In their rapid course, the Tartars crossed the Volga, and penetrated, almost without obstacle, into Muscovy, then a prey to the fury of civil war. The devastation of their country, the conflagrations of Kiow and Moscow, and the disgraceful yoke that so long oppressed these northern regions, were the punishments due to the feeble resistance of the Muscovites. After the conquest of Russia, the multitude of Moguls, led by Batou, son of Tuli, directed their victorious course towards Poland and the frontiers of Germany, and repeated, wherever they went, the horrors of Attila and his Huns. The cities of Lublin and Warsaw disappeared on their passage, and they laid waste both shores of the Baltic. In vain the duke of Silesia, the Polish palatines, and the grand master of the Teutonic order, united their forces to arrest the progress of this new scourge of God;[269] the generous defenders of Europe succumbed upon the plains of Lignitz, and nine sacks, filled with human ears, were the trophy of the victory of the barbarians. The Carpathian mountains presented but a feeble barrier to these invincible hordes; and the Tartars soon burst like a fearful tempest over the territories of those Hungarians who, two centuries before, had, like them, quitted the deserts of Scythia, and conquered the fertile banks of the Danube. Bela, king of Hungary, had recently attracted forty thousand families of Comans into his dominions, who betrayed him; the palatines and magnates of the kingdom were divided among themselves, and not even the aspect of danger could induce them to unite or submit themselves to the laws of the monarch. Disobedience, treachery, and discord, delivered the whole kingdom up to the furies of a pitiless enemy; the flocks, the harvests, the entire wealth of the country, became the prey of the Moguls; half the population was exterminated. Of all the cities of Hungary, only three offered an earnest and true resistance, and thus preserved themselves from scenes of carnage and destruction. The shepherds of Scythia, who could not read, have left to the vanquished the task of describing their conquests, and we have great difficulty in crediting the accounts of the old Hungarian chronicles, when they describe the unheard-of cruelties by which the Moguls disgraced their victories;[270] but several provinces entirely depopulated and changed into deserts, the ruins of two thousand churches, fifty destroyed cities, the traditions of these great disasters transmitted from age to age, and the terror that pervaded Europe, are evidences so worthy of faith, that we cannot reject them.