69 Fun Facts About Attila the Hun

By what nickname was Attila widely known?

The Scourge of God, flagellum Dei in Latin, cast Attila as heaven's whip: Christian writers explained his raids as divine punishment for their own sins.

One long-held theory builds Attila's name from the Gothic word 'atta', giving what meaning?

Little father, from Gothic atta, 'father', plus a diminutive: on this view history knows the great Hun by a name from his Gothic-speaking subjects. Others argue for Turkic roots, and the matter is unsettled.

With which elder brother did Attila rule the Huns jointly until 445?

Bleda shared the throne for about a decade; Roman and Gothic accounts say he was then killed through Attila's treachery, leaving his younger brother sole king of the Huns.

At an Italian siege, which rooftop-nesting birds, flying off with their young, reportedly convinced Attila the city would fall?

Storks were leaving their nests on the rooftops, Jordanes relates, and Attila told his weary army that the birds could foresee the city's ruin; the Huns renewed the assault and broke in.

At a banquet where his guests were served delicacies on silver, what did Attila himself eat?

Only meat: the envoy who sat at that table noted that the king took none of the dainties and wore no gold or gems, unlike the chiefs around him.

In the description Jordanes passed down, what did Attila look like?

Short, broad-chested and large-headed, with small eyes, a flat nose and a thin greying beard: the same passage calls this lover of war restrained in action and gracious to suppliants.

From which region did the Huns emerge before sweeping into Europe around 370?

East of the Volga is where they first enter the record; they soon overran the Alans and the Ostrogoths, and drove other Goths to seek refuge inside the Roman Empire.

What kind of fighters made the Huns so feared across Europe?

Mounted archers: Huns shot accurately from the saddle, charged hard and melted away in sudden retreats, and the sheer speed of their movements left slower armies with no answer.

Which Roman emperor did Goths fleeing the Huns kill at Adrianople in 378?

Valens died with much of his army: the Goths had crossed the Danube two years earlier as refugees from the Huns, then rose in revolt after mistreatment by Roman officials.

How did Attila and his brother insist on negotiating their first treaty with Roman envoys?

On horseback: a Roman historian records that the Huns thought it improper to confer dismounted, so the envoys stayed in the saddle too rather than talk up at them from the ground.

In Attila's first treaty with the Romans, what happened to their annual tribute of 350 pounds of gold?

It was doubled to 700 pounds of gold a year, yet it bought only a few years of quiet: in the 440s the Huns stormed across the Danube, sacked cities and tripled the price again.

What did Attila's Huns accuse a Roman bishop of doing, as their pretext for invading the Balkans?

Robbing Hun royal tombs was the charge, and the bishop settled it his own way: afraid of being handed over, he betrayed his city to the Huns, which opened the main road into the Balkans.

What did Attila's Huns shock the Romans by bringing against Balkan fortress cities in the 440s?

Battering rams and rolling siege towers let horse nomads crack walled cities that had once fallen only to treachery; Naissus, birthplace of Constantine the Great, was left deserted.

What stopped Attila from taking Constantinople during his Balkan campaigns?

The city's double walls held even after an earthquake threw part of them down in 447: the chariot-racing factions supplied thousands of men and rebuilt them within weeks, before the Huns arrived.

A Roman plot to assassinate Attila failed when the Hun envoy they had bribed did what?

Told Attila everything: the envoy Edeco revealed the plot, and Attila sent the bag that had held the bribe back to Constantinople hung round a messenger's neck, to shame the emperor in his own court.

In his 447 campaign Attila's forces rampaged through the Balkans as far south as which pass?

Thermopylae, where Leonidas had held off the Persians nearly a thousand years earlier, marked the limit of the raid; one contemporary wrote that the Huns took more than a hundred cities on the way.

Which Western Roman princess sent Attila her ring in 450, which he chose to read as a marriage proposal?

Honoria had been caught in an affair with a member of her household and promised to a dull senator against her will; her plea for rescue handed Attila a ready-made excuse to invade the West.

