He
watched the national passions, the prejudices, the creeds, and the
superstitions of the varied nations over which he ruled and of those
which he sought to reduce beneath his sway: all these feelings he had
the skill to turn to his own account. His own warriors believed him to
be the inspired favorite of their deities, and followed him with fanatic
zeal; his enemies looked on him as the preappointed minister of heaven's
wrath against themselves; and though they believed not in his creed,
their own made them tremble before him.
In one of his early campaigns he appeared before his troops with an
ancient iron sword in his grasp, which he told them was the god of war
whom their ancestors had worshipped. It is certain that the nomadic
tribes of Northern Asia, whom Herodotus described under the name of
Scythians, from the earliest times worshipped as their god a bare sword.
That sword-god was supposed, in Attila's time, to have disappeared from
earth; but the Hunnish King now claimed to have received it by special
revelation. It was said that a herdsman, who was tracking in the desert
a wounded heifer by the drops of blood, found the mysterious sword
standing fixed in the ground, as if it had darted down from heaven.
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