German Chronicle of Strasbourg

The translator gives Königshofen’s dates as 1346 to 1420, so he was an infant when the Jews of Strasbourg were burned, and he wrote decades afterwards. The same translator notes that he was an archivist and took much of his material from his predecessor Fritsche Closener, who was probably an eyewitness.

The passage tells of the plague, of the accusation that Jews had poisoned the wells, of confessions obtained under torture in Bern and Zofingen, of the meeting at Benfeld where the bishop of Strasbourg, the lords of Alsace and the cities agreed to do away with the Jews, and of the burning itself. Its figures (about two thousand burned; about sixteen thousand dead of the plague in the city) are the chronicler’s estimates. He states his own view of the motive: that the Jews would not have been burned had they been poor and had the lords not been in their debt. See the Black Death.