But the Jews, as on so many occasions before and since, so now proved in a practical and ghastly manner that they dreaded death less than apostasy. Many of them met bigotry with bigotry, and cheated their assailants of both glory and gain by committing their property, their families and themselves to destruction. Martyrdom is a pathetic yet forcible reply to oppression. At Trèves the Jews, on hearing that the holy army was drawing near, were so terrified that some of them killed their own children; matrons and maidens drowned themselves in the Moselle in order to escape baptism or disgrace; and the rest of the community vainly implored the hard-hearted Bishop for protection. His answer was that nothing could save them but conversion. Thereupon the wretches hastened to be converted. The scene must have been a perfect study in the grimly ludicrous. The enemy was outside ready to pounce upon his prey. The latter said to the Bishop: “Tell us quickly what to believe.” The Bishop recited the creed, and the converts repeated it after him with all the fervour and fluency which the fear of death can only inspire. At Speyer the Jews stoutly refused to be baptized, and many were, therefore, massacred. Those who succeeded in escaping sought shelter in the palace of the Bishop, who not only protected them, but incurred the censures of his contemporaries by ordering the execution of some of the holy murderers. A similar tragedy was acted at Worms, where some of the victims were temporarily saved by the Bishop, while a few were baptized, and the rest, men and women, committed suicide. At Mayence, they were slaughtered in the Archbishop’s palace, where they had taken refuge, and many murdered each other rather than betray their faith. At Cologne the majority of the community were rescued by the good burghers and their humane Bishop Hermann III. The Emperor Henry IV, also, on his return from his third Italian campaign, publicly denounced the crimes of the Crusaders, instituted proceedings against the Archbishop of Mayence, who had shared the spoils of the Jews, and permitted the surviving converts to return to Judaism; ♦1097♦ thereby drawing down upon himself an indignant reproof from his own antipope, Clement III., on whose behalf he had undertaken that expedition to Italy. For, however grateful Clement might be to Henry, he could not conscientiously connive at his impious interference with the designs of Providence. ♦1146♦