Châlons AD 451: When Rome and the Visigoths Stood Together Against Attila

A medieval depiction of the battle of the Catalaunian Plains from the 15th-century Chronica Hungarorum (artistic illustration, not a contemporary image). Image via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Châlons AD 451: When Rome and the Visigoths

Stood Together Against Attila

On a June day in AD 451, two of the largest armies ever assembled in western Europe crashed into each other on a plain in what is now north-eastern France. On one side stood Attila the Hun, the most feared commander of the ancient world, at the head of a coalition of Huns and subject Germanic peoples. On the other stood an extraordinary alliance: the armies of a dying Roman Empire fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Visigoths, their old enemies. It was the last great battle of the Western Roman Empire, and historians have argued over it ever since.

Key facts

• Battle: The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (also called Châlons, Troyes or Maurica)
• Date: Around 20 June AD 451 (the most widely accepted date)
• Location: Near Châlons-en-Champagne or Troyes, in north-eastern France; the exact site is disputed
• Commanders: Flavius Aetius and the Visigothic king Theodoric I against Attila the Hun
• Result: Disputed. Traditionally a Roman allied victory; many modern historians call it indecisive
• Cost: Ancient sources speak of 165,000 to 300,000 dead, figures no modern scholar takes at face value. All accounts agree the fighting was exceptionally bloody

Why Attila marched on Gaul

Attila had united the Hunnic tribes into a formidable empire, and by 451 his gaze had turned west. His pretext was a piece of palace intrigue: the previous year, Honoria, the sister of the Western emperor Valentinian III, had secretly written to Attila offering him her ring to help her escape her confinement. Attila chose to read it as a marriage proposal and demanded half of the Western Empire as a dowry. Valentinian refused, and Attila had his excuse.

Underneath, there was strategy. Gaul was held only loosely by a weakened Rome, and the wealthy Visigoths of the south-west were alone and restive. Jordanes also claims the Vandal king Gaiseric encouraged Attila; modern scholars distrust that.

Early in 451 Attila crossed the Rhine and marched down the Roman roads through Strasbourg, Worms, Mainz, Trier and Metz, which fell in April, to Reims and finally Orléans. Some of the colourful sack-and-salvation stories that later church chronicles attach to the invasion have no archaeological backing at all.

The opposing forces: weapons and equipment

The armies that met at Châlons were mirror images of each other: both were polyglot coalitions in which genuine Roman regulars played only a small part.

The Roman coalition was commanded by Flavius Aetius, the magister utriusque militiae and the effective ruler of the West, and the Visigothic king Theodoric I. Aetius had raced from Italy and, with the former praetorian prefect Avitus, persuaded Theodoric to bury the hatchet. With them marched the Alans of the Loire under king Sangiban, plus Franks, Burgundians, Saxons and Armoricans. Jordanes's list of allies even includes the mysterious "Liticiani", which Gregory of Tours suggests may have been troops from Britain, so British soldiers may have stood on that field. The days of the great legions were gone: most of this army was foederati, Germanic allies fighting under their own kings.

The Hunnic coalition was built around Attila's horse archers, armed with powerful composite bows that were devastating when fired on the move. Around this core marched the Gepids under king Ardaric and Gothic peoples led by the Amali brothers Valamir, Theodemir and Videmir, with further contingents of Rugians, Sciri, Thuringians, Franks, Burgundians and Heruli. Franks and Burgundians fought on both sides, and as one historian has noted, no single nation dominated either army.

Tactics and terrain

The battlefield was a broad plain rising on one side to a sharp ridge, and that ridge decided how the day was fought. Attila's men seized one end; Aetius's Romans seized the other, with the crest between them unoccupied. Attila's instinct was to pin the enemy centre with his horse archers while his weight fell on a flank. Aetius was ready and placed the Alans, skilled cavalrymen who knew Hunnic methods from long experience, in the centre of his line.

The siege before the battle also mattered. Attila had spent weeks before Orléans, and his final assault on 14 June was broken off when Aetius's coalition arrived. The Huns were already turning for home with their loot when the allies caught up with them. Several modern historians, including J. B. Bury, insist that the failed siege of Orléans, not the battle itself, was the decisive moment of the whole campaign.

How the battle unfolded

Attila consulted his diviners on the morning of battle: disaster for the Huns, but the death of an enemy leader. He waited until the ninth hour, about half past two, so his men could slip away after dark if beaten. Some scholars think the delay was simply deployment time.

