In the spring of the year 451 Attila moved the great host which he had assembled in the Hungarian plains westward toward the Rhine and the provinces of Gaul. He hesitated, it was said, between the Eastern and Western Empires as the objects of his attack. But the East had found an emperor, at last, in Marcian, who put some courage into the state,—who refused tribute to the insolent Hun and showed a willingness for war. The West, under Valentinian III. and his mother Placidia, with the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and Franks in the heart of its provinces, seemed to offer the most inviting field of conquest. Hence Attila turned his horses and their savage riders to the West. "The kings and nations of Germany and Scythia, from the Volga perhaps to the Danube, obeyed the warlike summons of Attila. From the royal village in the plains of Hungary his standard moved towards the West, and after a march of seven or eight hundred miles he reached the conflux of the Rhine and the Neckar, where he was joined by the Franks who adhered to his ally, the elder of the sons of Clodion. … The Hercynian forest supplied materials for a bridge of boats, and the hostile myriads were poured with resistless violence into the Belgic provinces." At Metz, the Huns "involved in a promiscuous massacre the priests who served at the altar and the infants who, in the hour of danger, had been providently baptized by the bishop; the flourishing city was delivered to the flames, and a solitary chapel of St. Stephen marked the place where it formerly stood. From the Rhine and the Moselle, Attila advanced into the heart of Gaul, crossed the Seine at Auxerre, and, after a long and laborious march, fixed his camp under the walls of Orleans." _E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 35._