After the death of his second son, Conrad, Henry turned his arms against a relation of his own, Duke Ladislaus of Gnesen and Posen, and came off victorious. His old warrior-blood once again stirred in him, it was impossible to keep him from the excitement of war, and Hedwige’s entreaties and messages were of no avail. She feared the excommunication which Pope Innocent had more than once threatened to launch against the restless Polish sovereigns, and was relieved when he undertook a war against the Prussians, who at least were heathens, and whose cruelties really needed strong repression. Still, it was rather the thirst for fighting that led the Duke of Silesia against them than any exalted motive of justice or desire to open the way for their conversion.
The pretext for the expedition was the cruelties they committed on their inroads into Poland, and especially the duchy of Masovia. To attack them among their own forests and morasses was so hopelessly difficult that the bishops, whom the pope had admonished to preach a “crusade” against them, had hitherto refrained from doing so. The event proved the wisdom of this inaction; for after marching a large army over the border, under the command of Henry of Silesia and Duke Conrad of Masovia, with whom the bishops with their men-at-arms joined forces, the assailers found themselves in a network of marshes, behind which the assailed quietly waited. The wearied troops had at last to be ingloriously marched back again, while the enemy came out in their rear, made a raid into Masovia, carried off five thousand Christian captives, burnt a thousand villages and hamlets as well as almost every church in the province, and drove Duke Conrad into Germany for refuge. Henry then advised the fugitive duke to call upon the German Knights of Venice, a military order who afterwards under their grand master, Hermann Balk, settled in Kulmerland and effectually routed and conquered the Prussians. The conversion of the latter was, therefore, a feat of arms rather than a triumph of missionary zeal; and perhaps it was less to be wondered at that, after only three hundred years’ Christianity, they should have accepted another change in the shape of the Lutheran Reformation. The order itself, however, was more blamable, in that it departed, in the person of its head, the famous Albert of Brandenburg, from its old chivalric standard of honor, and went over to the “new doctrine,” as it was called, because this defection promised political independence. And, again, it strikes one, in reading of these thirteenth-century feuds, that history repeats itself; for a new religious war has sprung up between Prussia and Posen, and the two civilized races are in much the same relative positions, speaking broadly, as the two barbarous ones were then, although Posen can point to a short and dazzling career between the two eras of persecution.
It is impossible here to recount the various and sad events that led up to the death of Henry. He died in 1238, at the age of seventy, under the ban of excommunication, which was only partially removed, and deprived to the last of the presence of his saintly wife. The scene of the return of his body to the abbey church at Trebnitz was heartrending. The nuns and vassals, no less than his widow and children, looked upon him as their stay and their protector; they bewailed him with genuine grief as their benefactor, and buried him with all imaginable respect and pomp as their founder. Hedwige’s life as a widow became more penitential than before.
After her death a hair-shirt and a belt with small, sharp points turned inwards were found on her body; but these she had worn for many years before her widowhood. Her cloister-life, however, was not her only one, for she watched with intelligent interest the politics of the time, the great events, and even the less obtrusive details, whose consequences to the cause of good might afterwards be manifold; and above all she lived in her son, Henry the Pious, a worthy and able sovereign, whose reign was to be short, stormy, and glorious.
