Search for:. The Witch Trials Between the 15th and 18th centuries in Europe, many people were accused of and put on trial for practicing witchcraft. Those who were accused of witchcraft were portrayed as being Devil worshipers.
The death of a large percentage of the European population was believed by many Christians to have been caused by their enemies.
The peak of the witch hunt was during the European wars of religion, peaking between about and Over the entire duration of the trials, which spanned three centuries, an estimated total of 40,—, people were executed. It led to the death of about people, and was perhaps the biggest mass execution in Europe during peacetime. While the witch trials had begun to fade out across much of Europe by the midth century, they became more prominent in the American colonies.
FULL TEXT The witch trials in the early modern period were a series of witch hunts between the 15th and 18th centuries, when across early modern Europe, and to some extent in the European colonies in North America, there was a widespread hysteria that malevolent Satanic witches were operating as an organized threat to Christendom. Background to the Witch Trials During the medieval period, there was widespread belief in magic across Christian Europe.
A Witch feeding her familiars An image of a witch and her familiar spirits taken from a publication that dealt with the witch trials of Elizabeth Stile, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell, and Mother Margaret in Windsor, While the witch trials only really began in the 15th century, with the start of the early modern period, many of their causes had been developing during the previous centuries, with the persecution of heresy by the medieval Inquisition during the late 12th and the 13th centuries, and during the late medieval period, during which the idea of witchcraft or sorcery gradually changed and adapted.
An important turning point was the Black Death of —, which killed a large percentage of the European population, and which many Christians believed had been caused by evil forces. Matteson, American painter. Licenses and Attributions. By nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the door of his local Catholic Church in , Luther was acting as an early consumer protection bureau of sorts, blasting the Catholic church for exploitative practices.
Per usual, the Pope declared Luther a heretic and banned the Ninety-five Theses. This decentralized structure made enforcing Catholicism and rooting out Protestantism much trickier. Plus, Luther had a hometown advantage. Before long, a slew of German princes had flipped over to Lutheranism—enough that, by , they were powerful enough to force the Emperor to decriminalize Lutheranism. The name of this agreement, the Peace of Augsburg, belies its result.
With Lutheranism now officially given the green light, violence broke out across the Holy Roman Empire, as princes fought to force their faith on neighboring territories. As a result, Germany became the bloodiest battleground in the Catholic-Protestant contest.
With Catholic-Protestant rivalries now out in the open, officials had to boost the appeal of their brand to religious consumers by providing more services. Protestants, for instance, offered lower prices for tithing, while Catholics reaffirmed the cult of saints, which encouraged grassroots engagement by beatifying and canonizing candidates venerated by local communities.
Among those selected post-Reformation were Albertus Magnus, the great German philosopher and patron saint of medical technicians, and Saint Charles Borromeo, a rabid witch-hunter who also happens to fend off ulcers. But in these unstable times of brutal weather and constant warfare, the hottest service to provide was protection against Satan and his minions: witches.
For centuries, common folk had widely believed in witchcraft. People bought and sold magical services like love potions and spells to help find stolen belongings. That stance reversed by the mids, as Lutheranism gained ground. Catholic leaders were getting nervous. That, in turn, inspired Lutheran authorities to up their witch-hunting game still more.
Witch investigations were time-consuming and expensive. But the payoff could be worth it. After all, what clearer way was there to quantify the fight against Satan than a big bonfire bodycount? The research by Leeson and Russ shows that religious competition did, indeed, spark witch hunts.
In addition to collecting data on religious battles, they amassed a dataset of more than 43, witchcraft prosecutions in nearly 11, separate trials. Sure enough, in places and periods where confessional competition was fierce, witch hunts intensified. Witch trials were also greater and more frequent in Germany and Switzerland, where religious contests were most heated.
Tellingly, the slaughter subsides after , when the Peace of Westphalia brought an end to religious wars by establishing the geography of Catholic and Protestant monopolies and mandating tolerance of mainstream sects of Christians, regardless of official religion.
That drop-off occurred well before the last gelid gasp of the Little Ice Age swept the area in the late s. The infamously savage Spanish Inquisition executed no more than two dozen alleged witches; Portugal put to death around seven.
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