This chapter focuses on violence against heretics and witches in Europe, above all in the western part, from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries.

Heresy is holding religious beliefs that do not agree with the theology of one's proclaimed faith. Thus in a strict sense, it is an ‘insider problem'; the medieval church, for example, could not label someone who was never baptised a heretic.

Heresy, from the Greek hairesis, meaning ‘choice', is often defined as Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, did in the thirteenth century: ‘a heresy is an opinion chosen by human perception contrary to Holy Scripture, publicly avowed and obstinately defended'. But who decided that a particular view contradicted Scripture, and why, after centuries of little persecution, did western European authorities begin in the eleventh century to care vehe­mently about ‘wrong' choices?

Heretics did not always publicly or obstinately cling to their views. Official Catholic investigations, carried out by individual Inquisitors and the Holy Offices of the Inquisition, announced in a papal bull of 1184 and created as an institution by Pope Gregory IX in 1231, often probed for privately held beliefs.^[768] Trials in Spain, Portugal, Goa under the Portuguese, and New Spain strove primarily to discover false converts (converses) from Islam and to identify Jews who were only Christian on the outside. As for obstinacy, better to confess than to endure torture, many felt.

There can be no religious heresy without orthodoxy. That is, when no official church doctrine exists, differences in belief are only differences in opinion, not crimes against the faith, as in Christianity before the Council of Nicea (325 ce). Once a religious structure and cosmology are in place and defended by a hierarchy of church officials, usually with the backing of secular power, disagreement with mainstream doctrine can be termed ‘heresy'.

Late medieval/ early modern notions of witchcraft evolved from depictions of heretics and their purported activities.

Charges of heresy and witchcraft fed each other for several centuries and led to torture and extreme forms of execution.^[769] Heresy in Europe as a crime worthy of such punishment appeared, or rather reappeared with a vengeance, in the eleventh century. Western Europe had not experienced the execution of a heretic for nearly 600 years before some sixteen people were burned at Orleans in 1022, in what appears to have been a struggle among court and church factions.^[770] Within several decades the victims at Orleans were depicted as worshipping the devil, engaging in orgies that included incest and sodomy, and killing and eating babies.^[771] Pope Gregory IX added the church's weight to these descriptions in a letter of 1233. Much of this image dates back to charges made against early Christians by the Romans;^[772] it later attached to Jews, Muslims, and witches and inflamed violence towards them and heretics. Persecution for heresy grew for several centuries, especially during a thirteenth-century French campaign in Languedoc that killed thousands, heretics or not. As time went on, and especially by about 1600, the pursuit of heretics more or less stabilised at a much lower level.

Early sources give various figures for heretics burned in particular cases. While the Spanish Inquisition kept careful records of all cases tried between 1540 and 1700, the Roman Inquisition had no central file, was looted during the Napoleonic Wars, and suffered the scattering of its archives across Europe.

William Monter provides a rough figure of 3,000 heretics executed in the period 1520-75, among them some 2,000 Anabaptists. However, he writes that 'the most important point... is that these executions were not simply deaths for heresy'. Rather, sentences were applied by secular courts ‘to members of a rival religious organization'.^{[773] [774]} These and other attacks by secular forces on any confession not deemed the true faith should be considered at least as much as events in wars of religion as persecutions of heretics. That secular authorities, not ecclesiastical tribunals, carried out religious cleansing is another indication of this point. The Anabaptists, moreover, were social and religious rebels despised by both Catholic and Protestant clerics. Such campaigns by secular officials continued, for example in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Although Louis XIV then labelled the Protestants as heretics, the goal of the subsequent campaign was to kill or drive Protestants from France, not to discover enemies within the ranks of good Catholics. Such cases were outsider more than insider problems. Nevertheless, ‘heresy' has been widely applied to such persecutions.

If the Inquisition has been overly vilified, it and the pursuit of heretics in the broad sense did open the door for a far larger slaughter, the witch trials.

