ON BLESSED LOUIS THE BOY OF RAVENSBURG IN SWABIA SLAIN BY THE JEWS.
IN THE YEAR 1429
CommentaryLouis the Boy, Martyr (St.)
D. P., FROM THE GERMAN OF MURER.
[1] Examples of the barbarous ferocity of the Jews against Christians, this month has given many on various days; nor yet is it lawful to make an end of gathering them, Whence are the Acts taken? except with the very end of it. For still Blessed Louis holds us, in the year 1429 at Ravensburg in Swabia cruelly slain, on this last day of April: whose passion and the veneration that followed of his sacred body, Henry Murer the Carthusian sets forth to us in his holy Switzerland, using, as he premises, two ancient Chronicles, one of which was of the monastery of Oeningen on the Rhine, the other Nicholas Walser, Parish Priest of Ravensburg and the same Dean of the Canonical Chapter, communicated. Which history because it is not permitted to receive from the sources themselves, in Latin we shall give here, as it is read in German in the aforesaid author, premising one thing, namely that Ravensburg is an Imperial town, six or seven hours from Lake Constance, situated in a pleasant valley, under Austrian dominion, and with the worship of religion for the greater part Catholic, which various monasteries of older and more recent Orders preserve, constituted within and around the walls. From here at about three hours' distance is the little town of Haslach, near which was a forest, and in it the chapel of this Blessed, about whom more below.
[2] At Ravensburg therefore with a Christian citizen, [frequenting schools the boy while with obsequious service he serves the neighboring Jews,] next to the house of certain Jews, there dwelt the boy Louis, named von Bruck or of the Bridge, a Helvetian by nation, and both used his table and was free for learning letters. He had contracted some familiarity with the neighboring Jews, and frequenting their houses often offered officious services. It happened moreover in the year 1429, between the feasts of Easter and Pentecost, that the Ravensburg Jews were celebrating a numerous banquet, to which also from the neighboring cities Constance, Uberlingen, and others many invited guests came together. On this occasion Louis did not wish to be absent from his neighbors, but offered them his work for the service of the kitchen and turning the spit. While he is doing this, two Jews, brothers Aaron and Anselm, cast their eyes on him: who knowing the boy to be a Christian, and in that place a stranger, he is foully mutilated: with great thirst of shedding blood inflamed, seized the innocent one; and having taken into the partnership of the crime their relative Moses, tortured him so long, until he breathed out his soul among the torments. They added also to the rest of their immanity, that having amputated his private parts they abused them basely, from insatiable hatred of the Christian kind. After they had thus sacrificed to their sacrilegious fury, they clothe the cadaver in their own garments, and having cast it into a sack on the first day of May they carry it to the Ravensburg tower; where finding a carter, by name Nicholas Knoll, they hire him for a fee, that he should carry that sack up into the forest of Haszlach; where some of them would await him, and indicate further commands.
[3] The carter went off with the commended burden of the innocent body, being killed he is suspended in the forest: partly persuaded by greed of gain, partly by too much simplicity; and arriving in the aforesaid forest, found around a tall fir many Jews, who immediately opening the sack drew out from there the killed boy. The carter was horrified at such a spectacle; and said, What evil cause, said he, has impelled you, to commend this innocent one to me to be carried? But they advise him to be silent, unless he would rather perish: for he has nothing to fear either for them or for himself, if he covers the matter with faithful silence; but if not, they threaten to accuse him as a partner in the slaughter. By this speech and the price of ten florins the foolish man was appeased, and with his own hands deposits from the cart the cadaver which he had carried, and places it under that tall fir: but they, with a rope passed through the branches of the fir, put a noose around his neck, and raised up the one nooseed, as if he had killed himself by voluntary suspension: they also bring the other hand to his loins, inserting into it a knife, as an instrument of spontaneous mutilation: and thus each returned to his own, thinking what they had done would remain secret.
[4] But God did not wish the hidden crime to be let go unpunished: illuminated by heavenly light, and he made for several consecutive nights, from the aforesaid forest, and from the very fir from which the innocent was hanging, a certain most bright torch as a star to radiate as far as Ravensburg, as certain honored citizens testified on oath that they had observed, although they were ignorant what was being signified by that indication. Meanwhile some boys go away into the same forest to despoil the nests of birds; and recognize their schoolmate hanging from the fir; and not doubting but that he had suspended himself there, they spread the matter through the whole Ravensburg town. A great concourse of the people is made to the place; where prudent men considering the hanging one more attentively, recognized by so many modes and signs that the death had been inflicted previously by another hand and the suspension fraudulently simulated; so that with all the circumstances of the matter, compared with the hitherto blameless life of Louis, all did not doubt, that he had been hung there by his very killers, and declared innocent by the nocturnal splendors. Therefore, by the deliberation and command of the civil and ecclesiastical Magistrate, there he is buried. the body is taken down from the unhappy tree, and under it is buried, until the sequence of the matter should be more fully known. Nor was there delay: suspicion falls upon the Jews of Ravensburg, because many remembered to have seen him going out and in to them: but the murmur grew so much in the people, that the aforementioned carter beginning to fear badly for himself, decided to migrate from Ravensburg to Uberlingen, a town situated on that very lake. By which departure the murmurs not being put to sleep but increased, at last Nicholas was accused before the Uberlingen Senate, and captured, and having confessed the whole order of the matter, named as many of the Jews as he knew to have participated: and although he believed himself to be excusable, he was condemned to the wheel. But the Jews, Aaron, with the culprits punished Anselm and Moses with others were captured at Ravensburg; the rest at Uberlingen, Lindau, and Constance, whence they had come together for the feast, were similarly caught and consumed by fire, perishing by sentence in the year 1430.
