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Every Friday, True Crime of the Historical Kind returns to the scene of the crime...
We uncover the deeper story. The world that shaped the violence, and the humans that played a hand history's tragedies.
Because the past may be distant, but human nature rarely is.
Between 1625 and 1631, one of the deadliest witch hunts in European history consumed the Catholic city of Würzburg in the Holy Roman Empire. Hundreds of men, women, and children were accused of consorting with the devil. They would face torture just to be burned at the stake. This is true crime of the historical kind. You're listening to part one of the witch trials in Wurzburg, the spark.
Speaker 1:To visit Würzburg, Germany today, you'll see the stunning Marienberg Castle up on the hill overlooking the Main River, among the beautiful rolling hills of the northernmost part of Bavaria. It's a city known for its historical buildings, university, wine, and, well, witches. Let's take a step back before the witch trials began to try and understand how a city could burn its own people alive. We need to go all the way back to the fourth century when the concept of demonology was developing. Early Christian theologians began to confront the question of evil as the world transitioned from paganism to Christianity as the main religion of Europe.
Speaker 1:So where did evil come from, and how could it coexist with a divine and all powerful God? People look to the church to help explain why suffering and sin persisted even after Christ's resurrection. Among the most influential of these thinkers was Saint Augustine of Hippo whose writings would be used across the next thousand years of Christian thought. Augustine argued that demons were not abstract symbols or pagan myths, but real beings who had once served God before rebelling with Lucifer and becoming fallen angels. Once they were cast out of heaven, they began to roam the earth as active agents of chaos, whispering temptations into human hearts and interfering in moral affairs.
Speaker 1:Humanity, caught in the middle, could be corrupted or even possessed. So what can mere mortals do to combat such evil? Though Augustine didn't invent new rites, his ideas reinforced and gave theological weight to practices that already existed in the early church, essentially Christian rituals of spiritual defense, such as the rite of deliverance or exorcisms, the formal act of casting out or repelling demons in the name of Christ performed by ordained priests. Or there was baptismal exorcism, which included prayers of renunciation, literally rejecting Satan and his works before receiving the sacrament. This symbolized the believer's liberation from demonic power, a declaration of choosing good over evil.
Speaker 1:Then there is blessings and holy water, the use of sanctified objects in prayers, such as sprinkling holy water. This arose from the belief that these tangible tools of faith could repel evil spirits. As Europe wrestled with these concepts, they found solutions, essentially forming a structure of how to manage the invisible forces of an untamable world. This theological framework would later form the spine of European demonology, the study of devils, witches, and their supposed earthly conspiracies. This is what laid the groundwork for a worldview looking for a way to explain every misfortune, illness, or incomprehendable event.
Speaker 1:In the thirteenth century came the Papal Inquisition, a formal churchroom system designed to rule out the evil of heresy. The Inquisition centralized authority under Papal control, allowing the church to investigate, interrogate, and punish those it deemed spiritually dangerous, which might look like anyone who challenged the church's authority or did not conform. Over the centuries, this created a system of dealing with any and all opposition. Once that opposition was under control, the scope would widen, like when sorcery was declared a form of heresy. This expanded what it meant to be a heretic and now included supposed witches while laying the bureaucratic and moral groundwork for what's to come in this story.
Speaker 1:Before this, magic had occupied a gray area in medieval life. Folk healers, midwives, and herbalists might practice charms or blessings without interference as long as they didn't openly challenge church authority. These were cultural norms passed down through families as ways to heal the sick, pray for crops, or as a way to comfort themselves in hardship, like dealing with the death of a child. This was thought of as being superstitious, which initially wasn't condemned outright by the church, though it was looked down upon. By the thirteenth century, with sorcery formally linked to heresy, what was once thought of as harmless folklore was now transformed into a crime against God and the church.
Speaker 1:Any person suspected of invoking demonic forces could now be investigated, tried, and punished by the Inquisition, and now folklore was considered a demonic force. This was the moment when demonology became embedded within church law. It also reflected a deepening anxiety within the medieval world. Europe was recovering from waves of famine and disease, and in a time when explanations were scarce, the idea of a human alliance with evil seemed like a logical way to make sense of the unknown. In 1326, the church expanded heresy even further when it included divination and alchemy as demonic acts.
