United States or Cook Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Their settlements were between the Elbe and the Vistula; and, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, they had, with other tribes, invaded the Roman world, but were defeated by the Roman emperor. One hundred years later they settled in Pannonia, where they had a bitter contest with the Goths. Defeated by them, they sought the protection of Rome, and enlisted in the imperial armies.
Straining all the resources with which the treasures that he had saved and the remnant of his states supplied him, he equipped a new army of 36,000 men consisting partly of slaves which he armed and exercised after the Roman fashion, and a war-fleet; according to rumour he designed to march westward through Thrace, Macedonia, and Pannonia, to carry along with him the Scythians in the Sarmatian steppes and the Celts on the Danube as allies, and with this avalanche of peoples to throw himself on Italy.
Orestes, who has been already mentioned in this History, had never deserted his country. His birth and fortunes rendered him one of the most illustrious subjects of Pannonia.
The leader of the Huns at this period was Attila a man of great astuteness and military genius, who succeeded in conquering, one after another, every existing tribe of barbarians beyond the Danube and the Rhine, and then turned his arms against the eastern empire. This was in the year 441. They ravaged Pannonia, routed two Roman armies, laid Thessaly in waste, and threatened Constantinople.
The robust peasantry of Noricum and Pannonia had resumed the manners of Barbarians; and the names of the Gepidæ, Bulgarians, Sarmatians, and Bavarians, may be distinctly traced in the provinces of Italy. Of the Saxons, the old allies of the Lombards, twenty thousand warriors, with their wives and children, accepted the invitation of Alboin.
"I don't in the least mind telling you," he said, "just what we are waiting for. Half the countryside knows and are alert to help us all they know how. "In the first place we have word of a big consignment of gold on the way to Rome; ingots from the mines in the mountains of Noricum, nuggets and dust washed from the rivers of Dacia and Pannonia and Moesia.
He marched from Thessalonica, through Pannonia to the Julian Alps; passed through the defiles of those guarded mountains, and appeared before the walls of Aquileia, one of the most important cities of Northern Italy, enriched by the gold mines of the neighboring Alps, and a prosperous trade with the Illyrians and Pannonians.
These events induced the Huns, who occupied Pannonia, to assail Italy; but, in an engagement with Berengarius, they were compelled to return to Pannonia, which had from them been named Hungary.
They were attacked both from Aquileia in the north and from Macedonia in the south, but it was not till the early years of our era that the Danube became the frontier of the Roman Empire. The province of Illyricum or Dalmatia stretched between the Save and the Adriatic, and Pannonia lay between the Danube and the Save.
At this time the ancient Roman empire was governed by the following princes: Zeno, reigning in Constantinople, commanded the whole of the eastern empire; the Ostrogoths ruled Mesia and Pannonia; the Visigoths, Suavi, and Alans, held Gascony and Spain; the Vandals, Africa; the Franks and Burgundians, France; and the Eruli and Turingi, Italy.
Word Of The Day