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.

This dramatic narrative is punctuated by analytical chapters which chart the transformations wrought in Hunnic society by contact with the more developed world of the Roman Mediterranean. In these chapters, the author sets himself the task of explaining the sudden rise and equally sudden fall of the Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries. He finds his answer in the impact of Roman wealth upon the original social structures of the Huns.

The Huns includes an Afterword by Peter Heather, Lecturer in Early Medieval History at University College London, which sets Professor Thompson's book in the broad context of recent studies on the Huns.