Imagination can hardly take in the extent of his empire. To the West he interfered with the Franks, and chastised the Burgundians, on the Rhine. On the East he even sent ambassadors to negociate an equal alliance with the Chinese Empire. The north of Asia was the home of his race, and on the north of Europe he ascended as high as Denmark and Sweden. It is said he could bring into the field an army of 500,000 or 700,000 men.

You will ask perhaps how he gained this immense power; did he inherit it? the Russian Empire i9 the slow growth of centuries; had Attila a long line of royal ancestors, and was his empire, like Haroun, or Soliman, or Aurunzebe, the maturity and consummation of an eventful history ? Nothing of the kind; it began, as it ended, with himself. The history of the Huns during the centuries immediately before him, will show us how he came by it. It seems that, till shortly before the Christian era, they had a vast empire, from a date unknown, in the portion of Tartary to the east of Mount Altai.

It was against these formidable invaders, that the Chinese built their famous wall, 1,500 miles in length, which still exists as one of the wonders of the world. In spite of its protection, however, they were obliged to pay tribute to their fierce neighbours, until one of their Emperors undertook a task which at first sight seems an exception to what I have already laid down to be a universal law in the history of northern warfare. This Chinese Monarch accomplished the bold design of advancing an army as much as 700 miles into the depths of the Tartar wilderness, and thereby at length succeeded in breaking the power of the Huns. He succeeded; but at the price of 110,000 men. He entered Tartary with an army 140,000 strong; he returned with 30,000.

Emigrating companies

The Huns, however, though broken, had no intention at all of being reduced. The wild warriors turned their faces westward, and not knowing whither they were going, set out for Europe. This was at the end of the first century after Christ; in the course of the following centuries they pursued the track which I have already marked out for the emigrating companies. They passed the lofty Altai; they gradually travelled along the foot of the mountain-chain in which it is seated; they arrived at the edge of the high table land which bounds Tartary on the west; they turned southward down the slopes which lead to the low level of Turkistan, they found themselves close to a fertile region between the Jaxartes and the Oxus, the present Bukharia, then called Sogdiana by the Greeks, afterwards the native land of Timour.

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