergency Response Unit of Canada's
Ontario Provincial Police will put Attila's
battering ram to the test.
First they need a ram built to the
same spec as the one Attila used.
Priscus describes a metal cap
connected to the tree trunk,
which is supported by a covered frame.
MASON: So it would be
covered with probably willow
sort of basketry and hides,
because one of the most
important things you need to
do when you're trying to knock
someone's wall down is stop
them dropping rocks on your head.
The police will try to smash their way
into a factory with steel doors and cinder
block walls.
Here we have what would be
quite a good representation of
a Roman city gate.
It would be a large gate just
like this, with simple bifold.
On the other side would be a
crossbar to protect it and to
stop people entering.
(Grunting)
MAN: Ready, and pull.
But when attacking a city, the gate
is often the most difficult way to get in.
MASON: People expect you to
try and get through a gate, and
so it was the strongest part of
the fortification.
So if you can go and knock down
a wall, just take down a whole
stretch of it, then it
basically completely makes the
place indefensible.
The ram has no problem
breaking through these 8-inch blocks.
But what about Roman defenses
5 times as thick?
MASON: Well, I think that
shows pretty effectively.
I'm pretty confident this would
actually get through a Roman
city wall, a meter-thick wall.
This went straight through this
block wall without hesitation,
and if we were up against a
Roman wall, even with this, we'd
be able to get through it.
So it's true.
Attila and Bleda could have
taken Naissus by smashing
through the walls.
Once inside, the Huns cause
appalling carnage. Few survived.
The Roman Empire is in shock. For the first
time, a key fortified city has fallen.
Word spreads like wildfire.
Attila is unlike any barbarian
Rome has seen before,
and imperial cities are there
for the taking.
You can imagine the Romans quaking in their
boots as they hear reports of Attila breaking
into cities and burning houses
like this to the ground.
And of course that's precisely
what Attila wants.
I mean, like any terrorist,
he thrives on fear.
Attila and his brother's
reign of terror is just beginning.
Now they're upping the stakes
and going for the richest city
in the world...
Constantinople.
Capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.
MANN: Here we are on top
of old Constantinople, the jewel
of the east, a prize waiting to be taken.
You can imagine Constantinople
as the Fort Knox of the ancient world.
It had to broken apart by
Attila somehow or other if he
was going to get what he wanted
from it, which was loot and more loot.
Taking Naissus was
impressive, but Constantinople
is no Naissus.
The imperial city of over
500,000 is heavily fortified.
These are the walls of Constantinople.
Time has happily X-rayed them
for us.
They are phenomenally thick.
I would think 4 or 5 yards thick.
It's not just the walls.
There are other defenses.
Now, look at this from the attackers' point
of view. First of all the fields, which
were then a moat, and then the
first defensive wall, and then
a platform where troops would
have been massed, and then
finally the main defensive wall itself.
These were the most formidable
defenses of the ancient world.
But Attila has a super
weapon, one far more powerful
than his battering ram:
psychological warfare.
His terrifying reputation reaches
Constantinople long before he does.
Attila can take impregnable cities.
And when he gets in, everyone dies.
The Romans cave.
Instead of trusting in their
defenses, they throw gold at
Attila to make him go away.
MANN: One of the bribes we
know was 6,000 pounds of gold.
That's 3 tons of gold, which
comes out to about $100 million
in modern terms.
More wealth than Attila had
ever seen in his life.
But even 6,000 pounds of gold
isn't enough for Attila.
He also wants revenge.
He has some scores to settle
with deserters from his army
who are now inside the walls of
Constantinople.
The Romans hand them over,
to a terrible fate.
Attila is ruthless, and when
there are deserters of his army
that go over to the other side,
he wants them back.
He demands them back and he gets them back,
and he doesn't welcome them with open arms.
He has them impaled.
He has them run through and
they're hung up to die over a
period of two days.
That is Attila the Hun.
It's the punishment for
the crime of disloyalty.
What kind of man would do this?
The method that Attila
uses to kill his enemies
demonstrates a particularly
brutal and sadistic cruelty.
Even Constantinople can't stand up to Attila
and Bleda. That means nowhere is safe.
Attila is running a Mafia-style
protection racket, and he's
doing it on a vast scale.
ARYA: Attila is a brilliant tactician.
He comes to the walls of
Constantinople, he threatens,
he gets his bribe, he goes
away, he can come back.
So he's like that Mafia boss
that keeps on coming, keeps on
extorting, and in the end he's
a part of your life; he's a
part of your culture and you
can't get rid of him.
Now only one thing stands
between Attila and total power:
his brother-in-arms and blood, Bleda.
NARRATOR: Attila the Hun and his brother Bleda
have created one of history's great rackets,
extorting gold from the Romans.
It's a family business that
works like a charm for 12 years.
Then brotherly love turns to
sibling rivalry.
One day in 445, Bleda goes
hunting and never comes back.
Jordanes, a Roman writer, calls it
homicide and fingers Attila for the hit.
Attila and his brother
have grown up together.
They've done everything together.
They've ruled together.
Attila callously murders him.
This shows Attila as a psychopathic
killer. >> And it leaves Attila as
sole leader of the Huns.
Attila has grown rich on extorted Roman
gold that he uses to keep his men loyal.
But the Romans have had enough.
They assemble an army
to engage Attila on the
battlefield at Utus in modern-day Bulgaria.
(Footsteps marching)
It's total carnage, and the Roman
opposition is all but wiped out.
The survivors make their excuses.
The Romans had to justify
their loss to these barbarians,
and how do they do that?
Well, it's not because they're
sophisticated and great and
intelligent; it's because they
were numerically far superior.
Oceans of armies overrunning the small
Roman army. >> Roman sources put Attila's
army at half a million and
their own at only 120,000,
outnumbered 4 to 1 by the barbarians.
For the Romans it's a
face-saving explanation.
But is it true?
Using the science of animal
husbandry, it is now possible
to calculate the real size of
Attila's army.
