Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/94

 58 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE career of conquest, altering the face of the earth by its depredations, and the map of the world by transplanting whole peoples, whom the nomads either forced to join them or to flee before them. They were a menace to China, In- dia, and Persia ; but we are especially concerned with their inroads into Europe. Such, perhaps, had been the origin of the Scythians and Sarmatians whom we have already men- tioned; such were the Tartar or Mongolian invasions of the thirteenth century, when most of Russia submitted to the Great Khan. The Turks, too, are of this stock. Before the Turks and Tartars make their conquests, we shall hear in the earlier Middle Ages of Bulgars, Avars, and Magyars, who, in their first appearance at least, all represent the same sort of inroads from Asia into Europe. And such mounted nomads were the people with whom we have now to deal, and who about £J2, a.d. burst like a cyclone into the region between the Volga and the Don Rivers and filled the neigh- boring Goths with unreasoning terror and aversion. These nomads were the Huns.