ible, undrilled, and rapacious; less responsible to
authority and less moved by pity than the Turks had ever been. In their
love for indiscriminate massacre they seem to have been the wild Indians
of Europe. They came, nobody anticipating them, nobody knowing from
whence. Their ranks were filled up and increased, nobody knew how.
Rumors of cannibalism preceded them, and they were believed to be less
than human in form and mind. A Finn might have partly understood their
talk, but, to the people they attacked, their speech was gibberish.

[Sidenote: _Huns in Europe_]

The weakness and divisions of Christendom invited their approach and
palsied resistance. At almost the same date Bremen on the Baltic and
Constance on the lake, felt their power. They swarmed over the Alps.
They menaced Southern France, and peered from the Pyrenees at Spain.
Italy felt their heaviest hand, and Rome saw their devastating flames
almost under its walls. For fifty years Christendom quaked and fell
before them, and halted them for the first time in A. D. 936 by the
hands of Henry the Fowler. Gradually they were restrained to the limits
of modern Hungary, and in the eleventh century they were Christianized
and the worst enemies of Christianity became guides and caterers to the
Crusaders, while not sharing largely in their enthusiasms.

[Sidenote: _The Bulgarians_]

It was very different with the Bulgarians south of the Danube over whose
great plain of Sophia a smoother path would be found if the Crusaders
could reach it. Sometimes protecting, sometimes robbing Constantinople,
their chiefs drank from the gold-banded skull of a Byzantine emperor.
Basil conquered them only to show himself more barbarous by putting out
the eyes of fifteen thousand Bulgarian captives.

[Sidenote: _Bulgarian Allegiance_]

[Sidenote: _Queer Christianity_]

At the beginning of the Crusades Bulgaria was nominally subject to the
Greek Empire, but held that authority in contempt. Heavy forests then
grew to the southern edge of the Danube where now there are bare hills.
This mingling of forest and hill gave to the Bulgarians a security in
self-rule which was only, in general, ineffectively interrupted by the
army of the empire. The Bulgarian type of Christianity did not extend
the idea of brotherhood beyond its own borders. They could cheerfully
make themselves, without the least trouble of conscience, the terror of
their Christian brethren who were making their way to