part of the
bailiwick of Husum in Schleswig; and the Germans of Holstein (Bede's Old
Saxons) are still all recognized by geographers and ethnographers as
distinct races."

ATTILA INVADES WESTERN ROME

BATTLE OF CHALONS

A.D. 451

CREASY GIBBON

After Attila had conquered and laid waste the provinces of the
Eastern Empire south of the Danube and exacted heavy tribute from
Theodosius II, he turned his attention to the subjugation of the
Slavic and Germanic tribes who still remained independent. These,
with one exception, he overcame and placed under the sovereignty of
his son. He laid claim to one-half of the Western Empire, as the
betrothed husband of Valentinian's sister Honoria, from whom he had
years before received the offer of her hand in marriage.

In 451, with Genseric, King of the Vandals, for his ally, he
invaded Gaul. Before his advance the cities hastened to capitulate,
and so complete was his devastation of the country that it came to
be a saying that the grass never grew where his horses had trod.
But in Aetius, their commander-in-chief under Valentinian III, the
Romans had an able general, who was aided by the West Gothic king
Theodoric. The West Goths and the Franks, the former from the
South, the latter from the North of Gaul, joined him in large
numbers, and the allied forces drove the Huns from the walls of
Orleans, which he had besieged. From there he retreated to Chalons,
where his westward movement was to receive its final check. This
decisive event was, in the words of Herbert, "the discomfiture of
the mighty attempt of Attila to found a new anti-Christian dynasty
upon the wreck of the temporal power of Rome, at the end of the
term of twelve hundred years, to which its duration had been
limited by the forebodings of the heathen."

SIR EDWARD SHEPHERD CREASY

A broad expanse of plains, the Campi Catalaunici of the ancients,
spreads far and wide around the city of Chalons, in the northeast of
France. The long rows of poplars, through which the river Marne winds
its way, and a few thinly scattered villages, are almost the only
objects that vary the monotonous aspect of the greater part of this
region. But about five miles from Chalons, near the little hamlets of
Chape and Cuperly, the ground is indented and heaped up in ranges of
grassy mounds and trenches, which