A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume III

by Henry Charles Lea

This shows the material which existed everywhere for development into organized persecution when properly handled by the Inquisition, and the Flagellum Hæreticorum Fascinariorum of the Inquisitor, Nicholaus Jaquerius, in 1458, indicates that the Holy Office was beginning to appreciate the necessity of organizing its efforts for systematic work. Perhaps the untoward result of the affair at Arras may have retarded this somewhat by the over-zeal and unscrupulous greed of its manipulators, but if there was a reaction it was limited, both in extent and duration. All the accumulated beliefs in the occult powers of demonic agencies inherited from so many creeds and races still flourished in their integrity. In the existing wretchedness of the peasantry throughout the length and breadth of Europe, recklessness as to the present and hopelessness as to the future led thousands to wish that they could, by transferring their allegiance to Satan, find some momentary relief from the sordid miseries of life. The tales of the sensual delights of the Sabbat, where exquisite meats and drink were furnished in abundance, had an irresistible allurement for those who could scantily reckon on a morsel of black bread, or a turnip or a few beans, to keep starvation at bay. Sprenger, as already stated, tells us that the attraction of intercourse with incubi and succubi was a principal cause of luring souls to ruin. The devastating wars, with bands of écorcheurs and condottieri pillaging everywhere with savage cruelty, reduced whole populations to despair, and those who fancied themselves abandoned by God might well turn to Satan for help. According to Sprenger, a prolific source of witches was the seduction of young girls who when refused marriage had nothing more to hope for, and sought to avenge themselves on society by acquiring at least the power of evil.[586] Not only thus was there on the part of many a desire to enter the abhorred sect of Satan-worshippers, which the Church declared to be so numerous and powerful, but doubtless not a few performed the ceremonies to effect it, when perhaps some evil wish which chanced to be realized would convince them that Satan had really accepted their allegiance, and granted them the power which they sought. Certain minds might, in moments of high-wrought exaltation, even imagine that they had obtained admission to the foul mysteries whose reality was rapidly becoming an article of orthodox belief. Others again, in weakness and poverty, found that the reputation of possessing the power of evil was a protection and a support, and they encouraged rather than repressed the credulity of their neighbors. To these must be added the multitudes who derived a source of gain from curing the sorcery which the Church was confessedly unable to relieve, and there was ample material in the despised and lower stratum of society for the innumerable army of witches conjured up by the heated imaginations of the demonographers.

Unfortunately the Church, in its alarm at the development of this new heresy, stimulated it to the utmost in the endeavor to repress it. Every inquisitor whom it commissioned to suppress witchcraft was an active missionary who scattered the seeds of the belief ever more widely. We have seen what a brood of witches Pierre le Brousart hatched at Arras out of the single one burned at Langres, and how Chiabaudi succeeded in infecting the valleys of the Canavese. It mattered little in the end that le Brousart overreached himself and that Chiabaudi was outwrangled. The minds of the people became more and more familiarized with the idea that witches were everywhere around them, and that every misfortune and accident was the result of their malignity. Every man was thus assiduously taught, when he lost an ox or a child, or a harvest, or was suddenly prostrated with illness, to suspect his neighbors and look for evidence to confirm his suspicions, so that wherever an inquisitor passed he was overwhelmed with accusations against all who could be imagined to be guilty, from children of tender years to superannuated crones. When Girolamo Visconti was sent to Como he speedily raised such a storm of witchcraft that in 1485 he burned no less than forty-one unfortunates in the little district of Wormserbad in the Grisons—an exploit repeatedly referred to by Sprenger with honest professional pride.[587]

A special impulse was given to this development when Innocent VIII., December 5, 1484, issued his Bull Summis desiderantes, in which he bewailed the deplorable fact that all the Teutonic lands were filled with men and women who exercised upon the faithful all the malignant power which we have seen ascribed to witchcraft, and of which he enumerates the details with awe-inspiring amplification. Henry Institoris and Jacob Sprenger had for some time been performing the office of inquisitors in those regions, but their commissions did not specially mention sorcery as included in their jurisdiction, wherefore their efforts were impeded by over-wise clerks and laymen who used this as an excuse for protecting the guilty. Innocent therefore gives them full authority in the premises and orders the Bishop of Strassburg to coerce all who obstruct or interfere with them, calling in, if necessary, the aid of the secular arm. After this, to question the reality of witchcraft was to question the utterance of the Vicar of Christ, and to aid any one accused was to impede the Inquisition. Armed with these powers the two inquisitors, full of zeal, traversed the land, leaving behind them a track of blood and fire, and awakening in all hearts the cruel dread inspired by the absolute belief thus inculcated in all the horrors of witchcraft. In the little town of Ravenspurg alone they boast that they burned forty-eight in five years.[588]

