a pardon and named him the count of Italy in exchange
for his ending any war against Ioannes’s killers. Aetius
accepted this offer, which led to his becoming one of the
most important generals in the Western Roman Empire.
In 429, he was named a magister utriusque militum (mas-
ter of the soldiers).
One of Aetius’s chief rivals for power was Count
Bonifacius (Boniface), the comes (count) of Africa, who,
siding with the Vandals in Africa, marched on Rome to
end Aetius’s influence. When the Hunnic and Vandal
armies met in battle at Rimini (432), Aetius killed Boni-
facius with his own javelin.
From 433, Aetius was involved in the Roman wars
in Gaul (modern France) against many of the barbarian
tribes there, including the Visigoths and Franks. How-
ever, few of his military accomplishments are noted by
historians. In 436, Aetius and a Hunnic army defeated
the Burgundians, a group of East Germanic tribesmen,
after they had invaded Upper Belgica (now north and
east of the River Loire in modern France). Aetius’s vic-
tory against this tribe was so complete—more than
20,000 Burgundians died in battle, as opposed to few
Romans and Huns—that the clash is remembered in
history in The Nibelungenlied, an epic poem written in
Middle High German around 1200.
Aetius’s greatest military victory is that of Châlons-
sur-Marne, also called the battle of Maurica or Cam-
pus Mauriacus, or the battle of the Catalunian Plains.
On 20 September 451, Aetius, commanding groups of
barbarian soldiers, including Visigoths and Burgundi-
ans—both of whom he had previously defeated—faced
Attila and the Huns, Aetius’s former allies. Attila had
turned against the Roman Empire to rampage across
Rome-controlled Europe, devastating the Balkans and
exacting tribute from the Eastern Roman Empire. When
the Huns turned on Gaul, Western Roman emperor
Marcian called on Aetius to defeat his former allies. At
Châlons-sur-Marne, Attila gathered the forces of many
barbarian tribes, including the Ostrogoths, the Gepids,
the Thuringians, and the Franks. To start the battle, Ae-
tius dispatched Thorismund, the son of King Theodoric
of the Visigoths, and his forces to seize an area that over-
looked the whole field; Thorismund battled back the
Hunnic forces to take the area. The Huns joined the
Ostrogoths to assault the main Visigothic regiment, but
the Visigoths held despite the death of King Theodoric.
A contingent of Gepids attacked a position held by Ro-
mans and Franks, but they, too, could not break through.
The battle lasted throughout the day; it is estimated that
perhaps 300,000 men died, although many historians
dispute this number. The end of the fight came when,
in the darkness, Thorismund and his men charged down
the hill from the heights he had seized and drove the
Huns and Ostrogoths into flight.
Edward Creasy, who named Châlons as one of the
15 most decisive battles in world history, writes: “But
when the morning broke and revealed the extent of the
carnage with which the plains were heaped for miles,
the successful allies saw also and respected the resolute
attitude of their antagonist. Neither were any measures
taken to blockade him in his camp, and so to extort by
famine that submission which it was too plainly perilous
to enforce with the sword. Attila was allowed to march
back the remnants of his army without molestation, and
even with the semblance of success.” The battle was crit-
ically important in the history of Europe since it halted
the advancement of the Huns to France and broke the
hitherto unstoppable Attila, who died two years later. As
a result, the Huns were never the power they had been
before Châlons-sur-Marne.
Aetius’s dreams of victory were short-lived. In Sep-
tember 454, he was about to marry one of his sons to the
daughter of Roman emperor Valentinian III. However,
during an argument over whether Aetius’s son could
become emperor, Valentinian drew a dagger and mur-
dered the general. The foul deed would cost the Roman
Empire its very existence: Lacking a reliable military
commander to stave off outside threats, Rome would
be invaded and destroyed in two decades’ time. Aetius’s
death was avenged when one of his friends accosted Val-
entinian at the Campus Martius in Rome and stabbed
him to death.References: Gwatkin, H. M., et al., eds., The Cambridge
Mediaeval History, 8 vols. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1911–36), I:418–419; Hodgkin,
Thomas, Italy and Her Invaders, 6 vols. (Oxford, U.K.:
Clarendon Press, 1880–89); Mócsy, András, Pannonia and
Upper Moesia: A History of the Middle Danube Provinces of
the Roman Empire (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1974);
“Challons, Battle of,” in The Hutchinson Dictionary of
Ancient and Medieval Warfare (Oxford, U.K.: Helicon
Publishing, Ltd., 1998), 64–65; “Flavius Aetius,” in Com-
mand: From Alexander the Great to Zhukov—The Great-
est Commanders of World History, edited by James Lucas
(London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988), 39–40.AetiuS, FlAviuS