Speaker 1:The church described those who practiced the art of magic as people who consorted with demons to invoke them for knowledge, power, or gain to purposely use against good. This escalation happened over the centuries and reflected both theological fear and political paranoia that was going on in the early fourteenth century. It was a time of turmoil that Papacy had recently moved to Avignon, tensions ran high between the church and secular rulers, and accusations of secret conspiracies abounded. By declaring divination and alchemy forms of demonic heresy, the pope gave inquisitors an even greater sweeping authority to essentially go after anyone suspected of occult practice. The seeds of witchcraft panic were now well sown.
Speaker 1:What was once harmless practices performed at home or in a small village evolved into formal criminal theology of evil that appeared to be the greatest threat to humanity. All this movement needed to really get underway was a little more direct thumbs up, so to speak, from the pope. That came in 1484 when Pope Innocent the eighth issued one of the most consequential documents in European history, the papal bull Sumis Desirens Affectibus, which roughly translated from Latin means desiring with the greatest longing, which apparently was endorsing the persecution of witches and declared unequivocally that witchcraft was not only real, it was an imminent threat to mankind. Two Dominican friars named Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger had complained that local authorities were resisting their investigations into witchcraft. The pope was one of the most influential men in Europe, and his bull removed all doubt.
Speaker 1:Witchcraft was a grave heresy deserving the full force of ecclesiastical punishment. It changed the momentum of this cause by not just granting inquisitors even more power to arrest, interrogate, and punish anyone who is suspicious, but that it should be actively pursued. And if they weren't, that could reflect poorly on them. The fear it unleashed spread through pulpits, courts, and villages alike. Kramer and Spranger would soon capitalize on this papal endorsement by publishing the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, the hammer of witches in 1487.
Speaker 1:Kramer was a man obsessed with rooting out evil, and he framed witch witchcraft as a vast conspiracy against Christendom. He argued that witches, especially women, were more inclined to consort with the devil due to what he called their weaker faith and insatiable carnal desire. His words carried the weight of doctrine, and his prejudices became policy. The hammer of witches did three devastating things. It declared witchcraft as a crime of both heresy and treason, punishable by death.
Speaker 1:It provided a detailed legal framework for extracting confessions, and it gave witch hunters a handbook to justify almost any accusation no matter how implausible. The book spread quickly across Europe, especially in the German speaking lands where fear of the devil already ran deep. In reality, it was a dense and venomous fusion of theology, misogyny, and legal procedure, a text that turned fear into a system to act upon. That book, armed with the authority of Innocence Bull, became the manual of witch persecution across Europe. So it would be fair to say that the church did more than just sanction witch trials.
Speaker 1:It legitimized a worldview in which invisible evil could be hunted, forced to extract the devil's deglains, and literally burned out of the population. But this all sounds so broad. Right? What does sorcery, conspiring with the devil, or witchcraft even mean? Like, what is the actual crime here?
Speaker 1:Horrifyingly, it could be anything. That's what made this thinking so dangerous. There were very specific punishments for very ambiguous offenses. It could be the accusation that someone thought a woman whispered a prayer over a wound. Any sort of casting of a spell.
Speaker 1:A midwife whose patient died in childbirth could be accused of offering the baby's soul to Satan. A poor man whose neighbor's crop failed could be charged with weather magic. Or even a child who hummed a strange tune, laughed at the wrong time, or claimed to have seen visions might be said to have danced with the devil. Even the simplest acts of care could turn dangerous, brewing herbal remedies, keeping a black cat, or whispering an old folk charm. Things that had long been a part of rural life now drew uneasy glances that could lead into turning that person into authorities.
Speaker 1:The line between faith and blasphemy grew perilously thin. Praying often could mark you as devout, but praying alone, that could make you suspect. Imagine the tension between community members. If everything you did was being watched, it would become performative, but then being performative would make you suspicious. And above all, any woman who lived outside society's control, like a widow, a healer, or just a woman who spoke too sharply, was at risk.
Speaker 1:To the church and the courts, witchcraft wasn't about what you did. It was more of who you were seen to be. Witches were thought to be in direct communication with the devil in a widespread network that would need to convene in a sort of devil's parliament known as Sabbats. In the minds of seventeenth century Europeans, the witches Sabbat was the ultimate proof of a pact with the devil. To them, it was a kind of inverted mass, a blasphemous gathering where every holy act was mocked and every virtue reversed.
Speaker 1:Authorities and townsfolk alike truly believed that witches flew through the night, often riding goats, wolves, or broomsticks to lonely fields or mountain clearings. There, under a moonlit sky, they were said to dance in wild circles while demons played pipes and drums. The devil himself presided, sometimes appearing as a horned beast, sometimes in human form, taking attendance and sealing his followers' loyalty with a kiss beneath his tail. These dramatic assemblies, witches were accused of renouncing baptism, trampling crosses, and performing obscene parodies of the Eucharist. Feasts of spoiled food and unholy communion were said to follow, ending in chaotic dancing, orgies, and oaths of servitude to Satan.
