In his wrath, the Hun spent the winter of 451-452 limbering up for yet more violence. This time the blow fell on Italy. In the spring of 452, his force broke through the Alpine passes. The first obstacle in their path was Aquileia. Here they were held up by the city’s massive defenses—Attila even contemplated calling off the whole campaign. On the point of bringing their long and frustrating siege to a halt, he saw a stork shipping its young out of the nest that it had built in one of the city’s towers, carrying one by one those that could not yet fly. Seeing this, he ordered his army to remain still in the same place, saying that the bird would never have gone unless it was foretelling that some disaster would strike the place very shortly. The stork, of course (not to mention Attila), was right. The Huns’ precocious skill at taking fortified strongholds prevailed, and Aquileia fell to them in short order. Its capture opened up the main route into northeastern Italy.

From Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, London: Pan Books, 2006 (first published in 2005), pp. 339-340.