The History of Christianity / Consisting of the Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth; the Adventures of Paul and the Apostles; and the Most Interesting Events in the Progress of Christianity, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time.

by John S. C. Abbott

The victorious Hun retired to the wilds of the North to replenish his diminished hordes, threatening to return and inflict still more signal vengeance, unless the bride he demanded, and the dowry claimed with her, were immediately granted him. In the mean time, he added to his harem of innumerable wives a beautiful maiden named Idaho.

“Their marriage,” writes Gibbon, “was celebrated with barbarian pomp and festivity at his wooden palace beyond the Danube; and the monarch, oppressed with wine and sleep, retired at a late hour from the banquet to the nuptial-couch. His attendants continued to respect his pleasures or his repose the greater part of the ensuing day, till the unusual silence alarmed their fears and suspicions; and, after attempting to awaken Attila by loud and repeated cries, they at length broke into the royal apartment. They found the trembling bride sitting bythe bedside, hiding her face with her veil, and lamenting her own danger, as well as the death of the king, who had expired during the night. An artery had suddenly burst; and, as Attila lay in a supine posture, he was suffocated by a torrent of blood, which, instead of finding a passage through the nostrils, regurgitated into the lungs and stomach. His body was solemnly exposed in the midst of the plain under a silken pavilion; and the chosen squadrons of the Huns, wheeling around in measured evolutions, chanted a funeral-song in memory of a hero glorious in his life, invincible in his death, the father of his people, and the terror of the world.

“According to their national custom, the barbarians cut off a part of their hair, gashed their faces with unseemly wounds, and bewailed their valiant leader as he deserved, not with the tears of women, but with the blood of warriors. The remains of Attila were enclosed within three coffins,—of gold, of silver, and of iron,—and were privately buried in the night. The spoils of nations were thrown into his grave. The captives who had opened the ground were inhumanly massacred; and the same Huns who had indulged such excessive grief, feasted, with dissolute and intemperate mirth, about the recent sepulchre of their king.”

Valentinian inveigled a noble lady, alike illustrious for beauty and piety, to his palace, where he treated her with such indignities as to rouse to the highest pitch the wrath of her husband and friends. A conspiracy was formed by her husband Maximus, a Roman senator; and Valentinian died beneath the daggers which his crimes had unsheathed. The solders placed the diadem upon the brow of Maximus. His wife soon after died; and he endeavored to compel Eudoxia, the widow of Valentinian, to become his spouse. She recoiled from throwing herself into the arms of the murderer of her husband, and appealed for aid to Genseric, one of those powerful Vandal kings who had wrested Africa from the Roman empire.

Genseric joyfully espoused her cause. With a large fleet he entered the Tiber, advanced to Rome, and captured the city. In the struggle, Maximus was slain, and unhappy Rome wassurrendered to the Moors and the Vandals to be pillaged for fourteen days. The barbarian Genseric carried back into the wilds of Africa, as slaves, Eudoxia, the widowed Empress of Rome, and her two daughters. Many other Roman matrons and maidens swelled the long train of captives who were dragged into life-long bondage.

“Eudoxia,” writes Gibbon, “was rudely stripped of her jewels; and the unfortunate empress, with her two daughters, the only surviving remains of the great Theodosius, was compelled as a captive to follow the haughty Vandal, who immediately hoisted sail, and returned, with a prosperous navigation, to the port of Carthage. Many thousand Romans of both sexes, chosen for some useful or agreeable qualifications, reluctantly embarked on board the fleet of Genseric; and their distress was aggravated by the unfeeling barbarians, who, in the division of the booty, separated the wives from their husbands, and the children from their parents.”

The whole world seemed to be now essentially in the condition of a city surrendered to the mob. There was no stable government anywhere. There was nowhere peace or prosperity or joy. Man’s corruption had filled the earth with misery. Still there were thousands of individual Christians, in obscurity and through much tribulation, struggling nobly to their throne and their crown in heaven.

It is difficult to conceive of a more melancholy spectacle than Italy presented. The barbarians were masters of the whole Peninsula. Odoacer, a stern Gothic warrior, after several years of the wildest anarchy, with wars and assassinations too numerous to mention, in the year 476 compelled the Roman senate by a formal decree to abolish the imperial succession, and to recognize him as the military chieftain of Italy. Thus, after the decay of ages, the Roman empire fell, to rise no more.

Sagaciously this ferocious barbarian respected time-honored institutions. He conferred upon his captains titles of dukes and counts, thus perpetuating and extending the feudal system. The Roman nobles, surrendering themselves to all sensual indulgence, had sunk into the lowest debasement. A contemporaryhistorian, Ammianus Marcellinus, gives the following graphic account of the aristocracy of Rome at that time:—

“The ostentation of presenting the rent-roll of their estates provokes the resentment of every man who remembers that their poor ancestors were not distinguished from the meanest of the soldiers. The modern nobles measure their rank by the splendor of their carriages and the magnificence of their dress. Followed by a train of fifty slaves, they sweep the streets with impetuous speed. When they condescend to visit the public baths, they assume a tone of loud and insolent command, and appropriate to themselves conveniences designed for the Roman people. Sometimes they visit their plantations in the country, and, by the toil of servile hands, engage in the amusements of the chase. When they travel, they are followed by a multitude of cooks and inferior servants, accompanied by a promiscuous crowd of slaves and dependent plebeians. They express exquisite sensibility for any personal injury, and contemptuous indifference for all the rest of the human species. Should they call for some water, and a slave be tardy in bringing it, the slave would be punished with three hundred lashes.