What did Attila demand as dowry for marrying the emperor's sister?

Half of the Western Empire was his price for a bride who may never have proposed; the emperor refused, and the next year Attila led his army into Gaul.

Which Roman general, once a hostage among the Huns, led the alliance that faced Attila in Gaul in 451?

Flavius Aëtius had for years won his own power struggles with hired Hun armies; in 451 he had to turn and fight the people who had made his career.

To roughly what size did Jordanes exaggerate Attila's army when it arrived in Belgica in 451?

It included Gepids, Ostrogoths, Rugians, Scirians, Heruls, Thuringians, Alans and Burgundians.

Which city in today's Lorraine did Attila's Huns reportedly burn on Easter eve 451, sparing only a chapel of St Stephen?

Metz burned on the eve of Easter, Gregory of Tours relates, and only the oratory of St Stephen escaped the flames; the city's cathedral still bears the saint's name.

Which saint is said to have saved Paris from Attila with her prayers?

Genevieve talked panicking Parisians out of fleeing and led the city's women in days of fasting and prayer; the Huns passed Paris by, and the city later took her as its patron saint.

At which battle in 451 was Attila stopped by a Roman-Visigothic alliance?

The Catalaunian Plains ended with Attila penned inside his wagon camp, where Jordanes says he piled up saddles for a funeral pyre, ready to leap into the flames rather than be taken alive.

Which Visigothic king was killed fighting alongside the Romans against Attila in 451?

Theodoric I went down in the thick of the fight, either thrown and trampled by his own charging men or speared by an Ostrogoth, Jordanes says; his body was found only the next day.

Which city on the Loire was Attila besieging in 451 when an approaching Roman-led army forced him to pull back?

Orléans was close to falling: Gregory of Tours has the walls already shaking while its bishop sent watchers up to the ramparts three times before they saw the relief army's dust.

Which city owes its origins partly to people fleeing Attila's 452 invasion?

Venice grew from refugees who sheltered on marshy islands that Hun horsemen had no way to reach; Gibbon remarked that the great destroyer had, without meaning to, founded a republic.

Which northern Italian city did Attila raze so completely its site was hard to recognise afterwards?

Aquileia was one of the richest and strongest cities on the Adriatic; Jordanes says its resistance had the Hun army eager to go home, and that once it fell they left scarcely a trace of it.

Which pope met Attila near Mantua in 452 and won his promise to withdraw from Italy?

Leo I did not go alone: a former consul and a former prefect travelled with him as the emperor's envoys, yet tradition gave the pope the whole credit for the retreat.

Superstitious fear of whose fate reportedly gave Attila pause about marching on Rome?

Alaric's death within months of sacking Rome in 410 was the warning Attila's own men pressed on him, Jordanes says; he was still wavering over the march when Rome's peace embassy arrived.

At which river did Attila's 452 invasion of Italy finally halt?

The Po was as far as he got: famine and disease were wasting his army and Eastern Roman troops had crossed the Danube to raid his homeland, so Rome's embassy found him ready to leave.

Which Eastern emperor, successor to Theodosius II, stopped paying tribute to the Huns?

Marcian cut off the gold in 450, and Attila died before he could punish him; Jordanes says that on the very night of the death the emperor dreamed he was shown Attila's bow, broken.

According to the conventional account, Attila died in 453 at a feast celebrating what?

His latest marriage came, Jordanes says, after countless other wives; late the next morning his attendants broke down the doors and found the young bride weeping beneath her veil.

How is Attila conventionally said to have died?

Choked on a heavy nosebleed as he lay on his back in a drunken sleep, with no wound on the body; Jordanes sneered that drink gave a shameful end to a king renowned in war.

A rival account by Marcellinus Comes, written 80 years later, claims Attila was killed how?

Stabbed by his wife, the chronicler wrote some 80 years on; historians call it hearsay, but Norse legend tells it the same way, with the Hun king killed by his own queen in revenge for her kin.

