y their warlike array terrified into
acquiescence the Sclavonic tribes which were settled in the
neighbourhood of Belgrade.

[Footnote 32: Kopke "Anfange des Konigthums", (p. 146) throws doubt on
this story of the decision by lot, and there seems something to be said
on his side.]

Having pushed up the valley of the Morava, they captured the important
city of Naissus (now Nisch), "the first city of Illyricum". Here
Theudemir tarried for a space, sending on his son with a large and eager
_comitatus_ farther up the valley of the Morava. They reached the head
of that valley, they crossed the watershed and the plain of Kossova, and
descended the valley of the Vardar. Monastir in Macedonia, Larissa in
Thessaly were taken and sacked; and a way having thus been made by these
bold invaders into the heart of the Empire, a message was sent to
Theudemir, inviting him to undertake the siege of Thessalonica. Leaving
a few guards in Naissus, the old king moved southward with the bulk of
his army, and was soon standing with his men before the walls of the
Macedonian capital. The Patrician Hilarianus held that city with a
strong force, but when he saw it regularly invested by the Goths and an
earthen rampart drawn all round it, he lost heart, and, despairing of a
successful resistance, opened negotiations with the besiegers. The
result of these negotiations (accompanied by handsome presents to the
king) was that Theudemir abandoned the siege, resumed the often adopted,
perhaps never wholly abandoned, position of a _foederatus_ or sworn
auxiliary of the Empire, and received for himself and his people the
unquestioned possession of six towns[33] and the surrounding country by
the north-east corner of the AEgean, where the Vardar discharges itself
into the Thermaic Gulf.

[Footnote 33: The best known of these towns are Pella, Pydna, and
Bercea.]

Thus ingloriously, thus unprofitably ended the expedition into Romania,
which had been proposed amid such enthusiastic applause at the great
Council of the nation, and pressed with such loud acclamations and such
brandishing of defiant spears upon the perhaps reluctant Theudemir. The
Ostrogoths in 472 were an independent people, practically supreme in
Pannonia. Those broad lands on the south and west of the Danube, rich in
corn and wine, the very kernel of the Austrian monarchy of to-day, were
theirs in absolute possession. Any tie of nominal dependence which
attached Pannonia to the Empire