The Sword of Attila (34 page)

Within the Church, differences in the style of Christian worship were becoming increasingly apparent between East and West, resulting in the distinctions that exist to this day between the Church of Rome and that of Constantinople. As these differences became institutionalized, theologians became entangled in debate over matters of doctrine and practice that became increasingly obscure – a parallel to the sophistic tradition of philosophical debate in the late classical period, about style more than substance. Despite their often recondite nature, these debates resulted in ‘schisms' that led to the adherents of one or another position being branded as heretics and persecuted, often to death; more Christians were killed by fellow believers in this way than were ever thrown to the lions by the pagan emperors; a dark side of Christianity in the West that was to blight its history for many centuries to come.

St Augustine and Pelagius

Two scholars in the early fifth century
AD
who figure in this novel stand out for their impact on early Christian thought, and on the relationship between Roman Christianity and the conduct of war in the final decades of the western empire. The first was Bishop Augustine of Hippo Regius in North Africa, later canonized as St Augustine; the second was a monk of probable British origin named Pelagius. We know a great deal about Augustine because his ideas became part of mainstream Christian thinking in the West through his two greatest written works,
Confessions
and
City of God
; Pelagius, on the other hand, was branded a heretic and nothing of his original writing survives.

Augustine's
City of God
can be seen as a response to the barbarian invasions of his lifetime as well as the endemic weakness he saw in the Roman state, leading him to dismiss earthly empires and assert that the only triumphant one would be the spiritual kingdom of the Church, his ‘City of God'. It was a position that would have found few followers among the army leadership looking for a militant church to provide a rallying point for troops on the ground, rather than one that had abandoned earthly matters and looked only to heaven. On the other hand, many of Augustine's other assertions pleased the clergy and state because they served to strengthen the hold of the Church over the people, including his belief that bishops and priests were divinely ordained and that divine favour or ‘grace' was a prerequisite of human action – that is, human action was something that required the intervention of priests and the rituals of the Church that were becoming established at this period.

It was this latter point that put Augustine at odds with Pelagius, who argued that human actions did not need divine or priestly guidance and that people could behave according to their own free will. Pelagius' thinking may reflect an undercurrent of individualism in the spiritual life of Roman Britain and the old Celtic world of north-west Europe, among people attracted to the teachings of Jesus when they first reached Britain in the early empire but who were less amenable to the Roman Church as it later developed. The legacy of this distinctive north-west European tradition, at odds with the Roman Church, can be seen a thousand years later in the Protestant revolution and the spread of non-conformism in Europe and beyond. The development of religious thinking in the fifth century therefore has a direct bearing not only on military strategy at the time – on whether or not an ‘earthly' empire was worth fighting for – but also on our understanding of the Christian world today.

The Roman Army in the Fifth Century
AD

The late Roman army was very different from the Republican army of my previous novel in this series,
Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage.
The danger in looking at past eras where generalization seems possible, such as ancient Rome, is to foreshorten them and apply one well-documented image – of soldiers, of lifestyle, of building types – to the entire period, when in fact huge expanses of time are involved; the six-hundred-year period between the siege of Punic Carthage in the second century
BC
and the Hun invasions of the fifth century
AD
is almost exactly the same span of time as that between the Battle of Agincourt and the present day. The changes we see in the late Roman army partly reflect the developments we should expect to see over such a long time period, but they also owe much to the reforms under the emperors Diocletian and Constantine mentioned above.

In many respects we know less about the late Roman army than we do about its Republican predecessor. For the army in the second century
BC
we have the extensive military treatise of Polybius, whereas none of the fifth-century
AD
historians whose work survives were themselves soldiers or much interested in military detail. The
Notitia Dignitatum,
a fourth-century
AD
catalogue of offices in the Roman Empire, tells us much about the upper structures of command but little about organization at the unit level. Unlike in the earlier empire, there are few tombstones in late antiquity inscribed with details of a soldier's military career, and little accumulation of archaeological and inscriptional evidence from forts where occupation by individual units had been sustained over long periods. Moreover, fewer sieges and battles of late antiquity were outright victories for the Romans, and even those that were are rarely recorded in eyewitness accounts or in more than a few lines of text, often with no detail of the tactics or units involved.

Again, because of our tendency to foreshorten, to draw together fragmentary evidence that is in fact quite widely dispersed in time – even in the context of the late Roman army in the West, we are talking about a period of a century and half, from Constantine the Great to the fall of the western empire in
AD
476 – some modern accounts of the late Roman army can present a bewilderingly complex picture, whereas if we were to know the picture in detail at any one point in time it might seem more orderly and rational. What the apparent diversity of ranks and unit titles does show, particularly as we move into the fifth century, is an army rapidly evolving and reshaping in response to external threat, internal discord and the increasing incorporation of barbarian units within its fold, all of it overshadowed by the knowledge that the army would soon have to face an enemy from the steppe-lands of Asia in a showdown as decisive as any in Rome's long history.

