The battle of the Catalaunian Plains was fought in Gaul in the summer of 451. On one side stood the army of Attila. On the other stood a coalition of the western Romans under Aetius and the Visigoths under their king Theodorid.[1] It ended Attila’s campaign in the West. For the Huns it was a lost battle. It cost them thousands of horsemen, and they took no prisoners and could not strip the dead.[2] Only one full account survives, in the Gothic history of Jordanes. Jordanes drew on Priscus and on the Gothic tradition of the Visigoths’ part in the fight.[3]

Background

In the spring of 451 Attila moved west. Jordanes reports as hearsay that his army numbered half a million men.[4] One reckoning allows no more than a fifth of that figure and probably less, a good part of it Germanic foot soldiers. Attila would have needed fifty or sixty thousand horses for the march.[5]

Jordanes gives a Vandal motive for the war. Gaiseric, king of the Vandals, had sent back to Theodorid his daughter, the wife of his son Huneric, with her nose and ears cut off. He feared the Visigoth’s revenge. With many gifts he drove Attila into war on the Visigoths.[6] Some scholars call the picture of Vandal agents carrying bags of gold from Africa to Hungary grotesque.[7] Others look to the Franks, in whose succession Aetius and Attila backed different claimants. They also look to the contest between the two men for influence in Gaul.[8] Until then Attila and Aetius had been allies.[9] The princess Honoria, who was said to have offered herself to Attila, belongs to the same year. The campaign in Gaul belongs to her story.[10]

Attila wrote to the emperor Valentinian that his quarrel was with the Visigoths alone. He wrote to Theodorid that he should leave the Roman alliance.[11] Jordanes says that beneath his ferocity Attila was a subtle man who fought with craft before he made war.[12] Valentinian’s envoys reminded the Visigoths of what they had suffered from the Huns. Theodorid answered: “Romans, you have attained your desire; you have made Attila our foe also.”[13] He marched with his two eldest sons, Thorismund and Theoderic. He sent four younger sons home.[14] Aetius brought Franks, Sarmatians, Armoricans, Liticiani, Burgundians, Saxons, Riparii and Olibriones, once Roman soldiers and now auxiliaries, and other Celtic and Germanic peoples.[15]

The armies meet

Jordanes calls the field the Catalaunian plains, “which are also called the Mauriacian”. He says it was a hundred leagues long and seventy wide by the Gallic measure, the league being fifteen hundred paces.[16] The place has been sought at Châlons-sur-Marne and at Méry-sur-Seine.[17] Some scholars regard “Catalaunian Plains” as a misnomer and keep the locus Mauriacus of the Gallic chroniclers. They note that a medieval Hungarian chronicle names the field after Beauvoir in the valley of the Aube, east of Troyes.[18]

Before the battle, Sangiban, king of the Alans, promised to hand over to Attila the city of Aureliani, Orléans, where he was staying. Theodorid and Aetius forestalled him. They raised great earthworks round the city before Attila arrived. They kept Sangiban under watch and placed him with his people in the middle of their army.[19] Some scholars say that the Alans held Orléans against a Hun siege. Attila withdrew towards Hungary when the siege dragged on, and the allies caught him on the Catalaunian Plains.[20] Jordanes knows no siege of Orléans. Gregory of Tours tells a different version.[19][17]

Omens

Attila was shaken by the turn of events and decided to inquire into the future. His seers, as was their custom, looked at the entrails of cattle and at certain lines on scraped bones. They foretold disaster to the Huns. They promised only that the supreme commander on the other side would fall.[21] Attila took this for Aetius and thought the price worth paying. He began the battle at about the ninth hour of the day, so that night would come to his aid if it went badly.[22] Divination from scraped shoulder blades is a practice of the eastern steppe.[23]