The Romans under Aetius and the Visigoths under Thorismund, Theodoric's son, got to the crest first and threw back the Gepids. Theodoric then led his men against the Amali Goths fighting for Attila and was killed in the assault, either thrown from his horse and trampled by his own advancing warriors, or slain by the spear of an Amali warrior named Andag. Jordanes, who worked for Andag's son, favours the second version, which may tell you something.

Enraged by the loss of their king, the Visigoths fell on Attila's own household troops with such fury that he was driven back into his camp, fortified with wagons in the steppe fashion. Darkness fell and chaos followed: Thorismund rode into the Hunnic camp by mistake and was wounded before his men dragged him out, while Aetius, separated from his own troops, spent the night among his Gothic allies.

The next morning the battlefield was, in Jordanes's words, piled high with bodies, and the Huns did not venture out. The allies surrounded the wagon fort, and Attila, unbowed, built a funeral pyre of horse saddles in the middle of his camp and announced he would throw himself into the flames rather than fall into enemy hands.

Meanwhile the Visigoths found their king's body where the dead lay thickest and carried it away with songs of honour in sight of the enemy. Thorismund, the new king, wanted to storm the camp and finish Attila, but Aetius talked him out of it. Jordanes says Aetius feared the Visigoths would become an even greater threat once the Huns were gone, so he urged Thorismund to hurry home to Toulouse and secure his throne before his brothers could seize it.

Casualties and outcome

The figures handed down are fantastic: 165,000 dead according to Jordanes, 300,000 according to the contemporary chronicler Hydatius. Neither can be true. Feeding an army of even 30,000 men on campaign was at the limit of what the age allowed. But every primary source agrees the slaughter was extraordinary, which makes the dispute about the outcome all the sharper.

The traditional view, beginning in the sixth century, was that Châlons was a Roman allied victory, the triumph that halted Attila. Many modern historians are more cautious and call it a draw or an indecisive bloodbath. The Huns were not destroyed: Attila marched away with the bulk of his army and would invade Italy the very next year. What the allies achieved was strategic rather than tactical. Attila's Gaul campaign was halted and his aura of invincibility cracked.

Strategic consequences

The long-term effects were far less decisive than legend suggests. In 452 Attila struck into Italy instead, sacking Aquileia after a three-month siege and ravaging the Po Valley, before an embassy led by Pope Leo I negotiated his withdrawal. He died in 453, and within a year of the battle of Nedao in 454 his empire had torn itself apart. Edward Gibbon called Châlons the last victory won in the name of the Western Roman Empire, and in the nineteenth century it was listed among the fifteen decisive battles of the world. Bury disagreed, arguing its significance had been enormously exaggerated and that the campaign was really decided at Orléans. Modern scholarship sits between the two: the battle did not save Roman Gaul, but it broke the myth that the Huns could not be stood against. In the event, it was the Visigoths, the Franks and the Burgundians, not Rome, who inherited Gaul.

Technical lessons

Châlons rewards a military reader because it is a textbook in coalition warfare. Aetius's greatest achievement was diplomatic, not tactical: holding together Romans, Visigoths, Alans, Franks and Burgundians, peoples with centuries of grievances against each other, long enough to fight one battle. Logistics, not courage, set the limits of ancient warfare: Attila's army had to keep moving because the countryside could not feed it, and that hunger had put him in retreat before a blow was struck. And it shows a cold political calculation: Aetius deliberately let Attila escape because he feared his own allies more than his enemy. Whether it was wise is still debated. Finally, the battle warns against ancient numbers. When the sources claim 300,000 dead on a fifth-century battlefield, they are not reporting statistics; they are telling you how the battle felt.

Related articles

• Adrianople AD 378: The Day Rome Lost an Emperor and an Army (previous instalment in this battles series)
• Battle of Mons Graupius AD 83: How Rome Fought Its Last Great Battle in Britain (series continuity)
• Battle of Watling Street: How Rome Crushed Boudica's Revolt (where the series began)
• The Victoria Cross: How Britain's Highest Award for Bravery Came to Be (battlefield leadership and its price)

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Battle of the Catalaunian Plains" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Catalaunian_Plains): belligerents, prelude, course of the battle and modern scholarly disputes, cross-checked against its cited classical sources (Jordanes's Getica, Hydatius's Chronicon, Gregory of Tours, Priscus via the Chronicon Paschale) and modern historians including Ian Hughes, Peter Heather, E. A. Thompson, J. B. Bury and Hyun Jin Kim
• Jordanes, Getica (via English translation summaries): the principal surviving account, treated with the scholarly caution it requires
• Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ("the last victory achieved in the name of the Western Roman Empire")
• Edward Shepherd Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: the traditional "saved civilisation" interpretation
• J. B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire: the sceptical reassessment quoted above