In January, 1241, the Tartars, under their chiefs Batu and Peta, having previously desolated Russia, fell with nearly three hundred thousand fighting men upon Bohemia, Hungary, Silesia, and Poland. The King of Hungary, Bela, was beaten by Batu, while Peta besieged, took, and burnt Cracow on his way to Silesia. The King of Bohemia, Wenzel, brought as large an army as he could to defend his frontiers, while Henry gathered thirty thousand men in his father’s city of refuge, Liegnitz, waiting to attack Peta on his road to Breslau. Trebnitz was in dire confusion; monasteries always fell the first prey to the heathen invaders, and the nuns judged it prudent to scatter themselves and claim each the protection of her own family, while Hedwige, with her daughter, the Abbess Gertrude, and her daughter-in-law, Anna, shut themselves up in the strong castle of Crossen on the Oder. Before she left she gave her son a scarf, or rather sword-belt, embroidered with her own hands, which he received as an omen of good-fortune, cheering her with hopes of his speedy and victorious return, while the stricken, heroic mother feared but too surely that she should never see his face again. All Breslau retired within the citadel to await the attack, and Henry tried to intercept the foe on his way. He drew up his army on some high ground just outside the walls—Wahlstatt, a good battle-ground, as he judged—and himself gave the signal to attack the oncoming foe. He commanded the main body, while lesser brother-sovereigns directed the wings; but the irresistible might of numbers, which was the chief reliance of the Tartars, bore down all opposition, as a whirlwind does the densest forest. The Poles and Silesians fell like heroes, defending themselves and asking no quarter, until a cry arose in German, “Strike dead! strike dead!” which, whether raised by accident or by treachery, produced a panic by its likeness to the Polish word for “Fly! fly!” The army seemed literally to melt away; squadrons broke and ran, and a cloud of small, sharp Tartar arrows clove the air after them; the Asiatic cavalry hunted and trampled down the fugitives. One of the Polish leaders at last succeeded in rallying part of the troops, and the fight began again with some hopes of victory, when the enemy had resort to a kind of infernal machine used in ancient Indian warfare, the likeness of a gigantic head, which was so made as to give out a dense smoke and unbearable stench, besides being in some degree explosive. The contrivance was held by the Christians to be magical and devilish, and the Tartars themselves, so dangerous was it to those of their own men who had the handling of it, only resorted to it in the utmost extremity, which shows how hard-pressed they were on this occasion by the Silesian soldiery. But the terrible device stood them in good stead this time. The panic was renewed, and once more a wild flight and wilder pursuit took place; the leaders, the knights, and Henry himself, regardless of the flight of their followers, fought on long after they knew their fate to be hopeless and death certain. One by one the brave fellows were cut down, the little band decreased at every stroke of sword or flight of arrows, and the duke, with four knights, found himself almost alone on the lost field of battle. They urged him to try to save his life by flight; he scouted the proposal, and told them that since God had not willed that he should conquer, he would at least die. “For the faith,” he said; “at least, it will be a martyr’s death.” His charger was killed under him, and he fought on foot for some time, hewing a lane for himself through his enemies. One of his knights managed at last to bring him a fresh horse, which he had no sooner mounted than his person was recognized by hundreds of his foes and he was hemmed in on all sides. While in the act of lifting his sword to cut down a Tartar in his front, he was wounded from behind by a long lance thrust in precisely where a joint in his armor exposed the shoulder; the spear went right through and pierced the lung, and the son of Duchess Hedwige sank dying from his horse. The enemy cut off his head, and, hoisting it on a spear, paraded it before the walls of Liegnitz, summoning the defenders to surrender; but they, guarding Henry’s young sons, answered back from the battlements: “If we have lost one duke to-day, we have four yet with us in the castle, and these we will defend to the last drop of our hearts’ blood.” The next day they were relieved by King Wenzel of Bohemia, who, however, came too late to do anything but hasten the departure of the Tartar horde, which had suffered severely in the encounter, but rallied soon enough to maraud, burn, and sack churches, abbeys, villages, etc., throughout Hungary and Silesia, Bohemia and Mähren, until, one year later, Jaroslaus von Sternberg finally routed their diminished army under the walls of Olmütz. This roused Germany and France, and the Christian sovereigns combined sent a mighty army, under the command of Wenzel of Bohemia, to defend the Austro-Hungarian frontiers, whence the Tartars retreated, by the same road by which they had come, to their steppes on the high table-lands of Asia. Their traces in Europe, however, were not blotted out for half a century; the ruined churches, blackened villages, and ravaged fields long showed their awful track; and the outward work of Hedwige’s life would have been well-nigh destroyed had not the spirit she had brought with it remained alive as the germ of a future exterior restoration.
