But in the West a series of phantoms succeeded one another upon the throne. The floodgates of the Rhine and Danube frontiers broke down completely and the new nations streamed into their heritage. Then it was found how truly Constantine’s policy had saved the world. Though the Goths took and plundered Rome (410), they came in not as pagan destroyers, but as Christian immigrants, and it was Gothic generals and Gothic armies who saved Europe from destruction. About 447 the Mongolian Huns under their terrible Attila came riding into western Europe from the steppes of Russia. They crossed the Rhine half a million strong, destroying and burning as they came. The Roman emperor’s sister Honoria proposed marriage to Attila, and the proud barbarian offered her a place in his harem if she would bring half the Western Empire as her dowry. The Roman general Aetius with a half-barbarian army in alliance with the Visigoths checked them at “The Battle of Chalons” and the peril drifted away. Aetius who had saved Rome was stabbed by his ungrateful emperor. The Vandals had already overrun Spain and streamed across to Africa, whence they issued forth to make a second sack of Rome. Britain had been deserted rather by the choice of its army than by command of any emperor, and left a prey to the pagans of the north in 406. Italy itself was wholly in the hands of the barbarians, who lived on terms of apparent equality with the Romans. Puppets wore the imperial purple and did the behests of barbarian “Patricians,” Ricimer the Suevian, Gundobald his nephew, and finally Odoacer, a tribeless barbarian from the north. By this time the Western Empire was dismembered for ever, and western Europe was merely a series of barbarian principalities. In 476 Odoacer removed the last puppet-emperor of Rome, who bore the significant name of Romulus Augustulus. The seat of the Western Empire had long been removed from the twice-sacked city of Rome, and the later princes had ruled from Ravenna, where the little mausoleum of the Empress Placidia, sister of Honorius, still stands as a type of the shrunken glories of the last successors of Augustus.[93] In theory the Western Empire did not come to an end in 476. The Eastern emperors now claimed authority over the whole Roman world and exercised it so far as they could obtain obedience. Strong Cæsars like Justinian made their rule respected far and wide. Geographically and politically, the West had now begun its mediæval existence as a congeries of small kingdoms generally of uncertain extent.