In vain did the Jews attempt to defend themselves in their streets; the inhabitants of the city, strengthened by troops from other places, besieged them, and took by storm the walls which surrounded the Jewish quarter, breaking them down and slaying almost all the Jews of the city. They also set fire to the Jewish houses, and reduced them to ashes. The description by an eye-witness of his own sufferings gives only a feeble idea of the horrors of this savage massacre in Estella. The murderers had slain the parents and the four younger brothers of Menachem ben Zerach, then barely twenty years old, afterwards a scholar of commanding influence. He himself was wounded by the murderers and knocked down, lying on the ground unconscious, from evening till midnight, beneath a number of corpses. A compassionate knight, a friend of Menachem's father, searched for him beneath the pile of corpses, took him to his house, and had him carefully tended till he recovered from his wounds. Similar scenes of barbarity were enacted in other parts of the country, especially in Tudela, the largest community in Navarre, and in the smaller ones of Falcos, Funes, Moncilla, Viana and others, but nowhere to so frightful an extent as in Estella. Over six thousand Jews perished in these massacres. Only the Jews of the capital, Pampeluna, appear to have escaped these savage attacks. The people of Navarre at length succeeded in their desire; their country was separated from France, and obtained a king of its own, Philip III, Count of Evreux and Angoulême. As soon as he was crowned, the relatives of the murdered entreated him to mete out justice. At first, Philip prosecuted the guilty persons in real earnest; he ordered the ringleaders, the Franciscan Pedro Olligoyen and others to be cast into prison, and laid a fine upon the cities in which these crimes had been committed. But, in course of time, he liberated all the imprisoned, and remitted the fine as an act of grace. He took good care, too, not to let the stolen property and the possessions of persons without heirs escape him; they had to be surrendered to him, just as in Germany. There was no objection to the Jews' being slaughtered, but the royal treasury was not to suffer loss on that account. This king and his successors imposed new burdens upon the wretched people. The Jews of Navarre now began to sink into degradation like those of Germany.