a large household of such domestics would
be partitioned among the heirs of their dead master. The pride of the
Teutons was touched, and they determined to strike a blow for the
recovery of their lost freedom. Ardaric, king of the Gepidae, so long the
trusty counsellor of Attila, was prime mover in the revolt against his
sons. A battle was fought by the banks of the river Nedao[11] between
the Huns (with those subject allies who still remained faithful to them)
and the revolted nations.

[Footnote 11: Situation unknown, except that it was in Pannonia, that
is, probably in Hungary, somewhere between the Save and the Danube.]

Among these revolted nations there can be but little doubt that the
Ostrogoths held a high place, though the matter is not so clearly stated
as we should have expected, by the Gothic historian, and even on his
showing the glory of the struggle for independence was mainly Ardaric's.
After a terrible battle the Gepidae were victorious, and Ellak, eldest
son of Attila, with, it is said, thirty thousand of his soldiers, lay
dead upon the field. "He had wrought a great slaughter of his enemies,
and so glorious was his end", says Jordanes, "that his father might well
have envied him his manner of dying".

The battle of Nedao, whatever may have been the share of the Ostrogoths
in the actual fighting, certainly brought them freedom. From this time
the great Hunnish Empire was at an end, and there was a general
resettlement of territory among the nations which had been subject to
its yoke. While the Huns themselves, abandoning their former
habitations, moved, for the most part, down the Danube, and became the
humble servants of the Eastern Empire, the Gepidae, perhaps marching
southward occupied the great Hungarian plains on the left bank of the
Danube, which had been the home of Attila and his Huns; and the
Ostrogoths going westwards (perhaps with some dim notion of following
their Visigothic kindred) took up their abode in that which had once
been the Roman province of Pannonia, now doubtless known to be
hopelessly lost to the Empire.

Pannonia, the new home of the Ostrogoths, was the name of a region,
rectangular in shape, about two hundred miles from north to south and
one hundred and sixty miles from east to west, whose northern and
eastern sides were washed by the river Danube, and whose north-eastern
corner was formed by the sudden bend to the south which that river
makes, a little above Buda-Pest