Attila died early in 453 in his residence beyond the Danube, on the night after he had married a girl named Ildico.[1] The account of Priscus, which Jordanes preserves, describes his death and then his funeral. It covers the mourning of the Huns, the dirge that the horsemen sang as they rode round his body, the feast over his grave and the secret burial at night.[2]

The last months

After his return from Italy in 452 Attila sent envoys to the eastern emperor Marcian.[3][4] He complained that the payments which Theodosius had promised him were not being made. He threatened to lay waste the provinces.[3] Marcian had stopped the tribute. In response Attila made ready for war against Constantinople.[5]

The wedding night

Jordanes writes after Priscus that Attila, shortly before his death, took in marriage a very beautiful girl named Ildico, “after countless other wives, as was the custom of his race”.[6] Her name points to a Germanic origin.[7][5] At the wedding Attila gave himself up to excessive joy. He lay on his back, heavy with wine and sleep. The blood that usually ran from his nose was stopped in its passage and ran down his throat. It killed him.[6] Late on the following day his attendants feared that something was wrong. After much shouting they broke down the doors. They found Attila dead of the effusion of blood, without any wound, and the girl weeping with downcast face under her veil.[6] “Thus did drunkenness put a disgraceful end to a king renowned in war,” Jordanes concludes.[6]

The rumour of murder

It was soon whispered that Attila had not died a natural death. Marcellinus Comes, writing a century later, records the view that he was killed by a woman. In Nordic saga his wife kills him to avenge her brothers.[8] Modern accounts generally take the rumour to be false.[8] The circumstances of Attila’s death were soon embroidered with all kinds of inventions.[9]

Date

Prosper, Victor of Tunnuna and the chronicle of 511 agree that Attila died in 453. The 454 of Marcellinus Comes is wrong.[1] Attila died at the beginning of the year, before the season for campaigning.[10][11] Jordanes gives no year.[12]

The mourning

As was the custom of that people, the Huns cut off part of their hair and disfigured their faces with deep wounds, “that the renowned warrior might be mourned, not by effeminate wailings and tears, but by the blood of men”.[13] The custom of cutting the face in mourning was also practised by the Göktürks.[14]

Priscus wrote that in the same night a god stood beside Marcian in a dream. Marcian lay troubled about his fierce enemy. The god showed him the bow of Attila broken, as if to say that this people relied above all on that weapon. Priscus said that he could prove the story by true testimony.[15] Some scholars take the story as a sign of how far contemporaries felt the bow to be the expression and symbol of Hunnic power.[16] The graves of the Hunnic age bear out the weight of the weapon. Four princely graves hold a bow cut from thin gold sheet, made for the burial. The bone-plated bow of the riders was a weapon that the Germans never took up.[17] Turkic Atlas treats the weapon itself under the composite bow.

The funeral

The body was laid in state in a silken tent in the middle of a plain. The best horsemen of the whole Hunnic people rode round it in circles, as in the circus games. They told his deeds in a funeral song.[18] Jordanes gives the song in Latin:[19]

The chief of the Huns, King Attila, born of his sire Mundiuch, lord of bravest tribes, sole possessor of the Scythian and German realms — powers unknown before — captured cities and terrified both empires of the Roman world and, appeased by their prayers, took annual tribute to save the rest from plunder. And when he had accomplished all this by the favor of fortune, he fell not by wound of the foe, nor by treachery of friends, but in the midst of his nation at peace, happy in his joy and without sense of pain. Who can rate this as death, when none believes it calls for vengeance?

Jordanes

The song throws a dim light on the poetry of the Huns, of which nothing else survives.[20] On one modern view, the authenticity of Priscus’s account of the funeral rites cannot be doubted.[20]

When they had mourned him with such lamentations, the Huns held over his tomb “a strava, as they call it”, with great feasting, joining grief and joy.[21] Some scholars regard it as a Slavic word, a funeral feast, and suppose that Priscus’s informant was a prisoner who spoke a Slavic language. In that case the custom itself was Hunnic.[22] Others argue that the word cannot be assigned to any language.[8]

The burial

In the secrecy of the night they buried the body in the earth. They secured the coverings with gold, with silver and with iron, “showing by such means that these three things suited the mightiest of kings; iron because he subdued the nations, gold and silver because he received the honors of both empires”.[23] With him they buried the arms of enemies taken in battle, trappings rich with gems and ornaments of every kind that belonged to princely state.[24] To keep so much wealth from human curiosity, they killed the men who had done the work.[24] The killing of the buriers was probably a sacrifice.[25][26] The mourning, the wounded faces and the riding round the body place the funeral within the customs of Inner Asia.[27] No part of these rites can be claimed as Germanic.[28]

The Latin speaks of coverings, copercula, not of coffins. The three coffins of gold, silver and iron come from the translations. The burial in a riverbed belongs to the Visigothic king Alaric, not to Attila.[29]

Aftermath

Attila’s sons, “who through the license of his lust formed almost a people of themselves”, demanded that the subject peoples be divided among them by lot like a family estate.[30] Within a year the Gepid king Ardaric rose against them. The battle of the Nedao ended Hunnic rule over the peoples of the middle Danube.[31][32] Some modern scholars hold that his death was a catastrophe for those who outlived him.[33]

References

  1. ^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 143–144
  2. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 254–258, p. 123–125
  3. ^ a b Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 225, p. 114
  4. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 132–141
  5. ^ a b Yavuz 2025, p. 103
  6. ^ a b c d Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 254, p. 123
  7. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 364
  8. ^ a b c Thompson 1948, p. 151
  9. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 144
  10. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 143
  11. ^ Thompson 1948, p. 148–149
  12. ^ Jordanes
  13. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 255, p. 123
  14. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 274–275
  15. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 255, p. 123–124
  16. ^ Werner 1956, p. 46–47
  17. ^ Werner 1956, p. 48–50
  18. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 256, p. 124
  19. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 257, p. 124
  20. ^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 277
  21. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 258, p. 124
  22. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 276, 278, 425–426
  23. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 258, p. 124–125
  24. ^ a b Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 258, p. 125
  25. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 278
  26. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 197
  27. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 197, 204
  28. ^ Thompson 1948, p. 150
  29. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 158, p. 95
  30. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 259, p. 125
  31. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 260–263, p. 125–126
  32. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 147
  33. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 104

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)
  • E. A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (1948)
  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
  • Joachim Werner, Beiträge zur Archäologie des Attila-Reiches (1956)

Related

What links here9

Persons
Attila · Ildico
Battles & Events
Battle of the Nedao
Peoples
Huns
Institutions and Titles
Composite bow
Religions
Riding Round the Dead · Strava · Turkic Mythology
Sources
Jordanes

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Death of Attila.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/events/death-of-attila/

Last revised: 8 November 2026