To add to the universal confusion caused by the influx of the German tribes, the Huns, the Mongolian people who had first pushed the West Goths into the Empire, now began to fill western Europe with terror. Under their chief, Attila,--"the scourge of God," as the trembling Romans called him,--the savage Huns invaded Gaul. But the Roman inhabitants and the Germans joined against the invaders and defeated them in the battle of Châlons, in 451. After this rebuff Attila turned to Italy. But the impending danger was averted. Attila was induced by an embassy, headed by Pope Leo the Great, to give up his plan of marching upon Rome. Within a year he died and with him perished the power of the Huns, who never troubled Europe again. Their threatened invasion of Italy produced one permanent result however; for it was then that fugitives from the cities of northeastern Italy fled to the sandy islets just off the Adriatic shore and founded the town which was to grow into the beautiful and powerful city of Venice.[11] [Sidenote: The 'fall' of the Empire in the West, 476.] [Sidenote: Odoacer.] 10. The year 476 has commonly been taken as the date of the "fall" of the Western Empire and of the beginning of the Middle Ages. What happened in that year was this. Since Theodosius the Great, in 395, had provided that his two sons should divide the administration of the Empire between them, most of the emperors of the West had proved weak and indolent rulers. The barbarians wandered hither and thither pretty much at their pleasure, and the German troops in the service of the Empire amused themselves setting up and throwing down puppet emperors. In 476 the German mercenaries in the Roman army demanded that a third part of Italy be given to them. On the refusal of this demand, Odoacer, their leader, banished the last of the western emperors (whose name was, by the irony of fate, Romulus Augustus the Little) to a villa near Naples. Then Odoacer sent the insignia of empire to the eastern emperor with the request that he be permitted to rule Italy as the emperor's delegate, thus putting an end to the line of the western emperors.[12] [Sidenote: Theodoric conquers Odoacer and establishes the kingdom of the East Goths in Italy.]