It all comes down to the number of horses.
The Huns' grazing land is here
on the Hungarian plain, a
natural bowl bounded by the
Alps, the Carpathian mountains
and the Danube.
Studies have shown that
the Hungarian grasslands can
support perhaps 150,000 horses.
That's already a lot less than the
half million Roman accounts suggest.
Beyond that, each of Attila's
men likely had several horses
to cover ground more quickly.
MANN: If each Hun horseman
needed, say, 5 horses each,
that's going to give a basic
army of 30,000.
This is quite a modest force
with which to take on the Roman
Empire, so if the Romans want
to explain their defeat by
referring to the overwhelming
numbers of the Huns, they need
a rather better excuse.
This analysis reveals the
total opposite of what the
Roman accounts say.
It's Attila who's outnumbered 4
to 1, not the Romans.
So how does he pull it off?
Clues can be found in the
account from the Roman writer Marcellinus.
His observations of the Huns
shortly before Attila is born
suggests they have a different
approach to warfare.
First he sends in his archers
to break up the Roman ranks.
Then he deploys two everyday
tools that the Romans are not
prepared for: the lasso and the net.
Simple equipment used in a
highly effective way.
There were probably
specifically assigned people to
use this to coordinate an actual maneuver.
So let's say you attack from one corner,
one flank to the other flank, and they would
use the rope and use that
effectively in a choreographed maneuver.
And when faced with
lasso-throwing horsemen,
there's little the Roman infantry can do.
CSORDAS: Lasso their neck.
Of course, in dragging them they
would be dead in seconds.
Rome has no answer to these tactics.
Tens of thousands die.
And there's another reason why the Romans
take a beating. They're simply no longer the
disciplined force that
dominated the barbarians for centuries.
This is your classic Roman
legionary as seen in countless
Hollywood films.
And basically he's wearing a
suit of armor called lorica
segmentata because of the
segmented layers within it,
a helmet and a large shield,
large rectangular shield which
is designed for close order fighting.
They locked their shields together, and
they raised their throwing javelins, their
pilums, threw their pilums at
the enemy, then charged forward
with their shields forward,
drew their shortswords, and stabbed home.
These were the soldiers
that conquered the world.
But by Attila's time, soldiers
like this were ancient history.
By the time of Attila,
a Roman legionary is looking
much, much more like this.
He's looking very different to
that guy over there.
I mean, essentially, he's now
got barbarian-style trousers
and his helmet is also sort of
based on a sort of barbarian
Persian design.
What's more, the sources
say the Roman army would have
largely been made up of mercenaries.
Barbarians.
They have none of the training
or equipment the Roman army
used to conquer the world.
Crushed by the defeat, the Romans
at Constantinople sue for peace.
An envoy heads to Attila's
headquarters in Hungary to talk terms.
Traveling with him is the
reporter Priscus, who writes
history's only firsthand account of Attila.
Historian John Mann retraces the journey.
Setting out from
Constantinople northwards, it
takes them perhaps a month or so.
And every day, Priscus finds
grisly evidence of Attila's savagery.
MANN: Along the way,
they come to areas which have
been devastated by the Huns on
their way south.
One of them being the town of
Naissus, which is shattered.
There are skulls still lying
about, bones on the riverbank.
Eventually they leave the Roman Empire
and cross into Attila's territory, reaching
the Tisza River.
MANN: They must have been
scared out of their wits by
what was ahead of them.
This was like coming to see
Saddam Hussein, but without any
warning at all.
Attila was random in his violence.
It's not known exactly
where Priscus met Attila, but
John Mann figures he is close.
Well, I think this is what we've been
looking for. This is the sort of place that
Priscus would finally have met Attila.
And the account he left of him
was a very surprising one.
Priscus expects to find a
foul tent city of unwashed barbarians.
What he sees surprises him.
Not just wooden huts, but a
stone-built bath complex, along
the lines of this one.
Priscus sees that there is a
bath complex within the
headquarters of Attila.
And this is shocking because
this is a great characteristic
of Roman culture, not the
culture of the Huns.
So the fact that it's present
there within the shadow of
Attila is a great indication
that the Huns can adapt and
adopt great Roman ideas, and the
bath is one of the key
characteristics of a Roman city.
By this account, Attila's a
regular guy who likes to kick
back in the pool after some
raping and pillaging.
He is also depicted as a guy
who loves his family.
Priscus' portrait of Attila
is one of a very rounded individual.
He is an affectionate father.
Priscus sees that.
He is a modest person.
So you do see that human side of
this very stoic ruler.
How does this square with
Priscus's descriptions of
Attila as a heavy-drinking,
quick-tempered thug who
doesn't think twice about
impaling spies and slaves?
Who is the real Attila? >> Inside,
Attila can act superficially, like an
upper-class Roman.
However, outside, as people are
being impaled, we see his true colors.
He is a psychopathic killer.
Two years after Priscus's visit, Attila's
got all he can from Constantinople.
But luckily, the Roman Empire
is split into two.
So having finished with the
eastern half of the Roman
Empire, he turns his attention west.
At the age of 45, Attila
is back in the saddle, eager
once again to shake down the Romans.
It's always worked before, but
this time he's badly
underestimated the empire.
NARRATOR: Attila the Hun and his barbarian
hordes are once more on the rampage, and
pushing their luck with the Romans.
They come galloping out
of the Hungarian plain into the
heart of Europe.
Everyone's surprised that
Attila now heads north from his
homeland, goes north and
crosses the Rhine, making one
of the most spectacular
smash-and-grab raids ever in
history, and he's in Central Europe.
Attila covers hundreds of miles with
thousands of men on horseback, all of them
fiery-eyed and spoiling for a fight.
It's as if they've been fed raw meat.
It turns out that they have.
The Roman historian Marcellinus
gets his hands on the menu:
uncooked flesh, warmed on horses' backs.
But raw meat is hard to digest,
even for a barbarian.