Our adjective ‘Byzantine', meaning excessively detailed and complicated, comes from the name of the old Greek colony on the Bosporus where Constantinople was built, and the term ‘Byzantine' is often used to refer to the eastern Roman Empire from its creation in the fourth century
AD
until Constantinople finally fell to the Turks in 1453. At first glance the late Roman army might seem ‘Byzantine' in its organization, over-administered and paralleling the complexity of the new provincial governance created in the fourth century. However, delve deeper, come closer to the soldiers themselves, and it is possible to see how this picture might give a misleading impression of its effectiveness as a fighting force. In many respects the early imperial army was more tightly controlled and less flexible, with the legions having something of the intractability of European infantry regiments in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If we leave aside the apparent complexity of higher-level organization, we can see an army in the fifth century where greater tactical responsibility was devolved to smaller units, with more flexibility given to commanders at a lower level and more initiative expected from the individual soldier. It was this that gave the late Roman army its strength, and this is something I have tried to bring across in this novel.

Officers and Other Ranks

Gone in large measure was the
‘cursus honorum',
the succession of military and civil offices that formed a fixed career structure for a Roman of senatorial or equestrian rank in the early empire. In the early fifth century the sons of aristocrats would still be ‘commissioned' as junior officers, but only after having gone through tribune school. Whereas the officer academy of the second century
BC
in my first novel in this series was conjectural, the
schola militarum
in the late empire is attested historically, a forerunner of modern academies such as Sandhurst and West Point. A crucial difference from my earlier academy is that students in the
schola militarum
included many former ‘non-commissioned' officers, men who had been recommended by the
magister
of their field army or the
dux
of their frontier unit, meaning that the officer corps of the late Roman army included more men risen from the ranks than had been the case in the early empire. This gave a very different flavour to army service, where any
milites
could aspire to high command and where many of the soldier-emperors and
magisteres milites
were themselves men of humble origin who had risen up the ladder through military merit rather than through privilege of birth.

The old rank of
centurion
still existed in some units, including those that still carried the title
legio.
However, the familiar legion of the early empire, numbering up to seven thousand men and divided into cohorts and centuries, had ceased to exist by the fifth century, and units that still carried that title were no different from the other smaller units, often called
numeri
– many with nominal strengths of perhaps a thousand or five hundred men – that formed the building blocks of the late Roman army. The role of the centurion in commanding a company-sized unit was now taken by a tribune, who as we have seen could either be a young officer or a veteran promoted from the ranks. The prevalence of veterans as unit commanders would have placed a particular onus on a newly appointed tribune with no field experience, his men being less deferential to his social status than they might have been in the early empire and expecting him to earn their respect the hard way through leadership in battle.

‘Tribune' is best understood not as an actual rank but as a title meaning ‘commander of a unit', the relative status of the tribune being determined by the unit involved – so that the tribune of a
limitanei numerus,
perhaps 80 or 100 men, would be understood as junior to the tribune of an
equus comitatenses
or a
pedes homoerari,
respectively an elite cavalry guard unit and a larger infantry unit of hundreds of men. In modern terms, a tribune might be the equivalent of anything from a platoon to a battalion commander, from lieutenant to lieutenant-colonel. For lower ranks, the many titles attested in late antiquity for junior NCOs and private soldiers could represent a collation from different time periods, as suggested above, though like the modern British army there may have been different titles for the same rank according to specialized roles or traditions within that unit, similar to sapper, gunner, trooper, fusilier, rifleman or Guardsman. In this novel I refer to private soldiers by their most commonly attested title,
pedes,
literally ‘foot soldier', or
milites.

Weapons

The armour and weapons of the Roman soldier had also changed dramatically from the early empire. Gone were the
lorica segmentata
plate armour, bare legs and sandals of the legionary; soldiers were now more likely to wear chainmail, tunics and trousers, an image that to us would appear more medieval than Roman. The short thrusting
gladius
sword and the
pilum
spear of the legionary had been replaced by an array of weapons that sometimes reflected the barbarian origins of their users, including the composite bow. Sword types that had been copied by Germanic smiths centuries before from Greek, Etruscan and early Roman examples, and had then evolved to suit barbarian fighting tactics – such as the long sword from a fifth-century warrior's grave in Hungary that illustrates this novel – had in turn become the basis for late Roman swords; weapons technology had thus come full circle by the middle of the fifth century
AD
, when soldiers fighting for Rome were pitted against barbarian invaders as never before, in a confrontation where Roman military might and the reputation of Rome in her heyday could no longer be counted on to hold sway against a man who saw himself as the next emperor of the known world.

Organization

The army of the early empire can be divided broadly into legionaries – citizen-soldiers – and auxiliaries, men from the new provinces who would be awarded Roman citizenship after a term of service; it also included irregular units from newly allied frontier tribes, the
foederati.
After the emperor Caracalla granted universal citizenship to free men within the empire in
AD
212 the distinction in status between legionaries and auxiliaries became blurred, though the legions continued in their role as units garrisoned within the provinces ready for deployment, and the auxiliaries as frontier units.

The reforms of the emperors Diocletian and Constantine did away with this old army structure, replacing the legions with
comitatenses,
literally ‘companions', and the frontier units with
limitanei,
border troops. These new units broadly continued the distinction in role between the legionaries and auxiliaries, but there were big changes in internal organization, particularly between the legions and the
comitatenses.
The legions had been large units of five thousand men or more, with the
esprit de corps
of a modern regiment but a tactical role more akin to that of a brigade; they were suited to the set-piece battles typical of the late Republic, for example during the Punic Wars. The
comitatenses,
by contrast, comprised units of about eight hundred or a thousand men, more like a modern battalion.