It is true that they were not everywhere so successful. In the Tyrol the Bishop of Brixen published Innocent’s bull July 23, 1485, and on September 21 he issued to the inquisitor Henry Institoris a commission granting him full episcopal jurisdiction, but recommending him to associate with him a secular official of the suzerain, Sigismund of Austria. The latter, however, ordered the bishop to appoint a commissioner, and he named Sigismund Samer, pastor of Axams near Innsbruck. The pair commenced operations October 14, but their career, though vigorous, was short and inglorious. It chanced that some of the archduke’s courtiers desired to separate him from his wife, Catharine of Saxony, and spread reports that she had endeavored to poison him; and they followed this up by placing in an oven a worthless woman who personated an imprisoned demon and denounced a number of people. Institoris at once seized the accused and applied torture without stint. Then the bishop interposed, and by the middle of November ordered him to leave the diocese and betake himself to his convent, the sooner the better. Institoris, however, was loath to abandon his duty, and drew upon himself a sharper reproof on Ash Wednesday, 1486; he was told that he had nought to do there, that the bishop would attend to all that was necessary through the exercise of the ordinary jurisdiction, and he was warned that if he persisted in remaining he was in danger of assassination from the husbands or kinsmen of the women whom he was persecuting. He finally withdrew to Germany, richly rewarded for his labor by Sigismund, and from his account of the matter it is easy to see that all the sick and withered of Innsbruck had flocked to him with complaints of their neighbors so detailed that he was justified in regarding the place as thoroughly infected. The next year the Tyrolese Landtag complained to the archduke that recently many persons, on baseless denunciations, had been imprisoned, tortured, and disgracefully treated, and we can readily understand the complaint of the Malleus Maleficarum that Innsbruck abounded in witches of the most dangerous character, who could bewitch their judges and could not be forced to confess. Still, the seeds of superstition were scattered to fructify in due time. Although in the Tyrolese criminal ordinance issued by Maximilian I., in 1499, there is no allusion to sorcery and witchcraft, yet in 1506 we find the craze fully developed. Some records which have been preserved show trials before secular judges with juries of twelve men, in which the unfortunate women accused, after due torture, confess all the customary horrors.[589]

One result of this campaign of Institoris in the Tyrol was that it left Sigismund of Austria in a condition of perplexity as to the reality of witchcraft. His judges had apparently been inexperienced in such matters, the confessions of the accused had varied greatly, and the inquisition had been cut short before they could be forced to consentaneous avowals. To satisfy his mind, in 1487, he consulted on the subject two learned doctors of the law, Ulric Molitoris and Conrad Stürtzel, and the result was published at Constance in 1489 by Ulric, in the form of a discussion between the three. Sigismund is represented as urging the natural argument that the results obtained by witchcraft were so wofully inadequate to the powers ascribed to it as to cast doubt upon the reality of those powers—if they were real, a conqueror would only have, like William the Manzer at Ely, to put a witch at the head of his army to overcome all opposition. Against this view the customary texts and citations were alleged, and the conclusions reached represent very fairly the moderate opinions of the conservatives, who had not as yet yielded fully to the witchcraft craze, but who shrank from a rationalistic denial of that which had been handed down by the wisdom of ages. These are summed up in eight propositions: 1. Satan cannot himself, or by means of human instruments, disturb the elements, or injure men and animals, or render them impotent, but God sometimes permits him to do so to a certain determinate extent. 2. He cannot exceed this designated limit. 3. By permission of God he can sometimes cause illusions by which men appear to be transformed. 4. The night-riding and assemblages of the Sabbat are illusions. 5. Incubi and succubi are incapable of procreation. 6. God alone knows the future and the thoughts of men; the devil can only conjecture and use his knowledge of the stars. 7. Nevertheless witches, by worshipping and sacrificing to Satan, are real heretics and apostates. 8. Finally, they should therefore be put to death. In this cautious endeavor to harmonize the old school and the new, the witch thus gained nothing; everything was conceded, that had a practical bearing on the tribunals, and it was a mere matter of speculation whether the Sabbat was a dream or a reality, and whether the evil she wrought was the result of a special or a general concession of power by God to Satan. Thus the work of Molitoris is important as showing how feeble were the barriers which intelligent and fair-minded men could erect against the prevailing tendencies so sedulously fostered by popes and inquisitors.[590]

