One more turbulent band followed, to meet the same fate; but this was the worst—the most undisciplined of all. Headed by a priest named Volkmar, and a Count Emicon, they straggled without order or discipline, filled with the wildest superstitions. Before their army was led sometimes a she-goat, sometimes a goose, which they imagined to be filled with the Holy Spirit; and as all sins were to be expiated by the recovery of the Holy Land, there was a growing feeling that there was no longer any need of avoiding sin. Consequently, the wildest licence was indulged in, and this, which called itself “the army of the Lord,” was a horde of the most abandoned criminals. Their greatest crime was the slaughter of the Jews along the banks of the Rhine and Moselle. “Why,” they asked, “should we, who march against the Infidels, leave behind us the enemies of our Lord?” The bishops of the sees through which they passed vainly interposed their entreaties. In Cologne and Mayence every Jew was murdered; some of the miserable people tied stones round their own necks, and leaped into the river; some killed their wives and children, and set fire to their houses, perishing in the flames; the mothers killed the infants at their breasts, and the Christians themselves fled in all directions at the approach of an army as terrible to its friends as to its foes. But their course was of short duration. At the town of Altenburg, on the confines of Hungary, which they attempted to storm, they were seized with a sudden panic and fled in all directions, being slaughtered like sheep. Emicon got together a small band, whom he led home again; a few others were led by their chiefs southwards, and joined the princes of the Crusade in Italy. None of them, according to William of Tyre, found their way to Peter the Hermit. Once across the Dardanelles, Peter’s troops, who amounted, it is said, in spite of all their losses, to no fewer than a hundred thousand fighting men, fixed a camp on the shores of the Gulf of Nicomedia, and began to ravage the country in all directions. The division of the booty soon caused quarrels, and a number of Italians and Germans, deserting the camp, went up the country in a body, and took possession of a small fortress in the neighbourhood of Nicæa, whose garrison they massacred. Then they were in their turn besieged, and, with the exception of their leader, Renaud, or Rinaldo, who embraced the Mahometan faith, were slaughtered to a man. The news of this disaster roused the Christians, not to a sense of their danger (which they could not yet comprehend), but to a vehement desire for revenge. They made the luckless Walter lead them against Nicæa, and issued forth from their camp _en masse_, a disordered, shouting multitude, crying for vengeance against the Turks. But their end was at hand. The Sultan of Nicæa placed half his army in ambuscade in the forest, keeping the other half in the plain; the Christians were attacked in the front and in the rear,