Surely this another case of the
Romans demonizing the bad guys.
Historian Robert Mason is going to
find out. >> We have this specially
prepared saddle blanket so that
we have as little horsehair as possible.
The horse is ridden for 6 hours to
discover if the meat becomes edible or just
revolting.
And so have another
slice of this. Piece for you.
Something has been done to it.
It has been imparted with a
certain tenderness.
It's not raw anymore.
Incredibly the story seems to be true.
Nutritionist Lynn Weaver thinks
she knows why.
There is the assumption
that the salt on the horse,
and salt is actually a
preservative, so perhaps that
is preserving the outside of
the meat, which would keep the
bacteria away.
It was also covered, and then there was a
lot of pressure given to it to tenderize it.
Raw meat is indigestible
because of its tough cellular structure.
The pounding action of riding
breaks down the cell walls, tenderizing it.
It's a version of the raw meat
dish steak tartare,
a practical dish that gives
Attila and his men more time in the saddle.
That's not bad.
Attila and his meat-fed forces storm across
Western Europe and come to the walled
city of Metz.
They roll out the battering
rams and the city falls.
He cuts deeper into Europe,
finding one ghost town after another.
The terrified inhabitants have fled.
But at Rheims, Archbishop Nicasius
stands firm, singing hymns to ward off
the barbarian.
But Attila doesn't care for hymns.
He slices off the archbishop's head.
Is there a grand strategy here,
or is Attila just on a bloody rampage?
Attila's attack on the
Western Empire of Rome has no
apparent strategic value whatsoever.
It is about spite, revenge,
hatred and destruction.
Finally, Attila reaches the
Catalaunian Plains in northern France.
And he comes head to head with
the Roman armies of Western Europe.
The Roman general Aetius has a simple
strategy: he's going for strength in numbers.
He's scoured Gaul, and pulled
together every last tribe that
has a grudge against Attila,
from the remnants of the
Burgundians to the Visigoths.
The two armies face each other.
It's showtime.
The key to this battle
was the high ground.
On the Catalaunian Plain there
was a ridge of high ground in
between the two armies, and
both sides raced to get there first.
And it was the Romans who got there
first. And at that point, they just dug
in on the ridge and let Attila's
cavalry just come at them up the hill.
It's cavalry against infantry,
dug in in a defensive position.
Both sides take big hits.
Sidonius Apollinaris, a
contemporary Gallic poet,
suggests 100,000 men die in a
single day, and the river
across the plain flows red with blood.
So you've got wave after
wave of Huns coming up this
ridge and getting thrown back
again and again and again,
and then, at the decisive
moment, the Visigoths just
charged down the hill.
Attila's just thrown right back
into his camp.
And the unthinkable's happened:
Attila's lost the battle.
Aetius wins by forcing
Attila to stand and fight
instead of allowing him to use
guerrilla tactics.
Attila turns out to be a very sore
loser. >> MALLOTT: Attila loses his
first major battle.
This isn't going to be a deterrent.
He believes in raw power.
He's going to be furious.
He wants vengeance.
He's going to try to get even.
It's exactly what Attila does.
He decides Rome is going to
pay, and sets a beady eye on Italy.
He crosses the Alps and
launches a new wave of death
and destruction.
First, it's the fortified city of Aquileia.
The siege machines do their job.
Attila's men pour into the city
and destroy it.
Attila has an advance scout:
his fearsome reputation.
Entire populations flee from his path.
But then Attila falters.
The story is that the pope
steps in and persuades him to turn back.
But the real story might be a
little less spiritual and a
little more to do with the
diseases ravaging Europe.
MANN: There were many
reasons to turn back: famine,
perhaps, but almost certainly plague.
So that in the end, it was not
the Italians that conquered
him, but bacteria.
With plague ravaging his army and winter
closing in, Attila makes the smart move
and goes home.
By Attila's standards, this hasn't
been the most successful European tour.
Still, he's loaded down with
pillaged and extorted gold.
He is around 47 years old and
has survived 19 years of bloody war.
It's not battle that finally
brings him down, but his
hard-living lifestyle.
NARRATOR: Attila the Hun: born to
raise hell. He has terrorized Europe and
the Balkans for 10 years,
amassing vast wealth and
killing hundreds of thousands.
By 453 AD, he's worn out and
ready for some rest and relaxation.
He never gets it.
He takes out a new bride,
and she's beautiful as these
stories go.
She's wonderful, she's young.
He takes her into his bedroom.
The next morning, he's dead.
According to Priscus, when Attila's
body is found, he's had a nosebleed.
Now can such a noble warrior
have died such an ignoble death?
The scourge of God, dead
from a nosebleed. How could this be?
Priscus provides medical
evidence in his account of Attila's death.
VALANI: Attila was found
in a stuporous state with
a lot of blood around the mouth.
There's blood in fact in the
close proximity as well, but
there's no evidence of vomitus.
Knowing this, a medical simulator can
be used to establish a probable cause of
death.
This brings up the
possibilities that the blood
either came in from the lungs or
the gastrointestinal tract.
Tuberculosis, infection or
a tumor could all cause
bleeding from the lungs, but
only small amounts of frothy blood.
This doesn't match what Priscus describes.
Attila was a heavy drinker
his whole life and was possibly
suffering from liver damage.
One of the consequences of
this is that the blood vessels
that feed into the liver end up
expanding and filling up even more.
Vessels in the throat lead
into one of the main veins
running to the liver.
VALANI: When too much
pressure builds up into
these vessels, they can
actually burst or rupture
leading to a massive hemorrhage.
These were the probable
consequences of his hard-living lifestyle.
A run of too much drinking, too
much carousing and too much stress.
His last night of anticipated
bliss ended in a coughing fit,
a sudden hemorrhage and a rush of blood.
The patient actually ends up choking in
their own blood. So in Attila's case it's
probably a combination of both.
The shock state from the
massive bleeding or hemorrhage,
as well as the filling of the
blood into the trachea and him
suffocating in his own blood,
that resulted in his death.
