Witch trials in the early modern period

Based on Wikipedia: Witch trials in the early modern period

Between 1560 and 1630, something extraordinary happened in Europe. Neighbor turned against neighbor. Peasants accused peasants. And somewhere between forty and sixty thousand people—mostly women over forty—were executed for a crime that, just two centuries earlier, the Church had officially declared impossible.

The crime was witchcraft.

The Church That Didn't Believe in Witches

Here's the twist that makes the witch trials so strange: for most of the medieval era, mainstream Christian doctrine held that witchcraft wasn't real. The official Church position, codified in a document called the Canon Episcopi, treated belief in witches and their supernatural powers as pagan superstition—the kind of foolishness that educated Christians should dismiss.

Think about that. The institution that would later oversee the execution of tens of thousands of accused witches started out saying the whole concept was nonsense.

So what changed?

The transformation began slowly, in theological debates that might seem abstract but would have deadly consequences. In the thirteenth century, the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas—one of the most influential Christian thinkers in history—developed arguments that opened a crack in the old consensus. Aquinas suggested that collaboration with demons might actually be possible, that a person could obtain real supernatural powers through such an alliance. His work didn't create the witch trials, but it helped lay the intellectual groundwork for theologians who would later argue that witchcraft was not merely possible but a genuine threat.

The Church's relationship with magic was complicated. Clergy themselves practiced certain occult arts, including necromancy—the practice of communicating with the dead. But witchcraft was placed in a different category entirely: it was assumed to be inherently demonic, a form of devil worship rather than merely forbidden knowledge.

The Inquisition's Original Target

In 1233, Pope Gregory IX established a new branch of the Inquisition in Toulouse, France, placing it under Dominican leadership. But the Inquisition wasn't created to hunt witches. Its targets were Christian groups the Church considered heretical—particularly the Cathars, who believed the material world was evil, and the Waldensians, who advocated for poverty and lay preaching.

The Dominicans proved zealous in their work. They kept meticulous records of their proceedings, carefully safeguarding documents as they traveled from town to town. This attention to paperwork makes their later role particularly ironic: the inquisitors were widely hated, and when they were ambushed on the roads—which happened frequently—attackers often cared more about destroying the records than killing the judges themselves. As one contemporary source put it, it was "better to take the papers the judge carries than to make the judge himself perish."

Friends and family of the accused would sabotage proceedings by destroying evidence. They wanted to protect reputations—not just of the living but of future generations who might be tainted by association with condemned heretics. Most of these records did not survive. One historian working in 1880 described what remained as merely "scanty debris."

This matters because it makes understanding the larger witch trials that came later genuinely difficult. How much can we extrapolate from fragments?

Before There Were Witches

There was no unified concept of "demonic witchcraft" during the fourteenth century. What would later become a single monstrous category—combining harmful magic, pacts with the Devil, and gatherings for Satanic worship—existed only as separate, unconnected accusations.

The witch trials of this early period were sporadic and relatively mild. More than half took place in France, often connected to political intrigue rather than genuine belief in supernatural evil. When French kings in the direct Capetian line died unexpectedly, witchcraft accusations became a convenient explanation. The papacy of John XXII generated another cluster of accusations.

The charges were usually modest. Accusations of "diabolism"—nocturnal orgies and devil worship—were rare. These were the kinds of lurid charges traditionally leveled at heretics, and they hadn't yet been grafted onto the concept of witchcraft.

Consider the case of Peter Recordi, a Carmelite friar sentenced to life imprisonment by the inquisitor of Carcassonne in 1329. His crimes? Using love magic to seduce women, invoking Satan, and—strangest of all—sacrificing a butterfly to the Devil. The sentence mentions "many and diverse conjurations and invocations of demons." But note what's missing: no midnight sabbaths, no pacts signed in blood, no flying through the air. The full-blown witch stereotype hadn't been invented yet.

The Forger Who Shaped History

For over a century, historians believed they knew exactly when the witch trials exploded into mass persecution. In 1829, a French writer named Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon published a history of the Inquisition that described a sudden outbreak of witch trials in southern France in the early fourteenth century—trials that ended in hundreds of executions, featuring accused witches who matched the demonic stereotype perfectly.

Lamothe-Langon claimed to be quoting extensively from inquisitorial records. His book proved enormously influential. Other historians incorporated his material into their own work, citing it as evidence that witch hunts had suddenly erupted in the late Middle Ages and might be connected to the suppression of Catharism.

