preached in all that part of Germany. The pope wrote to all the bishops
and leaders of the faithful an exhortation to arm, to root out from the
land those abominable witches and wizards. "The Stedinger," said his
Holiness, "seduced by the devil, have abjured all the laws of God and
man; slandered the Church--insulted the holy sacraments--consulted
witches to raise evil spirits--shed blood like water--taken the lives
of priests, and concocted an infernal scheme to propagate the worship
of the devil, whom they adore under the name of Asmodi. The devil
appears to them in different shapes; sometimes as a goose or a duck,
and at others in the figure of a pale, black-eyed youth, with a
melancholy aspect, whose embrace fills their hearts with eternal hatred
against the holy church of Christ. This devil presides at their
Sabbaths, when they all kiss him and dance around him. He then
envelopes them in total darkness, and they all, male and female, give
themselves up to the grossest and most disgusting debauchery."
In consequence of these letters of the pope, the Emperor of Germany,
Frederic II, also pronounced his ban against them. The Bishops of
Ratzebourg, Lubeck, Osnabruek, Munster, and Minden took up arms to
exterminate them, aided by the Duke of Brabant, the Counts of Holland,
of Cloves, of the Mark, of Oldenburg, of Egmond, of Diest, and many
other powerful nobles. An army of forty thousand men was soon
collected, which marched, under the command of the Duke of Brabant,
into the country of the Stedinger. The latter mustered vigorously in
defence of their lives and liberties, but could raise no greater force,
including every man capable of bearing arms, than eleven thousand men
to cope against the overwhelming numbers of their foe. They fought
with the energy of despair, but all in vain. Eight thousand of them
were slain on the field of battle; the whole race was exterminated; and
the enraged conquerors scoured the country in all directions--slew the
women and children and old men--drove away the cattle--fired the woods
and cottages, and made a total waste of the land.
Just as absurd and effectual was the charge brought against the
Templars in 1307, when they had rendered themselves obnoxious to the
potentates and prelacy of Christendom. Their wealth, their power, their
pride, and their insolence had raised up enemies on every side; and
every sort of accusation was made against them, but failed to work
their overthrow, until the terrible cry of witchcraft was let loose
upon them. This effected its object, and the Templars were extirpated.
They were accused of having sold their souls to the devil, and of
celebrating all the infernal mysteries of the witches' Sabbath. It was
pretended that, when they admitted a novice into their order, they
forced him to renounce his salvation and curse Jesus Christ; that they
then made him submit to many unholy and disgusting ceremonies, and
forced him to kiss the Superior on the cheek, the navel, and the
breech; and spit three times upon a crucifix. That all the members were
forbidden to have connexion with women, but might give themselves up
without restraint to every species of unmentionable debauchery. That
when, by any mischance, a Templar infringed this order, and a child was
born, the whole order met, and tossed it about like a shuttlecock from
one to the other until it expired; that they then roasted it by a slow
fire, and with the fat which trickled from it anointed the hair and
beard of a large image of the devil. It was also said that, when one of
the knights died, his body was burnt into a powder, and then mixed with
wine and drunk by every member of the order. Philip IV, who, to
exercise his own implacable hatred, invented, in all probability, the
greater part of these charges, issued orders for the immediate arrest
of all the Templars in his dominions. The pope afterwards took up the
cause with almost as much fervour as the King of France; and in every
part of Europe, the Templars were thrown into prison and their goods
and estates confiscated. Hundreds of them, when put to the rack,
confessed even the most preposterous of the charges against them, and
by so doing, increased the popular clamour and the hopes of their
enemies. It is true that, when removed from the rack, they denied all
they had previously confessed; but this circumstance only increased the
outcry, and was numbered as an additional crime against them. They were
considered in a worse light than before, and condemned forthwith to the
flames, as relapsed heretics. Fifty-nine of these unfortunate victims
were all burned together by a slow fire in a field in the suburbs of
Paris, protesting to the very last moment of their lives, their
innocence of the crimes imputed to them, and refusing to accept of
pardon upon condition of acknowledging themselves guilty. Similar
scenes were enacted in the provinces; and for four years, hardly a
month passed without witnessing the execution of one or more of these
unhappy men. Finally, in 1313, the last scene of this tragedy closed by
the burning of the Grand-Master, Jacques de Molay, and his companion,
Guy, the Commander of Normandy. Anything more atrocious it is
impossible to conceive; disgraceful alike to the monarch who
originated, the pope who supported, and the age which tolerated the
monstrous iniquity. That the malice of a few could invent such a
charge, is a humiliating thought for the lover of his species; but that
millions of mankind should credit it, is still more so.
