Witch trials: the period between the 15th and 17th centuries saw the greatest number of trials and convictions of people suspected of witchcraft. Their alleged crimes included making pacts with the devil, flying to distant places on broomsticks, gathering unlawfully at sabbaths, worshipping the devil, copulating with incubi or succubi, cannibalism, and bringing illness, possession, death, impotence and infertility upon people and animals. They were also accused of desecrating the host and the Holy Mass, and even of killing a neighbour’s cow, causing hailstorms, destroying crops, and stealing and eating children.
The heyday of the hunts
The witch hunts lasted from the mid-14th century to the mid-18th century, and in some places a little longer. They only began in earnest in the mid-15th century, when Pope Nicholas V, in a letter to Hugues Lenoir, the inquisitor for France, gave the Inquisition the right to deal with all cases of magical practices and witchcraft, even when they did not openly smack of heresy. Before that, supposed witches had to some extent been protected from death by a document issued in 906, the Canon Episcopi. It ordered that people who practised divination and witchcraft be driven out of the community, but made no mention of the death penalty. The Canon Episcopi regarded superstitious practices as a crime but not as heresy, since it assumed that witches’ flights and sabbaths were figments of the imagination, harmless to anyone else. The witch hunts reached their greatest intensity in France and Germany. In Germany alone, an estimated 100,000 people were sent to the stake. Protestant hunters favoured huge mass executions carried out all at once (with dozens of pyres burning simultaneously), whereas in the Catholic principalities persecution generally went on for longer.
How witches and sorcerers were characterised
In 1486 what is probably the most famous “handbook” for witch hunters was published: the Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum) by Heinrich Kramer (Institoris) and Jakob Sprenger. In the opinion of Kramer and Sprenger, witchcraft was practised above all by women, who were supposedly better suited to it by nature, not least because of the weaker faith that women allegedly possessed. The word “woman” itself was meant to prove this: the Latin femina was said to derive from a combination meaning “less faith” (fe = fides, faith, and mina = minus, less). Moreover, men were supposedly more resistant to Satan’s temptations simply because Jesus was a man. Other doctrinal principles set out in the Hammer of Witches held that belief in the existence of witches was an inseparable part of the Catholic faith, and that disbelief in the matter amounted to heresy. The diabolical conspiracy that had gripped the world could, they claimed, be fought by human hands through faith and repression.
In practice, the overwhelming majority of those accused of witchcraft were indeed women (estimates give a ratio of one man to several hundred women). People from the lower social classes were also accused far more often than members of the nobility. The disproportion between people of lower and higher social standing is even greater when we look at trials that ended in conviction.
The machinery of the hunts
An entire system of prosecutors, investigators and physicians was set up for the witch hunts (it was held that doctors could tell diabolical matters apart from bodily defects). A confession of guilt was the crowning proof. The law of the time permitted physical suffering to be inflicted during the investigation in order to extract confessions. Various ordeals were also used to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused. One of these was the water ordeal, which in practice gave the accused little chance: thrown into the water, she usually did not sink (which would have shown her innocence), because the voluminous skirts worn at the time kept her afloat. Guilt was also “proved” by the ordeal of tears (if she could not cry, she was a witch), by weighing (there was such a scale in Utrecht, for example: if the accused weighed less than 49.5 kg, it was thought she might be a witch able to fly on a broomstick) or by fire. Sometimes the body of the alleged witch was searched, on the skin or beneath it, for the devil’s mark, which involved pricking the body with needles. Once guilt had been “proved”, the condemned were sentenced to the stake (in continental Europe) or the gallows (in the British Isles and among the colonists of North America). Contrary to popular belief, witch trials did not always end in a death sentence. Some ended in acquittal, and lighter punishments were also used, such as flogging, banishment from one’s home town or payment of compensation to the alleged victim of the witchcraft. Historians agree neither on the number of victims nor on the proportion of those convicted to those acquitted.
- The social and cultural background
This terrible phenomenon was one of the most emblematic examples of the “scapegoat” mechanism and resulted from many social and cultural factors that built up and exploded at the end of the Middle Ages. European societies were then going through a period of great unrest and economic, political and social upheaval (the beginnings of capitalism, shifts in the political weight of the different social classes) and fierce religious conflict (Luther’s revolt, the wars of religion). By putting to death a scapegoat in the form of a “witch”, they tried to ward off a threat or crisis and restore balance. The hunts were also a consequence of medieval culture’s attitude towards women – of the thousand-year-old conviction that woman was evil by nature and susceptible to Satan. On top of this, religious unrest, especially Luther’s teachings, strengthened and spread the conviction that Satan was present in everyday life, all around people at every turn, and that he had to be fought without respite.
