The armies of the
Eastern Empire were vanquished in three successive engagements; and the
progress of Attila may be traced by the fields of battle. The two
former, on the banks of the Utus and under the walls of Marcianapolis,
were fought in the extensive plains between the Danube and Mount Haemus.
As the Romans were pressed by a victorious enemy, they gradually and
unskilfully retired toward the Chersonesus of Thrace; and that narrow
peninsula, the last extremity of the land, was marked by their third,
and irreparable, defeat.
By the destruction of this army Attila acquired the indisputable
possession of the field. From the Hellespont to Thermopylae, and the
suburbs of Constantinople, he ravaged, without resistance and without
mercy, the provinces of Thrace and Macedonia. Heraclea and Hadrianople
might, perhaps, escape this dreadful irruption of the Huns; but the
words, the most expressive of total extirpation and erasure, are applied
to the calamities which they inflicted on seventy cities of the Eastern
Empire. Theodosius, his court, and the unwarlike people were protected
by the walls of Constantinople; but those waits had been shaken by a
recent earthquake, and the fall of fifty-eight towers had opened a large
and tremendous breach.
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