Page:A Dictionary of Saintly Women Volume 1.djvu/379

ST. HEDWIG 365 go out to meet the funeral procession in honour of the deceased sovereign ; and, moreover, when a great weeping and lamentation was made for him, she re- buked some of the nuns for murmuring against the will of God. From that time she wore the habit of a Cistercian nun, but she never took the vows. She never would sit down to eat until she had fed twelve poor persons in memory of the twelve apostles. She tended the sick, dressing and kissing their sores. Two years after the death of Henry I., the Bearded, in the reign of his son, Henry II., the Pious, Poland and Silesia, already frequently desolated by famine, pestilence, and civil war, and only be- ginning to profit by peace and grow in civilization, were overrun by a countless horde of Tartars. Their ferocity, their ugliness, their illimitable swarms, re- mind us of the Huns, who overran the ancient civilization of the Romans. Henry II. was the leader and virtual monarch of Poland; for Boleslaus, though now nearly arrived at man's estate, seems to have been afraid to venture out of his fortress of Skata. Henry sent for assistance to his neighbours. Austria and Hungary were engaged in other wars, so that no steady united resistance was at hand to quell the inroad in the beginning. Wenzel, king of Bohemia, brother of Henry's wife, the Duchess Anna, was on the way to his aid, but Poland could not wait. She called in vain to her king; she looked to her dukes. The flood of Tartars swept on over the land ; the new villages, churches, and fields lay before them, ashes and corpses were all they left behind. Henry sent his mother, wife, and children, with many other persons, for safety to Krossen, or Crosna ; he gathered his forces together at Legnicz, and joy- fully resolved to fight the unequal battle, which all looked upon as a crusade and a martyrdom. As he rode out of the gate of Legnicz to meet the enemy on the plain of Wahlstadt, a stone fell from the building above his head, struck the crest off his helmet, and narrowly missed breaking his skull. This was regarded as a bad omen. All had received the Holy Sacrament, and went gallantly forth to victory or death in a sacred, although almost hopeless, cause. Henry, with the best and noblest of the Poles, was killed ; but the Tartars received a severe check : the many lives so gallantly laid down were not sacrified in vain. The number of Tartar dead far exceeded that of the whole Christian host. Soon afterwards, they heard of the death of their khan, and hurried home; and, with the exception of an occasional raid, they came no more into Poland. There was no second invasion. Search was made for the body of the Duke of Silesia; but the hacked and disfigured trunk, despoiled of its dress, as well as of its head, would never have been recognized among the ghastly heaps of slain had not Anna bid the seekers know him by the peculiarity of a sixth toe on his left foot. He was buried temporarily, with many others, in a neighbouring church, and eventually re- moved to the Franciscan convent, which he had founded at Breslau, and which his widow completed the following year ; and there they buried him like a great duke, with a natioi^'s lamentation. A church was built on the battle- field in memory of those who fell there, and many of them were buried in it. Although the news did not arrive until three days after the battle, Hed- wig, at Crossen, knew her son's fj&te, and told it to the venerable Adelaide, one of the nuns of Trebnicz, who was with her. When the disastrous event was announced, Hedwig took it with the same unnatural or supernatural coolness which she had exhibited on the occasion of her husband's death. Anna was over- come with grief and dismay, the nuns and attendants were loud in their lamen- tations. Hedwig alone shed no tear, but thanked God that He had made her the mother of a son who had never vexed her by an undutiful act, and who had met his death so bravely and piously against the enemies of Christ. Henry IL was succeeded by his son Boleslaus, called the Bald and the Furious. His mother and grandmother had often in his childhood deplored his violent temper, base inclinations, and un- reasonable disposition, which bordered