The last trial in Poland
In 1775, in Doruchów near Ostrzeszów, fourteen witches were put on trial. Three died under torture and the rest were burnt at the stake. In his book “In the Footsteps of the Curse” (Sladami Klatwy), Józef Siemek writes that “news of this crime spurred the bolder and more honest minds to fight the medieval spectres that had haunted the country for so long. As a result, at the next Sejm in 1776 a resolution was passed forbidding the courts to use torture and to hear witchcraft cases”.
Modern historians sometimes question the number of victims of the Doruchów trial, believing it to have been smaller. [1]
The last case of an alleged witch being burnt at the stake on what is now Polish soil (and at the same time the last in Europe) took place in Reszel in Warmia on 21 August 1811. The victim was Barbara Zdunk. She was accused not only of witchcraft, however, but above all of arson: in 1807 a fire had broken out at the castle, and its causes remain unclear. The trial lasted three years. Her guilt was disputed, but the court in Königsberg upheld the sentence. The condemned woman was strangled before being burnt.
The last trials in Europe
The last person in Europe to be sentenced to prison for witchcraft was Helen Duncan, a spiritualist medium from Great Britain. In 1944 she was sentenced to nine months in prison. The real reason seems to have been that, as a medium, she passed on information covered by state secrecy. Since neither illegal acquisition of secret information nor fraud could be proved, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was invoked instead. A little later that same year another medium, Jane Rebecca Yorke, was also convicted of witchcraft. She too had passed on information about people fighting at the front, and she was accused of spreading panic among the public. Probably because of her relatively advanced age (72), she received only a small fine of 5 pounds and was bound over for three years. Jane Rebecca Yorke was thus the last person in Europe to be convicted of witchcraft. Witchcraft finally ceased to be a crime in Great Britain in 1951.
Modern times
Today, in various parts of the world (especially in African countries and in India), people still believe that it is possible to cause harm through witchcraft. Although witchcraft does not officially appear on the list of crimes, there are cases of mob justice in which people accused of witchcraft are attacked and even killed [2], [3], [4].
Belief in witchcraft persists in highly developed countries too, and the law sometimes has to deal with phenomena described as witchcraft.
In 1999 in Oklahoma, USA, 15-year-old Brandi Blackbear was suspended from school for 15 days for “casting spells”. She was also forbidden to wear or draw emblems associated with the Wicca movement at school.
In Kraków in 2003 there was not so much a witchcraft trial as a trial over an accusation of witchcraft. Jerzy M., a farmer from Wola Kalinowska near Kraków, sued his neighbour Anna B., who had publicly declared that M. was a sorcerer who stole the milk from her cows. As evidence she cited the fact that he delivered 40 litres of milk from two cows, while she managed only 17. Tellingly, although the farmer stressed that he did not believe in witchcraft, he feared that his neighbour’s stories would ruin his reputation [5][6]. The case finally ended in a settlement.
The witches of Peney
This is the name given to a group of 34 women accused of spreading the plague by witchcraft, who were tortured and burnt alive at the stake in 1545 in Peney, a place belonging to the Republic of Geneva (today a village in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland).
The history of witch trials in Geneva begins in 1404, and mass executions (probably more than 500 victims, though exact figures are lacking) took place in 1513. Surviving documents show that between 1520 and 1681, 337 people (including 87 men) were accused of witchcraft; most of them did not confess despite torture, and 66 were executed. These so-called “witch hunts” were linked to the plague epidemics that struck the region.
Almost all Christians of the time (Catholics and Protestants alike) were convinced that witches were harmful, and many clergy fuelled this collective hysteria. Anyone who protested against such senseless cruelty risked being accused of witchcraft themselves.
John Calvin believed that, according to the Bible, witches were “enemies of God” and should be killed without mercy (Exodus 22:18). The constitution of Geneva provided for the death penalty for witches, heretics and blasphemers. The causes of epidemics were unknown. For these reasons Calvin was convinced that the accusation against a group of women and men from Peney – of spreading the plague there for three years by means of spells and magic – was true. He also accepted as genuine their confessions, extracted under torture. Pastors were instructed to denounce the accused in their sermons. After a trial lasting several months, 34 women were sentenced to be burnt alive in front of the houses they had supposedly infected.