According to Jordanes, how did the Huns mourn Attila?

Gashed their faces to weep blood: so great a warrior, Jordanes explains, was to be mourned with the blood of men and not with tears, while picked horsemen circled his silk tent chanting his deeds.

Jordanes says Attila was buried in three nested coffins made of which metals?

Gold, silver and iron, and Jordanes explains the choice: iron because he had subdued the nations, gold and silver because he had taken the honours of both Roman empires.

What happened to the men who buried Attila, according to Jordanes?

Killed to keep the grave secret, Jordanes says: he was buried by night with captured weapons and jewelled trappings, and the diggers died so that no one could learn the spot.

What was the strava celebrated over Attila's tomb?

Grief and joy alternated in extremes, Jordanes says.

Which Gepid king, once Attila's adviser, led the revolt that shattered the Hunnic Empire at Nedao in 454?

Ardaric had been famed for his loyalty to Attila, but when the dead king's sons proposed sharing out the subject peoples by lot like a family estate, he was the first to rise against them.

Attila's Roman secretary Orestes later made his young son an emperor, usually remembered as what?

The last Western Roman emperor, the boy Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476 after ten months; his father had spent years at the Hun court as one of Attila's most trusted envoys.

Which Hungarian royal house claimed direct descent from Attila?

The Árpáds had court chroniclers make the case: in one, the conquering Magyars choose the Danube plain because it had been King Attila's land, and Árpád's father is said to descend from him.

In Hungarian chronicle tradition, what was the name of Attila's brother?

Buda, the chronicles say, renamed the royal city after himself while Attila was away at war; the king came home, killed him with his own hands and had the body thrown into the Danube.

Which Hungarian king of 1458–1490 was happy to be called 'the second Attila'?

Matthias had a chronicler to thank: Thuróczy's history of 1488 recast the Hun king as a model conqueror and hailed his own war-loving sovereign as a second Attila.

According to Jordanes, Attila possessed a holy sword given by which god?

Mars, in Jordanes's telling: a herdsman followed the trail of a lame heifer to a blade buried in the grass and carried it to Attila, who took the gift as proof that he was meant to rule the world.

The so-called Sword of Attila is kept in a museum in which city?

Vienna's Imperial Treasury shows it under another famous name, the Sabre of Charlemagne, yet it is eastern European work of the early 900s, made too late for either man.

Which Renaissance artist painted the legendary meeting of Attila and the pope?

Raphael finished the fresco under a new pope and gave him a double cameo: the reigning pontiff appears twice, once as the pope who faces Attila and once as a cardinal riding behind him.

Which literary character boasts of descent from Attila?

Count Dracula makes the claim to his guest early in the novel: Stoker made his vampire a Székely, one of a Transylvanian people who long claimed the Huns as forefathers.

Under what name does Attila appear in the Nibelungenlied and other Middle High German poems?

Etzel is a long way from the conqueror of history: in the great German epic he is a widowed king whose second marriage brings a vengeful queen to his court and, years later, a massacre to his hall.

In the Nibelungenlied, Attila is the second husband of which woman, who destroys both the Huns and her Burgundian kin?

Kriemhild accepts the Hun king only because she sees a chance to avenge her murdered first husband, Siegfried; years later she has her brothers invited to his court, and the feast ends in slaughter.

Which composer conceived an opera about Attila in 1812 that was never written?

Beethoven had just set two Kotzebue plays for a new theatre in Pest when he wrote asking the playwright for a libretto, preferring a big subject from the darker periods of history, such as Attila.

Which composer's 1846 opera Attila is loosely based on his invasion of Italy?

Verdi gave the line everyone remembered to a Roman general bargaining with Attila: you may have the universe, but leave Italy to me, which Italians of the 1840s took as a call against foreign rule.

WWI Allied propaganda called Germans 'Huns' because of a 1900 speech praising Attila by whom?