The execution of Joan of Arc is the next most notorious example which
history affords us, of the imputation of witchcraft against a political
enemy. Instances of similar persecution, in which this crime was made
the pretext for the gratification of political or religious hatred,
might be multiplied to a great extent. But it is better to proceed at
once to the consideration of the bull of Pope Innocent, the torch that
set fire to the longlaid train, and caused so fearful an explosion over
the Christian world. It will be necessary, however, to go back for some
years anterior to that event, the better to understand the motives that
influenced the Church in the promulgation of that fearful document.
Towards the close of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth
century, many witches were burned in different parts of Europe. As a
natural consequence of the severe persecution, the crime, or the
pretenders to it, increased. Those who found themselves accused and
threatened with the penalties, if they happened to be persons of a bad
and malicious disposition, wished they had the power imputed to them,
that they might be revenged upon their persecutors. Numerous instances
are upon record of half-crazed persons being found muttering the spells
which were supposed to raise the evil one. When religion and law alike
recognized the crime, it is no wonder that the weak in reason and the
strong in imagination, especially when they were of a nervous
temperament, fancied themselves endued with the terrible powers of
which all the world was speaking. The belief of their neighbours did
not lag behind their own, and execution was the speedy consequence.
As the fear of witchcraft increased, the Catholic clergy strove to fix
the imputation of it upon those religious sects, the pioneers of the
Reformation, who began about this time to be formidable to the Church
of Rome. If a charge of heresy could not ensure their destruction, that
of sorcery and witchcraft never failed. In the year 1459, a devoted
congregation of the Waldenses, at Arras, who used to repair at night to
worship God in their own manner in solitary places, fell victims to an
accusation of sorcery. It was rumored in Arras that in the desert
places to which they retired, the devil appeared before them in human
form, and read from a large book his laws and ordinances, to which they
all promised obedience; that he then distributed money and food among
them, to bind them to his service, which done, they gave themselves up
to every species of lewdness and debauchery. Upon these rumours,
several creditable persons in Arras were seized and imprisoned,
together with a number of decrepit and idiotic old women. The rack,
that convenient instrument for making the accused confess anything, was
of course put in requisition. Monstrelet, in his Chronicle, says that
they were tortured until some of them admitted the truth of the whole
accusations, and said besides, that they had seen and recognized, in
their nocturnal assemblies, many persons of rank; many prelates,
seigneurs, governors of bailliages, and mayors of cities, being such
names as the examiners had themselves suggested to the victims. Several
who had been thus informed against, were thrown into prison, and so
horribly tortured, that reason fled, and, in their ravings of pain,
they also confessed their midnight meetings with the devil, and the
oaths they had taken to serve him. Upon these confessions judgment was
pronounced: the poor old women, as usual in such cases, were hanged and
burned in the market-place; the more wealthy delinquents were allowed
to escape, upon payment of large sums. It was soon after universally
recognized that these trials had been conducted in the most odious
manner, and that the judges had motives of private vengeance against
many of the more influential persons who had been implicated. The
Parliament of Paris afterwards declared the sentence illegal, and the
judges iniquitous; but its arret was too late to be of service even to
those who had paid the fine, or to punish the authorities who had
misconducted themselves; for it was not delivered until thirty-two
years after the executions had taken place.
In the mean time, accusations of witchcraft spread rapidly in France,
Italy, and Germany. Strange to say, that although in the first instance
chiefly directed against heretics, the latter were as firm believers in
the crime as even the Catholics themselves. In after times we also find
that the Lutherans and Calvinists became greater witchburners than ever
the Romanists had been: so deeply was the prejudice rooted. Every other
point of belief was in dispute, but that was considered by every sect
to be as well established as the authenticity of the Scriptures, or the
existence of a God.
But at this early period of the epidemic the persecutions were directed
by the heads of the Catholic Church. The spread of heresy betokened, it
was thought, the coming of Antichrist. Florimond, in his work
concerning the Antichrist, lets us fully into the secret of these
prosecutions. He says, "All who have afforded us some signs of the
approach of Antichrist agree that the increase of sorcery and
witchcraft is to distinguish the melancholy period of his advent; and
was ever age so afflicted as ours? The seats destined for criminals in
our courts of justice are blackened with persons accused of this guilt.
There are not judges enough to try them. Our dungeons are gorged with
them. No day passes that we do not render our tribunals bloody by the
dooms which we pronounce, or in which we do not return to our homes,
discountenanted and terrified at the horrible confessions which we have
heard. And the devil is accounted so good a master, that we cannot
commit so great a number of his slaves to the flames, but what there
shall arise from their ashes a sufficient number to supply their place."
Florimond here spoke the general opinion of the Church of Rome; but it
never suggested itself to the mind of any person engaged in these
trials, that if it were indeed a devil, who raised up so many new
witches to fill the places of those consumed, it was no other than one
in their own employ--the devil of persecution. But so it was. The more
they burned, the more they found to burn; until it became a common
prayer with women in the humbler walks of life, that they might never
live to grow old. It was sufficient to be aged, poor, and ill-tempered,
to ensure death at the stake or the scaffold.
