Very early in his reign, Honoria, grand-daughter of the emperor Theodosius II., being subjected to severe restraint on account of an amorous intrigue with one of the chamberlains of the palace, sent her ring to the king of the Huns and called on him to be her husband and her deliverer.
Nothing came of the proposed engagement, but the wrongs of Honoria, his affianced wife, served as a convenient pretext for some of the constantly recurring embassies with which Attila, fond of trampling on the fallen majesty of Rome, worried and bullied the two courts of Constantinople and Ravenna.
Accordingly the Hun, who had something of the bully in his nature, now turned upon Valentinian the trembling emperor of the West, and demanded redress for the wrongs of Honoria, and one-half of Valentinian's dominions as her dowry.
Upon Milan and the cities of western Lombardy the hand of Attila seems to have weighed more lightly, plundering rather than utterly destroying; and at last when Pope Leo I., at the head of a deputation of Romall senators, appeared in his camp on the banks of the Mincio, entreating him not to pursue his victorious career to the gates of Rome, he yielded to their entreaties and consented to cross the Alps, with a menace, however, of future return, should the wrongs of Honoria remain unredressed.