Strasbourg, Alsace
February 14, 1349
Six hundred years before Al Capone made Valentine's Day synonymous with bloodshed in Chicago, the citizens of Strasbourg, in the German Empire, committed a massacre that dwarfed it in scale and savagery. On February 14, 1349, as many as two thousand Jewish men, women, and children were marched to the Jewish cemetery and burned alive on a wooden platform — accused of poisoning the wells and conjuring the Black Death. The plague hadn't even reached the city yet. Five days earlier, a guild revolt had overthrown the city government that had been protecting the Jewish community. The new regime's first act was mass arrest. Its second was mass murder. And when the ashes cooled, the new council divided the dead's property among themselves and declared all debts owed to Jewish lenders void. The motive was the same as it always is. Money. Power. And someone to blame.
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