Attila

He was called the Scourge of God. The Romans gave him this name because they needed a name that contained what he was.

In the middle of the fifth century CE, a Hunnic king named Attila built the most feared military force in the western world, made the Eastern Roman Empire pay tribute on a scale that no outside power had ever extracted from it, crossed the Rhine into Gaul and the Alps into Italy, rode to within striking distance of Rome itself, and turned back - not because anyone had defeated him, but because the terms were acceptable and the plague was taking his horses and Attila understood arithmetic.

He died on his wedding night. Of a nosebleed. In his bed. Without an enemy in sight. The empire he had built dissolved within a year. The name he left behind has lasted fifteen centuries.

Attila: The Scourge of God enters the consciousness of the most feared man of the ancient world - the child of the Hunnic court who was sent as a hostage to Rome and returned with the understanding of both worlds that allowed him to extract from the Roman world more than any leader before him. The book follows the full arc of a life that reorganized the western world: the hostage years at the Roman court, where Attila observed the empire's strengths and its weaknesses with equal attention. The building of the confederation after the death of his uncle Rugila. The eastern campaigns of the 440s that drove the Eastern Roman Empire to the walls of Constantinople and extracted six thousand pounds of gold in arrears and two thousand one hundred pounds per year in tribute. The invasion of Gaul and the battle of the Catalaunian Plains, where Aetius - the Roman general who had grown up among the Huns and who knew Attila better than any Roman alive - organized the coalition that stopped the western campaign. The invasion of Italy and the meeting with Pope Leo I on the banks of the Mincio River. The death on the wedding night that ended the man and began the legend.

The book also enters the worlds around Attila - the court as seen by the Roman diplomat Priscus, who traveled to the Hunnic camp in 449 CE and left the most valuable firsthand account of the Hunnic world at the height of its power. The world of Aetius, the last great Roman general, who had grown up as a Hunnic hostage and who faced at the Catalaunian Plains the man he had known in the court of the confederation. The world of the two Roman empires - the wealthy Eastern Empire that paid rather than fought, the declining Western Empire that could do neither effectively. The world of the Germanic peoples who used the Hunnic period to establish the kingdoms that would replace the Roman political system.

Attila is the fourth book in I. Ioakim's Warriors series - full-length literary historical fiction that enters the minds of history's greatest warriors and stays there long enough to understand what it cost, and what it meant, to be that particular person in that particular world.