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and the Roman Empire—which may now be called rather the Greek
Empire—in A.D. 369. The course of the war was at first favourable
to the Emperor Valens. All the independent Goths were driven back
behind the Danube boundary, but were allowed to live there in
peace. The Roman orator Themistius, in congratulating the Emperor
Valens, put on record the extent of his achievement and of his
magnanimity:
But now, along almost all the frontiers of the Empire, peace reigns,
and all the preparation for war is perfect; for the Emperor knows that
they most truly work for peace who thoroughly prepare for war. The
Danube-shore teems with fortresses, the fortresses with soldiers, the
soldiers with arms, the arms both beautiful and terrible. Luxury is
banished from the legions, but there is an abundance of all necessary
stores, so that there is now no need for the soldier to eke out his deficient
rations by raids on the peaceful villagers. There was a time when the
legions were terrible to the provincials, and afraid of the barbarians. Now
all that is changed: they despise the barbarians and fear the complaint
of one plundered husbandman more than an innumerable multitude of
Goths.
To conclude, then, as I began. We celebrate this victory by numbering
not our slaughtered foes but our living and tamed antagonists. If we
regret to hear of the entire destruction even of any kind of animal, if
we mourn that elephants should be disappearing from the province of
Africa, lions from Thessaly, and hippopotami from the marshes of the
Nile, how much rather, when a whole nation of men, barbarians it is true,
but still men, lies prostrate at our feet, confessing that it is entirely at our
mercy, ought we not instead of extirpating, to preserve it, and make it
our own by showing it compassion?
Valens restored Bulgaria to the position of a wholly Roman
province, even the Gothic Minores being driven across the Danube.
But there was now to come another racial element into the making of
Bulgaria—the Huns.
I can still recall the resentment and indignation of the Bulgarian
officers in 1913 because a French war correspondent had, in a
despatch which had escaped the Censor, likened the crossing of
the Thracian Plain by the great convoys of Bulgarian ox-wagons to
the passage of the Danube by the Huns in the fourth century. The
Bulgarians, always inclined to be sensitive, thought that the allusion
made them out to be barbarians. But it was intended rather, I think,
to show the writer’s knowledge of the early history of the Balkan
Peninsula and of the close racial ties between the Bulgarians of today
and the original Huns. We have seen how the Gothic invasion,
coming from the Baltic to the Black Sea, pushed on to the borders of
the Hun people living east of the Volga. These Huns now prepared
an answering wave of invasion.
To the Goths the Huns—the first of the Tartar hordes to invade
Europe—were a source of superstitious terror. The Gothic historian
Jordanes writes with frank horror of them:
We have ascertained that the nation of the Huns, who surpassed all
others in atrocity, came thus into being. When Filimer, fifth king of the
Goths, after their departure from Sweden, was entering Scythia, with
his people, as we have before described, he found among them certain
sorcerer-women, whom they call in their native tongue Haliorunnas,
whom he suspected and drove forth from his army into the wilderness.
The unclean spirits that wander up and down in desert places, seeing
these women, made concubines of them; and from this union sprang
that most fierce people, the Huns, who were at first little, foul, emaciated
creatures, dwelling among the swamps and possessing only the shadow
of human speech by way of language.
According to Priscus they settled first on the eastern shore of the Sea
of Azof, lived by hunting, and increased their substance by no kind of
labour, but only by defrauding and plundering their neighbours.
Once upon a time when they were out hunting beside the Sea of Azof,
a hind suddenly appeared before them, and having entered the water of
that shallow sea, now stopping, now dashing forward, seemed to invite
the hunters to follow on foot. They did so, through what they had before
supposed to be trackless sea with no land beyond it, till at length the
shore of Scythia lay before them. As soon as they set foot upon it, the stag
that had guided them thus far mysteriously disappeared. This, I trow,
was done by those evil spirits that begat them, for the injury of the Goths.
But the hunters who had lived in complete ignorance of any other land
beyond the Sea of Azof were struck with admiration of the Scythian land
and deemed that a path known to no previous age had been divinely
revealed to them. They returned to their comrades to tell them what had
happened, and the whole nation resolved to follow the track thus opened
out before them. They crossed that vast pool, they fell like a human
whirlwind on the nations inhabiting that part of Scythia, and offering up
the first tribes whom they overcame, as a sacrifice to victory, suffered the
others to remain alive, but in servitude.
With the Alani especially, who were as good warriors as themselves,
but somewhat less brutal in appearance and manner of life, they had
many a struggle, but at length they wearied out and subdued them.
For, in truth, they derived an unfair advantage from the intense
hideousness of their countenances. Nations whom they would never
have vanquished in fair fight fled horrified from those frightful—faces