it. In
bands, varying in numbers from one to five thousand, they traversed the
country in all directions, bent upon plunder and massacre. They wore the
symbol of the Crusade upon their shoulders, but inveighed against the
folly of proceeding to the Holy Land to destroy the Turks, while they left
behind them so many Jews, the still more inveterate enemies of Christ.
They swore fierce vengeance against this unhappy race, and murdered all
the Hebrews they could lay their hands on, first subjecting them to the
most horrible mutilation. According to the testimony of Albert Aquensis,
they lived among each other in the most shameless profligacy, and their
vice was only exceeded by their superstition. Whenever they were in search
of Jews, they were preceded by a goose and goat, which they believed to be
holy, and animated with divine power to discover the retreats of the
unbelievers. In Germany alone they slaughtered more than a thousand Jews,
notwithstanding all the efforts of the clergy to save them. So dreadful
was the cruelty of their tormentors, that great numbers of Jews committed
self-destruction to avoid falling into their hands.

Again it fell to the lot of the Hungarians to deliver Europe from these
pests. When there were no more Jews to murder, the bands collected in one
body, and took the old route to the Holy Land, a route stained with the
blood of three hundred thousand who had gone before, and destined also to
receive theirs. The number of these swarms has never been stated; but so
many of them perished in Hungary, that contemporary writers, despairing of
giving any adequate idea of their multitudes, state that the fields were
actually heaped with their corpses, and that for miles in its course the
waters of the Danube were dyed with their blood. It was at Mersburg, on
the Danube, that the greatest slaughter took place,--a slaughter so great
as to amount almost to extermination. The Hungarians for a while disputed
the passage of the river, but the Crusaders forced their way across, and
attacking the city with the blind courage of madness, succeeded in making
a breach in the walls. At this moment of victory an unaccountable fear
came over them. Throwing down their arms, they fled panic-stricken, no one
knew why, and no one knew whither. The Hungarians followed, sword in hand,
and cut them down without remorse, and in such numbers, that the stream of
the Danube is said to have been choked up by their unburied bodies.