One morning in the year 1338 as the future Emperor Charles IV lay sleeping, a young knight woke him with the cry, “Sire, get up! The Last Day has arrived, for the whole world is covered with locusts!” Charles arose, dressed, went out to see how large the swarm was, and rode nearly thirty miles without coming to its end. Ten years later, a tremendous earthquake rocked the eastern Alps. A report from Villach in Carinthia said that the castle, monastery, churches, and all the city's walls and towers had collapsed; the earth opened up and poured out water and sulfur; at least 5,000 people had perished. The plague (Black Death) that followed close on this disaster raged so fiercely in Vienna, “that in a single day 1,200 bodies were buried in St. Colman's cemetery…. The great mortality was blamed on the Jews, and … the common people rose up in the towns of Stein and Krems … seized the Jews, and killed them all.” At Strasbourg, too, on the western edge of the Empire, Jews were rounded up and killed, and their kinsmen were forbidden ever to reside in the city again.