Speaker 1:Curses, plagues, and crop failures were all believed to be planned there, like dark councils of rebellion against heaven itself. So imagine how horrifying that would sound to you when your concept of good was the complete opposite of that. It's fascinating because, as we know, the church discouraged superstition in reference to old folklore, herbal remedies, etcetera, but superstition wasn't connected to these beliefs in witches' sabbaths even though there is no evidence such gatherings ever occurred. The so called proof would come from confessions, which we'll talk more about later. Adding yet another layer to this already combustible environment was in 1517 when an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther challenged the Catholic church in a way that would forever change Europe and the world.
Speaker 1:On October 31, he famously, or at least symbolically, nailed his 95 theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, denouncing the sale of indulgences and questioning the authority of the papacy. What began as a theological protest quickly grew into the Protestant Reformation. In English, we pronounce Protestant and Protestant differently for some reason, but it comes from the same meaning, and this movement would shatter the unity of Western Christianity forever. It transformed the religious landscape that made the witch hunts possible. His defiance unleashed waves of conflict, dividing towns, families, and entire nations along lines of faith.
Speaker 1:For the first time, Europe faced a choice between two competing visions of Christianity, and that choice, of course, turned violent. In the decades that followed, the Catholic church responded with the Counter Reformation, which was the backdrop that added urgency and motive to seeking to reclaim spiritual and political control over its territories. They would use the system already in place of witch hunting to assert that control. Nowhere was this more intense than in the German speaking lands where small principalities and bishoprics like Würzburg became battlegrounds of belief. This centuries long struggle between Protestant and Catholic would harden into an obsession with purity, of doctrine, of faith within communities.
Speaker 1:And in 1580, the French jurist Jean Bodin published on the demon mania of witches, a work that poured fuel on Europe's growing obsession with witchcraft. Bodin was no fringe fanatic. He was one of the era's most respected intellectuals, a lawyer, economist, and political philosopher whose writings on sovereignty shaped modern political thought. That made his turn towards demonology all the more serious. He added to the voices arguing that witchcraft was the gravest of all crimes, worse even than treason or murder, because it was rebellion against God himself.
Speaker 1:Witches, he claimed, were conscious agents of Satan bound in a vast conspiracy to destroy Christian society. Torture was not only permitted but necessary since witches, under the devil's protection, could not be trusted to tell the truth. Bodan's influence lay in his authority. His arguments fused theology, law, and reason so persuasively that they gave witch hunting an air of intellectual legitimacy. His book became one of the century's most cited demonological manuals, helping shape the bureaucratic, methodical persecutions that would later devastate regions like Wurzburg, which we are ready to get into.
Speaker 1:Würzburg was a Catholic stronghold within the Holy Roman Empire ruled by a prince bishop, though today it's modern Germany. Across Europe, the level of trials varied, but the areas that were affected the most, the ones that saw the most recklessness, broad cruelty, and departure from logical thinking, were areas that were ruled by a prince bishop. A prince bishop was a unique kind of ruler in the Holy Roman Empire, a figure who held both religious and secular power, the spiritual leader of a diocese's and the political sovereign of its territory. Locally, there was no one that could rival that sort of power. This system emerged in the early Middle Ages when emperors granted land and authority to high ranking clergymen in exchange for loyalty.
Speaker 1:Since priests were forbidden to marry, their power couldn't easily become hereditary, allowing the emperor to maintain control through appointment rather than lineage. In practice, a prince bishop ruled much like other territorial lords. He collected taxes, raised armies, enforced laws, and presided over courts, but he did so in the name of both God and the empire. This particular prince bishopric of Würzburg was one of the most powerful ecclesiastical states since it was centered in Franconia and spanned dozens of towns and villages, not to mention it was covered from the imposing Marienburg Fortress. This dual power made the witch hunts especially dangerous when the church and the state were embodied in the same person.
Speaker 1:In the early sixteen hundreds, the prince bishop of Würzburg was prince bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn. He became a fierce reformer and devout champion of the counter reformation as the Catholic church was fighting to reclaim both territory and souls. After the territory of Fruedenberg was incorporated into Würzburg's control, Julius Ector moved swiftly to assert Catholic orthodoxy. There had been local rumors of sorcery as in harmful magic blamed for the poor harvest and illness people were suffering from, and Julius Echter offered the perfect solution, root out the witches and burn them. In Freudenberg, the campaign turned deadly almost immediately.
