In Switzerland the persecution commenced about the middle of the fourteenth century, and several expulsions are recorded in the ensuing century. In Eastern Europe the Jews suffered in Russia and Hungary. The semi-civilised and semi-Christianized Magyars, who had hitherto tolerated the Jews, were incited to acts of oppression by the Western friars. Poland and Lithuania were the only European countries where the Jews of the later Middle Ages found shelter, and consequently both those countries received large numbers of fugitives from the Western fields of carnage. Credulity joined hands with bigotry. No story told of the Jews was too extravagant for belief; no charge brought against them too trivial for repetition, provided it afforded an excuse for persecution. Some of the odious crimes attributed by the heathens in the early centuries to the Christians, as a justification of their suppression, were now revived by the Christians against the Jews. The latter were accused of enveigling Christian children into their houses and sacrificing them for ritual or medicinal purposes, of travestying the sacraments of the Church, of poisoning wells and of committing all kinds of abominations, which plainly rendered their utter extermination a public duty. Similar charges, curiously enough, are still brought against the Jews by the Christians of Eastern Europe, by the Jews themselves against Hebrew converts to Islam in Turkey, and by the Chinese against Protestant missionaries--“charges of gross personal immorality and of kidnapping and mutilation of children, which, however monstrous and malevolent, are not the less, but the more serious, because they are firmly believed by the ignorant audiences to whom they are addressed.”[55] To the vulgar all that is strange is sinister. The free propagation of these heinous and disgusting myths among the vulgar masses of mediaeval Europe led, as it had done in ancient times and as it has done more recently, to a horrible persecution of those against whom they were levelled. ♦1171♦ The Jews were ruthlessly burnt by order of Duke Theobalt at Blois, were massacred by the populace in Languedoc and Central France, ♦1321♦ and on the plague breaking out in the following year, they were burnt _en masse_--men, women and children. A season of alternate persecution and toleration ensued, until they were banished from Central France and finally driven out from the rest of the country by the insane King Charles VI., ♦1394–5♦ at the end of the fourteenth century.