Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/160

148 148 CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA, ETC. patliians, to guard them, and block each of them up with an abattis of felled trees. But the Tartars swept away such obstacles as these in a moment; Hungary was invaded at three points at once by fifty thousand men, and the whole country was soon in the power of the barbarians, who covered its cities and its fields with fire and blood. The people fled in horror and con- sternation, and great numbers took refuge in Varadin, one of the principal cities, which had a citadel defended by broad moats, and walls flanked with towers, though, unfortunately, only of wood. The Mongols captured it with great ease, pillaged it, set fire to it, and beheaded the whole population, without any distinction of age or sex. The ladies had taken refuge in the cathedral, and the Mongols would not give themselves the trouble to break open the doors, but set fire to it, and the unfor- tunate ladies all perished in the flames. The barbarians profaned the churches by the most abominable debauchery, broke open the tombs, trampled the relics under their feet, polluted the sacred vessels, and put the Canons to torture, to make them reveal all that they possessed. The few inhabitants who had been left alive after the first massacre, citizens, ecclesiastics, or soldiers, were hacked to death in the plain with sabres and hatchets, and the ravages only ceased when the infection from the putrefying corpses forced the Tartars to leave the place, of which they had made a vast desert. Roger, one of the canons of Varadin, has related the invasion and destruction of Hungary by the Tartars, in a production entitled, Miserabile Carmen. The narrative of these deplorable events could, in fact, be nothing else than a song of lamentation.