In the year 1487 there was a severe storm in Switzerland, which laid
waste the country for four miles around Constance. Two wretched old
women, whom the popular voice had long accused of witchcraft, were
arrested on the preposterous charge of having raised the tempest. The
rack was displayed, and the two poor creatures extended upon it. In
reply to various leading questions from their tormentors, they owned,
in their agony, that they were in the constant habit of meeting the
devil, that they had sold their souls to him, and that at their command
he had raised the tempest. Upon this insane and blasphemous charge they
were condemned to die. In the criminal registers of Constance there
stands against the name of each the simple but significant phrase,
"convicta et combusta."
This case and hundreds of others were duly reported to the
ecclesiastical powers. There happened at that time to be a Pontiff at
the head of the Church who had given much of his attention to the
subject of witchcraft, and who, with the intent of rooting out the
crime, did more to increase it than any other man that ever lived.
John Baptist Cibo, elected to the Papacy in 1485, under the designation
of Innocent VIII, was sincerely alarmed at the number of witches, and
launched forth his terrible manifesto against them. In his celebrated
bull of 1488, he called the nations of Europe to the rescue of the
church of Christ upon earth, emperilled by the arts of Satan, and set
forth the horrors that had reached his ears; how that numbers of both
sexes had intercourse with the infernal fiends; how by their sorceries
they afflicted both man and beast; how they blighted the marriage bed,
destroyed the births of women and the increase of cattle; and how they
blasted the corn on the ground, the grapes of the vineyard, the fruits
of the trees, and the herbs of the field. In order that criminals so
atrocious might no longer pollute the earth, he appointed inquisitors
in every country, armed with the apostolic power to convict and punish.
It was now that the Witch Mania, properly so called, may be said to
have fairly commenced. Immediately a class of men sprang up in Europe,
who made it the sole business of their lives to discover and burn the
witches. Sprenger, in Germany, was the most celebrated of these
national scourges. In his notorious work, the "Malleus Maleficarum," he
laid down a regular form of trial, and appointed a course of
examination by which the inquisitors in other countries might best
discover the guilty. The questions, which were always enforced by
torture, were of the most absurd and disgusting nature. The
inquisitors were required to ask the suspected whether they had
midnight meetings with the devil? whether they attended the witch's
sabbath on the Brocken? whether they had their familiar spirits?
whether they could raise whirlwinds and call down the lightning? and
whether they had sexual intercourse with Satan?
Straightway the inquisitors set to work; Cumarius, in Italy, burned
forty-one poor women in one province alone, and Sprenger, in Germany,
burned a number which can never be ascertained correctly, but which, it
is agreed on all hands, amounted to more than five hundred in a year.
The great resemblance between the confessions of the unhappy victims
was regarded as a new proof of the existence of the crime. But this is
not astonishing. The same questions from the "Malleus Maleficarum,"
were put to them all, and torture never failed to educe the answer
required by the inquisitor. Numbers of people whose imaginations were
filled with these horrors, went further in the way of confession than
even their tormenters anticipated, in the hope that they would thereby
be saved from the rack, and put out of their misery at once. Some
confessed that they had had children by the devil; but no one, who had
ever been a mother, gave utterance to such a frantic imagining, even in
the extremity of her anguish. The childless only confessed it, and were
burned instanter as unworthy to live.
For fear the zeal of the enemies of Satan should cool, successive Popes
appointed new commissions. One was appointed by Alexander VI, in 1494;
another by Leo X, in 1521, and a third by Adrian VI, in 1522. They
were all armed with the same powers to hunt out and destroy, and
executed their fearful functions but too rigidly. In Geneva alone five
hundred persons were burned in the years 1515 and 1516, under the title
of Protestant witches. It would appear that their chief crime was
heresy, and their witchcraft merely an aggravation. Bartolomeo de Spina
has a list still more fearful. He informs us that, in the year 1524, no
less than a thousand persons suffered death for witchcraft in the
district of Como, and that for several years afterwards the average
number of victims exceeded a hundred annually. One inquisitor,
Remigius, took great credit to himself for having, during fifteen
years, convicted and burned nine hundred.
In France, about the year 1520, fires for the execution of witches
blazed in almost every town. Danaeus, in his "Dialogues of Witches,"
says they were so numerous that it would be next to impossible to tell
the number of them. So deep was the thraldom of the human mind, that
the friends and relatives of the accused parties looked on and
approved. The wife or sister of a murderer might sympathise in his
fate, but the wives and husbands of sorcerers and witches had no pity.
