Attila’s invasions of the Balkans

Since the 420s the Eastern Empire had paid the Huns to keep the peace, and by the treaty of Margus (435) Attila and Bleda obtained a doubled tribute of 700 pounds of gold a year, the return of fugitives and open markets. The Huns then attacked Roman traders at a market on the Danube, accusing the bishop of Margus of robbing Hunnic graves, and in 441, while eastern troops were in Sicily preparing an expedition against the Vandals, they crossed the river and took Margus, Viminacium, Singidunum (Belgrade), Sirmium and other towns. The historian Priscus describes how they stormed Naissus (Niš) with siege towers and battering rams; when an embassy he took part in passed through a few years later, the city was deserted and the river bank was covered with the bones of the dead.

Fighting died down in 442. After the death of Bleda, around 445, Attila ruled alone, and in 447, soon after an earthquake had brought down part of the walls of Constantinople, he invaded again. The eastern army under Arnegisclus was destroyed on the river Utus (the Vit in Bulgaria), Marcianopolis was taken, and the Huns plundered the Balkan provinces down to Thermopylae; a contemporary, Callinicus, speaks — probably with exaggeration — of more than a hundred cities captured. The capital, its walls hastily rebuilt, was spared, but another Roman army was defeated in the Thracian Chersonese (in the traditional chronology, 443).

Under the peace negotiated by Anatolius and known from a fragment of Priscus, the empire handed over fugitives, paid 6,000 pounds of gold in arrears, tripled the annual tribute to 2,100 pounds and agreed to pay 12 solidi for every escaped Roman prisoner; Attila also demanded that a strip five days’ journey wide south of the Danube be left empty. The chronology is disputed: the traditional reconstruction places a second invasion — with the fall of Naissus and Serdica — and a first treaty of Anatolius in 443, while O. J. Maenchen-Helfen argued for only two wars, in 441–442 and 447, with the treaty after the second. The payments stopped only when the new emperor Marcian refused the tribute in 450.