Word: attila
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...parodies history. It unmasks in a Bavarian setting the rise of a parvenn power-maniac, played by Michael York, as a cool mastery of perversion and murder. Angela Lansbury as the Countess von Ornstein nostalgically bewails the passing of "real men"-that stalwart Germanic breed in direct lineage from Attila the Hun and Barbarossa. In a world of "upstarts, the American tourists and plastic dirndls," she craves submission to a genuinely phallic male like Conrad. She also craves money...
...proslave band sacked free-soil Lawrence in 1856; Abolitionist John Brown responded by massacring five alleged slave owners at nearby Osawatomie a few days later. In 1863, an outlaw band, led by the notorious William Clarke Quantrill, descended on the town like Attila's Huns. Before they left, they had burned most of the town and murdered 142 of its citizens...
...City student revolt only last summer. (Womack is not sure Zapata ever said it, and the students attributed the remark to Father Hidalgo, the fervent but inept tocsin-sounder of the Revolution of 1810.) To the old regime in Zapata's time, he was a bandit of a new Attila; to the ruling class today, he remains the ominous symbol for the dark forces within the dispossessed which could still be stirred up at an moment. For those of us who like our history epic and our heroes simple and romantic, Zapata is Marlon Brando schmarfing to himself...
...conferences. He bucked himself up for his important meeting with Pancho Villa by masquerading as part charro, an elegant cowboy, and part gypsy, rings and scarves and a lavender shirt. All through the meeting, Zapata hardly spoke. Glowering and slumped in the official photograph, he looked less like the "Attila of the South" than like a poor village president who had been brought up before the bigwigs. He seemed to know that whatever the apparent outcome of the parley, the real chingado had already been determined. Eternal experience teaches the campesino at least this much: "honest" and "political" are antithetical...
During the fifth and sixth centuries, the spiritual prestige of Rome's bishop became complicated by the fact that he was a secular power as well. At the time of the barbarian invasions, the Popes emerged as Rome's most prestigious leaders. Leo I, who stopped Attila the Hun at the gates of Rome, was the first to use the term primacy in reference to the papacy. The Prankish King Pepin gave the Pope jurisdiction over central Italy-and for the next 1,000 years bishops of Rome were land-governing princes as well as the spiritual leaders...