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,