[139] Bernard of Clairvaulx, a zealous partisan of the rival pope, Innocent V., dilates on the outrage offered to Christ through the occupation of the seat of St. Peter by ‘Judaica Soboles.’—_Bern. Epist._ 134. CHAPTER XXIII. A.D. 1300-1400. THE JEWS IN GERMANY, THE LOW COUNTRIES, ETC. The history of the Jews in Germany throughout the fourteenth century is one long series of wrongs and barbarities. Almost immediately after its commencement, the disturbances at Nuremberg, which had been suppressed by Duke Albert some ten or twelve years previously, broke out afresh. In the course of these the mob, seizing on Mordecai, a Rabbi of learning and high repute, publicly hanged him. In the next generation, a man named Armleder, a publican by trade, incited an outbreak among the peasants of Alsatia with such fatal effect that more than 1500 Jews were slaughtered. In Swabia also great numbers were murdered; while at Deckendorf we are informed that the whole of the Hebrew inhabitants of the town were massacred, and their property pillaged or destroyed. There appear to have been no special grounds for these enormities. The whole atmosphere was, as it were, charged with deadly vapours, and the slightest spark of discontent was enough to cause a disastrous explosion. The authorities in some cases sided with the rioters; in others they stood aloof, and allowed them to work their pleasure; while in some few they interfered to stay the mischief if they could, generally with but little success. Great injury was also done to the Jews all over Germany, by the censure passed on them by Pope Clement V. for their excessive usury. Numberless lawsuits, we are told, were in consequence instituted against them, in which their right to recover money lent on interest by them was challenged. A few years subsequently the whole of the Hebrew population of Hungary was expelled from the country by Louis I., who displayed his intemperate zeal, not by that act only, but by his attempts, in concert with Casimir of Poland, to force the profession of Christianity on the Lithuanians.