In 1782, in the Swiss canton of Glarus, the maidservant Anna Göldi was beheaded after a trial in which she was accused of bewitching her employer’s eight-year-old daughter. It is the last known legal execution for witchcraft in Western Europe. In 2008, the government of Glarus declared her innocent, according to swissinfo.ch.
Göldi’s case closes a long history that begins at the end of the Middle Ages. This post is part of the map presented in Magic and spirituality in ancient civilisations: a map to get started and follows the post on magic in the medieval West [coming soon].
From sorcery to the pact with the Devil
Accusations of harmful magic had existed for a long time. At the end of the Middle Ages, the idea emerged that the witch made a pact with the Devil and received from him the power to cause harm. The historian Ronald Hutton, in The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (2017), places the first executions based on this concept in the 1420s, in the Pyrenees and in Rome.
The most famous book on the subject came shortly afterwards. The Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”) was written by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. The first edition came from the workshop of Peter Drach in Speyer and was already on sale in February 1487, according to the printer’s records analysed by Christopher S. Mackay, its English translator. The name of the theologian Jacob Sprenger appears as co-author, but his involvement is disputed. Mackay points out that the book arose in part from a failed trial: in 1485 Kramer accused women in Innsbruck, and the Bishop of Brixen eventually intervened and closed the case.
The real numbers
Estimates of the dead have fallen sharply in recent decades, as regional archives have been studied.
Brian P. Levack, in The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, calculates around 90,000 witchcraft prosecutions in Europe. In the third edition (2006), he lowered his estimate of executions from 60,000 to around 45,000. Peter Leeson and Jacob Russ cite a consensus of 100,000 to 110,000 people tried between about 1400 and 1750, half of them executed. Hutton speaks of 40,000 to 60,000 people legally executed between the 1420s and 1782, with the real figure probably in the lower half of that range.
According to Hutton, in The Witch, the great majority of victims died between 1560 and 1640. The epicentre was the Holy Roman Empire: in 1998, Wolfgang Behringer estimated a minimum of 30,000 executions in Europe, more than 20,000 of them in the territory of present-day Germany. Most victims were women, around three-quarters of those accused according to Levack.
Secular courts and the Inquisition
In the popular image, the Inquisition lights almost every pyre. The economist Emily Oster sums up the consensus: “The earliest trials, going back to the thirteenth century, were the work of church institutions, particularly the Catholic Inquisition, but the mass of trials later in the period saw very little formal church involvement of this type.” Most sentences came from local secular courts, belonging to towns, lordships and principalities.
The Spanish Inquisition is the most studied example. Gustav Henningsen, in The Witches’ Advocate, reconstructs the great Logroño trial: at the auto-da-fé of 1610, six people were burnt alive and five in effigy (represented by figures, because they had already died in prison). In 1611 the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías toured the region and gathered 1,802 confessions, 1,384 of them from children. His sceptical examination of the cases led to the instructions of 1614, which made the standards of proof so demanding that prosecutions practically stopped. Hutton writes that the results of the Western Mediterranean inquisitions’ campaign against magic, the Roman one included, “have come to be recognized as remarkably mild: several thousand prosecutions for magic yielded at the very most five hundred death sentences.” In Venice, the inquisitors held more than six hundred trials concerning magic between 1550 and 1650, and none ended in execution.
Why did it happen? Three explanations
The first explanation involves climate and hunger. Behringer, in the article “Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting” (1999), linked the great waves of persecution to the Little Ice Age, the period of lower temperatures running roughly from the 14th to the 19th century. Frosts, hail and failed harvests prompted calls for the punishment of those who supposedly controlled the weather. In 2004, Oster tested this idea with data from eleven European regions. She found more trials in the coldest periods and in regions with slower economic growth, and interpreted witches as scapegoats for food crises.
The second involves religious competition. In the article “Witch Trials” (2018), Leeson and Russ treat Catholics and Protestants as competitors in a “religious market”. Where the Reformation left territories contested, the two churches would compete for followers by presenting themselves as effective protectors against the Devil, and the trials would serve as a showcase for that protection. They gathered data on more than 43,000 people tried in 21 European countries between 1300 and 1850, and on more than 400 conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. They concluded that confessional rivalry explains the intensity of the trials better than climate, income or state capacity.
