They had gone some distance, when John of Swabia suddenly rushed upon the emperor, and buried his lance in his neck, exclaiming, “Such is the reward of injustice!” Immediately two others rode upon him, Rudolph of Balm stabbing him with his dagger, while Walter of Eschenbach clove his head in twain with his sword.  This bloody work done, the conspirators spurred rapidly away, leaving the dying emperor to breathe his last with his head supported in the lap of a poor woman, who had witnessed the murder and hurried to the spot.

This deed of blood saved Switzerland from the vengeance which the emperor had designed.  The mountaineers were given time to cement the government they had so hastily formed, and which was to last for centuries thereafter, despite the efforts of ambitious potentates to reduce the Swiss once more to subjection and rob them of the liberty they so dearly loved.

THE BLACK DEATH AND THE FLAGELLANTS.

The middle of the fourteenth century was a period of extraordinary terror and disaster to Europe.  Numerous portents, which sadly frightened the people, were followed by a pestilence which threatened to turn the continent into an unpeopled wilderness.  For year after year there were signs in the sky, on the earth, in the air, all indicative, as men thought, of some terrible coming event.  In 1337 a great comet appeared in the heavens, its far-extending tail sowing deep dread in the minds of the ignorant masses.  During the three succeeding years the land was visited by enormous flying armies of locusts, which descended in myriads upon the fields, and left the shadow of famine in their track.  In 1348 came an earthquake of such frightful violence that many men deemed the end of the world to be presaged.  Its devastations were widely spread.  Cyprus, Greece, and Italy were terribly visited, and it extended through the Alpine valleys as far as Basle.  Mountains sank into the earth.  In Carinthia thirty villages and the tower of Villach were ruined.  The air grew thick and stifling.  There were dense and frightful fogs.  Wine fermented in the casks.  Fiery meteors appeared in the skies.  A gigantic pillar of flame was seen by hundreds descending upon the roof of the pope’s palace at Avignon.  In 1356 came another earthquake, which destroyed almost the whole of Basle.  What with famine, flood, fog, locust swarms, earthquakes, and the like, it is not surprising that many men deemed the cup of the world’s sins to be full, and the end of the kingdom of man to be at hand.

An event followed that seemed to confirm this belief.  A pestilence broke out of such frightful virulence that it appeared indeed as if man was to be swept from the earth.  Men died in hundreds, in thousands, in myriads, until in places there were scarcely enough living to bury the dead, and these so maddened with fright that dwellings, villages, towns, were deserted by all who were able to fly, the dying and dead being left their sole inhabitants.  It was the pestilence called the “Black Death,” the most terrible visitation that Europe has ever known.