A bloody death for a bloody killer.
Attila grew up a nomad on the plains of
Hungary and challenged the might of the
Roman Empire.
The body count ran to the hundreds of
thousands. He waged wars of terror and
extortion.
He committed genocide, wiping
out the Burgundians in a
ferocious episode of bloodletting.
He destroyed city after city,
just because he could.
Rotting bodies filled the streets.
His revenge for treachery was
horrific: impaling, a slow and
painful death.
Where does this behavior place Attila
on the scale of Ancients Behaving Badly?
Was Attila a psychopathic
murderer who killed for the
sheer love of it, like Caligula?
Or was he driven to murder
as part of a vision, like Genghis
Khan?
His violence, his conquering,
doesn't seem directed to any specific end.
He wants to go out and destroy
almost for destruction's sake itself.
He's a cruel remorseless killer.
Attila is at the top of the
scale of psychopathic behavior.
All Attila cared about was destruction.
He had no vision that
ensured a future for the Huns.
Compared to the other
ancient tyrants, Attila is very
low on a scale of creativity.
He doesn't solve problems.
He doesn't build anything.
He doesn't leave anything behind.
When in doubt, kill.
It's a nasty psychological
profile that you can still find today.
MALLOTT: Attila reminds me
of a drug lord, a Pablo Escobar.
They're interested only in
naked power, money.
They create nothing.
They build nothing.
If anyone gets in your way, kill them.
Attila may be history's
first great terrorist.
He succeeded in building
enormous wealth from his
5th-century protection racket,
but his lack of vision resulted
in Attila failing to lay the
foundations of an enduring civilization.
After he died, it fell apart.
Just 30 years later, Attila's
entire empire had vanished.
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY
A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS.
They call him the scourge of
God. He lays waste to everything in
his path.
He was a thug, he was an
extortionist, and he was a murderer.
The Attila stories are horrific, but
come from people with an ax to grind: his
enemies.
It's now possible to reveal the
truth behind the tales.
Investigators will search out the real Attila,
putting events in his life to scientific
tests.
Archeological evidence will
reveal how just looking at the
Huns scared the wits out of their enemies.
And a psychiatrist will put
Attila on the couch,
all to reveal if he was as evil
as he's described...
And how he stacks up against
other Ancients Behaving Badly.
He's a marauding barbarian with a
reputation as one of history's monsters.
Even today, the name "Attila
the Hun" is a synonym for savagery.
To understand Attila better, psychiatrist
David Mallott will study his behavior.
Is Attila the Hun an empire
builder, or is he a criminal
and a thug?
Attila would be placed on a
unique behaving badly psychograph
to reveal how he compares to other
tyrants from history, like Genghis Khan and
Caligula.
He has a terrifying rap sheet. He makes
Hannibal Lecter look like Mother Teresa.
In the French city of Rheims,
he goes to church and beheads
the archbishop.
He sets out to become this
terrifying, barbaric figure, and
he achieves it.
He wipes out a whole culture... man,
woman and child... for riches and gold.
Attila is a mass murderer,
a pillager, a plunderer,
terrorizing savage.
He slaughters an entire Roman
army. >> The man is utterly, utterly
ruthless.
And he executes deserters in
the most bloodthirsty way imaginable.
ARYA: For Attila, loyalty is
everything and betrayal, he's
going to punish that with such
brutality you'd wish you'd never been born.
The horror stories go on and
on, depicting a level of
savagery that's hard to believe.
Perhaps it's because they're
written by the Romans, his sworn enemies.
MANN: It's very hard to get
an accurate image of the Huns
because the evidence is so one-sided.
Romans are entirely
prejudiced against the Huns.
This is what the Roman writer
Marcellinus had to say about them.
"They are totally ignorant of the distinction
between right and wrong, a wild race,
consumed with the passion to
pillage, rob and slaughter."
So it's two thumbs down for the Huns.
But can the Roman historians be trusted?
Some answers may lie in Attila's childhood.
The record is sketchy.
The historian Priscus, writing
during Attila's life, says he
is born somewhere on the
Hungarian plain around 406 AD.
He is the younger of two
brothers and a member of the
Hun royal family.
The world that he grew up in
was one of grasslands,
of tents, of horses, of wagons,
of horse archery.
It's the Huns' home base,
but they leave little here for
the archaeologists.
No permanent structures,
no coins, no monuments.
Understanding Attila,
who he is, is very, very
difficult, because of the lack
of resources, a lack of evidence.
It's like trying to grasp smoke.
The Romans took a malicious stab at describing
the Huns. They weren't into political
correctness.
The Roman historian Ammianus
Marcellinus describes the Huns
in some detail.
He says "They have thick, squat,
broken, bent bodies.
They're prodigiously ugly.
They have a savage passion to
pillage, and from birth the
parents disfigure the faces of
their children."
So was Attila really some kind of horror
movie monster? Hard evidence from rare
archaeological sites has
produced startling results.
At Gyor in Hungry, an excavation has turned
up Hun skulls from the time of Attila.
What they found astonished them.
The skulls were deformed.
It was a widespread
custom among the Huns that they
deformed the skull of their children.
They put a bandage on the forehead
of the baby and wound around the head.
And the bandage was knotted very
tightly, and that's why the skull deformed.
So Marcellinus described them correctly.
And, to the Romans, their ethnic
origin added to their strange appearance.
ARYA: A large part of the
population of the Huns was, in fact, Asian.
This, combined with this
evidence we have for the
deformed skulls, gives further
weight to the descriptions of
them being terrifying, being
different, being savage.
(Thunder rumbling)
434 AD. At age 28, Attila
is crowned co-king of the Huns
alongside his older brother, Bleda.
They take control of a territory stretching
from Germany to Central Asia, and
from the Danube River to the Baltic Sea.
It's a lot of real estate. The brothers
want something else to go with it:
gold, and lots of it.
