In the summer of 451 Attila, retreating from the bloody plain of Chalons, recrossed the Rhine and returned to his quarters in Hungary. There, through the following autumn and winter, he nursed his chagrin and his wrath, and in the spring of 452 he set his host in motion again, directing its march to the Julian Alps and through their passes into Italy. The city of Aquileia, then prominent in commerce, and prosperous and rich, was the first to obstruct the savage invasion. The defence of the city proved so obstinate that Attila was at the point of abandoning his siege, when a flight of storks, which his shrewdness construed favorably as an omen, encouraged the Huns to one more irresistible assault and the doomed town was carried by storm. "In proportion to the stubbornness of the defence was the severity of the punishment meted out to Aquileia. The Roman soldiers were, no doubt, all slain. Attila was not a man to encumber himself with prisoners. The town was absolutely given up to the rage, the lust, and the greed of the Tartar horde who had so long chafed around its walls. … When the barbarians could plunder no more, they probably used fire, for the very buildings of Aquileia perished, so that, as Jornandes tells us, in his time, a century later than the siege, scarcely the vestiges of it yet remained. A few houses may have been left standing, and others must have slowly gathered round them, for the Patriarch of Aquileia retained all through the middle ages considerable remains of his old ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and a large and somewhat stately cathedral was reared there in the eleventh century. But the City of the North Wind never really recovered from the blow. … The terrible invaders, made more wrathful and more terrible by the resistance of Aquileia, streamed on through the trembling cities of Venetia." Patavium (modern Padua), Altinum and Julia Concordia, were blotted out of existence. At Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Pavia and Milan, the towns were sacked, but spared destruction, and the inhabitants who did not escape were carried away into captivity. Many of the fugitives from these towns escaped the Huns by hiding in the islands and fens of the neighboring Adriatic coast, and out of the poor fishing villages that they formed there grew, in time, the great commercial city and republic of Venice. "The valley of the Po was now wasted to the heart's content of the invaders. Should they cross the Appennines and blot out Rome as they had blotted out Aquileia from among the cities of the world? This was the great question that was being debated in the Hunnish camp, and strange to say, the voices were not all for war. Already Italy began to strike that strange awe into the hearts of her northern conquerors which so often in later ages has been her best defence. The remembrance of Alaric, cut