The steppe horseman who, in a few terrifying years, made himself the nightmare of the dying Roman world, extorted the Eastern Empire, threatened the West, and rode almost unchecked from the Danube into northern Italy, becoming for fifteen centuries the West's very image of the barbarian at the gate, even though he never took a great city or left a lasting state behind him.
Within a single decade Attila forced the Eastern Roman Empire to pay him in gold, ravaged the Balkans, invaded Gaul and Italy, and became, in later Christian memory, the Scourge of God, the whip in heaven's hand. Then he died on a wedding night around 453, reportedly choking on his own blood, and the empire of the Huns fell apart within two years. He had taken no great city and built no lasting state. What he left was an image: the savage nomad at the gate, the picture of the barbarian that Europe would carry for fifteen hundred years.