This execution is often cited, mainly by Calvin’s critics, as evidence of his despotism. What is overlooked is that Calvin did not start trials of this kind in Geneva (they had begun more than a hundred years earlier, before Geneva became a Protestant city), and that they never took the form of mass terror (as they did, for example, in the Holy Roman Empire of the time).
In 1598 the German Calvinist minister Anton Praetorius, in his book Von Zauberey und Zauberern Gründlicher Bericht (A Thorough Report on Sorcery and Sorcerers), questioned whether belief in witches was justified and called for Calvin’s views on the matter to be re-examined.
The “Salem witches” is the name commonly given to a group of around 80 women (and men, too) accused in court of witchcraft in 1692 in Salem Village and Salem Town, New England (now the state of Massachusetts, USA). The case resulted in the execution of 13 women and 7 men.
The trial of the alleged “witches” led to the Puritans losing their influence over the authorities and set American society on the road towards an ideologically neutral state.
The trial of the “Salem witches” was made famous by American dramas: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Giles Corey and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, allegories of the persecution of individuals by unjust authority (Miller’s play is a reflection on the consequences of Senator McCarthy’s activities).
History
In 1692 two residents of Salem – Betty Parris, the daughter of the local minister, and her cousin Abigail Williams – began to suffer strange convulsions and claimed they had been “bewitched” by the beggar woman Sarah Good, the elderly Sarah Osborne and the enslaved Black woman Tituba. Gradually, symptoms of the illness began to appear in other women of Salem too.
The three alleged “witches” were imprisoned, but the number of people accused of witchcraft grew like an avalanche (to around 80), and even the prisons in neighbouring towns were overcrowded.
In May 1692 Governor William Phips set up a court in Salem to deal with the case.
The trial was based on the principle that confessing to being a witch (or wizard) meant release, while refusing to confess meant facing the death penalty. Between 10 June and 19 October 1692, 19 people were hanged on the gallows, mostly elderly and poor women, but also a minister who had refused to continue arresting alleged witches. One 80-year-old man, Giles Corey (who refused to plead guilty), was killed by being slowly crushed under enormous stones.
The trial ended in January 1693 and provoked widespread outrage in New England society, along with demands for compensation for the victims’ families and for those wrongly arrested and persecuted. Yet it was not until 1954 that all those sentenced to death were formally exonerated.
The causes of the “possession”
According to some modern views, it is possible that feigned “possession” (a phenomenon known from medieval Europe, among other places) was caused by the monotony of life in the strict, ascetic Puritan society (especially among young girls). One person pretended to be “possessed”, others imitated her behaviour, and eventually this led to mass hysteria.
Another possibility is ergot poisoning – ergot being a widespread parasitic fungus of cereals that causes convulsions in humans. Laurie Winn Carlson argues that similar symptoms are caused by the disease encephalitis lethargica, which is transmitted from animals. According to yet another theory, it may have been the hereditary Huntington’s disease.
The witches of Witten
This is the name given to a group of several dozen (exact figures are lacking) women, children and a few men who were accused of witchcraft between 1580 and 1647 and tried in Witten (now in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany). As a result, at least 25 women, 2 men and 2 children were sentenced to death in Witten.
The years 1580 and 1581 were a record in the Rhineland and Westphalia for death sentences passed on witches – for example, 44 executions in Recklinghausen, with women making up 80% of all the victims. In the neighbouring Duchy of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, the ruler, Duke William the Rich (Wilhelm der Reiche), was sceptical about the existence of witches and did not allow trials of this kind.
The intensification of the “witch hunts” was linked to successive plague epidemics in the region, but the reasons for the accusations varied. Blame fell on “socially undesirable” people, such as unmarried and single women, the poor and homeless, the mentally ill, insolvent debtors or women who had killed their children. In these cases, an accusation of witchcraft was rather a convenient pretext for “eliminating” such people. An accusation of witchcraft was also often a way of removing political opponents among the local nobility. Frequently the accusation of one person also led to the accusation of their spouse and sometimes their children. The beginning of the witch trials is linked to the arrival of the Inquisition in Witten.
The first victims, in 1580, were two poor, homeless women (a mother and daughter). Perhaps the Witten town councillors wanted to rid themselves of the problem of homelessness in this way. Sentences were carried out by burning at the stake, drowning, beheading or hanging. The last “sorcerer” to be sentenced and hanged in Witten was Arndt Bottermann. On the banks of the River Ruhr in Witten there is a place where witches were subjected to the water ordeal, known as the “Hexenkolk”.
