Attila, King of the Huns - Patrick Howarth

The infamous fifth-century king Attila has long suffered from the reputation he gained at the hands of the early Christian chroniclers, who believed he had been sent to punish people for their sins. Later Italian artists portrayed him with horns. He has featured equally unsympathetically in the Nibelungenlied and in Hollywood epics, and the enduring picture remains with us of a pitiless and bloodthirsty tyrant. Yet in this readable and revealing life of Attila, Patrick Howarth gives the more rounded view of the king's intimate friends, to whom he appeared a wise and tolerant leader, one capable of clemency, though a fearsomely successful warlord.

Attila reigned for only eight years. In that time he consolidated an empire that extended to the Caspian sea, while he came near to toppling the Roman Empire in both East and West. His armies marched through France and Italy, capturing one great city after another, yet he never advanced on Rome, but mysteriously abandoned the campaign and left Italy after a dramatic meeting with Pope Leo the Great.

This is a new paperback edition of Patrick Howarth's thrilling work of historical reconstruction, which draws on the wealth of evidence from modern archaeological finds, as well as Hungarian sources not previously known in the West, to give this first authentic account of the life of Attila.