ns of Arpad in their career of
conquest. It is certain that Attila made Hungary the seat of his empire.
It seems also susceptible of clear proof that the territory was then
called Hungvar, and Attila's soldiers Hungvari. Both the Huns of Attila
and those of Arpad came from the family of nomadic nations whose
primitive regions were those vast wildernesses of High Asia which are
included between the Altaic and the Himalayan mountain chains.

The inroads of these tribes upon the lower regions of Asia and into
Europe have caused many of the most remarkable revolutions in the
history of the world. There is every reason to believe that swarms of
these nations made their way into distant parts of the earth at periods
long before the date of the Scythian invasion of Asia, which is the
earliest inroad of the nomadic race that history records. The first, as
far as we can conjecture, in respect to the time of their descent, were
the Finnish and Ugrian tribes, who appear to have come down from the
Altaic border of High Asia toward the northwest, in which direction they
advanced to the Uralian Mountains. There they established themselves;
and that mountain chain, with its valleys and pasture lands, became to
them a new country, whence they sent out colonies on every side; but the
Ugrian colony which under Arpad occupied Hungary and became the
ancestors of the bulk of the present Hungarian nation did not quit
their settlements on the Uralian Mountains till a very late period, and
not until four centuries after the time when Attila led from the primary
seats of the nomadic races in High Asia the host with which he advanced
into the heart of France. That host was Turkish, but closely allied in
origin, language, and habits with the Finno-Ugrian settlers on the Ural.

Attila's fame has not come down to us through the partial and suspicious
medium of chroniclers and poets of his own race. It is not from Hunnish
authorities that we learn the extent of his might: it is from his
enemies, from the literature and the legends of the nations whom he
afflicted with his arms, that we draw the unquestionable evidence of his
greatness. Besides the express narratives of Byzantine, Latin, and
Gothic writers, we have the strongest proof of the stern reality of
Attila's conquests in the extent to which he and his Huns have been the
themes of the earliest German and Scandinavian lays. Wild as many of
those legends are, they bear concurrent and certain te