Speaker 1:Between sixteen o nine and 1612, around 50 people were executed for witchcraft in that small territory alone. Men and women alike, some elderly, some children. They were accused of blighting crops, poisoning livestock, or calling up storms. Confessions came under torture. Property was seized, and the executions were public, which kept the state of fear at a frenzy.
Speaker 1:It was meant to warn, to purify, and to remind everyone who held the power. In retrospect, it's easier to see it for what it was, not divine justice, but a tool to bring people to heal. Back in Würzburg, Julius Echter continued his campaign of spiritual cleansing. There aren't many surviving records of all that really happened, but chroniclers later wrote of a wave of executions that swept the region between 1616 and 1617. Roughly 300 souls experienced this same pattern.
Speaker 1:Confessions were wrenched out through torture, property seized, and the pyres lit in public squares for a warning and a ritual purification. By the time of Echter's death in 1617, Würzburg had the machinery of persecution already in place. All it needed was a spark. Yet, ironically enough, what would actually pause the killing was a war. In 1618, tensions were brewing across the Holy Roman Empire, and conflict soon consumed the region.
Speaker 1:The trials were essentially put on hold, not because the belief had waned, but because the focus changed. In 1618, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Ferdinand the second, who was a devout Catholic, had been tightening restrictions on faith and begun closing Protestant churches that had stood for generations, determined to stamp out what he saw as heresy. Then on a May morning in Prague, a crowd of Protestant nobles stormed the Heracne Castle. They burst into the council chamber shouting that their rights had been betrayed. Two Catholic governors tried to reason with them, but the argument escalated.
Speaker 1:Voices began to rise, and in a surge of fury, the nobles dragged the men to the window. Both men and their secretary are thrown from a third story window, and the fall should have killed them. Instead, they land in a heap of manure outside of the castle's walls. Protestants called it luck. The Catholics called it divine intervention.
Speaker 1:Either way, word spread across Europe within weeks. The defenestration of Prague, as they called it, put things in motion. Armies began to gather first in Bohemia, then beyond. The conflict that follows became what we now know as the Thirty Years' War. It pulled in nearly every power in Europe, Austria, Spain, France, Sweden, and the German principalities caught in between.
Speaker 1:By autumn, troops are marching through fields of wheat and rye. Villages were being burned, and harvests were stolen or trampled underfoot. Soldiers spread plague and hunger wherever they went. For ordinary people like farmers, merchants, or priests, life became a daily struggle with fear. Families could only pray that the armies would pass them by, and they would do anything to protect themselves if they could.
Speaker 1:In this state of fear and instability, people lean into their spiritual understanding of the world around them. And in every church, sermons thunder that Satan is on the move, that the devil is punishing Europe for its sins. So while it can sometimes be easy to look back and shake our heads and wonder how on earth could they believe that witches were at the bottom of this, we have to keep in mind that it's not that these people were unintelligent. It's more of a lack of understanding of the world around them and using the same methods people still use today, like groupthink, confirmation bias, or superstition. And this wasn't isolated.
Speaker 1:Across Europe and even across the Atlantic, the same unease was taking root in very different worlds. In England, witch trials were already well established. The memory of the Lincolnshire witch trials of sixteen twelve still lingered. 10 people were hanged after being accused of bewitching their neighbors. By 1620, king James the first sat on the English throne, the same monarch who had written demonology.
Speaker 1:His obsession with rooting out witches had given both royal and legal authority to the idea that witchcraft was treason against god and crown alike. Trials were frequent, especially in East Anglia and Essex where local justices eagerly followed the king's example. Across the border in Scotland, fear ran even hotter. The North Berwick Trials of fifteen nineties had set a precedent for brutal confessions and mass executions. Though the worst waves had passed, local hunts still flared up through the sixteen twenties whenever famine or plague struck.
Speaker 1:Hundreds more would die before mid century from both Catholic and Protestant areas. Meanwhile, across the ocean, the American colonies were only just being born. The Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, still clinging to the rigid Calvinist worldview that they had carried from England. There were no witch trials yet in the New World. Those would come much later in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, but the Puritan mindset that would fuel them was already in place, and the Salem witch trials will definitely be future episodes.