The best source is close at
hand, just across the Danube.
On this side you have
the Roman Empire, civilization,
everything that it stands for;
and on this side you have the
barbarians, the Huns,
and they're so close that they
can smell the loot.
Before you know it, the barbarians are
at the gates. Attila, Bleda and their men
sack one Roman town after
another, striking quickly and vanishing.
Sources say it's their skill on
horseback that gives the Huns
the edge over the Romans.
ARYA: These guys are glued
to the saddle.
These guys are riding with lightning speed.
And on the saddle they are
a force to be reckoned with,
using their arrows as they
attack and as they retreat.
Is this yet more Roman
hype or did Attila have a secret weapon?
The difference between the Hun
riders and the Romans was their saddles.
Unlike the Romans, the Hun
saddles had a high front and rear section.
The advantages for
this saddle is simply because
it gives you support to the
front, and it gives you very
good support to the back.
This allowed the rider to twist his
upper body and shoot in any direction.
CSORDAS: You're actually
almost fixed in the saddle.
That's the main difference.
With the rider locked in
place, his horse becomes a
multifunction weapons platform.
ARYA: This is a very
particular saddle that allows
them to fire from 360 degrees.
This is something that allows them to become
extremely versatile and better than their
opponents, and it really does
transform a pack horse or pack
animal into a sophisticated
fighting machine.
Attila becomes a 5th-century
terrorist, storming Roman
towns, raping, looting and
killing, and leaving them in flames.
His reputation quickly spreads
far and wide: this is a
marauder to be reckoned with.
But instead of fighting Attila
and his hordes, the Romans
decide to hire them as hit men.
Mercenaries.
Clearly, it's a case of keeping
your friends close and your enemies closer.
The Romans recognized the
military prowess of the Huns
and they promised them great
virtues if they'd come and fight for them.
Killing for money: it's
an offer Attila and brother
Bleda can't refuse.
In 437 AD, the Huns launch a
full-scale attack against the
Burgundians in modern-day France.
It turns into an atrocity.
Historical sources say Attila
slaughters the defenders then
turns on the women and children.
Twenty thousand die.
It's ethnic cleansing on an epic scale.
But why?
Is there any strategy to this bloodlust?
What's going on in Attila's head?
The slaughter of the
Burgundians by Attila
reinforces in my mind this view
that he's working for money.
There's no greater goal.
It's destruction for
destruction's sake out of pure
spite and hatred.
The Romans reward Attila
generously for wiping out the
Burgundians, perhaps not aware
that they've created a monster.
Attila takes the Roman gold and
realizes there's more, much
more, where that came from.
Once they succeed in getting one great payoff
from the Romans, they know that they can
come back for more, and again and again.
Sacking and slaughtering
two-bit tribes isn't enough for Attila.
He wants a bigger payoff, and
there's only one place to steal
that much from: the Romans.
NARRATOR: Rome hires Attila the Hun and his
brother Bleda to do its dirty work, giving
them gold for getting rid of
the empire's enemies.
But Attila and Bleda need more
to insure the loyalty of their Huns.
So they set out to do something
no barbarian had ever done before:
break into a fortified Roman city.
Attila basically wants to
extort money from the Roman
Empire.
In order to do that, he's got
to prove to the Roman Empire
that he's going to be a problem
if they don't give him that money.
So he basically needs to find a city
and destroy it. >> A city like Naissus,
in modern-day Serbia.
In 441 AD, Naissus is
strategically important to Romans.
It's an armed fortress.
But there's gold inside and
Attila wants it and nothing else.
He's a pillager, not an empire builder.
Attila's not interested in
taking cities.
He just wants to break down the
gate, get in there and trash
the city, then get out as fast as he can.
And the more people that get
killed in the process the
better it is for his reputation.
(Men hooting and hollering)
Attila and his brother
send in their crack troops on
horseback, and they're cut
down by the defending Romans.
They go to plan B.
According to Priscus, a Roman
diplomat from Attila's time,
it's simplicity itself: a tree.
Priscus records that the walls of
Naissus were destroyed by a battering ram.
Nothing subtle about Attila.
But could Attila and Bleda, illiterate nomads,
have built a ram powerful enough to smash
through a city wall?
This is a job for the SWAT team.
The Emergency Response Unit of Canada's
Ontario Provincial Police will put Attila's
battering ram to the test.
First they need a ram built to the
same spec as the one Attila used.
Priscus describes a metal cap
connected to the tree trunk,
which is supported by a covered frame.
MASON: So it would be
covered with probably willow
sort of basketry and hides,
because one of the most
important things you need to
do when you're trying to knock
someone's wall down is stop
them dropping rocks on your head.
The police will try to smash their way
into a factory with steel doors and cinder
block walls.
Here we have what would be
quite a good representation of
a Roman city gate.
It would be a large gate just
like this, with simple bifold.
On the other side would be a
crossbar to protect it and to
stop people entering.
(Grunting)
MAN: Ready, and pull.
But when attacking a city, the gate
is often the most difficult way to get in.
MASON: People expect you to
try and get through a gate, and
so it was the strongest part of
the fortification.
So if you can go and knock down
a wall, just take down a whole
stretch of it, then it
basically completely makes the
place indefensible.
The ram has no problem
breaking through these 8-inch blocks.
But what about Roman defenses
5 times as thick?
MASON: Well, I think that
shows pretty effectively.
I'm pretty confident this would
actually get through a Roman
city wall, a meter-thick wall.
This went straight through this
block wall without hesitation,
and if we were up against a
Roman wall, even with this, we'd
be able to get through it.
So it's true.
Attila and Bleda could have
taken Naissus by smashing
through the walls.
Once inside, the Huns cause
appalling carnage. Few survived.
The Roman Empire is in shock. For the first
time, a key fortified city has fallen.
Word spreads like wildfire.
Attila is unlike any barbarian
Rome has seen before,
and imperial cities are there
for the taking.
