s remained unseparated
by death. Of the Franciscan Minorites of Germany, one hundred and
twenty-five thousand died.

Outside of Germany the fury of the pestilence was still worse; from east
to west, from north to south, Europe was desolated. The mortality in
Asia was fearful. In China there are said to have been thirteen million
victims to the scourge; in the rest of Asia twenty-four millions. The
extreme west was no less frightfully visited. London lost one hundred
thousand of its population; in all England a number estimated at from
one-third to one-half the entire population (then probably numbering
from three to five millions) were swept into the grave. If we take
Europe as a whole, it is believed that fully a fourth of its inhabitants
were carried away by this terrible scourge. For two years the pestilence
raged, 1348 and 1349. It broke out again in 1361-62, and once more in
1369.

The mortality caused by the plague was only one of its disturbing
consequences. The bonds of society were loosened; natural affection
seemed to vanish; friend deserted friend, mothers even fled from their
children; demoralization showed itself in many instances in reckless
debauchery. An interesting example remains to us in Boccaccio's
"Decameron," whose stories were told by a group of pleasure-lovers who
had fled from plague-stricken Florence.

In many localities the hatred of the Jews by the people led to frightful
excesses of persecution against them, they being accused by their
enemies of poisoning the wells. From Berne, where the city councils
gave orders for the massacre, it spread over the whole of Switzerland
and Germany, many thousands being murdered. At Mayence it is said that
twelve thousand Jews were massacred. At Strasburg two thousand were
burned in one pile. Even the orders of the emperor failed to put an end
to the slaughter. All the Jews who could took refuge in Poland, where
they found a protector in Casimir, who, like a second Ahasuerus,
extended his aid to them from love for Esther, a beautiful Jewess. From
that day to this Poland has swarmed with Jews.

This persecution was discountenanced by Pope Clement VI. in two bulls,
in the first of which he ordered that the Jews should not be made the
victims of groundless charges or injured in person or property without
the sentence of a lawful judge. The second affirmed the innocence of the
Jews in the persecution then going on and ordered the bishops to
excommunicate a