and Palestine, were no less in esteem among the Western Christians of the 10th century during the Roman pornocracy (§ 96, 1) or the tyranny of the Seljuk dynasty in Palestine (§ 94). The expectation of the approaching end of the world, rather gave them an impulse during this century, which reached its fullest expression in the crusades.--Continuation, § 115, 9. § 104.9. The earliest trace of a commemoration of =St. Ursula and her 11,000 Virgins= is met with in the 10th century. Excavations in the _Ager Ursulanus_ near Cologne in A.D. 1155 led to the discovery of some thousand skeletons, several of them being those of males, with inscribed tablets, one of the fictitious inscriptions referring to an otherwise unknown pope Cyriæus. St. Elizabeth of Schönau (§ 107, 1) at the same time had visions in which the Virgin gave her authentic account of their lives. Ursula, the fair daughter of a British king of the 3rd century, was to have married a pagan prince; she craved three years’ reprieve and got from her father eleven ships, each with an equipment of a thousand virgins, with which she sailed up the Rhine to Basel, and thence with her companions travelled on foot a pilgrimage to Rome. On her return, in accordance with the Divine instruction, Pope Cyriæus accompanied her, whose name was on this account struck out of the list by the offended cardinals; for as Martinus Polonus says, _Credebant plerique eum non propter devotionem sed propter obtectamenta virginum papatum dimississe_. Near Cologne they met the army of the Huns, by whom they were all massacred, at last even Ursula herself on her persistent refusal to marry the barbaric chief.--In the absence of any historical foundations for this legend, an explanation has been attempted by identifying Ursula with a goddess of the German mythology. An older suggestion is that perhaps an ancient inscription may have given rise to the legend.[311]