The truth is that pity was dangerous, for it was thought no one could
have compassion on the sufferings of a witch who was not a dabbler in
the art: to have wept for a witch would have insured the stake. In some
districts, however, the exasperation of the people broke out, in spite
of superstition. The inquisitor of a rural township in Piedmont burned
the victims so plentifully, and so fast, that there was not a family in
the place which did not lose a member. The people at last arose, and
the inquisitor was but too happy to escape from the country with whole
limbs. The Archbishop of the diocese proceeded afterwards to the trial
of such as the inquisitor had left in prison.
Some of the charges were so utterly preposterous that the poor wretches
were at once liberated; others met a harder, but the usual fate. Some
of them were accused of having joined the witches' dance at midnight
under a blasted oak, where they had been seen by creditable people. The
husbands of several of these women (two of whom were young and
beautiful) swore positively that at the time stated their wives were
comfortably asleep in their arms; but it was all in vain. Their word
was taken, but the Archbishop told them they had been deceived by the
devil and their own senses. It was true they might have had the
semblance of their wives in their beds, but the originals were far
away, at the devil's dance under the oak. The honest fellows were
confounded, and their wives burned forthwith.
In the year 1561, five poor women of Verneuil were accused of
transforming themselves into cats, and in that shape attending the
sabbath of the fiends--prowling around Satan, who presided over them in
the form of a goat, and dancing, to amuse him, upon his back. They were
found guilty, and burned. [Bodin, page 95. Garinet, page 125.
"Anti-demon de Serclier," page 346.]
In 1564, three wizards and a witch appeared before the Presidents
Salvert and D'Avanton: they confessed, when extended on the rack, that
they anointed the sheep-pens with infernal unguents to kill the
sheep--that they attended the sabbath, where they saw a great black
goat, which spoke to them, and made them kiss him, each holding a
lighted candle in his hand while he performed the ceremony. They were
all executed at Poitiers.
In 1571, the celebrated sorcerer, Trois Echelles, was burned in the
Place de Greve, in Paris. He confessed, in the presence of Charles IX,
and of the Marshals de Montmorency, De Retz, and the Sieur du Mazille,
physician to the King, that he could perform the most wonderful things
by the aid of a devil to whom he had sold himself. He described at
great length the saturnalia of the fiends--the sacrifices which they
offered up--the debaucheries they committed with the young and handsome
witches, and the various modes of preparing the infernal unguent for
blighting cattle. He said he had upwards of twelve hundred accomplices
in the crime of witchcraft in various parts of France, whom he named to
the King, and many of whom were afterwards arrested and suffered
execution.
At Dole, two years afterwards, Gilles Garnier, a native of Lyons, was
indicted for being a loupgarou, or man-wolf, and for prowling in that
shape about the country at night to devour little children. The
indictment against him, as read by Henri Camus, doctor of laws and
counsellor of the King, was to the effect that he, Gilles Garnier, had
seized upon a little girl, twelve years of age, whom he drew into a
vineyard and there killed, partly with his teeth and partly with his
hands, seeming like wolf's paws--that from thence he trailed her
bleeding body along the ground with his teeth into the wood of La
Serre, where he ate the greatest portion of her at one meal, and
carried the remainder home to his wife; that, upon another occasion,
eight days before the festival of All Saints, he was seen to seize
another child in his teeth, and would have devoured her had she not
been rescued by the country-people--and that the said child died a few
days afterwards of the injuries he had inflicted; that fifteen days
after the same festival of All Saints, being again in the shape of a
wolf, he devoured a boy thirteen years of age, having previously torn
off his leg and thigh with his teeth, and hid them away for his
breakfast on the morrow. He was, furthermore, indicted for giving way
to the same diabolical and unnatural propensities even in his shape of
a man, and that he had strangled a boy in a wood with the intention of
eating him, which crime he would have effected if he had not been seen
by the neighhours and prevented.
Gilles Garnier was put to the rack, after fifty witnesses had deposed
against him: he confessed everything that was laid to his charge. He
was, thereupon, brought back into the presence of his judges, when Dr.
Camus, in the name of the Parliament of Dole, pronounced the following
sentence:--
"Seeing that Gilles Garnier has, by the testimony of credible
witnesses, and by his own spontaneous confession, been proved guilty of
the abominable crimes of lycanthropy and witchcraft, this court
condemns him, the said Gilles, to be this day taken in a cart from this
spot to the place of execution, accompanied by the executioner (maitre
executeur de la haute justice), where he, by the said executioner,
shall be tied to a stake and burned alive, and that his ashes be then
scattered to the winds. The Court further condemns him, the said
Gilles, to the costs of this prosecution."
"Given at Dole, this 18th day of January, 1573."
In 1578, the Parliament of Paris was occupied for several days with the
trial of a man, named Jacques Roller. He, also, was found guilty of
being a loup-garou, and in that shape devouring a little boy. He was
burnt alive in the Place de Greve.