The battle

The plain rose to a ridge, and both sides tried to take it. The Huns held the right, the Romans and Visigoths the left. Theodorid commanded the right wing of the coalition and Aetius the left. Sangiban’s Alans stood in the centre between them.[24] Attila stood in the centre with his best men. On his wings were the many peoples he had subdued. These included the Ostrogoths under the brothers Valamir, Thiudimir and Vidimir. They also included the Gepids under their king Ardaric. Attila prized Ardaric and Valamir above all his other kings.[25] The other kings, Jordanes says, hung on Attila’s nod like attendants. Attila alone, king of all kings, was concerned for all.[26] Thorismund and Aetius took the summit first and drove the Huns back as they came up.[27]

Jordanes gives Attila a speech. “Who opened to our fathers the path through the Maeotic marshes, a secret closed for so many ages?” Attila asks. He ends: “I shall hurl the first spear at the foe. If any can stand at rest while Attila fights, he is a dead man.”[28] Then the armies met. Jordanes calls the fight fierce, confused, monstrous and unrelenting, and says that no ancient time had recorded its like.[29] A brook on the plain, the old men told, ran high with blood. The wounded who drank from it drank blood.[30]

Theodorid was riding along his lines when he fell from his horse and was trampled by his own men. Others say that Andag, an Ostrogoth on Attila’s side, killed him with a spear.[31] The seers’ prophecy had come true, though Attila had read it of Aetius.[31] The Visigoths broke away from the Alans and fell on the Huns. They nearly killed Attila. He fled into his camp, which he had ringed with wagons.[32] In the dark Thorismund rode into the enemy’s wagons. He was wounded in the head and unhorsed, and his men saved him. Aetius lost his way among the enemy and spent the rest of the night among the shields of the Goths.[33] A kinsman of Attila, Laudaricus, fell in the battle.[34]

The morning after

At dawn the field was heaped with the dead, and the Huns did not come out. Attila stayed in his camp, sounding trumpets and threatening to attack, “like a lion pierced by hunting spears, who paces to and fro before the mouth of his den”.[35] The Goths and Romans thought of starving him out. Attila is said to have built a pyre of horse saddles. He meant to throw himself into the flames rather than be wounded or taken by his enemies.[36] The saddles can only have been wooden ones, of the kind the riders of the steppe used. Their remains, plated with gold, lie in graves of the age.[37]

The Visigoths found Theodorid’s body among the dead and carried it off with songs, in sight of the enemy.[38] Thorismund wanted to avenge his father on the Huns who remained. In Jordanes’s account, Aetius feared that the Goths would destroy the Huns altogether, and that the Roman empire would then be overwhelmed by the Goths. He advised Thorismund to hurry home before his brothers seized the kingdom.[39] Thorismund went back to Toulouse. Attila suspected a ruse and stayed in his camp for some time. Then he withdrew.[40]

Losses

Jordanes says that 165,000 were killed on both sides. He counts besides these 15,000 Gepids and Franks, who had met in the dark the night before and fallen to each other’s wounds. The Franks fought for the Romans and the Gepids for the Huns.[41] One reckoning puts the number of men in the battle at up to 300,000.[42] The Hunnic losses must have been very heavy.[43]

Outcome

Jordanes gives the victory to the Goths, as the chronicle of Cassiodorus did.[44] The Gallic chroniclers took it for a Roman victory dearly bought, because the Huns went no further into Gaul.[45] Some historians hold the battle strictly undecided, but a lost one for the Huns. It cost them thousands of horsemen, and they took no prisoners and could not strip the dead.[2] Others see a strategic Roman victory and no clear decision on the field. They point out that Thorismund and Aetius both lost touch with their troops and found themselves among the Huns, which suggests that the allies were the ones pursued. They add that the Visigoths went home and Aetius sent his Frankish allies away. They also note that a Hunnic cauldron found near Châlons suggests that the Huns kept the field.[42] The same historians have the Roman camp, not the Hunnic one, besieged after the battle.[42] In Jordanes it is Attila who sits in his wagon camp, and the allies who think of starving him out.[46] The fragment of a cauldron is said to have been found near Troyes.[18]

