The murderers escaped into the Swiss mountains, expecting shelter there;
but the stout, honest men of the cantons were resolved not to have any
connection with assassins, and refused to protect them. Johann himself,
after long and miserable wanderings in disguise, bitterly repented,
owned his crime to the Pope, and was received into a convent; Eschenbach
escaped, and lived fifteen years as a cowherd. The others all fell into
the hands of the sons and daughters of Albrecht, and woeful was the
revenge that was taken upon them, and upon their innocent families and
retainers.
That Leopold, who had seen his father slain before his eyes, should
have been deeply incensed, was not wonderful, and his elder brother
Frederick, as Duke of Austria, was charged with the execution of
justice; but both brothers were horribly savage and violent in their
proceedings, and their sister Agnes surpassed them in her atrocious
thirst for vengeance. She was the wife of the King of Hungary, very
clever and discerning, and also supposed to be very religious, but all
better thoughts were swept away by her furious passion. She had nearly
strangled Eschenbach's infant son with her own bare hands, when he was
rescued from her by her own soldiers, and when she was watching the
beheading of sixty-three vassals of another of the murderers, she
repeatedly exclaimed, 'Now I bathe in May dew.' Once, indeed, she met
with a stern rebuke. A hermit, for whom she had offered to build a
convent, answered her, 'Woman, God is not served by shedding innocent
blood and by building convents out of the plunder of families, but by
compassion and forgiveness of injuries.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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