eft him for dead. The unhappy monarch expired a few minutes
after in the arms of a passing peasant woman. All this bloody scene took
place in full view of the Emperor's train on the opposite side of the
river, though no one apparently was able to render him assistance,
probably from the absence of boats and the suddenness of the tragedy.
The murderers succeeded in making good their escape, though two of them
were afterward captured and executed, as were also a number of innocent
people believed to be participators in the conspiracy. John himself was
more fortunate, for, disguised as a monk, he managed for many years to
hide his identity, and, after wandering in Tuscany unsuspected,
eventually died in a monastery at Pisa.

Albert's daughter Agnes, Queen of Hungary, "a woman unacquainted with
the milder feelings of piety, but addicted to a certain sort of
devotional habits and practices by no means inconsistent with implacable
vindictiveness," fearfully avenged his murder. This woman appears to
have been seized with a perfectly demoniacal mania for blood and
revenge. Aided by those in authority, who feared lest a widespread
conspiracy had been formed, she seized, on the slightest suspicion,
hundreds of innocent victims and put them to death with all the ferocity
of a famished beast. Members of nearly a hundred noble families, and at
least a thousand persons of lower rank, of every age and of both sexes,
fell beneath her savage vengeance. She is said to have further whetted
her appetite for horrors by wading, at Fahrwangen, in the blood of
sixty-three innocent knights, exclaiming the while, "This day we bathe
in May-dew." But at last, after several months, even the implacable
bloodthirstiness of the Hungarian Queen was satisfied, and the massacre
ceased. Over the spot where Albert met his death Agnes built a
monastery; she named it Koenigsfelden and enriched it with the spoils of
her victims. Here she took up her abode for the remainder of her life,
and for nearly fifty years practised the most rigid asceticism, and
here, by the side of her parents, she was eventually buried.
Koenigsfelden stood on the road from Basel to Baden and Zurich, and
within sight of the castle of Hapsburg, the cradle of the house of
Austria.

Strenuous efforts were made by Albert's widow to obtain the succession
to the imperial throne for her son, Frederick, Duke of Austria, but the
choice of the prince-electors, headed by the Archbishop of Mainz