They note that many of the Huns had left their horses and fought on foot in wooded country.[45] They also find the battle’s importance in the near collapse of the western Roman army. That army afterwards broke up into bands of mercenaries under barbarian leaders.[42] Steppe horsemen fought on both sides. So did Alans, Germanic peoples and Gallo-Romans, Christians and pagans. The battle was a war between powers, not between peoples or faiths.[47] Historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made it a shield of western Christendom against Asia. That view has since been given up.[20]

A fourth group calls the campaign a failure that left the Hunnic military strength unbroken. This group holds that the Huns were a minority in their own army. The Huns formed the centre of the line, with the wings made up of the innumerable peoples that followed Attila. Seen this way, the battle was one in which Goths fought Goths in their accustomed way.[48] Jordanes, on this view, mentions no Hunnic cavalry charge and assigns the showers of arrows to the Romans.[49] Attila was far from his bases, outnumbered, and short of the light cavalry that had won his earlier victories. By this measure, he acquitted himself well.[49]

Aftermath

Attila was back on the Danube in the summer of 451.[7] In the following spring he invaded Italy. The campaign of 452 brought the sack of Aquileia and the meeting with Pope Leo.[50] Jordanes adds a second campaign against the Alans beyond the Loire. Thorismund, now king, beat it back “in almost the same manner” as on the Catalaunian Plains. No other writer mentions it.[51][52]

References

  1. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 190–217, p. 104–112
  2. ^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 143
  3. ^ Mierow 1915, p. 31, 173
  4. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 182, p. 102
  5. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 213
  6. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 184–185, p. 103
  7. ^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 130
  8. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 99
  9. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 98
  10. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 224, p. 114
  11. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 185–186, p. 103
  12. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 186, p. 103
  13. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 187–189, p. 103–104
  14. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 190, p. 104
  15. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 191, p. 105
  16. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 192, p. 105
  17. ^ a b Mierow 1915, p. 173
  18. ^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 131
  19. ^ a b Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 194–195, p. 105–106
  20. ^ a b Yavuz 2025, p. 100
  21. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 195–196, p. 105–106
  22. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 196, p. 106
  23. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 269–270
  24. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 197, p. 106
  25. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 198–200, p. 106–107
  26. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 200–201, p. 107
  27. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 201, p. 107
  28. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 202–206, p. 107–109
  29. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 207, p. 109
  30. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 208, p. 109
  31. ^ a b Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 209, p. 109
  32. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 210, p. 109
  33. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 211–212, p. 110
  34. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 388
  35. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 212, p. 110
  36. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 213, p. 110
  37. ^ Werner 1956, p. 51
  38. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 214, p. 110–111
  39. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 215–216, p. 111
  40. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 216–218, p. 111–112
  41. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 217, p. 112
  42. ^ a b c d Yavuz 2025, p. 101
  43. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 132
  44. ^ Mierow 1915, p. 31, 174
  45. ^ a b Yavuz 2025, p. 102
  46. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 212–213, p. 110
  47. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 100–101
  48. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 194–195
  49. ^ a b Sinor 1990, p. 194
  50. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 219–223, p. 112–114
  51. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 226–227, p. 114–115
  52. ^ Mierow 1915, p. 175

Sources

Literature

  • Charles Christopher Mierow, The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version, with an Introduction and a Commentary (1915)
  • Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973)
  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
  • Joachim Werner, Beiträge zur Archäologie des Attila-Reiches (1956)

Related

What links here14

Persons
Aetius · Ardaric · Attila · Theodoric I · Thorismund · Valamir · Valentinian III
States
Hunnic Empire
Conflicts
Hunnic invasion of Gaul, 451
Peoples
Alans · Gepids · Goths · History of the Turkic peoples
Sources
Jordanes

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/events/battle-of-the-catalaunian-plains/

Last revised: 8 November 2026