This is a history of the Huns in Europe from their first attacks on the Goths north of the Black Sea to the collapse of their central European empire after the death of the legendary Attila. In the only connected narrative account of the rise and fall of the Huns in English, Professor Thompson reconstructs their campaigns in detail from disparate and often fragmentary sources. In the process, there emerges a clear picture of their dramatic successes, and failures, against the non-Roman peoples of central and eastern Europe, and of their many invasions of the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire.

E. A. Thompson was Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham from 1948-1979. His previous books include A History of Attila and The Huns, The Early Germans, The Goths in Spain, Romans and Barbarians and Who was St Patrick? The Huns includes a revised afterword by Peter Heather, Lecturer of Ancient History at University College London.

Professor Thompson died in 1994.