[5] Hence with fame spread everywhere, it often took increase from the luminous star, and with miracles multiplying a chapel is erected: as it was shining before and after above the place of burial: wherefore a stone chapel was built there, to the honor of God and the memory of that deed, which the common people determined to be called "at the Fir." With a great concourse of locals and pilgrims the place was then celebrated for a hundred years, as the Chronicle of Ravensburg testifies, mentioning three miracles by name from many, which there are said to have happened
it says. John Grabman of Ravensburg, whose lineage still continues, laboring with a difficult hernia, through the same had been brought into danger of life more than once: but vowing that he would go to the Fir, through the intercession of the holy youth received wholeness of body. At Bregenz a boy having fallen into the water, and having been drawn out thence after an hour dead, through a similar vow of his for him returned to life by the merits of Blessed Louis. Michael Biegh, from the town of Eschach, distant one German mile, was suffering such pains in the fingers of one of his hands, that he could not extend or straighten them: he therefore vowed a pious pilgrimage to the Fir, with the offering of an iron hand: which fulfilled, he returned home safe, and began to use his hand for working.
[6] But the aforementioned chapel stood for a whole hundred years: but when these had elapsed, with it afterwards collapsing the body is translated to Ravensburg. when no one took sufficient care for the repairs being kept up, and the prevailing Lutheran heresy was extinguishing the fervor of ancestral piety, it gradually fell into ruin; so that nothing remains of it any more than certain walls. But the bones of the holy youth were translated into the chapel of St. Vitus, above the mountain which overhangs the town of Ravensburg to the south: where they are even now seen to be honored. But in the curia itself are kept and shown his hat, gown, belt, and writing tablets smeared with wax hanging from the belt, with which he was captured and killed by the Jews. Moreover to those making the pilgrimage to the Fir there used to be distributed signs of the completed devotion, such as are distributed at Einsiedeln, and in other places frequented by votive pilgrimage. Thus far Murer, without any determination of the age, which I would easily believe to have been advanced beyond the fourteenth year: if the people of Ravensburg suggest more things either about the present cult or from the genuine sources of the Chronicles, there will be a place for them in the Supplement of this month.
[7] These things happened in Swabia in the 15th century: but the Palatinate nearest to Swabia, which is called Upper and now belongs to the rights of the Dukes of Bavaria, In the year 1540 butchered in the Palatinate Michael, mourned for an equally dismal tragedy, acted out on the body of Michael not yet four years old, the more so in the year 1540, the less it was permitted either to avenge the crime or to pursue the Martyr of Christ with due cult, under Otto Henry the Lutheran Palatine, to whom Catholic Christians were of less value than Jews. Whoever wishes to see the sequence of the matter more fully described, let him read the third volume of holy Bavaria from page 76; indeed let him contemplate the effigy of the killed and foully butchered boy, expressed to life on the last page of pious Bavaria. The author of those works Matthew Raderus, asserts the boy to have been secretly intercepted on Passion Sunday, which then fell on March 14. Whom when the impious Dynast did not permit to be sought in the houses where he was said to be detained, it is deferred to the Supplement of March, it is credible that the barbarians indulged some delay to the destined crime, until either their or our Passover should come; and so the end of the month of March that butchery, which lasted a whole three days, was occupied. Nor certainly does a lesser interval of time require, the things which are described as having happened before the body was found by the parent of the boy, who moved every stone to recover his son. And so to the Supplement of March we defer a fuller report of this boy, with the Fathers of our college with the Eichstätters meanwhile informing us, with what honor from the old church into the new, which after the edition of the aforepraised work rose more magnificently, the body has been translated, and in what price and veneration it is now held.
[8] We hope also to find: we meanwhile a book of John Eck, a Doctor most celebrated for his many battles and victories with Luther and the Lutherans, until the writings of eyewitnesses are had. which he wrote against the Patron of the Jews, namely (I believe) the aforementioned Otto Henry, and inscribed to Christopher Madruzzi Bishop of Trent. For that Doctor was then staying at Ingolstadt nearby, and in the year after the murder of Michael came to Eichstätt, and learned the whole butchery from the doctors, who at the Bishop's command had inspected the body. From the same book we shall learn various other cruelties of this kind, which we preferred to let go untouched this month; by name about the Regensburg boys six or eight, whose relics immolated with similar ferocity in the year 1486 were brought forth into the light; and about two others, at Savona in Liguria in the year 1562, and at Ancona in Picenum after four years killed. But also a German poem is necessary to us, by which Hildebrand Thiermarius, then Chancellor of the Bishop of Eichstätt, published the same tragedy: to whom this gift from God happened, that the tongue, which the Palatine Patron of the Jews had had cut out, on account of the injury he interpreted to be inflicted on himself by that song, again grew back, and for twenty whole years afterwards offered expedited faculty of speaking. But all these things and whatever else can tend to this, when the Eichstätters shall know to be desired by us, that they are not promptly to be sought and sent to us, we do not doubt at all.