powerless; “it was not a battle, but a butchery.”[40] Bela fled to the Karpathians, thence to Austria; his brother Kalman reached Kroatia, where he died of his wounds. Among the slain were the Archbishops Mathias of Gran and Ugolin of Kalocza, the Bishops of Raab, Neutra, and Siebenbürgen, and counts and nobles galore, the flower of Hungarian aristocracy. Surely not to be reckoned as “the weak and the false,” “the fool and the knave.” Bela, betrayed by the Duke of Austria and hunted from one refuge to another by the remorseless enemy, took ship from the Dalmatian coast and left his kingdom in the hands of Batu. Southern Hungary, Servia, Dalmatia, and parts of Bulgaria were ravaged by detachments of the Horde, but south of Albania and west of Austria they do not appear to have penetrated. The news of the death of the Grand Khan Ogatai, and possibly the increasing difficulty of supporting so large a body of men in a devastated country, determined Batu to withdraw his hosts from the scene of their conquests, and the Mongol swarms melted away from the erstwhile fertile lands which they had turned into a howling wilderness. Bela returned to take possession of his stricken kingdom, confronted on all sides by evidences of the great calamity; “the highways were grown with grass, the fields were white with bones, and here and there for more than a day’s journey round, no living soul.”[41] In distant corners of Europe men shuddered at the tales that were told of these fearsome sons of the desert; in marvel-loving Constantinople it was gravely averred that they had the heads of dogs and fed upon human flesh, and the dread of their coming kept the fishermen of Sweden and Friesland from attending the herring-market on the English coast, thereby demoralising prices.[42] FOOTNOTES: [35] Sir H. H. Howorth, _History of the Mongols_. [36] Howorth sees in the recurring devastations of such men as Jingis, Attila, Timur, Bonaparte, and their ilk, the hand of “Providence” operating to purge the world of “the diseased and the decaying, the weak and the false, the worn out and the biased, the fool and the knave.” The Mongol massacres were so thorough and indiscriminate that it is hard to say what classes of human beings came safest out of the ordeal, but in the wars of Napoleon it would certainly not be a survival of the fittest; the weak, the cowardly, the frivolous would be least likely to perish; the strong, the brave, the patriotic would be those who “foremost fighting fell.” [37] Riesenkampff, _Der Deutsche Hof zu Nowgorod_.