Germany: the sky toward the northwest as if burning, 1262

Fritz 1873, from the Chronicle of Salzburg: 'Der Himmel zwischen Niedergang und Mitternacht wie brennend.' Earlier we translated this as 'between sunset and midnight', which was wrong: in old German Niedergang means west and Mitternacht means north, so it means the sky between west and north, the northwest, looked as if on fire. A glow low in the northwest at night is where an aurora appears from central Europe, which supports the aurora reading. But on a summer evening the northwest is also where twilight lingers, and Guillet et al. 2023 list a northern volcanic eruption around 1262 whose haze stayed low in the atmosphere. A volcanic haze can make twilight glow red. Without a month or hour we cannot tell which it was.