Kaiser Wilhelm II was seeing off troops sent to crush the Boxer Rebellion and told them to take no prisoners, so that the name German would be feared in China as the Huns' had been under Attila.

Which river did Attila's army cross in 451 to invade Roman Gaul?

The Rhine: he crossed it announcing that he came as a friend of Rome to fight only the Visigoths, then sacked one Roman city in Gaul after another.

Which actor played the title role in the 2001 TV miniseries Attila?

Gerard Butler had trained as a lawyer in Scotland before he took up acting; wider fame came later with another ancient warrior king, Leonidas in the film 300.

In Attila's timber-built capital, his chief deputy had which Roman luxury built in imported stone?

A bathhouse, built of stone hauled from Pannonia by a captive architect who hoped to earn his freedom with it; instead, a visiting envoy reports, he was kept on as the bath attendant.

Which Norse saga features Attila as a major character?

Volsunga saga makes him a king who marries the widow of the dragon-slayer Sigurd, lures her brothers to his hall for their gold and has one of them thrown into a snake pit.

In which two modern countries is Attila, or the variant Atilla, a common male first name?

Hungary and Turkey: medieval Hungarian chronicles claimed the Huns as forebears and Hungarians came to place him among their own kings, so the man the West remembers as a destroyer became a name to give sons.

Many skulls from Hun-era graves show which deliberate custom?

Heads bound long in infancy: tight wrappings made a baby's skull grow elongated, and the fashion spread from the steppe to the Germanic peoples the Huns ruled.

Which young woman was found weeping beside Attila's body the morning after he died?

Ildico was there at the end of an empire: Attila's sons were soon fighting over the inheritance, and the peoples he had ruled rose up and broke free.

What was the name of Attila's father?

Mundzuk is named in the dirge the Huns' best horsemen chanted as they circled his dead son's tent: 'King Attila, born of his sire Mundiuch, lord of bravest tribes.'

Which Vandal king's seizure of Carthage drew Roman armies away to Sicily, clearing Attila's path across the Danube in 441?

Geiseric took Carthage in 439, and in 455 his fleet plundered Rome itself, the raid that later gave English the word 'vandal' for a wilful destroyer.

Which Western Roman emperor was talked out of executing his own sister for appealing to Attila?

Valentinian III was furious: he had his sister's go-between tortured and beheaded, and only their mother's pleading kept the princess herself alive.

The Roman fortress city of Singidunum, razed by Attila's Huns, became which modern capital?

Belgrade grew around Singidunum's fortress on a headland where the Sava meets the Danube, a site so strategic that it has been destroyed and rebuilt again and again.

Which son did Attila favour because seers foretold he would restore the family's fortunes?

Ernak was the one guest who softened the stern king at a 449 banquet: a Roman envoy watched him pull the boy close by the cheek and gaze on him calmly while ignoring his other sons.

In Dante's Inferno, what is Attila condemned to stand in for eternity?

Boiling blood fills the river where Dante sinks tyrants as deep as their guilt, while centaurs patrol the bank and shoot arrows at any who rise too high.

In legend, which two saints appeared in the sky with swords to scare Attila away from Rome?

Peter and Paul are the legend's answer; one chronicler of Attila's own day put the retreat down to famine and disease among the Huns.

Which future pop superstar fronted a 1970 heavy-metal duo called Attila?

Billy Joel ran a Hammond organ through a Marshall stack in place of a guitar and posed for the cover dressed as a barbarian in a meat locker; the album sank and he went solo a year later.

In a captured Italian palace, Attila reportedly had a painting redone to show Roman emperors doing what?

Pouring gold at his feet from sacks: the original in Milan's palace showed the emperors enthroned with Scythians lying at their feet, so Attila had an artist turn the scene round.

In which family comedy does Attila the Hun chase the hero but end up weeping in his arms?

Night at the Museum brings a wax model of Attila to life after dark, and the night guard he has been hunting finally tames him with sympathy and a bear hug instead of force.