As eastern Europe filled with refugees, panic gripped western Europe. In Germany rumors that the Tartars were Gog and Magog, the two lost tribes of Israel, ignited pogroms against the Jews. In France a knight warned Louis IX that the Mongols would soon be on the Somme. In England the monk Matthew Paris predicted a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions. The Mongols, he said, are “monsters rather than men, . . . inhuman and beastly, thirsting for and drinking blood and devouring the flesh of dogs and men, and striking everyone with terror and incomparable horror.” In Rome the pope received a
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