Attila:The Scourge of God

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In AD 376, exactly a hundred years before the end of the Western Roman Empire, an extraordinary thing happened. An entire German nation, the Visigoths, assembled on the banks of the River Danube pleading for permission to cross the river into the Roman Empire. The reason: a terrible race of mounted nomad-warriors, the Huns, had suddenly fallen on them from the east with such ferocity and in such overwhelming numbers that the Goths were forced to seek safety across the Roman frontier. Entry was granted, and all might have been well; the Goths would probably have settled peacefully as workers on the land and recruits for the legions. But exploitation by corrupt Roman1 officials (for example, when reduced to starvation the Goths were given dogmeat in exchange for their sons sold into slavery) provoked the Goths into rebellion. In 378, at Adrianople in Thrace, they destroyed a huge Roman army, killing the Eastern emperor, Valens. (The empire had recently been split into two halves, with capitals at Milan and Constantinople.) This was Rome’s worst disaster since Cannae, where in 216 BC her forces had been massacred by Hannibal.

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