Quote of the Day: October 18, 2011: The Co-Dependence of the Hunnic Empire and the Western Roman Empire
"The Huns’ second-greatest contribution to imperial collapse, in fact, was their sudden disappearing act after Attila’s death in 453. This was the straw that broke the western Empire’s back. Bereft of Hunnic military assistance, it had no choice but to build regimes that would include at least some of the immigrant powers. This started a bidding war in which the last of the west’s disposable assets were expended in a futile effort to bring enough powerful supporters together to generate stability. But by the late 460s, the more ambitious leaders of these outside groups, particularly Euric, king of the Visigoths, could see that what purported to be the central western authority now controlled too little to prevent him from establishing an independent kingdom. It was this realization that led to the rapid unravelling of the last strands of Empire between 468 and 476…"
--Peter Heather: The Fall of the Roman Empire : A New History of Rome and the Barbarians
