Witchcraft

In contrast to the way that accusations of heresy came from religious officials, charges of witchcraft typically began with peasants who suspected their neighbours of evil or of gaining some advantage, even growing especially large vegetables, through supernatural connections.

Witch hunts were not illogical by the day's notions of causation. A child healthy in the morning but covered with blotches and dead in the afternoon could not be explained by reference to science. Hailstorms, which could destroy a crop in one field and leave neighbouring plants untouched, lent themselves to supernatural explanations. The plague came and went for no apparent reason into the late eighteenth century. For minds on edge because of any problems - and most people lived on the brink of disaster in the early modern period - the idea of the devil, at work on earth and allied to suspect neighbours, made sense. Certainly the clergy told people that the Prince of Darkness or his sub-demons constantly set snares to trap those of weak faith.

The witch was an especially vicious foe of humanity. Her purpose was to harm people, livestock and crops; she made a direct pact with Satan; she might be recruited and act alone, not as a member of a perverted group; and she could fly great distances in an instant to sabbaths.

Or so the witch finders claimed; but vehement objections to that picture arose quickly and in many areas effectively countered the fantasies of the hunters, although too often in the wake of profound suffering. The infamous Malleus malficarum, written in i486 by the Dominican Heinrich Kramer, and frequently considered to be both the ultimate witch hunter's manual and a particularly nasty statement of misogyny, illustrates the point. Accepted in some venues, it was rejected elsewhere as dangerous nonsense. Among its opponents were Kramer's own bishop of Brixen (today in Austria) in the 1480s, the town council of Nuremberg slightly later, and the Spanish Inquisition in 1528. Kramer was disciplined by his bishop for staging a trial in which women were tortured; no more processes occurred around Brixen. Yet in other areas the Malleus or other works that advocated persecution were taken all too seriously.

Matching or exceeding the zeal to persecute heretics in the high Middle Ages, early modern witch hunters in Franche-Comte conducted some 800 trials from 1600 to 1660, when it was part of the Holy Roman Empire; the prince-bishoprics of Wurzburg and Bamberg executed more than 1,500 people in the years 1616 to 1629; and the area under the jurisdiction of the abbey of St Maximin, just outside Trier, witnessed savage hunts in several periods after 1586. Entire villages near the town, Ruwer and Eitelsbach, ceased to exist in the 1580s and 1590s; nearly every household suffered accusations and executions. Whole families fled if they could. If some deeper function was involved in these cases, it descended into overkill, not a lesson about behaviour.

Yet it appears that more jurisdictions did not conduct large-scale hunts than did. Where central authority and appellate courts operated more or less effectively, accusations were often treated with considerable scepticism.

In English-speaking lands, large persecutions erupted when central author­ity was weak or broke down, as in East Anglia during the English Civil War and Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Massachusetts colonists drove out an unpopular governor and were awaiting a new charter and governor when a local minister and doctor began to talk of diabolic possession among young girls. The regular court system had ceased to function. Children were allowed to testify in special proceedings, following practice in recent Swedish cases, which were well known in Massachusetts.

The tendency of witch finders to quickly employ torture, as Matthew Hopkins did in East Anglia in 1645, occurred on the local level, as it did in the decentralised empire. Appellate courts, and for that matter town officials, had to rely more on documents than did village or seigneurial tribunals, which were close to local fears and reputations. In a large town, hundreds or thousands of people might have been nearby when a baby suddenly sickened and died. How could any one of them be identified as a witch? Rothenburg and Frankfurt did not convict witches, and Nuremberg tried only a few.

Why did women make up such a large portion, perhaps 75 per cent, of those tried for witchcraft? General misogyny should not be underestimated. Yet the gendered roles of women seem more important. They gave birth and nursed infants, putting mothers and midwives in a position to attract blame when a child died. Women mixed ingredients and cooked them, traded secrets at the village well about sex and abortion, and took care of domestic animals that might be regarded as familiars, demons in disguise. Sadistic male witch finders may have particularly enjoyed tormenting women. That the devil was always male encouraged common folk and the elite alike to think of him having sexual intercourse with women, usually a central part of depic­tions of the witches' sabbath. Yet men comprised the majority of victims in several cases, for instance in Iceland and Normandy, where male shepherds in possession of written spells aroused deep suspicion. Given the hunts' erratic nature and absence in many regions, it is difficult to see the persecutions as attempts to frighten women into further submission.

It is more productive to examine the spread of witch fear. The Rhine was the information highway of its day; those inclined to condemn witches in the first place could hear and read about trials and pro-persecution opinion from German, French and Latin sources. Perhaps 80 per cent ofknown executions occurred in a zone 100 kilometres on either side of the Rhine. The diffusion of fear, which could become panic, can sometimes be traced, for example through Alsace and from Sweden to England to Massachusetts by 1692. As witch fear gripped a community, local authorities lowered or abandoned previous standards of evidence. Zealous witch finders like Cardinal Borromeo or Archbishop Ferdinand needed no physical evidence to convict a witch.

