Huns (Lat. Hunni), a people of northern Asia who in the '5th century invaded and conquered a great part of Europe. Of their origin little is known with certainty. Under the name of Chuni they were known to the Greeks, and are mentioned by Ptolemy as early as the 2d century. According to the theory of De Guignes in his Histoire des Huns, the Huns were a Tartar nation, the Hiung-nu, whose original country was the region immediately north of the great wall of China, which was built to protect that empire against their incursions. For several ages they carried on successful wars against the Chinese emperors, who were compelled to pay them tribute in order to purchase a precarious peace. Their power was at length broken by the arms of the emperor Vouti and by their own dissensions, and in the first century of the Christian era the unconquered remnant of they nation abandoned their country and marched westward in search of a new home. One division established themselves on the E. side of the Caspian sea, where they became known as "White Huns. The main body of the nation established themselves for a while in Russia on the banks of the Volga. In the 3d century they crossed this river and invaded the territory of the Alans, whom they conquered and amalgamated with themselves.

The united nations pressed onward, and attacked the Goths in 375. The Goths were defeated, their king Ermanric put to death, and the Gothic nation driven to seek an asylum within the bounds of the Roman empire. The Huns established themselves on the banks of the Don and the Dnieper and in Pannonia. They soon became involved in war with the Romans, and in the 5th century under the leadership of Attila attained to a high degree of power and empire. (See Attila.) Their dominion fell to pieces after the death of Attila (about 453), and the people themselves were lost and swallowed up in fresh invasions of barbarians from the north and east. The Huns of the Byzantine authors included many distinct tribes which invaded Europe in successive waves, including the Avars. Howorth identifies the Hunnic Avars with the Iouan-Iouan, who appear in Chinese history in the beginning of the 3d century A. D. Some time later they are found on the Jaxartes, and invading Transoxiana, where they intermarried with the Yethas or Ephtalitas. They compelled these latter to emigrate to the south of the Oxus, and during the 4th and 5th centuries extended their power as far as India. The whole frontier of eastern Persia is then described by western writers as infested by enemies, to whom the name of "White Huns is given.

Cosmas Indicopleustes, who was in India about 525, gives the name of Hunnia to the vast territory separating India from China. Thus, while Europe and the west were flooded by one wave of Huns, eastern Persia and the Indian border were flooded by another. Howorth has also attempted to prove that the Khazars or Akatzirs were the same race as the Ephtalitae of the Persian frontier. According to some writers, the Huns were a tribe of Finnish stock, and the ancestors of the Hungarians or Magyars. They are described by the Roman writers as hideous in appearance, with broad shoulders, flat noses, and small black eyes, deeply buried in the head. "A fabulous origin was assigned to them," says Gibbon, "worthy of their form and manners; that the witches of Scythia, who for their foul and deadly practices had been driven from society, had copulated in the desert with infernal spirits; and that the Huns were the offspring of this execrable conjunction. The tale was greedily embraced by the credulous terror of the Goths; but, while it gratified their hatred, it increased their fear, since the posterity of demons and witches might be supposed to inherit some share of the preternatural powers as well as of the malignant temper of their parents." - See Histoire generale des Huns, Turcs, Mogols et autres Tartares occidentaux, by Joseph de Guignes (5 vols. 4to, Paris, 1756-8); and Histoire d'Attila et de ses successeurs, by A. Thierry (3d ed., Paris, 1865).