171- The Gathering Storm

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode one seventy one, the Gathering Storm. Oh my goodness. The History of Rome tour is so much fun. We don't have firm dates for the next round, but historyofrometour.com. Check it out. It is so much fun. Also, as you may have noticed, a combination of jet lag and conflicting responsibilities have conspired to leave this episode a bit shorter than usual, but we will be back in full effect next week. I promise. Okay. Where were we? Ah, yes. It's April, and Attila the Hun is loose in the central empire. The Theodosian walls have managed to hold him off, but unfortunately, almost nothing else was able to say the same thing. Forts, garrisons, cities, armies, all overrun, ransacked, and left dazed and traumatized. But consistent with the standard Hun policy of the last fifteen years, Attila was not actually interested in annexing Roman territory or in trying to conquer the empire per se. As you'll recall, the whole trigger for this lightning campaign had been Constantinople's experiment with not paying the indemnity that they had agreed to. An experiment Attila hoped Constantinople now recognized to be a complete failure. Also consistent with standard Hun policy, Attila took the opportunity to jack up the going rate for keeping the Huns out of the field from 1,400 to 2,100 pounds of gold per year. And, oh, yeah, we're gonna need that 6,000 of gold you already owe us upfront. Left with no other choice and probably just happy that there was a choice besides the Huns kicked the crap out of us indefinitely, Theodosius the second agreed to the terms. Now I haven't really talked about this yet, but the Huns' indemnity policy goes a long way towards establishing them as something more advanced than your average snatch and grab barbarians. They were not at all interested in killing the goose that laid their golden egg. Sure, sometimes you had to go down and kick the goose around a bit if it tries to stop laying golden eggs, but you don't kill it. You let it live. The Huns were far sighted enough to recognize that just blasting the Romans out of the water wouldn't be any good for anyone. They had this nice advanced economy that had long established trade networks crisscrossing the Mediterranean, and that reached as far afield as India and China. Why mess that up? So as much as they could afford to, they didn't mess it up. They pushed it around some, sure, but it was imperative to leave the Roman economic structure intact so that every year, it could deposit 2,100 pounds of gold on their doorstep. So as much as the Huns have been portrayed as mindless barbarian demons rampaging mindlessly across late antiquity, they strike me as pretty savvy operators. Meanwhile, off in the West, just as Theodosius and the Eastern empire were agreeing to pay whatever the Huns wanted, Flavius Aetius was …