As the Reformation grew nearer, public opinion veered round to some slight extent in the direction of leniency. The Inquisition was itself becoming so unpopular that its victims were bound to excite some secret sympathy. The Renaissance, throwing wide the door to all the intellect of classical days, already shook the dominion of the Church to its foundations. The time had come for desperate measures if Orthodoxy was to hold her own. In 1484 the Witch-Bull of Innocent VIII. definitely handed the witch over to the care of the Inquisitors—and thus gave the signal for a series of persecutions of unexampled horror, enduring through more than two centuries, and the last echoes of which have scarcely died away even to-day.
THE WITCH-BULL AND ITS EFFECTS
I have elsewhere in this volume attempted to show that, even in our own days, there is nothing particularly incredible about a witch—and that the disrespect into which she has fallen is due rather to our modern lack of any sense of proportion in our beliefs, than to any fault of her own. Certainly we have no cause to pride ourselves on any intellectual superiority to the great divines and scholars of past ages who devoted themselves to the dissection or condemnation of witchcraft—rather we should deplore our lack of faith and of imagination. For them there existed no possibility of doubt, no relative standard of fact or theory. The premises were absolute. The spiritual world was based upon the word of God as expressed in the Bible and translated by the Church. To argue the absurdity or inadmissibility of any particular tenet of Christian doctrine was to suppose a paradox—the fallibility of the infallible. Eminent jurists, as was Bodin, or learned physicians such as Wierus, both writing towards the close of the sixteenth century, arguing with great mental dexterity on opposite sides, alike accepted the initial axiom, cramp and confine them though it might. They had, indeed, no alternative—as well might two modern astronomers in disputing over the whereabouts of an undiscovered planet deny the existence of the sun. The humane Wierus, a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, by the way, preaches from the same text as does the judicial Bodin—though he delivers a different sermon. Bodin, supporter of the old conventions, makes a formidable onslaught on Wierus—not for any scepticism as to the existence of witches—no ground was given him for such an accusation—but for maintaining against the view of the Church that witches were victims rather than disciples of the Devil. Nor, in the face of the very explicit injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"—and the suggestion was still to be mooted that "witch" in the original stood for "poisoner"—can we accuse those who obeyed it of having acted from any other motives than those of earnest Christians. It is true that they carried zeal to the point of enthusiasm—but zeal has always been accounted a mark of grace.
As we have seen the severest period of witch-persecution commences from their definite classification as heretics by the Bull of Innocent VIII. issued in 1484. The Bull itself was not lacking in directness:—"It has come to our ears," it commences, "that great numbers of both sexes are not afraid to abuse their own bodies with devils that serve to both sexes. And with their Inchantments, charms and sorceries to vex and afflict Man and Beast with inward and outward pains and tortures.... Therefore with the authority apostolic we have given power to the Inquisitor ... to convict, imprison and punish."
The Inquisitor, Sprenger, lost little time in making use of this delegated authority—and such was his zeal and so many his opportunities of acquiring knowledge that within two years after the issue of the Bull he gave to the world his famous "Witch's Hammer," for the direction and guidance of those upon whom should fall the duty of exterminating so vile a heresy. This "Malleus Maleficarum" contains minute accounts of every description of witch, with suggestions for counteracting and exterminating their influence. Like most of his predecessors—and successors—Sprenger blames the whole existence of witchcraft upon the notorious frailty of women. The very word "fœmina," he declares, in the accents of authority, is derived from "fe" and "minus"—because women have less faith than have men. From this unhappy constitution of the sex countless ills have sprung—among them innumerable varieties of witch. Of these, thirteen are exhaustively described, that all may recognise them. Worst are those who slay and devour children. Others raise hail, tempests, lightning and thunder, procure barrenness in man, woman and beast, make horses kick until they throw their riders, or pass from place to place through the air, invisible. Others can render themselves taciturn and insensible under torture, can find things hidden or lost, foretell the future and alter men's minds to inordinate love or hate. They can draw down the moon, destroy unborn children, raise spirits—in a word, there is no department of devilry, major or minor, in which they are not adepts, if we may trust their enthusiastic historian, whose work at once became an authority—almost a ready reckoner of witchcraft, by which anyone with a knowledge of Latin had at his fingers' ends the best possible method of recognising, convicting and destroying any variety or variant whatsoever.
It is pleasant to reflect that so careful and conscientious a work earned for its author the affection and admiration alike of his contemporaries and of posterity. Later writers based their theories and arguments upon his discoveries as upon a firm rock, while during his lifetime he directed public opinion upon the evil he had set himself to combat so successfully that not one old woman in fifty could be sure of dying in her bed for generations. It is a pregnant sign of the genuine horror in which witches were held that all the ordinary legal conventions were suspended at these trials. Contrary to the usual procedure, witness might be borne against them by excommunicated persons, convicts, infants, dishonest servants and runaways. Presumption and conjecture were accepted as evidence, an equivocal or doubtful answer was regarded as a confession and rumour or common report sufficient to ensure a conviction. It is true that such improvements in legal procedure cannot be altogether attributed to the exertions of the Inquisitor—dating, as many of them do, from centuries before the publication of his magnum opus—at least he devoted a splendid enthusiasm to the object he had set before him, and on his death-bed was able to look forward with confident humility to the reward merited by a well-spent life.
The effects of the Witch-Bull were immediate and in every way satisfactory to its authors—a perfect frenzy of witch-finding resulting. Forty-one women were burned in one year—commencing in 1485—by the Inquisitor Cumanus. A colleague, not to be outdone, executed a hundred in Piedmont—and was perfectly willing to continue the good work, had not public enthusiasm waned in view of the inevitable monotony in this form of amusement. A little later a tempest devastated the country around Constance. The inhabitants recognising that—in face of the recent Bull—it were blasphemous to attribute such a storm to natural causes, seized two old women, obtained confessions in the usual way, and burned them. About 1515, some five hundred persons were executed in Geneva as "Protestant witches"—an instance of the alliance between heresy and witchcraft. In Lorraine the learned and enthusiastic Inquisitor Remigius put to death nine hundred persons in 15 years. Hutchinson, indeed, writing in 1718, puts the number at eighteen hundred, but even the smaller—and more correct—total shows that Remigius did his duty nobly. Italy, naturally enough, was determined not to be outdone by foreign holocausts, and accordingly we find that more than a thousand executions took place in Como in 1524, and an average of more than a hundred was maintained for several years.