the king, who appointed one of the burghers as his deputy, the town thus becoming a free imperial city under the nominal rule of a distant sovereign. The abbess in 1234 became a princess of the empire, but power rapidly passed from her to the council which she had originally named to look after police, but which came to be elected by the burghers, though the abbess was still the lady of Zürich. This council (all powerful since 1304) was made up of the representatives of certain knightly and rich mercantile families (the patricians), who excluded the craftsmen from all share in the government, though it was to these last that the town was largely indebted for its rising wealth and importance. Predigerkirche was built in 1231 AD as a Romanesque church of the then Dominican Predigerkloster nearby the Neumarkt and the city's hospital. As the other convents in Zürich, it was abolished after the Reformation in Switzerland. In October 1291 the town made an alliance with Uri and Schwyz, and in 1292 failed in a desperate attempt to seize the Habsburg town of Winterthur. After that Zürich began to display strong Austrian leanings, which characterize much of its later history. In 1315 the men of Zürich fought against the Swiss Confederates at the Battle of Morgarten. The Codex Manesse, a major source of medieval German poetry, was written and illustrated in the early 14th century in Zürich. Among the collection are poems by Süsskind von Trimberg. Very little is known about Süsskind, but scholars speculate that he was a Jew, as the name “Süsskind” was only given to Jews at the time. The first official mention of Jews in Zürich was in 1273. The existence of a synagogue in the 13th century testifies to an active Jewish community. When the Black Death epidemic came to Switzerland in 1348/49, the Jews were widely accused of having poisoned wells. On the 24th of February 1349, the city's Jews were tortured, burned and driven out of Zürich. From 1354, Jews began to re-settle in Zürich, but from 1400, the legal situation of Jews in Zürich began to deteriorate. A 1404 law forbade them from testifying against Christians in court, and in 1423 they were indefinitely expelled from the city. In the later medieval period, the political power of the convent slowly waned. The beginning of self-government came with the establishment of the