The witch hunts are usually dated roughly 1500-1700, occasionally 1450-1750. Trials of witches, and with them torture and death sentences, reached a peak in the 1580s and 1590s and again from about 1620 to 1630. Relatively few cases reached the courts of western Europe or North America after that year. Recent estimates of the death toll are 30-40,000.8

A number of early killings of heretics, especially in the eleventh century, were lynchings: crowds put heretics to death without official sanction. Lynching disturbs officials, since mobs enacting ‘popular justice' represent a threat to social stability and to the rule of law administered by the elite. As prosecutions for heresy attained institutionalised form, trial procedures had the effect in several Catholic lands of reducing the number of executions and dampening or even precluding hunts for witches.

Persecuting heretics in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries increased the power and influence of the Catholic Church and of the French Crown in southern territories. In the twelfth century and for some time after, accusations of heresy appear to have derived frequently from rivalries among factions or between families striving to hold or expand their power.^{[775] [776]} Many sources from this period indicate that clerical and secular authorities perceived heresy, or said they did, as a great danger to respectable religion and society.

For the witch hunts, scholars debate the existence of further purposes or functions,^[777] a sociological term, beyond the effort to eliminate dangerous criminals. Were the hunts in fact or effect a campaign to intimidate women and force them into silence on most topics?¹¹ Did the trials thinly veil efforts to instil social discipline, especially among peasants; more broadly, were the hunts intended to discourage deviant thought and behaviour?^{[778] [779]} Were the persecutions a strategy or at least an aid in state building,^[780] which brought new power to central officials? Some historians also emphasise the effects of the Little Ice Age, the ‘core phase' of which is dated to the early 1560s. As crops failed and misery rose, this argument runs, people were accused of producing disasters through witchcraft.1^[781]

But why any of these factors would have led to waves of witchcraft trials is an open question. In any event, the persecutions were erratic. They never occurred in numerous regions, cold or not, while they claimed many victims in others, only to end quickly. Conviction rates varied widely. A close look at the timing, locations, victims and dynamics of persecuting witches undermines the view that any function accompanied the trials.^[782] Perhaps ‘latent' or unintentional functions operated; but this notion, drawn from functional theory, leads into the caverns of Freudian thought, where any speculation may be offered.

No known source from the period of the witch hunts refers to a purpose beyond extirpating clear and present danger. And why would the highly disruptive and often costly charge of witchcraft - it was expensive to hire an experienced torturer/executioner and to gather the wood needed to burn a human body - serve to intimidate a population when that was accomplished much more directly by the upper classes? Extensive laws and customs were in force across Europe to ensure that peasants and all women remained in their designated places.

After the fourteenth century, with the exception of the abortive German Peasants' War of 1524-5, the elite controlled villagers without especial diffi­culty until the French Revolution. Authorities did not need to draw on witchcraft accusations, almost invariably made by peasants against other peasants, to further regulate rural life.

Zeal to control society did foster some witch trials, only to evoke opposition from other authorities. Milan's archbishop, then Cardinal Carlo Borromeo (in office 1563-84), inflamed by the Catholic Reformation and his own inclinations to persecute any who did not strictly follow the church's teachings, tried extensively to punish local magicians and witches. But he encountered staunch opposition from the Holy Office in Rome. Only Borromeo's family connections - his uncle was elected Pope Pius IV in 1560 - and prestige, it seems, allowed him to bypass the Roman Inquisition and execute witches, for example ten women at Val Mesolcina in 1583.^[783] But the Holy Office quickly ordered its inquisitors not to stage similar trials. In 1558 Borromeo's conduct was a factor in prompting the Roman Holy Office to forbid the prosecution of people denounced as participants in sabbaths by accused witches. This injunction precluded the snowball effect that widened persecutions further north. In 1600 the Holy Office issued new instructions for witchcraft trials with higher standards of evi­dence; for example, physicians had to examine dead bodies to establish cause of death, while sickness alone could not constitute proof of witchcraft.^[784] The Roman Inquisition's approach to cases of witchcraft now became ‘cautious and moderate'.^[785] All of these practices stand in sharp contrast to the bulk of witchcraft processes in German and autonomous French-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire, which were often disruptive.