Attila, the Scourge of God
I was told that Attila king of the Huns (406 - 453) was a very brutal man that used to attack enemies with storms of fire, so when I had to depict the Art Girona 54mm figure I decided to test those fire and ashes on a vignette. And someone got hurt in the process
Very nicely built and looking mean, Caudelguille.
All the best!
Nice work.
It turns out that Atilla got a lot of "bad press" from the Romans due to the fact they thought of him as a "turncoat." He was a royal child from the Huns, who was sent as a hostage when the Huns were defeated but allowed to become a "vassal state" and was raised in Rome, where it was expected he would become pro-Roman and return to be the new ruler whose allegiance the Romans wouldn't have to worry about. Nope. He learned everything he could about the Romans, particularly about their art of war, then returned home and created an army that could defeat them by attacking their weak points technologically and strategically, and then he whipped them a new posterior. Of course, someone who would do that to the Romans after they had been so "nice" to him had to be a horrible person, yes? (No) And that's how Atilla and his tribe the Huns got turned into the bad guys of history. Because they taught Rome a lesson it had long needed.
Thanks Tom, for your interesting point of view. And I guess that Atilla might not be the believer the european historians wanted, so he was soon tagged as a 'barbarian' for so many years. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a more accurate portrait of the figure!
Attila didn't whip the Roman armies posterior... the Roman army had fallen into disrepair and what was left was fighting far from Rome to the north when Attila rode in and made a deal with the pope [extortion]...when Atilla was sent to Rome as a political exchange Flavius Aetius was sent to the huns which he loved while Atilla hated his assignment...a year before in the battle of the catalaunian plains [chalons] the bloodyist battle in history Flavius along with other barbarian tribes whipped the huns and sent them back to Hungry...after the battle he crawled to the top of a pile of saddles and demanded his troops set him on fire...they begged him down...he came down and retreated till the following year when he entered Rome with no fight...he then turned to the northern plains looking to live off the land because he had left scorched earth behind him where he won his battles with little gain...the Huns where not an army more a pack of raiders and they generally didn't do well attacking armies...the Hells Angels can wreck havoc at a fireman's picnic but wouldn't fair too well against an Army base...though Attila sacked 70 cities against inept untrained militias he never touched the churches unlike the Vikings...the Hun campaign in the north netted no profit and eventually malaria swept through his ranks and finished the scourge for once and for all...when the huns took a village they rode in with bullwhips and took out the bravest defenders by dragging them out over tree stumps and through the forests...then they would go cook breakfast...after which they would return to the village with all the resistance gone and ravage what was left...the entrance to his camps where lined with traitors impaled on spears still alive...he was not a good guy...he was one of those guys that only comes along about every 1,000 years and he terrified everyone in his path even his own family just like Genghis Khan, Hitler and Stalin and you can take wiki with a grain of salt
i particularly like the corpse with the open mouth and ashes...most interesting diorama and very out of the box
Thanks Bob for your Attila's biography counterpart, at least we might get the lesson Attila was not a peaceful man and for sure, related to more than a single death on his hands ( I could not afford more than one in a vignette, sorry).