Huns and the End of the Western Empire 225 Next year he came into Italy by way of Venetia, burnt Aquileia and Padua and looted Milan. Numbers of fugitives from these north Italian towns and par- ticularly from Padua fled to islands in the lagoons at the head of tiie Adriatic and laid there the foundations of the city state of Venice, which was to become one of the greatest of the trading centres in the middle ages. In 453 Attila died suddenly after a , great feast to cele- brate his marriage to a young woman, and at his death this plunder confederation of his fell to pieces. The actual Huns disappear from history, mixed into the sur- rounding more numerous Aryan-speaking populations. But these great Hun raids practically consummated the end of the Latin Roman empire. After his death ten different Emperors ruled in Rome in twenty years, set up by Vandal and other mercenary troops. The Vandals from Carthage took and sacked Rome in 455. Finally in 476 Odoacer, the Chief of the barbarian troops, suppressed a Pannonian who was figuring as Emperor under the impressive name p HEAD OF BARBARIAN CHIEF (/« the British Museuui)
