Book description
Attila the Hun - godless barbarian and near-mythical warrior king -
has become a byword for mindless ferocity. His brutal attacks smashed
through the frontiers of the Roman empire in a savage wave of death
and destruction. His reign of terror shattered an imperial world that
had been securely unified by the conquests of Julius Caesar five
centuries before. This book goes in search of the real Attila the Hun.
For the first time it reveals the history of an astute politician and
first-rate military commander who brilliantly exploited the strengths
and weaknesses of the Roman empire.
We ride with Attila and the Huns from the windswept steppes of
Kazakhstan to the opulent city of Constantinople, from the Great
Hungarian Plain to the fertile fields of Champagne in France.
Challenging our own ideas about barbarians and Romans, imperialism and
civilisation, terrorists and superpowers, this is the absorbing story
of an extraordinary and complex individual who helped to bring down an
empire and forced the map of Europe to be redrawn forever.
Christopher Kelly is a historian and classicist. He read classics and
law at the University of Sydney in Australia before taking his doctorate
at Trinity College, Cambridge. He stayed at Cambridge and is now a
Fellow of Corpus Christi College, and was for five years its Senior
Tutor. In 2006 he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research
Fellowship. His previous books include
Ruling the Later Roman Empire
(Harvard, 2004) and
The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford, 2006).
