Attila was content for ten years to receive an ever increasing tribute from the Romans. Then, making alliance with the Vandals in the west and the Franks in the north, he prepared to pour his barbarian hordes into the plains of Europe and wipe out the civilized nations that occupied the land.

The great question was, Would the Romans and Goths unite against the Huns? We to-day can see that on the answer to that question hung the fate of Europe. If they did, Europe might be saved; if they did not, Europe and civilization were doomed. Attila feared that they would combine, and did his best to prevent it. To the Gothic king he sent messengers to explain that this was the time to destroy Rome, the hated conqueror, and to the emperor he represented that this was a chance to drive out the Goths, against whom they had so long waged war, and regain their supremacy. But the Romans and Goths had learned wisdom since the days of Alaric.

The Gothic peoples had come into Italy by means of the sword. Then they had lost their great leader and been left in the land they had coveted, a vast, unwieldy army burdened with long wagon trains of treasure and great camps of women and children. "Before two years were ended," says the historian, "God moved the hearts of the invaders to occupy the land without wasting it. The wandering hosts settled down and became nations dwelling under their kings on conquered soil."

So the two races had dwelt together, and a new generation had been born to each. They had come to know each other, and though there had not always been peace between them, yet the dark-haired Italian noble had found that his tall, fair-haired, fair-skinned neighbor from the north was not so different from himself as he had supposed. The Goths were the noblest of all the barbarian nations, and if it took them some time to learn all the grace of civilization from their cultured neighbors, yet they brought with them from the north a spirit of freedom, a purity, and an unspoiled strength which the Romans were forced to recognize, and to which they were glad to turn in this hour of need, when this Hunnish people, who were so barbarian that it made the Goths seem in comparison like their own race, threatened to come down upon them.

So the Goths and the Romans united their armies and called in their allies, and in July of the year 451they met Attila and his forces on the battle field of Chalons, midway between the north and the south. Such a confusion of all the barbarian nations was never seen before nor since. On the one side were the Romans, a mere shadow people in numbers or power as compared to their great allies, the East Goths and West Goths, the Alans and the Saxons and the Britons, those barbarian peoples who were so fast being transformed into civilized nations, and who were soon to take up that work of maintaining law and order which the Romans were laying down. Against this army of nations, which had been united only by their common danger, stood the Huns and the allies from the Vandals and Franks and Ostrogoths whom they had been able to gather about their standard. It was a conflict of barbarian against barbarian, with every nation and tribe represented; and the more noble barbarians won. Attila and his Huns used all the strange customs of fighting with which they had been wont to terrify the European world. They swept down from the neighboring hills with wild, discordant cries. Dashing through the lines of soldiery on horseback, they threw their lassos or nets round the bodies of their opponents, making them helpless. "It was a battle," says an eyewitness, "which for ruthlessness, for multitude of men, for horror, and for stubbornness has not in all stories of similar encounters since the world began a parallel." Night fell, and the weary hosts were forced by the darkness to cease fighting; but neither Goth nor Roman nor Hun knew till morning which side had been victorious. When day dawned the Goths and Romans, seeing that the Huns did not venture forth from their camp, concluded that the victory was theirs. But Attila, though so many of his followers had been cut down that he dared not renew the battle, yet did not admit defeat, "but clashed his arms, sounded his trumpets, and continually threatened a fresh attack. As a lion close pressed by his hunters, ramps up and down before the entrance to the cave, and neither dares make a spring, nor yet ceases to frighten all the neighborhood with his roarings, so did that most warlike king, though hemmed in, trouble his conquerors. The Goths and Romans accordingly called a council of war and deliberated what was to be done with their worsted foe. As he had no store of provisions, and as he had so posted his archers within the boundaries of his camp as to rain a shower of missiles on an advancing assailant, they decided not to attempt a storm, but to weary him out by a blockade. It is said that seeing his desperate plight the Hunnish king had constructed a funeral pyre of horses' saddles, determined, if the enemy should break into his camp, to hurl himself headlong into the flames, that none should boast himself and say, 'I have wounded Attila,' nor that the lord of so many nations should fall alive into the hands of his enemies."

