Christopher Kelly (4)

A riveting narrative of Attila the Hun recasts the ferocious warrior-king as a political strategist who was instrumental in the fall of the Roman Empire. Drawing on original texts, scholar Christopher Kelly follows the Huns from the steppes of Kazakhstan to the opulent city of Constantinople and the ... (more)Great Hungarian Plain, uncovering along the way an unlikely marriage proposal, a longstanding relationship with a treacherously ambitious Roman general, and a thwarted Roman assassination plot. Attila and his warriors on horseback sacked and razed countless cities, relentlessly expanding the Huns' control from Central Asia to modern Germany. His name has become a byword for barbarianism, but Attila did more than terrorize villages on the edges of the empires. Kelly captures the story of how a small but dedicated opponent defeated a seemingly invincible empire. Kelly is a professor of ancient history and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. His book The End of Empire: Attila the Hun & the Fall of Rome is available for signing after the lecture.