The Huns were, with the exception of the Persians who had vainly attacked the Greek States at an earlier period, the first successful Asiatic invaders of Europe. For a full century they ravaged the Empire, and the Balkan Peninsula felt the chief force of their barbarian rage. By the fifth century the waves of the Hun invasions had died away, leaving distinct traces of the Hunnish race in the Balkans. The Gepidae, the Lombards, and later the Hungarians and the Tartars then took up the task of ravaging the unhappy land which as the chief seat of power of the Greek Empire found itself the first objective of every invader because of that dignity and yet but poorly protected by that power. Constantinople was never taken by these barbarians, but at some periods little else than its walls stood secure against their ravages. Meanwhile the first Saracens had appeared in the Peninsula, curiously enough not as invaders nor as enemies, but as mercenary soldiers in the army of the Greek Empire fighting against the Goths. To a Gothic chronicler we are again indebted for a vivid picture of these Saracens, "riding almost naked into battle, their long black hair streaming in the wind, wont to spring with a melancholy howl upon their chosen victim in battle and to suck his life-blood, biting at his throat." Perhaps the Gothic war correspondent of the day studied picturesqueness more than accuracy, like some of his modern successors. But, without a doubt, the first contact with Asiatics, whether Huns or Saracens, gave to the European peoples a horror and a terror which had never been inspired by their battles among themselves--battles by no means bloodless or merciful. As the Asiatic waves of invasion later developed in strength the unhappy Balkan Peninsula was doomed to feel their full force as they poured across the Bosphorus from Asia Minor, and across the Danube from the north-eastern Asiatic steppes. It would be vain to attempt to chronicle even in the barest outline all the horrors inflicted upon the Balkans from the date of the first invasion of the Huns in the fourth century to the first invasion of the Turks in the fourteenth century. To say that those ten centuries were filled with bloodshed suffices. But they also saw the development of the Balkan nationalities of to-day, and cannot therefore be passed over without some attention. Let us then glance at each Balkan nation during that period. _Roumania_, inhabited by the people of the old Roman-Dacian colony, stood full in the way of the Northern invasions of Goths, of Huns, of Hungarians, of Tartars. It was almost submerged. But in the thirteenth century the country benefited by the coming of Teutonic and Norman knights. The two kingdoms or principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (which, combined, make up modern Roumania) were founded in this century.