The Historians' History of the World 06

During these events there reigned in the East a suspicious and weak prince, Valens, who had had to suppress the revolt of Procopius, cousin to Julian. That usurper being detected in treason was beheaded (366); but Valens, far from imitating the prudent reserve of his brother, disturbed the whole Orient by a cruel persecution directed against the magicians and those who consulted them, and also by his partiality for the Arians. The faithful of the orthodox church were once more disturbed, the bishops driven from their sees, and an Arian placed on the archiepiscopal throne at Constantinople. Still worse sufferings would have been inflicted on the Church if the gravity of the political events which filled this reign had left Valens sufficient leisure to respond to all the demands of the heretic leaders. Sapor had expelled the kings of Armenia and Iberia. Valens restored them and forced the Great King to agree to a treaty with the empire. This was a success, but unfortunately a frightful catastrophe was preparing on the Thracian border.

Procopius, when he revolted, had taken into his pay a corps of three thousand Visigoths. When the usurper was overthrown Valens endeavoured to punish the barbarians for the help they had furnished. A three years’ war ended in a treaty by which the barbarians were sent beyond the Danube, the subsidies which the empire had paid them were suppressed, and two frontier towns given in exchange. Athanaric, one of the principal leaders of the western Goths or Visigoths who lived to the north of the lower Danube, accepted this convention for his people. Bishop Ulfilas had just converted a number of the Goths to Arianism. He had compiled a translation of the Gospels in their tongue, the first written monument of their language. The manuscript is preserved at Upsala. Ulfilas had first to make an alphabet, which he borrowed in great part from that of the Greeks. Arianism was therefore to return with the barbarians during the invasion.

To that invasion we are approaching, after having seen it constantly threatening for nearly two hundred years. The people who brought it about were strangers to the Germanic race, being tribes of Huns belonging to the Mongolian race, as far as can be judged from the description which ancient writers have left us of the features and customs of these ferocious hordes. The Huns were nomads and scarcely recognised social ties. The tribes in their expeditions followed particular leaders, who sometimes, however, united for common enterprises. Attila, one of them, is apparently the first who contrived to make the entire nation recognise his authority.

All the Huns were horsemen, and knew no other dwellings than their tents or huts. As greedy and cruel as those Mongols of the Middle Ages who killed five or six million men under Jenghiz Khan, they ravaged gold and silver—not for use, because that they did not understand, but simply to possess it. Following their vagabond instincts, and in order to augment these useless treasures, they undertook disastrous expeditions against civilised peoples. Their incursions, so rapid and unlooked for, spread more terror than those of any other barbarous people of the time, for wherever they passed they destroyed, merely for the pleasure of destroying. Attila, their great chief, boasted later that grass would not spring again where his horse had passed. There was a legend that they were born in the desert of demons and witches, and their cruelty towards women, whom even the Germans in their ravages respected, seemed to confirm this unclean origin.

[375-378 A.D.]

Where they first lived and what led them to migrate towards the west, is unknown, but it seems to be established that, at the time when the Scandinavian and German tribes began to stir, the nomadic hordes of western Asia furled their tents and advanced on the west. Their march, many times interrupted and by long intervals, owing to the obstinate resistance of certain tribes, resumed its course when the obstacle had been overcome or they had attracted to them the peoples who had stopped their way. This is what happened in the time of Valens. The Huns crossed the Urals and subjugated the Alans who lived between the Volga and the Black Sea. A part of these people fled beyond the Caucasus, where their descendants still live; the rest followed the conquerors, who, spreading over the vast plains of Sarmatia, found themselves confronted by the great kingdom of the Goths.