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.
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