Marcianople fell immediately to the Huns, who destroyed it; the city then lay desolate until the Emperor Justinian restored it one hundred years later. Even worse, Constantinople, the capital of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, was especially vulnerable to attack by the Huns as its walls had been ruined during an earthquake in January 447, and its population had suffered from an ensuing plague.Thompson (1999) pp. 99–100. However, the Praetorian prefect of the East Constantinus managed to repair the walls in just two months by mobilizing the city's manpower, with the help of the Circus factions.Blues and Greens, the infamous factions of the Hippodrome of Constantinople. See Thompson (1999) pp. 100 These hasty repairs, combined with the urgent transfer of a body of Isaurian soldiers into the city, plus the heavy losses incurred by the Huns' army in the Battle of Utus, forced Attila to abandon any thought of besieging the capital.
