Witch trials in Denmark

Based on Wikipedia: Witch trials in Denmark

The Eight Years That Changed Everything

Between 1617 and 1625, something terrible swept through Denmark. In just eight years, the kingdom executed more accused witches than it had in the previous century combined. On the Jutland peninsula alone, 297 people were burned at the stake during this period—nearly forty people per year, in a region with a relatively small population.

What triggered this sudden explosion of violence?

A new law.

Before the Madness

Denmark's relationship with magic and sorcery had actually been surprisingly measured for centuries. The earliest laws addressing sorcery, dating back to the 1170s in the regions of Scania and Zealand, followed a principle common throughout medieval Europe: magic itself wasn't necessarily criminal. What mattered was whether magic was combined with murder. You could be a known practitioner of folk magic, a healer who whispered charms over wounds, a wise woman who read fortunes—and none of that, by itself, would land you before a judge.

Whether anyone was actually executed for sorcery in Denmark during the entire medieval period remains unknown. The records simply don't exist.

The first documented executions for witchcraft in what is now Danish territory occurred in 1530, when two women—identified in the records only as "the wives of Lars Kylling and Jørgen Olsen"—were burned on the island of Bornholm. But here's a curious historical footnote: Bornholm wasn't actually part of Denmark at that time. So the first witchcraft executions in Denmark proper didn't happen until about a decade later, around 1539 or 1540, when two women named Karen Grottes and Bodil Lauritzen were killed in the town of Stege.

The sixteenth century saw attitudes hardening. The Danish theologian Peder Palladius wrote in the 1530s that godly people should "hunt witches down like wolves." This was the language of the Protestant Reformation—Martin Luther himself had declared that all witches should be killed—and Denmark, having officially converted to Lutheranism in 1536, was absorbing these new theological attitudes along with the new faith.

The Laws That Protected the Accused

Despite the darkening mood, Denmark developed some remarkable legal protections during this period. In 1547, the Copenhagen Recess—a formal legislative decree—established two crucial principles. First, testimony from a convicted criminal couldn't be used as the sole basis for a death sentence. This mattered enormously in witch trials, where accused witches were routinely tortured into naming "accomplices." Second, torture was prohibited before a guilty verdict had been reached.

Think about what this meant in practice. In many other European countries during this era, authorities could arrest someone on suspicion of witchcraft, torture them until they confessed, then execute them based on that confession. Denmark's laws created obstacles at every step.

Then came the case of Gertrud Skomagers in 1558, which led to an even more protective law: no local judge could execute anyone for sorcery until the verdict had been confirmed by the High Court. The 1576 Kalundborg Recess extended this further, forbidding any execution issued by a local court from being carried out without high court confirmation.

These weren't abstract principles. They had real effects. Between 1576 and 1617, the witchcraft persecutions in Denmark remained relatively moderate precisely because of these legal safeguards. Local courts might be eager to burn witches, but they had to convince the educated judges of the High Court that their evidence was sufficient. Often, they couldn't.

The Law That Changed Everything

On an autumn day in October 1617, King Christian IV introduced the Trolddomsforordningen—the Witchcraft Ordinance of 1617. This law would remain in effect for nearly seventy years, until 1686, and it transformed Danish witch persecution.

The ordinance created two distinct categories of sorcery crimes. The first category covered people who used magic without associating with the Devil—folk healers, fortune tellers, practitioners of traditional charms. These people would be punished by exile, not death.

The second category was different. Anyone who had consorted with the Devil, who had made a pact with him, should be executed by burning. And here was the crucial detail: this applied regardless of whether they had actually performed any magic. The crime wasn't in doing harm. The crime was in the relationship with Satan.

This represented a fundamental shift in how Denmark understood witchcraft. Under the older laws, authorities had to prove that someone had used magic to harm another person—that they had killed livestock, caused illness, ruined crops. Under the new law, the crime was theological. Had you made a deal with the Devil? Had you attended a sabbath—one of those nighttime gatherings where witches supposedly flew to meet with Satan and his demons? If so, you deserved death, even if you'd never harmed a fly.

But the law alone didn't cause the witch panic. What caused the panic was the instruction that accompanied it.

King Christian IV didn't simply announce the new law and leave its enforcement to chance. He sent instructions to local authorities and parish vicars throughout the kingdom, directing them to investigate any suspected sorcery in their parishes. This was an explicit command from the crown to go looking for witches.

And so they did.

The Great Danish Witch Hunt

Between 1617 and 1625, witch accusations exploded across Denmark. In the region of Jutland—the only area for which good documentation survives—297 people were executed in these eight years alone. When you consider that only 494 people were executed for witchcraft in Jutland during the entire documented period of 1609 to 1687, you realize that sixty percent of all executions occurred during this brief, terrible window.

