VI.—Notes on a Vellum Album containing some original sketches of public buildings and monuments, drawn by a German artist who visited Constantinople in 1574

Extract

The interest in the unpublished document now submitted to the Society lies, mainly, in three large sepia drawings of a triumphal column, erected by the Emperor Arcadius in honour of his father the Emperor Theodosius the Great. My purpose is to draw attention to the historical importance attaching to these drawings, for, excepting some fragmentary sketches to be referred to presently, they are the only evidence we now possess to corroborate the narratives of contemporary historians who describe an important episode in later Roman history, when Theodosius the Great was engaged in a war on the Danube with a ‘new Scythian people who had not been seen before by any one’. We shall have no difficulty in identifying these new-comers, thus described by Zosimus, with the Tartar Huns, the forerunners of Attila and his host, who now, and for the first time, faced the Roman army in battle and were utterly defeated. The victory thus won for Theodosius and his imperial colleague, the second Valentinian, was considered, and not without reason, to be important enough to merit record in this triumphal column, for the westward invasion of the Huns, though not stopped, received a check from which it did not recover for another half-century.