The night of the lost battle, when Henry’s headless body lay on the field, Hedwige, after a prayer of unusual length, woke her nearest friend and favorite attendant, and said to her:
“Demundis, this night I have lost my only son. He has left me as swiftly as a bird flies upwards, and I shall never look upon his face again.” She forbade her to say anything of this to the dead man’s wife and sister until some messenger from the army should bring news of the battle; and it was not till the third day that Jaroslaus von Janowitz came with the terrible tidings. Anna, Henry’s young widow, hastened to the field to seek and recover her husband’s body, which was so mutilated that she only recognized it by the six toes of the left foot. The corpse was brought to Trebnitz and buried with his father, brother, and infant sons in the abbey church. Hedwige prayed thus aloud over his grave: “O Lord! I thank thee that thou hast given me such a son, who, as long as he lived, loved and honored me truly, and never gave me an hour’s sorrow. However gladly I would have kept him by my side on earth, I hold him blessed in that, by the shedding of his blood, he is now united in heaven with thee, his Creator. With supplication, O Lord! do I commend his soul unto thee.”
Hedwige’s life and work were drawing to an end. Her last public act was one of charity to the dead and comfort to the bereaved living. The bodies of many heroic defenders of their country had been left to rot upon the field of battle. She had these gathered together and buried in consecrated ground, and ordered solemn requiems to be sung for the repose of their souls, while she made herself accessible to every sorrowing widow, mother, sister, or orphan of the dead soldiers, listened to their complaints and laments, comforted and helped them, and brought God’s peace once more into their hearts. After this she prepared herself to die. Her first care was a practical one: she set her affairs in order—a moral duty too often foolishly confounded with worldliness. Then she redoubled her devotions, and, sending for her chaplain, asked to receive Extreme Unction. He demurred, seeing no sign of death about her; but her holiness was so well known that he asked her the reason of her request.
“It is a sacrament,” she answered reverently, “which should be received in full consciousness, that we may treat it with due reverence and thankfulness; and I fear that sickness would make me receive it with little or no preparation, and would prevent me from being, as far as possible, worthy of this dying grace. I shall belong to the sick before many days are over, and I would fain be strengthened for the passage through death to the joy of meeting my God.”
Her agony was not long, but she seemed to struggle with a fear of death and of the devil’s temptations. When her daughter wished to send for Anna, she said: “No; I shall not die before she comes home” (she was then absent on a visit to her brother, King Wenzel of Bohemia). Her biographers tell us that angels and saints visited her on her death-bed. She died with the veil of her holy niece, Elizabeth of Hungary, wound round her head, and held in her hand, and often to her lips, a little ivory image of the Blessed Virgin. At the very last she was calm and peaceful, blessed her daughter and daughter-in-law, and every nun in the monastery of Trebnitz, her chosen home, and died at evening twilight, on the 15th of October, 1243. Twenty years later the clergy of Silesia, Poland, and Bohemia sent deputies to Rome to beg for her canonization, which Pope Clement IV. proclaimed almost immediately. Many miracles through her intercession were sworn to by credible witnesses, and the neighborhood blossomed with gracious and beautiful legends of the sainted duchess, the mother of the poor and the guardian angel of Silesia. The ceremony of transferring her body to a shrine in the abbey church at Trebnitz in 1268 was the occasion for a national festival; pilgrims flocked in from the remotest districts, and many foreigners came too. Sovereigns and knights, in costly robes and armor, walked in procession to her altar; lay and ecclesiastical pomp was showered upon and around her remains; but nothing of all this was so great a tribute as the memory she left, deep in the heart of the people, of a model wife, mother, mistress, and sovereign, a woman strong in principle, truthful in every word and deed, charitable yet not weak, merciful yet not sentimental, a wise, far-seeing, but tender, brave, and thoroughly womanly woman.