What did these persecutions actually look like on the ground?

The educated authorities—the judges, the clergy, the officials who had read the continental demonological texts—were deeply interested in the theological aspects of witchcraft. They wanted to hear about Satan's sabbaths, about flying through the night on broomsticks, about pacts signed in blood. This was what the new law had criminalized, and this was what they were looking for.

But ordinary people had different concerns entirely.

When Danish villagers accused their neighbors of witchcraft, they weren't talking about midnight sabbaths or demonic pacts. They were talking about practical grievances. My cow died after she looked at it. My child fell ill after we had an argument. My crops failed after I refused her charity. The accusations emerged from the fabric of daily life—from feuds, from envy, from the ordinary frictions of living in close quarters with people you didn't like or trust.

Most of those accused were poor women. They were people who had developed reputations over years, sometimes decades, for being involved with magic. Perhaps they had claimed powers they didn't have. Perhaps their neighbors had attributed powers to them. Either way, when the authorities came looking for witches, these were the people their neighbors pointed to.

Here was the terrible mechanism of it all. Under the Witchcraft Act, a death sentence could only be issued for the crime of making a Devil's pact. And such a confession could only be obtained through torture—but torture was forbidden until after a guilty verdict. This should have created an impossible legal contradiction.

In practice, the judges simply adjusted. They sentenced people to death on the grounds of sorcery alone, ignoring the letter of their own law. When you've been told by your king to find witches, when your neighbors are demanding justice for their dead children and blighted crops, legal niceties have a way of dissolving.

After the Panic

By 1625, the great witch hunt was essentially over. The pace of executions dropped dramatically and never recovered.

Why did it end? One explanation is grimly simple: they had run out of obvious targets. The people most likely to be accused—the marginalized, the eccentric, those already reputed to deal in magic—had been killed. There were simply fewer people left who fit the profile of a witch.

The following decades saw occasional flare-ups. The Rosborg witch trials between 1639 and 1642 were the first large-scale witch trial since the 1620s persecution, but they resulted in only three executions. One of the most famous individual cases was that of Maren Spliid in 1641, who became one of the best-known victims of the Danish witch hunt—though the details of her case, like so much about this period, survive only in fragments.

Between 1656 and 1687, only one person was executed for sorcery in all of Jutland. The legal machinery for witch-hunting still existed, but the will to use it had largely evaporated.

The International Dimension

Denmark's witch trials didn't occur in isolation. They were connected to the broader currents of witch persecution sweeping through Europe during this period.

One remarkable case illustrates these connections. The Copenhagen witch trials of 1590-91 targeted a woman named Anna Koldings and her supposed accomplices. These trials were directly linked to one of the most famous witch trials in history: the North Berwick witch trials in Scotland.

The connection was King James VI of Scotland, who would later become King James I of England. In 1589, James traveled to Denmark to marry Princess Anne of Denmark. His return voyage was plagued by terrible storms, and when he finally reached Scotland, he became convinced that witches had raised those storms to kill him. The resulting trials in North Berwick led to the execution of around seventy people.

But the Danish authorities were paying attention too. If Scottish witches had tried to murder their princess's new husband, perhaps Danish witches had been involved as well. The Copenhagen trials followed, pursuing the supposed conspirators on the Danish side of the plot.

Other major Danish cases had purely domestic causes. The Gyldenstierne affair and the Nakkebølle case, two significant witch trials of the 1590s, were essentially caused by feuds among Danish noble families. When aristocrats fought, accusations of witchcraft became weapons—a way to destroy your enemies' reputations, to have their servants and dependents tortured and burned, to drag entire households into ruin.

The Swedish Province

The region of Scania presents a complicated case for any history of Danish witch trials. Today, Scania is the southernmost province of Sweden, home to the city of Malmö. But until 1658, it was a Danish province—and not just any province, but one of the most important and populous in the kingdom. For centuries, Malmö had been one of Denmark's major cities.

Between 1543 and 1663, there were sixty-three witch trials in Malmö, during which eighty-three people were prosecuted and thirty-eight were executed. The city saw its first major persecution in 1543, centered around a woman named Gyde Spandemager, which attracted considerable attention and is better documented than many contemporary cases.

Outside Malmö, one case that has drawn particular historical attention was that of Anne Pedersdater Kasteføll of Ystad. In 1636, Kasteføll was burned at the stake in the middle of Ystad's main square, convicted of causing illness through sorcery. Ystad, like Malmö, was then a Danish town—it would become Swedish along with the rest of Scania just twenty-two years later.

The End of the Trials

The Rugård witch trials of 1685-1686 marked a turning point. In 1686, four people were executed—the last people to be executed for witchcraft in the Jutland region. That same year, a new law required that local courts obtain confirmation from the national high court before carrying out any execution.