There was just one problem. The records Lamothe-Langon cited didn't exist.

It wasn't until the 1970s that two scholars, Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer, working independently, demonstrated that Lamothe-Langon's sources were highly dubious and probably forged. When researchers checked a published inventory of actual inquisitorial records from Carcassonne, nothing matched Lamothe-Langon's descriptions. The language and stereotypes in his supposed medieval documents were anachronistic—they reflected later periods, not the fourteenth century. And Lamothe-Langon himself had a track record of forging genealogies about his own ancestry.

By the time historians rejected his work, the damage was done. His fabrications had become firmly entrenched in the popular imagination of witchcraft.

The Invention of the Witch

The concept of the demonic witch—the figure we recognize from Halloween decorations and fairy tales—was assembled piece by piece during the fifteenth century. The construction happened in the mountainous regions around western Switzerland, in places like Valais, the Bernese Alps, and the nearby Dauphiné region.

During the 1430s, ideas that had previously floated separately began to combine. Witchcraft came to be understood as an alliance between a human and the Devil, one that didn't merely allow for mischief but actively threatened the Christian foundation of society. This was something new: not just magic that might harm your neighbor's crops, but a conspiracy against civilization itself.

The Valais witch trials began in 1428 in the French-speaking lower Valais and eventually spread to German-speaking regions. They lasted six to eight years. This period coincided with the Council of Basel, a major Church gathering from 1431 to 1437, and some scholars believe the new anti-witchcraft doctrines spread among theologians and inquisitors who discussed the Valais trials at this council.

The old Canon Episcopi—the decree that had called witchcraft a pagan superstition—still had many supporters. The theological faculty at the University of Paris endorsed it as late as 1398. It was never officially repudiated by a majority of bishops, not even by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, which immediately preceded the peak of the trials.

But powerful opponents emerged. Jean Vinet, a Dominican inquisitor in Carcassonne. Alfonso Tostado, the Bishop of Avila. Nicholas Jacquier, another Dominican inquisitor. It's unclear whether these men knew of each other's work, but they shared a common challenge: the disbelief in the reality of demonic activity that the Canon Episcopi represented.

Jacquier's argument against the Canon Episcopi was lengthy and complex, written in Latin. He began working on it in 1452 and expanded it into a full monograph by 1458. Nine manuscript copies still exist, though it wasn't printed until 1561. Among the trials Jacquier personally witnessed was that of Guillaume Edelin, whose main crime appears to have been preaching a sermon claiming that witchcraft was merely an illusion. Edelin eventually recanted this view.

Most likely under torture.

The Hammer of Witches

The book that changed everything was published in 1487. Its title was Malleus Maleficarum—Latin for "The Hammer of Witches"—and its author was Heinrich Kramer, a German clergyman and inquisitor.

Kramer had met fierce resistance to his views. The Bishop of Innsbruck had expelled him from the city after a trial that embarrassed Kramer with its procedural irregularities. Frustrated and determined, Kramer wrote his book as both propaganda and practical manual for like-minded zealots.

The timing was perfect. The Gutenberg printing press had been invented along the Rhine River just decades earlier, and Kramer used this new technology aggressively to spread his ideas. What had developed among inquisitors and theologians in France now flooded into the Rhineland and beyond.

The Malleus Maleficarum was divided into three sections: the nature of magic, the origins of witches, and appropriate punishments. The punishment section ranked offenses from "slight" to "very great." A small group meeting to practice witchcraft counted as slight. Respecting and admiring heretics was very great.

But the book's most lasting contribution was its portrait of the witch herself. Kramer created a new medieval witch: fundamentally evil, fundamentally female. This image would stretch all the way to the modern day.

The Malleus was printed thirteen times between 1486 and 1520. Then came a fifty-year pause that coincided with the height of the Protestant Reformation—theological debates had moved on to other matters. But after the Council of Trent concluded in 1563, the book roared back into print: sixteen more editions between 1574 and 1669. It inspired imitators, including an influential work by the French jurist Jean Bodin, and was still being cited in 1692 by Increase Mather, then president of Harvard College—three thousand miles and two hundred years from its origins.

The Killing Time

The most active phase of the European witch trials occurred between 1560 and 1630. During these seventy years, more than forty thousand people were executed.

