It occurred in the
Franconian region during the civil strife between the elected
King of the Romans, Count
Adolf of Nassau, and his
Habsburg rival Duke
Albert of Austria, when
Imperial authority, traditionally concerned with the protection of the Jews, had temporarily collapsed. Already in 1287, the death of
Werner of Oberwesel in the
Rhineland had been blamed on Jews, and about 500 were killed in a violent outburst of random violence, followed by a series of
blood libels. When King Adolf was finally deposed and killed in the
Battle of Göllheim on 2 July 1298, the Franconian nobility gathered at Albert's
election in
Frankfurt. When at the same time the Jews in the
Hohenlohe town of
Röttingen were accused of having obtained and
desecrated a consecrated host, one "Lord Boels von Rindtfleisch", who the sources refer to either as an impoverished knight or—more probably—a butcher (the term
Rindfleisch means "beef" in modern
German spelling), gathered a mob around him and
burned the Röttingen Jews on Sunday, April 20. Rintfleisch declared to have received a mandate from
heaven to avenge the sacrilege and exterminate the Jews. The
Colmar Dominican Rudolph refers to him in Latin as a
carnifex, i.e. butcher or executioner, but it is not clear if Rudolph meant his original profession, or his behaviour as a slaughterer of the Jews. According to contemporary sources, the Lord of Röttingen, Kraft Boels von Hohenlohe, was encumbered with debts to Jewish lenders. After this, he and his mob went from town to town and killed all Jews that fell under their control, destroying the Jewish communities at
Rothenburg ob der Tauber,
Würzburg,
Bamberg,
Dinkelsbühl,
Nördlingen and
Forchheim. In the
Free Imperial City of Nuremberg, the Jews sought refuge in the
fortress and were assisted by the Christian citizens, but Rintfleisch overcame the defenders and butchered the Jews on 1 August. The
Nürnberger Memorbuch contains the names of thousands of murdered Jews in numerous cities, among them
Mordechai ben Hillel, a pupil of
Meir of Rothenburg, with his wife and children. The communities at
Regensburg and
Augsburg alone escaped the mass killing, as the cities' magistrates protected them. Spreading from Franconia to
Bavaria and
Austria, the persecutors destroyed 146 communities, and 20,000–100,000 Jews were killed. The
Austrian Chronicle of 95 Seigneurs about 100 years later alleged that King Albert I finally had Rintfleisch arrested and hanged. The cities in which Jews had been killed were required to pay fines to the king. ==See also==