The fine-drawn distinctions of such men were quickly brushed aside by the aggressive self-confidence of the inquisitors. Even more potent than the personal activity of Sprenger was the legacy which he left behind him in the work which he proudly entitled the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, the most portentous monument of superstition which the world has produced. All his vast experience and wide erudition are brought to the task of proving the reality of witchcraft and the extent of its evils, and, further, of instructing the inquisitor how to elude the wiles of Satan and to punish his devotees. He was no vulgar witch-finder, but a man trained in all the learning of the schools. He apparently was not inhumane. In many places he manifests a laudable desire to give the accused the benefit of whatever pleas they might rightfully put forward, but he is so fully convinced of the gigantic character of the evils to be combated, he so thoroughly believes that his tribunal is engaged in a contest with Satan for human souls, that he eagerly justifies every artifice and every cruelty that could be suggested to outwit the adversary, on whom fair play would be thrown away. Like Conrad of Marburg and Capistrano, he was a man of the most dangerous type, an honest fanatic. His work is, moreover, an inexhaustible storehouse of marvels to which successive generations resorted whenever evidence was needed to prove any special manifestation of the power or malignity of the witch. Told as the results of his own experience or that of his colleagues, with the utmost good faith, they carried conviction with them. In fact, but for the delusive character of human testimony in such matters, the evidence would seem to be overwhelming. Statements of disinterested eye-witnesses, complaints of sufferers, confessions of the guilty, even after condemnation, and at the stake, when there was no hope save of pardon of their sins by God, are innumerable, and so detailed and connected together that the most fertile imagination would seem inadequate to their invention. Besides, the work is so logical in form, according to the fashion of the time, and so firmly based on scholastic theology and canon law, that we cannot wonder at the position accorded to it for more than a century of a leading authority on a subject of the highest practical importance. Quoted implicitly by all succeeding writers, it did more than all other agencies, save the papal bulls, to stimulate and perfect the persecution, and consequently the extension of witchcraft.[591]

Thus the Inquisition in its decrepitude had a temporary resumption of activity, before the Reformation came to renew its vigor in a different shape. Yet it was not everywhere allowed to work its will upon this new class of heretics. In France edicts of 1490 and 1493 treat them as subject exclusively to the secular courts, unless the offenders happen to be justiciable by the ecclesiastical tribunals, and no allusion whatever is made to the Inquisition. At the same time the growing sharpness of persecution is seen in provisions which subject those who consult necromancers and sorcerers to the same penalties as the practitioners themselves, and threaten judges who are negligent in arresting them with loss of office, perpetual disability, and heavy arbitrary fines. It was doubtless owing to this exclusion of spiritual jurisdiction over sorcery that the spread of witchcraft in France was slower than in Germany and Italy.[592]

Cornelius Agrippa, whose learned treatises on the occult sciences trench so nearly on forbidden ground, when he held the position of Town Orator and Advocate of Metz, had the hardihood, in 1519, to save from the clutches of the inquisitor, Nicholas Savin, an unfortunate woman accused of witchcraft. The only evidence against her was that her mother had been burned as a witch. Savin quoted the “Malleus Maleficarum” to show that if she were not the offspring of an incubus she must undoubtedly have been devoted to Satan at her birth. In conjunction with the episcopal official, John Leonard, he had her cruelly tortured, and she was then exposed to starvation in her prison. When Agrippa offered to defend her he was turned out of court and threatened with prosecution as a fautor of heresy, and her husband was refused access to the place of trial, lest he should interject an appeal. Leonard chanced to fall mortally sick, and, touched with remorse on his death-bed, he executed an instrument declaring his conviction of her innocence and asked the chapter to set her at liberty; but Savin demanded that she should be further tortured and then burned. Agrippa, however, labored so effectually with Leonard’s successor and with the chapter that the woman was discharged; but his disinterested zeal cost him his office, and he was obliged to leave Metz. Relieved of his presence, the inquisitor speedily found another witch, whom he burned after forcing her by torture to confess all the horrors of the Sabbat and customary evil deeds wrought through the power of Satan. Encouraged by this, he organized a search for others, doubtless based on the confessions of the victim, and imprisoned a number, while others fled, and there would have been a pitiless massacre had not Roger Brennon, parish priest of St. Cross, openly opposed him and vanquished him in disputation, whereupon the jail doors were thrown open and the fugitives returned.[593]

