The European Witch Hunts

Belief in harmful magic is ancient and found in many cultures. What was new in late medieval Europe was the idea that witches were not just individuals who cursed their neighbours, but members of a secret sect sworn to the Devil. In the fifteenth century, theologians and inquisitors in the Alps and in France began to describe night-time gatherings, later called sabbaths, where witches were said to worship Satan and plot harm. The Malleus Maleficarum, published by the Dominican Heinrich Kramer in 1486–1487, gathered these ideas into a handbook for judges, though it was never an official Church text and other clergy criticised it.

This learned theory met a much older world of village quarrels. Most cases began locally. A cow stopped giving milk, a child fell ill, a harvest failed, and someone remembered an argument with a poor, elderly or sharp-tongued neighbour. Accusations often followed years of suspicion. Robin Briggs and other historians have shown how ordinary tensions over charity, inheritance and reputation fed the trials.

Once a case reached a court, procedure mattered enormously. On the Continent, judges could use torture to obtain confessions, and the accused were asked to name others they had seen at the sabbath. In this way one arrest could become dozens. In England, where torture was not normally allowed in such cases and juries decided guilt, trials were fewer and convicted witches were hanged rather than burned.

The hunts crossed confessional lines. Catholic prince-bishops in Germany presided over some of the worst panics, but Lutheran and Calvinist territories also tried and executed witches, and Protestant Scotland had one of the highest rates of execution in Europe. Reformers and Counter-Reformers alike preached against the Devil and demanded godly order, and some historians see the trials partly as a product of this age of religious discipline. Others point to the hardships of the period, including war, epidemics and the colder decades of the so-called Little Ice Age, when failed harvests made people look for someone to blame.

For a long time popular books spoke of nine million victims. That figure goes back to an eighteenth-century writer who multiplied the records of one region across Europe and many centuries; it was later repeated without checking. Since the 1970s historians have studied surviving court records region by region. Their estimates now cluster around 100,000 trials and 40,000–60,000 executions over three centuries.

The killing was very uneven. Roughly half of all executions happened in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, where many small states, prince-bishoprics and towns had their own courts and little oversight. Trier in the 1580s and Würzburg and Bamberg in the late 1620s each saw hundreds executed. Scotland, the Swiss cantons and parts of France also had intense episodes. By contrast, Ireland, Portugal and much of Italy saw few executions.

The voices of the accused survive mostly in hostile records, but a few speak directly. In 1628 Johannes Junius, a former mayor of Bamberg, managed to smuggle a letter out of prison to his daughter. In it he wrote that he was innocent, that he had confessed only because of torture, and that he had been forced to name others. He was executed soon afterwards. His letter remains one of the most moving documents of the period.

About three quarters or more of those executed were women, many of them older and poor, though in some regions, such as Iceland and parts of Normandy, most of the accused were men. Historians debate how far the hunts were driven by hostility to women as such. Most agree that gender mattered, alongside age, poverty and local conflict.

Church courts played a smaller role than often imagined. The Spanish Inquisition, after investigating a panic in the Basque country, accepted the conclusion of the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías that there was no reliable evidence that any of the accused were witches. From 1614 it imposed strict rules that made executions for witchcraft very rare in Spain.

The best-known trials in the English-speaking world came late. In 1692, in Salem Village, Massachusetts, several girls began to suffer fits that local ministers and doctors attributed to witchcraft. The accusations spread across Essex County, fed by tensions between families, fears of war with Native Americans on the frontier, and a special court that accepted ‘spectral evidence’, testimony that the accused’s spirit had appeared to the afflicted.

More than 150 people were accused. Nineteen were hanged, including Rebecca Nurse, a respected elderly church member, and Bridget Bishop, the first to die. Giles Corey, who refused to enter a plea, died after being pressed under heavy stones, and several others died in prison. Those who confessed were generally spared, which meant that the people executed were those who refused to admit to something they had not done.

Doubts grew quickly. Leading ministers, among them Increase Mather, argued that spectral evidence was unsafe, and the governor ended the special court in late 1692. In 1697 the colony held a day of fasting and repentance, and the judge Samuel Sewall publicly asked forgiveness for his part. In 1711 the colony reversed the convictions of many of the victims and paid compensation to their families.

Criticism had accompanied the hunts from the start. In 1563 the physician Johann Weyer argued that many supposed witches were sick or deluded old women. In 1631 the Jesuit Friedrich Spee, who had heard the confessions of condemned prisoners, published an anonymous book arguing that torture would make anyone confess to anything. Over the seventeenth century, higher courts in France, the Empire and elsewhere demanded stronger proof and reviewed local verdicts, and convictions fell sharply.

By the early eighteenth century most educated Europeans no longer believed that witches could be proved in court. Britain’s Witchcraft Act of 1736 replaced the crime of witchcraft with the lesser offence of pretending to use magic. A few late executions still occurred, such as that of the servant Anna Göldi in the Swiss canton of Glarus in 1782; in 2008 the cantonal parliament declared her innocent.

Remembrance has grown in recent decades. Towns in Germany and elsewhere have formally rehabilitated victims, memorials stand in places such as Bamberg and Salem, and in 2022 the First Minister of Scotland issued a formal apology to those accused under the country’s Witchcraft Act. Historians stress that the accused were ordinary people caught in a system of fear, law and belief, and that the hunts ended because people inside the same societies argued, case by case, that the system was wrong.