You can imagine the Romans quaking in their
boots as they hear reports of Attila breaking
into cities and burning houses
like this to the ground.
And of course that's precisely
what Attila wants.
I mean, like any terrorist,
he thrives on fear.
Attila and his brother's
reign of terror is just beginning.
Now they're upping the stakes
and going for the richest city
in the world...
Constantinople.
Capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.
MANN: Here we are on top
of old Constantinople, the jewel
of the east, a prize waiting to be taken.
You can imagine Constantinople
as the Fort Knox of the ancient world.
It had to broken apart by
Attila somehow or other if he
was going to get what he wanted
from it, which was loot and more loot.
Taking Naissus was
impressive, but Constantinople
is no Naissus.
The imperial city of over
500,000 is heavily fortified.
These are the walls of Constantinople.
Time has happily X-rayed them
for us.
They are phenomenally thick.
I would think 4 or 5 yards thick.
It's not just the walls.
There are other defenses.
Now, look at this from the attackers' point
of view. First of all the fields, which
were then a moat, and then the
first defensive wall, and then
a platform where troops would
have been massed, and then
finally the main defensive wall itself.
These were the most formidable
defenses of the ancient world.
But Attila has a super
weapon, one far more powerful
than his battering ram:
psychological warfare.
His terrifying reputation reaches
Constantinople long before he does.
Attila can take impregnable cities.
And when he gets in, everyone dies.
The Romans cave.
Instead of trusting in their
defenses, they throw gold at
Attila to make him go away.
MANN: One of the bribes we
know was 6,000 pounds of gold.
That's 3 tons of gold, which
comes out to about $100 million
in modern terms.
More wealth than Attila had
ever seen in his life.
But even 6,000 pounds of gold
isn't enough for Attila.
He also wants revenge.
He has some scores to settle
with deserters from his army
who are now inside the walls of
Constantinople.
The Romans hand them over,
to a terrible fate.
Attila is ruthless, and when
there are deserters of his army
that go over to the other side,
he wants them back.
He demands them back and he gets them back,
and he doesn't welcome them with open arms.
He has them impaled.
He has them run through and
they're hung up to die over a
period of two days.
That is Attila the Hun.
It's the punishment for
the crime of disloyalty.
What kind of man would do this?
The method that Attila
uses to kill his enemies
demonstrates a particularly
brutal and sadistic cruelty.
Even Constantinople can't stand up to Attila
and Bleda. That means nowhere is safe.
Attila is running a Mafia-style
protection racket, and he's
doing it on a vast scale.
ARYA: Attila is a brilliant tactician.
He comes to the walls of
Constantinople, he threatens,
he gets his bribe, he goes
away, he can come back.
So he's like that Mafia boss
that keeps on coming, keeps on
extorting, and in the end he's
a part of your life; he's a
part of your culture and you
can't get rid of him.
Now only one thing stands
between Attila and total power:
his brother-in-arms and blood, Bleda.
NARRATOR: Attila the Hun and his brother Bleda
have created one of history's great rackets,
extorting gold from the Romans.
It's a family business that
works like a charm for 12 years.
Then brotherly love turns to
sibling rivalry.
One day in 445, Bleda goes
hunting and never comes back.
Jordanes, a Roman writer, calls it
homicide and fingers Attila for the hit.
Attila and his brother
have grown up together.
They've done everything together.
They've ruled together.
Attila callously murders him.
This shows Attila as a psychopathic
killer. >> And it leaves Attila as
sole leader of the Huns.
Attila has grown rich on extorted Roman
gold that he uses to keep his men loyal.
But the Romans have had enough.
They assemble an army
to engage Attila on the
battlefield at Utus in modern-day Bulgaria.
(Footsteps marching)
It's total carnage, and the Roman
opposition is all but wiped out.
The survivors make their excuses.
The Romans had to justify
their loss to these barbarians,
and how do they do that?
Well, it's not because they're
sophisticated and great and
intelligent; it's because they
were numerically far superior.
Oceans of armies overrunning the small
Roman army. >> Roman sources put Attila's
army at half a million and
their own at only 120,000,
outnumbered 4 to 1 by the barbarians.
For the Romans it's a
face-saving explanation.
But is it true?
Using the science of animal
husbandry, it is now possible
to calculate the real size of
Attila's army.
It all comes down to the number of horses.
The Huns' grazing land is here
on the Hungarian plain, a
natural bowl bounded by the
Alps, the Carpathian mountains
and the Danube.
Studies have shown that
the Hungarian grasslands can
support perhaps 150,000 horses.
That's already a lot less than the
half million Roman accounts suggest.
Beyond that, each of Attila's
men likely had several horses
to cover ground more quickly.
MANN: If each Hun horseman
needed, say, 5 horses each,
that's going to give a basic
army of 30,000.
This is quite a modest force
with which to take on the Roman
Empire, so if the Romans want
to explain their defeat by
referring to the overwhelming
numbers of the Huns, they need
a rather better excuse.
This analysis reveals the
total opposite of what the
Roman accounts say.
It's Attila who's outnumbered 4
to 1, not the Romans.
So how does he pull it off?
Clues can be found in the
account from the Roman writer Marcellinus.
His observations of the Huns
shortly before Attila is born
suggests they have a different
approach to warfare.
First he sends in his archers
to break up the Roman ranks.
Then he deploys two everyday
tools that the Romans are not
prepared for: the lasso and the net.
Simple equipment used in a
highly effective way.
There were probably
specifically assigned people to
use this to coordinate an actual maneuver.
So let's say you attack from one corner,
one flank to the other flank, and they would
use the rope and use that
effectively in a choreographed maneuver.
And when faced with
lasso-throwing horsemen,
there's little the Roman infantry can do.
CSORDAS: Lasso their neck.
Of course, in dragging them they
would be dead in seconds.
Rome has no answer to these tactics.
Tens of thousands die.
And there's another reason why the Romans
take a beating. They're simply no longer the
disciplined force that
dominated the barbarians for centuries.