The most decided rebuff, however, which the Inquisition experienced in its new sphere of activity was administered by Venice. I have had occasion more than once to allude to the controversy between the Signory and the Holy See over the witches of Brescia, when the Republic definitely refused to execute the sentences of the inquisitors. To understand the full significance of its action, it is to be observed that for two generations the Church had been energetically cultivating witchcraft throughout Lombardy by unceasingly urging its persecution and breaking down all resistance on the part of the intelligent laity, until it had succeeded in rendering upper Italy a perfect hot-bed of the heresy. In 1457 Calixtus III. ordered his nuncio, Bernardo di Bosco, to use active measures in repressing its growth in Brescia, Bergamo, and the vicinage. Thirty years later Frà Girolamo Visconti found an abundant field for his labor in Como, the result of which he communicated to the world in his Lamiarum Tractatus, and Sprenger assures us that a whole book would be required to record the cases, in Brescia alone, of women who had become witches through despair in consequence of seduction, although the episcopal court had shown the most praiseworthy vigor in suppressing them. In 1494 we find Alexander VI. stimulating the Lombard inquisitor, Frà Angelo da Verona, to greater activity, assuring him that witches were numerous in Lombardy and inflicted great damage on men, harvests, and cattle. When at Cremona, in the early years of the sixteenth century, the inquisitor, Giorgio di Casale, endeavored to exterminate the numberless witches flourishing there, and was interfered with by certain clerks and laymen, who asserted that he was exceeding his jurisdiction, Julius II., following the example of Innocent VIII. in the case of Sprenger, promptly came to the rescue by defining his powers, and offering to all who would aid him in the good work indulgences such as were given to crusaders—provisions which, in 1523, were extended to the Inquisitor of Como by Adrian VI. The result of all this careful stimulation is seen in the description of the Lombard witches by Gianfrancesco Pico, and in the alarming report by Silvester Prierias that they were extending down the Apennines and boasting that they would outnumber the faithful. The spread of popular belief is illustrated in the remark of Politian, that, when he was a child he had great dread of the witches whom his grandmother used to tell him lie in wait in the woods to swallow little boys.[594]

Venice had always been careful to preserve the secular jurisdiction over sorcery. A resolution of the great council in 1410 allows the Inquisition to act in such cases when they involve heresy or the abuse of sacraments, but if injury had resulted to individuals the spiritual offence alone was cognizable by the Inquisition, while the resultant crimes were justiciable by the lay court; and when, in 1422, some Franciscans were charged with sacrificing to demons, the Council of Ten committed the affair to a councillor, a capo, an inquisitor, and an advocate. Brescia was a spot peculiarly infected with witchcraft. As early as 1455 the inquisitor, Frà Antonio, called upon the Senate for aid to exterminate it, which was presumably afforded, but when a fresh persecution arose in 1486 the podestà refused to execute the inquisitorial sentences, and the Signoria supported him, calling forth, as we have seen, the vigorous protest of Innocent VIII. Under the stimulus of persecution the evil increased with terrible rapidity. In 1510 we hear of seventy women and seventy men burned at Brescia; in 1514 of three hundred at Como. In such an epidemic every victim was a new source of infection, and the land was threatened with depopulation. In the madness of the hour it was currently reported that on the plain of Tonale, near Brescia, the customary gathering at the Sabbat exceeded twenty-five thousand souls; and in 1518 the Senate was officially informed that the inquisitor had burned seventy witches of the Valcamonica, that he had as many in his prisons, and that those suspected or accused amounted to about five thousand, or one fourth of the inhabitants of the valleys. It was time to interfere, and the Signoria interposed effectually, leading to violent remonstrances from Rome. Leo X. issued, February 15, 1521, his fiery bull, Honestis, ordering the inquisitors to use freely the excommunication and the interdict, if their sentences on the witches were not executed without examination or revision, showing how transparent were the subterfuges adopted to throw upon the secular courts the responsibility of putting to death those who were not relapsed. On March 21 the imperturbable Council of Ten quietly responded by laying down regulations for all trials, including the cases in question, of which the sentences were treated as invalid, and all bail heretofore taken was to be discharged. The examinations were to be made without the use of torture by one or two bishops, an inquisitor, and two doctors of Brescia, all selected for probity and intelligence. The result was to be read in the court of the podestà, with the participation of the two rettori, or governors, and four more doctors. The accused were to be asked if they ratified their statements, and were to be liable to torture if they modified them. When all this was done with due circumspection, judgment was to be rendered in accordance with the counsel of all the above-named experts, and under no other circumstances was a sentence to be executed. In this way the Signoria hoped that the errors said to have been committed would be avoided for the future. Moreover, the papal legate was to be admonished to see that the expenses of the Inquisition were moderate and free from extortion, and was to find expedients to prevent greed for money from causing the condemnation of the innocent, as was said to have often been the case. He should also depute proper persons to investigate the extortions and other evil acts of the inquisitors, which had excited general complaint, and he should summarily punish the perpetrators to serve as an example. He was further requested to consider that these poor people of Valcamonica were simple folk of the densest ignorance, much more in need of good preachers than of persecutors, especially as they were so numerous.[595]