that Constantine should have been in such haste to make the faith universal: the hierarchy thus grew worse and worse, and although there were still Popes like Leo the Great, there were likewise many bad bishops. The Vandal fleets from Africa pillaged Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and also the coast of Italy. This piracy was a fresh calamity for Italy, which had already begun to recover a little from its sufferings, although many parts had indeed remained waste, and the mass of the population had given themselves up as serfs to the great lords. And as ill luck would have it, most of the Roman nobles had their estates in Africa; so that these families, whose wealth sounds quite fabulous, were utterly ruined, as Genseric confiscated everything. A new storm came from another quarter, even the Huns who had formerly driven away the Goths. Of their abodes in the times of Theodosius and his sons, we have no certain trace; perhaps they dwelled in the country between the banks of the Don and the borders of Wallachia: during the first years of Theodosius, they are to be found on the banks of the Danube, and even beyond the Theiss, as far as Pannonia. Concerning all these points, our sources are too scanty: as for the hypothesis of De Guignes, who traces them from China, I have already branded it as false; it is a view which in this day is justly rejected. The Huns being now met with as far as Pannonia, the Pannonian frontier must have been lost by the Romans. Bledas and Attila (Bledel and Etzel), the two sons[75] of Rugilas, appear with a formidable power as the kings of the Huns: the description of the might of Attila, however, is one of the weak points in Gibbon, as he believes the rule of Attila to have reached as far as China. It is indeed very likely that his sway extended beyond the Don even to the Volga: the German peoples paid homage to him, as one may see from our own poems; and as they were treated by him with forbearance, the lays are not bitter upon him. The main strength of his empire, according to a very correct remark of Friedrich Schlegel, was in German tribes: he himself, as Jornandes describes him, was a Mogul, and surrounded by Moguls. Yet this Mogul tribe is comparatively weak; so that, immediately after his death, the German tribes are free again. Until the middle of the fifth century, Attila had turned himself against the eastern empire only, which he made to suffer dreadfully by devastation, disgraceful treaties of peace, and tribute: Servia, and the greater part of Bulgaria, he altogether changed into a desert. The Huns carried on their frightful and bloodthirsty havoc in quite a different manner from the Goths, for instance: they were in the true sense of the word, destroyers. The western empire, being hard pressed by the Vandals, was not able to aid that of the East in this distress: there was even a sort of friendly relation between the former and the Huns, namely, by means of presents.