This is your classic Roman
legionary as seen in countless
Hollywood films.
And basically he's wearing a
suit of armor called lorica
segmentata because of the
segmented layers within it,
a helmet and a large shield,
large rectangular shield which
is designed for close order fighting.
They locked their shields together, and
they raised their throwing javelins, their
pilums, threw their pilums at
the enemy, then charged forward
with their shields forward,
drew their shortswords, and stabbed home.
These were the soldiers
that conquered the world.
But by Attila's time, soldiers
like this were ancient history.
By the time of Attila,
a Roman legionary is looking
much, much more like this.
He's looking very different to
that guy over there.
I mean, essentially, he's now
got barbarian-style trousers
and his helmet is also sort of
based on a sort of barbarian
Persian design.
What's more, the sources
say the Roman army would have
largely been made up of mercenaries.
Barbarians.
They have none of the training
or equipment the Roman army
used to conquer the world.
Crushed by the defeat, the Romans
at Constantinople sue for peace.
An envoy heads to Attila's
headquarters in Hungary to talk terms.
Traveling with him is the
reporter Priscus, who writes
history's only firsthand account of Attila.
Historian John Mann retraces the journey.
Setting out from
Constantinople northwards, it
takes them perhaps a month or so.
And every day, Priscus finds
grisly evidence of Attila's savagery.
MANN: Along the way,
they come to areas which have
been devastated by the Huns on
their way south.
One of them being the town of
Naissus, which is shattered.
There are skulls still lying
about, bones on the riverbank.
Eventually they leave the Roman Empire
and cross into Attila's territory, reaching
the Tisza River.
MANN: They must have been
scared out of their wits by
what was ahead of them.
This was like coming to see
Saddam Hussein, but without any
warning at all.
Attila was random in his violence.
It's not known exactly
where Priscus met Attila, but
John Mann figures he is close.
Well, I think this is what we've been
looking for. This is the sort of place that
Priscus would finally have met Attila.
And the account he left of him
was a very surprising one.
Priscus expects to find a
foul tent city of unwashed barbarians.
What he sees surprises him.
Not just wooden huts, but a
stone-built bath complex, along
the lines of this one.
Priscus sees that there is a
bath complex within the
headquarters of Attila.
And this is shocking because
this is a great characteristic
of Roman culture, not the
culture of the Huns.
So the fact that it's present
there within the shadow of
Attila is a great indication
that the Huns can adapt and
adopt great Roman ideas, and the
bath is one of the key
characteristics of a Roman city.
By this account, Attila's a
regular guy who likes to kick
back in the pool after some
raping and pillaging.
He is also depicted as a guy
who loves his family.
Priscus' portrait of Attila
is one of a very rounded individual.
He is an affectionate father.
Priscus sees that.
He is a modest person.
So you do see that human side of
this very stoic ruler.
How does this square with
Priscus's descriptions of
Attila as a heavy-drinking,
quick-tempered thug who
doesn't think twice about
impaling spies and slaves?
Who is the real Attila? >> Inside,
Attila can act superficially, like an
upper-class Roman.
However, outside, as people are
being impaled, we see his true colors.
He is a psychopathic killer.
Two years after Priscus's visit, Attila's
got all he can from Constantinople.
But luckily, the Roman Empire
is split into two.
So having finished with the
eastern half of the Roman
Empire, he turns his attention west.
At the age of 45, Attila
is back in the saddle, eager
once again to shake down the Romans.
It's always worked before, but
this time he's badly
underestimated the empire.
NARRATOR: Attila the Hun and his barbarian
hordes are once more on the rampage, and
pushing their luck with the Romans.
They come galloping out
of the Hungarian plain into the
heart of Europe.
Everyone's surprised that
Attila now heads north from his
homeland, goes north and
crosses the Rhine, making one
of the most spectacular
smash-and-grab raids ever in
history, and he's in Central Europe.
Attila covers hundreds of miles with
thousands of men on horseback, all of them
fiery-eyed and spoiling for a fight.
It's as if they've been fed raw meat.
It turns out that they have.
The Roman historian Marcellinus
gets his hands on the menu:
uncooked flesh, warmed on horses' backs.
But raw meat is hard to digest,
even for a barbarian.
Surely this another case of the
Romans demonizing the bad guys.
Historian Robert Mason is going to
find out. >> We have this specially
prepared saddle blanket so that
we have as little horsehair as possible.
The horse is ridden for 6 hours to
discover if the meat becomes edible or just
revolting.
And so have another
slice of this. Piece for you.
Something has been done to it.
It has been imparted with a
certain tenderness.
It's not raw anymore.
Incredibly the story seems to be true.
Nutritionist Lynn Weaver thinks
she knows why.
There is the assumption
that the salt on the horse,
and salt is actually a
preservative, so perhaps that
is preserving the outside of
the meat, which would keep the
bacteria away.
It was also covered, and then there was a
lot of pressure given to it to tenderize it.
Raw meat is indigestible
because of its tough cellular structure.
The pounding action of riding
breaks down the cell walls, tenderizing it.
It's a version of the raw meat
dish steak tartare,
a practical dish that gives
Attila and his men more time in the saddle.
That's not bad.
Attila and his meat-fed forces storm across
Western Europe and come to the walled
city of Metz.
They roll out the battering
rams and the city falls.
He cuts deeper into Europe,
finding one ghost town after another.
The terrified inhabitants have fled.
But at Rheims, Archbishop Nicasius
stands firm, singing hymns to ward off
the barbarian.
But Attila doesn't care for hymns.
He slices off the archbishop's head.
Is there a grand strategy here,
or is Attila just on a bloody rampage?
Attila's attack on the
Western Empire of Rome has no
apparent strategic value whatsoever.
It is about spite, revenge,
hatred and destruction.
Finally, Attila reaches the
Catalaunian Plains in northern France.
And he comes head to head with
the Roman armies of Western Europe.
The Roman general Aetius has a simple
strategy: he's going for strength in numbers.
