An attempt to assassinate Attila, made, or supposed to have been made, at the instigation of Theodoric the Younger, the emperor of Constantinople, drew the Hunnish armies, in 445, upon the Eastern Empire, and delayed for a time the destined blow against Rome.  Probably a more important cause of delay was the revolt of some of the Hunnish tribes to the north of the Black Sea against Attila, which broke out about this period, and is cursorily mentioned by the Byzantine writers.  Attila quelled this revolt, and having thus consolidated his power, and having punished the presumption of the Eastern Roman Emperor by fearful ravages of his fairest provinces, Attila, in 450 A.D., prepared to set his vast forces in motion for the conquest of Western Europe.  He sought unsuccessfully by diplomatic intrigues to detach the king of the Visigoths from his alliance with Rome, and he resolved first to crush the power of Theodoric, and then to advance with overwhelming power to trample out the last sparks of the doomed Roman Empire.

A strange invitation from a Roman princess gave him a pretext for the war, and threw an air of chivalric enterprise over his invasion.  Honoria, sister of Valentinian III, the emperor of the West, had sent to Attila to offer him her hand and her supposed right to share in the imperial power.  This had been discovered by the Romans, and Honoria had been forthwith closely imprisoned.  Attila now pretended to take up arms in behalf of his self-promised bride, and proclaimed that he was about to march to Rome to redress Honoria’s wrongs.  Ambition and spite against her brother must have been the sole motives that led the lady to woo the royal Hun; for Attila’s face and person had all the natural ugliness of his race, and the description given of him by a Byzantine ambassador must have been well known in the imperial courts.  Herbert has well versified the portrait drawn by Priscus of the great enemy of both Byzantium and Rome: 

    “Terrific was his semblance, in no mould
    Of beautiful proportion cast; his limbs
    Nothing exalted, but with sinews braced
    Of Chalybean temper, agile, lithe,
    And swifter than the roe; his ample chest
    Was overbrow’d by a gigantic head,
    With eyes keen, deeply sunk, and small, that gleam’d
    Strangely in wrath as though some spirit unclean
    Within that corporal tenement install’d
    Look’d from its windows, but with temper’d fire
    Beam’d mildly on the unresisting.  Thin
    His beard and hoary; his flat nostrils crown’d
    A cicatrized, swart visage; but, withal,
    That questionable shape such glory wore
    That mortals quail’d beneath him.”