This was essentially a return to the protective principles of the sixteenth century, the laws that had been undermined during the great witch hunt. With the high court reviewing cases, local enthusiasm for burning witches found itself checked by educated judges who were increasingly skeptical of the entire enterprise.

Anne Palles, executed in Copenhagen in 1693, is often cited as the last person legally executed for sorcery in Denmark. But her case wasn't quite the end of the story.

The last large witch trial in Denmark was the Thisted witch trial of 1698, in which several women were sentenced to death, accused of causing fits through sorcery. The supposed victims had been experiencing convulsions and strange behaviors, which neighbors attributed to witchcraft. But before the executions could be carried out, the fits were proved to be false—either faked or caused by some natural ailment. The condemned women were freed.

After Thisted, Danish authorities became deeply reluctant to accept witchcraft charges. When the local court of Schelenburg condemned two women to be burned at the stake for witchcraft in 1708, the high court revoked the sentence. The central government had lost faith in the entire system of witch prosecution.

The True Last Victim

Anne Palles is often called the last witch executed in Denmark, but this isn't quite accurate. She was probably the last woman to be legally executed for sorcery. The actual final person to be legally executed for this crime was a man, a grenadier named Johan Pistorius, in 1722—nearly thirty years after Palles's death.

And death sentences for witchcraft continued to be issued long after 1722. In 1733, a student was sentenced to life imprisonment with forced labor for making a Satanic pact. In 1752, a farmer received the same sentence. As late as 1803—the nineteenth century, the age of Napoleon and the American republic—two craftsmen received death sentences for entering into pacts with the Devil.

None of these sentences were actually carried out. The courts were still willing to condemn, but the authorities were no longer willing to execute. The legal apparatus of witch-hunting lingered on, a ghost of its former self.

Beyond the Law

But the formal end of witch trials didn't mean that belief in witchcraft disappeared. When the legal system stopped prosecuting witches, some communities took matters into their own hands.

Dorte Jensdatter's case is one of the most disturbing. Villagers who believed she had caused deaths through magic didn't wait for legal proceedings. They apprehended her, tied her up in her own home, and burned the house down with her inside it.

The last known lynching for witchcraft in Denmark occurred in 1800—the very threshold of the modern era. Anna Klemens was killed in Brigsted, near the town of Horsens, after a cunning woman—a local practitioner of folk magic, the kind of person who might herself have been accused of witchcraft in an earlier generation—pointed to Klemens as a sorceress.

This detail captures something essential about the witch trials. The accusers and the accused often came from the same world. The cunning woman who identified Anna Klemens as a witch was herself someone who claimed magical knowledge and power. The line between the healer and the harmer, between the wise woman and the witch, was drawn and redrawn by communities according to their own fears and needs.

What the Numbers Tell Us

Eighty percent of those executed in the Danish witch trials were women. This aligns with patterns seen across Europe during the witch persecution era, though the percentage varied considerably by region. In some parts of the continent, men made up a much larger proportion of the accused.

Why were women so disproportionately targeted? Historians have offered many explanations: the association of women with folk healing and midwifery, misogynistic theological texts that portrayed women as more susceptible to demonic temptation, women's vulnerable social position in early modern society. But perhaps the simplest explanation is that the cultural archetype of the witch—the old woman who mutters curses, who lives alone at the edge of the village, who knows strange things about herbs and remedies—was overwhelmingly female.

The Danish witch trials killed somewhere between five hundred and one thousand people over about two centuries, with most of those deaths concentrated in a few terrible decades. By the standards of the witch persecution era, this places Denmark in the middle of the pack—far fewer deaths than the German states, where estimates run into the tens of thousands, but far more than in countries like England, where witch trials were comparatively rare and executions even rarer.

The Records That Survive

One of the frustrating aspects of studying Danish witch trials is how fragmentary the evidence is. With some notable exceptions—the Copenhagen witch trial of 1589, the Køge Huskors case of 1608-1615—only the documentation from Jutland between 1609 and 1687 survives in enough detail to allow proper historical investigation.

What happened in the rest of Denmark? What was the scale of persecution in Zealand, in Funen, in the many smaller islands? We simply don't know. The records were lost or destroyed or never properly kept in the first place. The people who were accused and tried and perhaps executed in these regions have been erased from history twice over—once by their deaths, and once by the loss of the documents that might have preserved their stories.

This is worth remembering. When we talk about witch trials in Denmark, we are really talking about witch trials in Jutland, plus a handful of famous cases from elsewhere. The true scale of the persecution may have been larger or smaller than the surviving evidence suggests. The real people, with their real lives and real deaths, are largely beyond our reach.