He's scoured Gaul, and pulled
together every last tribe that
has a grudge against Attila,
from the remnants of the
Burgundians to the Visigoths.
The two armies face each other.
It's showtime.
The key to this battle
was the high ground.
On the Catalaunian Plain there
was a ridge of high ground in
between the two armies, and
both sides raced to get there first.
And it was the Romans who got there
first. And at that point, they just dug
in on the ridge and let Attila's
cavalry just come at them up the hill.
It's cavalry against infantry,
dug in in a defensive position.
Both sides take big hits.
Sidonius Apollinaris, a
contemporary Gallic poet,
suggests 100,000 men die in a
single day, and the river
across the plain flows red with blood.
So you've got wave after
wave of Huns coming up this
ridge and getting thrown back
again and again and again,
and then, at the decisive
moment, the Visigoths just
charged down the hill.
Attila's just thrown right back
into his camp.
And the unthinkable's happened:
Attila's lost the battle.
Aetius wins by forcing
Attila to stand and fight
instead of allowing him to use
guerrilla tactics.
Attila turns out to be a very sore
loser. >> MALLOTT: Attila loses his
first major battle.
This isn't going to be a deterrent.
He believes in raw power.
He's going to be furious.
He wants vengeance.
He's going to try to get even.
It's exactly what Attila does.
He decides Rome is going to
pay, and sets a beady eye on Italy.
He crosses the Alps and
launches a new wave of death
and destruction.
First, it's the fortified city of Aquileia.
The siege machines do their job.
Attila's men pour into the city
and destroy it.
Attila has an advance scout:
his fearsome reputation.
Entire populations flee from his path.
But then Attila falters.
The story is that the pope
steps in and persuades him to turn back.
But the real story might be a
little less spiritual and a
little more to do with the
diseases ravaging Europe.
MANN: There were many
reasons to turn back: famine,
perhaps, but almost certainly plague.
So that in the end, it was not
the Italians that conquered
him, but bacteria.
With plague ravaging his army and winter
closing in, Attila makes the smart move
and goes home.
By Attila's standards, this hasn't
been the most successful European tour.
Still, he's loaded down with
pillaged and extorted gold.
He is around 47 years old and
has survived 19 years of bloody war.
It's not battle that finally
brings him down, but his
hard-living lifestyle.
NARRATOR: Attila the Hun: born to
raise hell. He has terrorized Europe and
the Balkans for 10 years,
amassing vast wealth and
killing hundreds of thousands.
By 453 AD, he's worn out and
ready for some rest and relaxation.
He never gets it.
He takes out a new bride,
and she's beautiful as these
stories go.
She's wonderful, she's young.
He takes her into his bedroom.
The next morning, he's dead.
According to Priscus, when Attila's
body is found, he's had a nosebleed.
Now can such a noble warrior
have died such an ignoble death?
The scourge of God, dead
from a nosebleed. How could this be?
Priscus provides medical
evidence in his account of Attila's death.
VALANI: Attila was found
in a stuporous state with
a lot of blood around the mouth.
There's blood in fact in the
close proximity as well, but
there's no evidence of vomitus.
Knowing this, a medical simulator can
be used to establish a probable cause of
death.
This brings up the
possibilities that the blood
either came in from the lungs or
the gastrointestinal tract.
Tuberculosis, infection or
a tumor could all cause
bleeding from the lungs, but
only small amounts of frothy blood.
This doesn't match what Priscus describes.
Attila was a heavy drinker
his whole life and was possibly
suffering from liver damage.
One of the consequences of
this is that the blood vessels
that feed into the liver end up
expanding and filling up even more.
Vessels in the throat lead
into one of the main veins
running to the liver.
VALANI: When too much
pressure builds up into
these vessels, they can
actually burst or rupture
leading to a massive hemorrhage.
These were the probable
consequences of his hard-living lifestyle.
A run of too much drinking, too
much carousing and too much stress.
His last night of anticipated
bliss ended in a coughing fit,
a sudden hemorrhage and a rush of blood.
The patient actually ends up choking in
their own blood. So in Attila's case it's
probably a combination of both.
The shock state from the
massive bleeding or hemorrhage,
as well as the filling of the
blood into the trachea and him
suffocating in his own blood,
that resulted in his death.
A bloody death for a bloody killer.
Attila grew up a nomad on the plains of
Hungary and challenged the might of the
Roman Empire.
The body count ran to the hundreds of
thousands. He waged wars of terror and
extortion.
He committed genocide, wiping
out the Burgundians in a
ferocious episode of bloodletting.
He destroyed city after city,
just because he could.
Rotting bodies filled the streets.
His revenge for treachery was
horrific: impaling, a slow and
painful death.
Where does this behavior place Attila
on the scale of Ancients Behaving Badly?
Was Attila a psychopathic
murderer who killed for the
sheer love of it, like Caligula?
Or was he driven to murder
as part of a vision, like Genghis
Khan?
His violence, his conquering,
doesn't seem directed to any specific end.
He wants to go out and destroy
almost for destruction's sake itself.
He's a cruel remorseless killer.
Attila is at the top of the
scale of psychopathic behavior.
All Attila cared about was destruction.
He had no vision that
ensured a future for the Huns.
Compared to the other
ancient tyrants, Attila is very
low on a scale of creativity.
He doesn't solve problems.
He doesn't build anything.
He doesn't leave anything behind.
When in doubt, kill.
It's a nasty psychological
profile that you can still find today.
MALLOTT: Attila reminds me
of a drug lord, a Pablo Escobar.
They're interested only in
naked power, money.
They create nothing.
They build nothing.
If anyone gets in your way, kill them.
Attila may be history's
first great terrorist.
He succeeded in building
enormous wealth from his
5th-century protection racket,
but his lack of vision resulted
in Attila failing to lay the
foundations of an enduring civilization.
After he died, it fell apart.
Just 30 years later, Attila's
entire empire had vanished.
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