After driving the Goths from Dacia, the terrible Huns had halted in their march westward for something more than a generation. They were hovering, meantime, on the eastern frontiers of the empire "taking part like other barbarians in its disturbances and alliances. Emperors paid them tribute, and Roman generals kept up a politic or a questionable correspondence with them. Stilicho had detachments of Huns in the armies which fought against Alaric; the greatest Roman soldier after Stilicho,—and, like Stilicho, of barbarian parentage,—Aetius, who was to be their most formidable antagonist, had been a hostage and a messmate in their camps. … About 433, Attila, the son of Mundzukh, like Charles the Great, equally famous in history and legend, became their king. Attila was the exact prototype and forerunner of the Turkish chiefs of the house of Othman. In his profound hatred of civilized men, in his scorn of their knowledge, their arts, their habits and religion, and, in spite of this, in his systematic use of them as his secretaries and officers, in his rapacity combined with personal simplicity of life, in his insatiate and indiscriminate destructiveness, in the cunning which veiled itself under rudeness, in his extravagant arrogance, and audacious pretensions, in his sensuality, in his unscrupulous and far-reaching designs, in his ruthless cruelty joined with capricious displays of generosity, mercy, and good faith, we see the image of the irreclaimable Turkish barbarians who ten centuries later were to extinguish the civilization of [eastern?] Europe. The attraction of Attila's daring character, and his genius for the war which nomadic tribes delight in, gave him absolute ascendency over his nation, and over the Teutonic and Slavonic tribes near him. Like other conquerors of his race, he imagined and attempted an empire of ravage and desolation, a vast hunting ground and preserve, in which men and their works should supply the objects and zest of the chase." _R. W. Church, Beginning of the Middle Ages, chapter 1._ {1688} "He [Attila] was truly the king of kings; for his court was formed of chiefs, who, in offices of command, had learned the art of obedience. There were three brothers of the race of the Amales, all of them kings of the Ostrogoths; Ardaric, king of the Gepidæ, his principal confidant; a king of the Merovingian Franks; kings of the Burgundians, Thuringians, Rugians, and Heruli, who commanded that part of their nation which had remained at home, when the other part crossed the Rhine half a century before." _J. C. L. de Sismondi, Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 7 (volume 1)._