The 30 Years War - Witch Hunts

Witch Hunts

Among the great traumas abetted by the war was a major outbreak of witchcraft persecutions that followed the the first phase of the conflict. This wave of witch-hunting first erupted in the territories of the Franconian Circle, but the turmoil unleashed by the war enabled the hysteria to spread quickly to other parts of Germany. Residents of areas that had been devastated not only by the conflict itself, but also by various crop failures, famines and plagues, were quick to blame these calamities on supernatural causes and allegations of witchcraft against fellow citizens flourished. The sheer volume of trials and executions during this time would mark the period as the peak of the European witch-hunting phenomena.

The persecutions began in the Bishopric of Würzburg, which was then under the leadership of Phillip Adolf von Ehrenberg, an ardent supporter of the Counter-Reformation, who was eager to assert Catholic authority in the territories he administered. Beginning in 1626, von Ehrenberg staged numerous mass trials for witchcraft in which all levels of society, including the nobility and the clergy, found themselves targeted. By 1630 it is estimated that 219 men, women and children were burned at the stake in the city of Würzburg itself, with an additional 900 executed elsewhere in the province.

Concurrent with these events, a similar large-scale witch hunt claimed 300 to 600 lives in nearby Bamberg, where the prince-bishop erected a specially designed Malefizhaus (witch house), containing a torture chamber whose walls were adorned with Bible verses, in which to interrogate the accused. Meanwhile, in Upper Bavaria, 274 suspected witches were put to the torch in the Bishopric of Eichstatt in 1629 and another 50 perished in the adjacent district of Neuburg.

Elsewhere, the persecutions arrived in the wake of the early Imperial military successes. The witch-hunts would expand into Baden following it’s reconquest by Tilly, while the defeat of Protestantism in the Palatinate opened the way for their eventual spread to the Rhineland. The Rhenish electorates of Mainz and Trier would both witness mass-burnings of suspected witches during this time. In Cologne, that territory's Prince-Archbishop, Ferdinand of Bavaria, presided over a particularly brutal persecution that included the infamous trial and execution of Katharina Henot in 1627.

The witch-hunts reached their height around the time of the Edict of Restitution in 1629 and enthusiasm for them declined sharply in most areas after Sweden's entry into the war the following year. However, in Würzburg, the persecutions would continue until the death of von Ehrenberg in 1631. The excesses of this period would inspire the Jesuit scholar Friedrich Spee to author his scathing condemnation of the trials, the Cautio Criminalis. This influential work would later be credited with bringing about the end of witch-burning in some areas of Germany and its gradual abolition throughout Europe.