The Great Plumes of Smoke Rise Above the Flaming Ruins of the City of Nysus

The stench of smoke and death fills the air. Thousands of corpses carpet the ground.

Men, women, children, until his huns had spared not a soul when they took the city.

Their bones will still be there half a decade later. There's nobody left to bury them.

Only the rustle of the wind and the faint crackle of flames break the eerie silence.

A group of Roman soldiers, their red cloaks stained with sweat and dirt, survey the carnage from horseback.

They had been sent to scout and evaluate, to see what destruction Atilla and his army had wrought on this once prosperous city and military base.

Nysus had been the last lynchpin along the Danube frontier that separates Roman territory from the barbarians.

Now it's gone, wiped off the map as if it had never existed.

One young, pale-faced soldier, overcome by the smell of death and the sheer scale of the destruction, leans out of his saddle and wretches.

Pull yourself together, Petrus, says the centurion in charge of the detachment.

He sounds like he's trying to convince himself as much as his subordinate.

It's not hard for them to see what will happen next.

Atilla and his army will sweep to the east, attacking the few remaining cities of the Balkans before heading for Constantinople itself.

If the strong, thick walls of Nysus can't stand up to Atilla's siege engines, what chance does any other city have?

The year is 443, and the Roman Empire in the east is on the brink of utter destruction.

From Wendry, this is Tides of History. I'm Patrick Weiman. Welcome and thanks for joining me today.

When we talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, we have to bear in mind that only half of it actually fell, the western half.

The east, the part ruled from Constantinople, wrote out the calamitous 5th century and emerged with a stable political system, a blossoming Christian culture and a thriving economy.

By the beginning of that 5th century, there wasn't one singular Roman Empire, but twin empires.

The two incompetent sons of Theodosius the Great, who had died in 395, each inherited half. Anorias received the west and Arcadius the east.

At that point, nobody knew that the division between the two empires would last, but that's how it turned out.

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