Antiquity
Synagogues set on fire
519·Ravenne
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
Ravenna was at that time the capital of the Ostrogothic kingdom of Théodoric, an Arian prince who governed a predominantly Catholic population and recognized for the Jews the protection of Roman law.
The synagogues of the city were burned by the crowd. Théodoric ordered that they be rebuilt at the expense of the inhabitants, and that those who lacked the means to contribute be publicly flogged — a decision exactly contrary to the one Ambrose had wrested from Théodose a century earlier regarding Callinicum.
The episode has since been cited as the textbook case of a power that enforces the letter of the law against the religious fervor of its own capital. It prevented neither subsequent fires nor the hardening of the status of Jews following the Byzantine reconquest.
- Period :
- Antiquity
- Type :
- Massacre
- Region :
- Western Europe
- Country :
- Italie
*Anonyme de Valois* ; Cassiodore, *Variae*.