Scholars have debated whether Catholic or Protestant regions conducted more witch trials, but the answer isn't simple. Catholic Spain and Portugal had few witch trials because their Inquisitions preferred to focus on public heresy. Protestant Scotland had many. The Protestant Netherlands stopped early and had some of Europe's lowest numbers. But the most infamous mass trials occurred in the autonomous territories of Catholic prince-bishops in Southern Germany.

A contemporary writer named Herman Löher described what life was like for ordinary people in these territories:

The Roman Catholic subjects, farmers, winegrowers, and artisans in the episcopal lands are the most terrified people on earth, since the false witch trials affect the German episcopal lands incomparably more than France, Spain, Italy or Protestants.

The mass trials came in waves between the 1560s and the 1620s. Some lasted for years. They consumed victims of both sexes, all ages, every social class.

The Trier witch trials ran from 1581 to 1593. The Fulda trials from 1603 to 1606. The Eichstätt trials from 1613 to 1630. The Würzburg witch trials, from 1626 to 1631, were among the largest and deadliest in all of history.

And Bamberg, also from 1626 to 1631.

In these places, the machinery of accusation fed on itself. Torture produced confessions, confessions named accomplices, accomplices were arrested and tortured and named more accomplices. The process could continue until an entire community had been consumed.

Who Were the Accused?

Roughly eighty percent of those convicted of witchcraft were women, most of them over the age of forty. Among the lower classes, accusations typically came from neighbors. Both women and men made formal accusations—this wasn't simply men accusing women, though the accused were overwhelmingly female.

Some of the accused were what contemporaries called "cunning folk"—magical healers who offered remedies and advice. But cunning folk seem to have made up only a minority of those prosecuted. Most accusations arose from the ordinary tensions of village life: feuds between neighbors, unexplained illnesses, crops that failed, children who sickened and died. When misfortune struck, people looked for explanations. And increasingly, they found them in the woman down the road who had given them an angry look the week before.

The accusations of the 1500s were rooted in fears of malicious supernatural harm—curses, ailments, crop failures. Behind them lay deep anxieties about hidden malevolent forces within rural communities, forces that could strike without warning and without visible cause.

The Method of Execution

In some regions, convicted witches were burned at the stake. This wasn't a punishment invented for witches—it was the traditional method of executing religious heretics. By burning the body entirely, the authorities believed they were preventing the heretic from achieving bodily resurrection at the Last Judgment.

Other methods were used in other places. In England, convicted witches were typically hanged. In parts of the Holy Roman Empire, where the persecution was most severe, burning was standard.

The total numbers are staggering: approximately one hundred thousand people prosecuted, between forty and sixty thousand executed. Almost all of this occurred in Europe. The famous Salem witch trials of 1692—which loom so large in American memory—resulted in twenty executions. The Würzburg trials alone killed an estimated nine hundred.

How It Ended

The witch trials didn't end with a dramatic repudiation. They faded gradually, as new ways of thinking spread through European culture.

The Enlightenment brought skepticism about supernatural claims. The scientific revolution offered alternative explanations for misfortune. Legal reforms made it harder to convict on spectral evidence—the testimony of accusers who claimed to see the accused person's spirit tormenting them. Courts began requiring stronger proof.

By the time the trials ended around 1775, the concept of the demonic witch had lost its power over educated Europeans. The witch who had been assembled piece by piece in the fifteenth century—from harmful magic, devil worship, and nocturnal sabbaths—was disassembled again, returned to the realm of superstition where the Canon Episcopi had always placed her.

But not before tens of thousands had died.

The Lesson That Isn't Simple

It would be comforting to treat the witch trials as a story of ignorance defeated by progress, superstition overcome by reason. And there's truth in that narrative.

But the trials weren't driven by the most ignorant members of society. They were promoted by educated theologians, conducted by trained lawyers, supported by printed books from the newest technology of the age. Heinrich Kramer was no backwoods peasant—he was a sophisticated operator who understood how to use the printing press to spread his ideas across Europe.

The witch trials show how a concept can be constructed—how separate anxieties can be combined into a single terrifying category, how legal innovations can enable persecution, how new technology can spread dangerous ideas as easily as beneficial ones.

And they show how difficult it is to disbelieve something once it has become entrenched in the culture. The Canon Episcopi called witchcraft an illusion for centuries, but when enough influential people decided otherwise, the old skepticism couldn't hold. The witch became real because enough people believed in her.

Real enough to kill for.