Attila was not forced to this desperate death. Though the victory was with the Goths it was not an unmixed triumph. They had lost their king and many thousands of men, and they deemed it wise not to press their success farther, but retired in their triumph, leaving the defeated chief to return with his conquered army beyond the Rhine. Both sides had suffered immense losses, and the Hunnish invaders had received for the first time a check in their march of destruction.

Attila returned to his log hut, and there on the vast, lonely plains of Hungary he spent the winter brooding over his defeat and nursing his wounded pride. He became more silent and sullen than ever, until his courtiers came to be afraid of the motionless figure of the king, who seemed hardly to heed whether he was alone or whether a company was about him, but sat ever looking, looking toward the world beyond the river, toward Rome, which he longed to destroy.

With the coming of spring Attila's energy returned, and he became once more the active, alert general, planning an Italian campaign by which he hoped to revive his fallen prestige and regain his position as a terror to the world. He was to succeed in part and for a time, but he was never to sweep things before him as he had in the days when the Huns were surrounded by a mysterious terror far beyond their actual power of destruction. The Italian cities of the Venetian plains were forced to yield, but it was after long sieges and sharp battles. Still it was a terrible invasion, and Rome began to tremble lest once more she should find herself in the power of barbarians.

The cities which Attila was conquering were the most beautiful cities in all Europe. Here had been collected treasures of art, statues of the golden age of Greek and Roman sculpture, paintings, beautiful vases, all preserved in the splendid palaces and churches and public buildings of Aquileia, Verona, Milan, and Pavia. In these marble palaces and amid these priceless treasures Attila and his Huns camped.

To-day we cherish in museums the fragments which they left when they had thrown aside and smashed what was in their way or did not for some reason please them. In the palace where he stayed in Milan, Attila came one day, in the course of his wanderings through the great salons, upon a picture which filled him with rage. It was entitled "The Triumph of Rome over the Barbarians," and pictured the two Roman emperors sitting on their golden thrones, while conquered Scythians crouched at their feet in abject subjection. The "Scythians" were without doubt Goths, and the period of the picture at least a century before Attila's time; but Attila took it as a personal insult to his race. With one of those strange impulses which make us see what shrewdness and humor were combined in this world conqueror with his more terrible qualities, he did not destroy the picture, but called an artist, whom he commanded to paint a companion picture on the opposite wall. In this painting Attila sat on his throne, and the two emperors knelt humbly before him, one with a huge sack of tribute money still on his shoulder, the other pouring out before him a heap of gold pieces from another bag.

Another side of the character of this strange man was soon to be shown. It was time for him to turn southward in his march toward Rome. As Alaric had paused in the passes of Switzerland, so he paused, and his counselors, filled with the awe which every barbarian host felt when it came face to face with the world power which they had so long reverenced, reminded him of the fate of Alaric which came on him so soon after he had taken the Eternal City, and advised him to turn back.

Attila did not turn back, but the strange awe of Rome began to steal over his heart. As he rode on at the head of his army he was met by an embassy from Rome, headed by a commanding figure. Pope Leo I, head of the great Christian Church, which stood for the spiritual power of Christendom, had come to turn Attila from his purpose of attacking Rome. One man—of commanding presence, it is true, and quiet strength—but one man against an army of barbarians! Ah! but he stood for all which the superstitious barbarian feared. He had behind him a might before which Attila did well to tremble. Civilization, with all its constructive power of religion to uplift and lead men, stood over against barbarism, with its superstition and its fierce power of destruction. And civilization triumphed. The awe of Rome fell upon Attila, and he turned back, murmuring, "What gain indeed if I conquer like Alaric, to die with him?"