Witches' hunt

On 5th December 1484, Pope Innocent VIII with the bubble Summis desiderantes affectibus (Desiderando con supremo ardorato), officially banned witchcraft. This was the basis of the notorious witch hunt. It was a horrible massacre of humble and anonymous victims of all ages and conditions: midwives, healers, peasants, prostitutes and in many cases simple women. Victims were often arrested for reporting an envious neighbour or for simple gossip.

But not only women accused of witchcraft, but also practitioners of popular medicine and pre-Christian archaic cults who, between 1500 and 1650, were persecuted by an anguished and paranoid "hunt" and then tried and burned at the stake all over Europe. In Spain, England and Germany this happened with particular violence.

The repression of witchcraft began at the beginning of the 14th century, mixing with the persecution of Jews and heretics. The persecution, which reached the character of a collective obsession, was not only a prerogative of the Catholics and the Inquisition but also of the Protestants.

Under torture heretics (especially women accused of witchcraft) were forced to admit their guilt before the inquisitors. But pleading guilty and repenting did not save them from being burned at the stake. Joan of Arc ended up burnt alive in 1431 and after suffering terrible tortures she came to accuse herself of betrayal of God but, undergoing other interrogations, she was equally condemned and burnt alive as a heretic and witch. Five centuries later she was made a saint.

The first Instruction for judges of witch trials dates back to the 14th century, but it was Pope Innocent VIII, as mentioned above, who with the Bull of 1484 endorsed this ignoble practice with the highest ecclesiastical authority, appointing two figures of inquisitors, the German Dominicans Heinrich Kramer Instintor and Jacob Sprenger, charged with the extreme harshness of prosecuting heretics, magicians, healers and witches.

The Bubble catalogued the main evil produced by witches, giving the inquisitors ample faculty for their repression and threatening canonical punishment for those who opposed it. Undocumented accusations were made, suspicions arose, trials were organised and people were burned. To instruct the inquisitors the Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches' Hammer, 1487) was reprinted, in which witchcraft was tackled as a purely feminine phenomenon.

In the treatise, it was made clear that the witch is distinguished from the demon. While the latter is the victim of the devil from whom he can be freed through exorcism, the witch is the protagonist of a sought and desired relationship with the devil with whom she weaves a sexual relationship.

Being female witches, they remain closely and exhaustively connected to the sexual sphere. It can be said that the so-called witches were often guilty more in their imaginations of inquisitors polluted by forced chastity than in the facts. A compendium of superstition and misogyny that found fertile ground well beyond the German borders where the inquisitors operated with extreme freedom, spreading and spreading, favoured by the pause and ignorance of the peasant world and the poorer classes throughout Europe.

Without inquisitors, doctors and intellectuals the obsession would never have existed. It is impossible today to calculate the exact number of those persecuted, a probable figure for the period 1575-1700 is one million executed, one-third of them in Protestant countries.

It is also impossible to trace the victims of those dark years, as in many cases they preferred to burn and destroy the acts of the trials both by the Church and by the relatives of the victims. Wrongly framed in the medieval context (during the course of the war there were more persecutions of heretics and other religions), the witch-hunt lasted until the middle of the 17th century.