friend of the emperor Justinian, stopped the persecution
and recalled the banished. Fulgentius was received back with great joy, and
in February, 525, Archbishop Bonifacius held at Carthage a Council once
more, at which sixty bishops were present. Africa had still able
theologians. Hilderich was murdered by his cousin Gelimer: a new
persecution was preparing. But the Vandal kingdom in Africa was overthrown
in 533 by the eastern general Belisarius, and northern Africa united with
Justinian's empire. However, the African Church never flourished again with
its former lustre.

But Gaul and Italy had been in the greatest danger of suffering a
desolation in comparison with which even the Vandal persecution in Africa
would have been light. St. Leo was nearly all his life contemporaneous with
the terrible irruptions of the Huns. These warriors, depicted as the
ugliest and most hateful of the human race, in the years from 434 to 441,
having already advanced, under Attila, from the depths of Asia to the
Wolga, the Don, and the Danube, pressing the Teuton tribes before them,
made incursions as far as Scandinavia. In the last years of the emperor
Theodosius II. they filled with horrible misery the whole range of country
from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. In the spring of 451 Attila broke out
from Pannonia with 700,000 men, absorbed the Alemans and other peoples in
his host, wasted and plundered populous cities such as Treves, Mainz,
Worms, Spires, Strasburg, and Metz. The skill of Aetius succeeded in
opposing him on the plains by Chalons with the Roman army, the Visigoths,
and their allies. The issue of this battle of the nations was that Attila,
after suffering and inflicting fearful slaughter, retired to Pannonia. The
next year he came down upon Italy, destroyed Aquileia, and the fright of
his coming caused Venice to be founded on uninhabited islands, which the
Scythian had no vessels to reach. He advanced over Vicenza, Padua, Verona,
Milan. Rome was before him, where the successor of St. Peter stopped him.
He withdrew from Italy, made one more expedition against the Visigoths in
Gaul, but died shortly after. With his death his kingdom collapsed. His
sons fought over its division, the Huns disappeared, and what was
afterwards to be Europe became possible.

The invasions of the Hun shook to its centre the western empire. Aetius,
who had saved it at Chalons in 451, received in 454 his death-blow as a
reward from the hand of Valen