concentrated his attacks on the eastern Empire, before turning against the
West in the hope of added booty. In 451, Attila led his forces into Gaul, and
on the Catalaunian Plains confronted a combined army of Romans and
federated Germans, mostly Goths. The Romans achieved a great victory,
which was Attila’s first defeat. Attila retired his forces across the Alps with
the plan of plundering Italy. Successful in the north, Attila then prepared to
cross one of the Po tributaries, only to be confronted with the figure of
Pope Leo the Great who had journeyed all the way north from Rome with
priests, monks and deacons bearing crosses and banners. Pope Leo had no
army, but made full use of his authority as the political potentate of the
once great capital. Attila was convinced to turn away from Rome on the
grounds that famine and pestilence then plaguing Italy would prevent his
forces feeding off the countryside. Others say, that while speaking to Pope
Leo, Attila saw behind him an apparition of St. Peter with a flaming sword
ready o strike any would-be attacker. In any case, the Huns turned back,
and only two years later Attila was dead and the vast Hunnish kingdom
rapidly broke up. By 455, the surviving Huns were back in the distant east,
never to be a powerful force again.
Nevertheless, Rome would be visited with catastrophe in the fateful year of
455. Genseric with his Vandals landed in person at Ostia, and then
launched an assault against the Eternal City. There was no Emperor or
army to stop them. For two whole weeks the defenseless city was
plundered by looting far beyond that inflicted by Alaric nearly fifty years
earlier. Pope Leo I again intervened, preventing wholesale murder and
burning and the sacking of the largest churches. On his departure, Genseric
took thousands of captives as slaves, leaving a shattered and empty shell of
a city.
The twenty-one years that followed saw nine more or less legitimate rulers
of the western Empire come and go, six of them coming to violent ends.
These rulers governed from Ravenna, the last being Romulus Augustulus.
Given the throne by his father at the age of only fourteen, Romulus
remained Emperor for less than a year. The general Odoacer, who
commanded an army of Danubian compatriots within Italy, began
demanding federate status within that peninsula. Upon being rejected,
Odoacer’s troops declared him as their independent king and marched on
Ravenna. Romulus was deposed and pensioned off into exile in Dalmatia.
The eastern Emperor, Zeno, continued to recognize Romulus as the
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