INV. 054 · Manuscript
Medieval miniature of Jews being burned, c. 1349 to 1353
Miniature from a fourteenth-century manuscript, usually captioned as the burning of Jews accused of spreading the plague in 1349. The book treats the well-poisoning charge and the violence of the Black Death but does not reproduce this image. The reading of the Latin text is editorial and needs palaeographic checking.
Editorial note: The identification of the episode and the holding institution come from the conventional caption and need checking in the library's catalogue.
- Type
- Manuscript
- Nature
- Ancient objectThe object itself dates from the period indicated.
- Date of the object
- c. 1352Commons attributes the miniature to Pierart dou Tielt, around 1352 to 1353, in Gilles li Muisis's Antiquitates Flandriae. The date comes from the metadata.
- Depicts
- People watching a pyre on which figures burn; the Latin text at the foot mentions the year 1349, captured Jews and poison in wells and fountains.
- Institution
- Bibliothèque royale de Belgique (a conferir)
- Provenance
- Flemish chronicle of Gilles li Muisis, abbot of Tournai.
- Image
- Pierart dou TieltAntiquitates Flandriae, Gilles li Muisis
- Licence
- Public domain
- Retrieved
- Commons API, 2026-10-14
Sourced historical context
In the late 1340s, with Europe staggered by bubonic plague, the Black Death, which by some estimates killed as much as a third of its people, Christians again rounded on the Jews, accused of poisoning wells and believed by many to have drawn down God's anger by living among Christians. In Provence and Catalonia, the account goes, the massacres killed more victims than the epidemic did, and the violence rapidly engulfed much of Western and Central Europe, hitting hundreds of communities from France and northern Spain through the German Empire to northern Italy and Hungary. It was undoubtedly the worst anti-Jewish persecution the medieval world had yet witnessed, though oddly it did not draw from Jews a literary outpouring on the scale of the Crusades.