Several developments helped to undo that approach. First, objections arose to the idea of witchcraft, for example from the physician Johann Weyer in 1563. He maintained that only God could create storms and that torture produced unreliable confessions. Weyer added that the ‘power of reason and truth' discredited tales of witches' powers, for which no physical evidence existed. More denunciations of physical coercion appeared, in particular from Friederich Spee von Lagerfeld in 1631.

Problems of proof became critical in ending persecutions. Prominent ministers in Massachusetts quickly disagreed about what constituted good evidence of witchcraft. Strongly endorsed by Cotton Mather, the hunt claimed twenty lives in the span of a few months before other leading clerics of the colony, among them Cotton's father Increase Mather, were able to assert their authority to end reliance on testimony previously unacceptable in the courts. Two Catholic rulers and brothers, Maximilian and Ferdinand of Bavaria, educated by the same pro-persecution tutor, differed markedly in their approach to witchcraft. After some hesitation, Maximilian halted trials while he was duke of Bavaria, 1597-1651, because of concerns about proof. Ferdinand, archbishop and elector of Cologne from 1595 to 1650, arranged the largest single hunt in European history.

In 1585 the magistrates of Rottenburg, Germany, where more than twenty women had been burned since 1578, remarked that if that pace continued, there would be no women left in the town. Witch hunters in south-west Germany ‘stopped because they no longer knew how to find witches'.^[797] That is, they could not tell the innocent from the guilty; hunts collapsed of their own weight. Some 200 people were accused around Salem, reproducing the pro­blem. The pattern of local figures leading a hunt, only to see it opposed or ended by higher parties, found in France, Sweden and in the person of James I when he became king of England, suggests that state building was not central to witch trials; instead, central authorities asserted themselves in ending hunts.

By the 1690s the crone who had once gone to the stake or gallows could be drawn as kindly Mother Goose. She personified the trend of rapidly declining violence towards witches, except for rare cases of lynching by European villagers, which have continued sporadically into recent decades.

Russian Christianity, and with it the pursuit of heretics and witches in Muscovy, took a different path. The elite's conversion in 988 was to the Byzantine Church, in which Christ was usually depicted not as helpless on the cross but as Pantocrator, omnipotent lord of the universe, a powerful young man. The devil did not compete with him in the Orthodox faith. Demons were small figures that flitted around the edges of icons. Moreover, Russians stayed too busy fighting people of other faiths - the Mongols from 1238 on, then Germans, Poles and Swedes - to worry much about internal religious fragmen­tation. Feudalism, in the form of hereditary local nobles ruling over specific geographical areas, did not appear in Muscovy. Thus in contrast to southern France or the divided German bailiwicks, centralising authorities in Russia had less reason to fear local power or to smear it as following the wrong religion.

Pursuit of heresy and witches east of German-speaking lands differed substantially from events in the West. Although Russians often clung to dual faith (dvoeverie) in pagan gods and in Christianity, for centuries church­men were not vehement about eliminating the old ways. Nor did they soon acquire the power to do so. Several more or less coherent heresies did emerge in Muscovy, for example the Judaisers, centred on Novgorod in 1470, who accepted the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) but not the New. But such heresies apparently never spread beyond members of the elite. The Judaiser leaders were burned in 1504.

Then in 1666 a schism erupted in the Russian Church. When the official church adopted several reforms, the Old Believers, also called Old Ritualists, clung to traditional ways while insisting that they were the true Orthodox. Muscovite armies destroyed several Old Believer communities, particularly one on the White Sea in 1676 which had resisted central secular as well as religious authorities. Old Believer groups were sometimes allowed to operate openly but were also occasionally persecuted until 1905, when the tsarist government proclaimed religious toleration. But after the seventeenth cen­tury, the Old Believers never posed a serious threat to the state.

Nor did heresies in Russia lead to accusations of satanic partnership, which helped limit witch trials there. Only 227 Russians are known to have been tried in the seventeenth century. About 14 per cent of those charged were executed, although Muscovite practice made up for this leniency to a significant degree by requiring that accused and accusers alike be tortured ‘without mercy' when an investigation began. This was because maleficia were considered crimes against the state. Satan did not figure in Russian trials until the early eighteenth century; witches were anyone who chanted spells, made suspicious potions, were near someone who died suddenly, or merely possessed written material without official permission. But certainly accused Russian heretics and witches suffered extreme violence.

Poland, Catholic by faith and Western oriented by the use of Latin, also witnessed relatively few witch trials, which peaked more or less a century after those in the West, from 1650 to 1750. Because of the massive destruction of Polish records during World War II, trying to estimate deaths is frustrat­ing. Perhaps a few thousand died, perhaps 30,000; the former figure seems more likely. Most trials seem to have been for simple maleficia, not for connections to Satan; Polish witches were called czarnownik/czarnownica, derived from ‘black (czarny) magic' and thus better translated as ‘sorcerers'. The late, and probably relatively mild, spread of witchcraft cases to Poland suggests that geographical proximity to other witch fears was important, as most documented cases were in the western part of the kingdom.