Hunnic invasions
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Between the late fourth and the mid-fifth century the Huns, a nomadic people from the steppe north of the Black Sea, moved into Europe and set off a chain of migrations that transformed the Roman world. Under rulers whose names survive chiefly in Roman and Byzantine sources they defeated the Alans and pushed the Goths across the Danube in 376, where the refugees fought and killed the emperor Valens at Adrianople. Some Goths settled in the empire as federates, others under Alaric sacked Rome in 410. Attila, who ruled from about 434 to 453, collected tribute from both empires, destroyed cities in the Balkans and in 451 was checked by a Roman and Gothic army under Aetius at the Catalaunian plains. He invaded Italy in 452 but withdrew, and after his death in 453 his empire fell apart among rival chiefs. The Huns themselves left few monuments and little writing, but the pressure they exerted drew Germanic peoples into Gaul, Spain, Britain and Africa, emptied the Danube frontier and handed the western empire provinces it never recovered. Roman writers blamed them for the ruins of provinces, and later medieval legend made Attila the scourge of God, a name that outlived any evidence about how the Huns actually lived.