In the same year he was elected parish priest of Glarus, in spite of the pope's nomination of Heinrich Goldli, an influential pluralist of Zurich, whom Zwingli found it necessary to buy off at an expense of more than a hundred gulden.
The exchequer being drained by the payment of 10,000 pieces of gold to buy off the Gauls who had invaded their territories about 279 B.C., and by the imposition of an annual tribute which was ultimately raised to 80 talents, they were compelled to exact a toll on all the ships which passed the Bosporus - a measure which the Rhodians resented and avenged by a war, wherein the Byzantines were defeated.
She needed more blood and more time to buy off her allies.
Through his generals Ardoburius and Aspar he waged two fairly successful wars against the Persians (421 and 441), and after the failure of one expedition (431) by means of a gigantic fleet put an end to the piracies of the Vandal Genseric. A Hunnish invasion in 408 was skilfully repelled, but from 441 the Balkan country was repeatedly overrun by the armies of Attila, whose incursions Theodosius feebly attempted to buy off with everincreasing payments of tribute.
He proposed to provoke the Tatars to a rupture by repudiating the humiliating tribute with which the Republic had so long and so vainly endeavoured to buy off their incessant raids.
