All goes well while the Crusaders march through loyal and liberal France. Help was literally poured into their laps; nor did the Germans, from the earliest historic days easily touched by noble sentiments, fail to respond both to the plea for the Holy Land and for practical sympathy. The Rhine people smoothed the pilgrims' way. They were, however, to meet trouble on the banks of the Danube.
[Sidenote: _Western Christendom Disordered_]
The expectation that the end of the world was to come about the year 1000 was, for a century before that date, well-nigh universal and dominant. As that year approached the condition apparently confirmed the prophetic warnings of the New Testament. Western Christendom seemed to be hopelessly disordered. It was at this time that a worse invasion than that of the Turks threatened Europe. The Magyars, or Huns, were barbarous, irresponsible, 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.
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.
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.