anube. Their wants and
numbers soon compelled them to separate, and his lieutenant, Walter
the Penniless, a valiant though needy soldier, conducted a van guard of
pilgrims, whose condition may be determined from the proportion of eight
horsemen to fifteen thousand foot. The example and footsteps of Peter
were closely pursued by another fanatic, the monk Godescal, whose
sermons had swept away fifteen or twenty thousand peasants from the
villages of Germany. Their rear was again pressed by a herd of two
hundred thousand, the most stupid and savage refuse of the people, who
mingled with their devotion a brutal license of rapine, prostitution,
and drunkenness. Some counts and gentlemen, at the head of three
thousand horse, attended the motions of the multitude to partake in
the spoil; but their genuine leaders (may we credit such folly?) were
a goose and a goat, who were carried in the front, and to whom these
worthy Christians ascribed an infusion of the divine spirit. [35]
Of these, and of other bands of enthusiasts, the first and most easy
warfare was against the Jews, the murderers of the Son of God. In
the trading cities of the Moselle and the Rhine, their colonies were
numerous and rich; and they enjoyed, under the protection of the emperor
and the bishops, the free exercise of their religion. [36] At Verdun,
Treves, Mentz, Spires, Worms, many thousands of that unhappy people
were pillaged and massacred: [37] nor had they felt a more bloody stroke
since the persecution of Hadrian. A remnant was saved by the firmness of
their bishops, who accepted a feigned and transient conversion; but the
more obstinate Jews opposed their fanaticism to the fanaticism of the
Christians, barricadoed their houses, and precipitating themselves,
their families, and their wealth, into the rivers or the flames,
disappointed the malice, or at least the avarice, of their implacable
foes.

[Footnote 35: Fuit et aliud scelus detestabile in hac congregatione
pedestris populi stulti et vesanae levitatis, anserem quendam divino
spiritu asserebant afflatum, et capellam non minus eodem repletam, et
has sibi duces secundae viae fecerant, &c., (Albert. Aquensis, l. i.
c. 31, p. 196.) Had these peasants founded an empire, they might have
introduced, as in Egypt, the worship of animals, which their philosophic
descend ants would have glossed over with some specious and subtile
allegory. * Note: A singular "allegoric" explanation of this strange
fact ha