The third rejects a single cause. The two lines of explanation are not mutually exclusive, and historians such as Levack insist that the witch hunt depended on several factors at once: the new demonological theory, the use of torture, the autonomy of local courts and village tensions.
The myth of the “9 million”
Behringer traced the origin of the most frequently repeated figure on the subject in the article “Neun Millionen Hexen” (1998). Gottfried Christian Voigt, a jurist in the service of the town of Quedlinburg, wrote about the witch trials in an essay completed in 1783 and published in 1784 in the Berlinische Monatsschrift. He found 30 death sentences between 1569 and 1598 in the local archive, assumed there had been at least 40, multiplied by centuries and by the estimated population of Christian Europe, and arrived at 9,442,994 victims over eleven centuries.
In 1869 the theologian Gustav Roskoff rounded the figure to “ungefähr neun Millionen” (“about nine million”) in his Geschichte des Teufels (“History of the Devil”), and the origin of the calculation was lost. In 1934, amid the Nazi campaign against the churches, Mathilde Ludendorff revived the figure in a pamphlet. Behringer also records that the German translation of a book by Gerald Gardner, from 1965, carried the “nine million” in the translator’s introduction, although the figure does not appear in Gardner’s text. From the 1970s, according to Behringer, radical feminism, with impetus from the United States, brought the figure back and even inflated it.
The end
Executions declined over the 17th century and almost ceased in the 18th. In Great Britain, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 stopped treating witchcraft as a real crime and instead punished those who pretended to practise it. Göldi’s case caused a scandal because it seemed to belong to another age. This series runs to 1850 by editorial choice, to include the period in which the laws against witchcraft were abolished. No legal execution after Anna Göldi’s in 1782 is confirmed.
The next post in this block deals with colonial Brazil and the Portuguese Inquisition [coming soon].
Questions answered
How many people were executed as witches in Europe?
Between 40,000 and 60,000, according to Hutton, and around 45,000, according to Levack. The figure of 9 million comes from a baseless calculation made by Voigt in 1783.
Did the Inquisition burn most of the witches?
No. Most convictions came from local secular courts. The Spanish Inquisition, after Logroño (1610), became very cautious.
Where was the persecution most intense?
In the Holy Roman Empire. Behringer counts more than 20,000 executions in the territory of present-day Germany alone.
Who was the last person executed for witchcraft?
Anna Göldi, beheaded in Glarus, Switzerland, in 1782, is considered the last legal execution in Western Europe.
Mini-glossary
- Malleus Maleficarum: a treatise on witchcraft by Heinrich Kramer, printed in Speyer in 1486/1487.
- Secular court: a court belonging to a civil power, such as a town or a prince.
- Auto-da-fé: a public ceremony at which the Inquisition read out the sentences of the condemned.
- Little Ice Age: a period of lower temperatures in Europe, roughly between the 14th and 19th centuries.
- Holy Roman Empire: a group of territories in Central Europe, mainly German, under an elected emperor.
Bibliography
BEHRINGER, Wolfgang. Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities. Climatic Change, v. 43, n. 1, p. 335–351, 1999.
BEHRINGER, Wolfgang. Neun Millionen Hexen: Entstehung, Tradition und Kritik eines populären Mythos. Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, v. 49, p. 664–685, 1998.
HENNINGSEN, Gustav. The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (1609–1614). Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980.
HUTTON, Ronald. The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2017.
LEESON, Peter T.; RUSS, Jacob W. Witch Trials. The Economic Journal, v. 128, n. 613, p. 2066–2105, Aug. 2018. DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12498.
LEVACK, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006.
MACKAY, Christopher S. (trans.). The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
OSTER, Emily. Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe. Journal of Economic Perspectives, v. 18, n. 1, p. 215–228, 2004.
SWISSINFO.CH. “Last witch in Europe” cleared. 27 Aug. 2008. Available at: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/last-witch-in-europe-cleared/662078.