Speaker 1:But as Catholic forces gained the upper hand in the Thirty Years' War, they were able to push back Protestant armies and reclaim territory for Rome. These Catholic reconquests were celebrated at the pulpit as divine victories, and it only deepened the rifts tearing the empire apart. Every success of the Catholic League brought new waves of suspicion and punishment. The message was clear. Salvation demanded obedience, and deviation invited ruin, which continued to fuel the beliefs in heresy must be actively found and destroyed.
Speaker 1:Nowhere did this atmosphere cut deeper than along the Catholic Protestant borderlands where faith itself became a matter of survival, and they needed someone to blame for the devastation around them. Back in Würzburg, there was a new prince bishop who would soon go after the supposed culprits in full force. A few years into the Thirty Years' War, Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg took power in Würzburg in 1623. He was a man who would take witch hunting to unfathomable levels. Under his rule, the machinery of persecution began to roar back to life, this time more organized, more righteous, and more merciless than ever.
Speaker 1:A devout Jesuit and ardent supporter of emperor Ferdinand the second, Ehrenberg saw himself as both a shepherd and a soldier of God. Ehrenberg believed utterly in discipline, both moral and spiritual. His mission, as he saw it, was to transform Wurzburg into a godly state, a model of Catholic obedience and moral purity amid the empire's religious turmoil. What he inherited was not just a battered city, but a frightened, superstitious people, men and women who have watched the world come undone and are desperate to understand how to eradicate whatever curse was upon them. To do that, they'd need to hunt for witches.
Speaker 1:In 1625, a small group of suspected witches in Würzburg became the first victims of a campaign spearheaded by the newly installed prince bishop Philip von Ehrenberg. The exact names of the accused are not reliably recorded in surviving sources, but it was probably around 10 people or so who would tragically become sort of a test run for Ehrenberg. Accusations were being made of sorcery following misfortune in the countryside, so arrests were made under ecclesiastical and secular order, and torture was used to extract confessions of demonic pacts. And it all sounds so familiar. Then in 1626, nature itself seemed to turn against Würzburg.
Speaker 1:A devastatingly late frost swept through Franconia, destroying the grape harvest, which was the region's economic lifeblood. For a land that relied on its vineyards not only for trade but for communion wine, this was nothing short of a catastrophe. People began to whisper that the cold had been unnatural. This must have been a curse conjured by witches in league with the devil. They began to question who was acting suspiciously.
Speaker 1:Had anyone seen anyone muttering or staring at the fields too long? As crops withered and hunger spread, suspicion hardened into conviction. Prince Bishop Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg, already steeped in counter reformation zealotry, seized on this fear as proof that Satan was indeed at work within his diocese. He saw it as his sacred duty to cleanse Würzburg once and for all. To do so, he established a special witch commission, an official body tasked with investigating, interrogating, and eradicating witchcraft wherever it was thought to be found.
Speaker 1:The commission operated with terrifying efficiency, and any rumor was worth investigating, and they had pressure to come up with culprits. Investigations consisted of questioning the accused, asking them about pacts with the devil, if they were flying through the air for Sabbats, and who were their dark accomplices because witches don't work alone. The accusations are physically impossible, yet confessions were nearly always extracted because they were done under torture. Common devices filled the cold stone chambers beneath Würzburg administrative buildings and prisons. The strappado was a rope tied to the wrists, hoisting the victim into the air until their shoulders dislocated.
Speaker 1:Most people are familiar with the medieval torture device, the rack, that stretches limbs until joints tear. Even if the person is allowed to live, they would be permanently crippled. Then there was the thumb screw, a small but vicious device made of iron threaded with screws and spikes. It clamped over the victim's fingers or thumbs, tightening with every turn until bone and flesh gave way. Questions were shouted as the metal bit deeper, each answer wrung out by pain rather than truth.
Speaker 1:Or they might use the Spanish boot, a device of iron plates and wedges that crushed legs until the blood ran through the wood. Each session was mercifully that has, quotes, punctuated by prayers. The interrogators insisted that they sought not punishment, but repentance. There was no concept of innocent until proven guilty. They truly believed that they weren't harming a fellow community member.
Speaker 1:Or even if they weren't guilty, it was a sacrifice they were willing to make because they were stopping Satan. And the more fervor, the better. It's obvious to us now that the pain made answers meaningless. People confessed to whatever their captors believed. It was only ever a matter of time before the confession was made.
Speaker 1:Then names would be extracted, neighbors, friends, even children, because each new confession would be feeding the next arrest. This created a confession chain where each torture victim provided more names and the number became outrageous. Every so called confession only deepened the illusion of truth. The more people spoke under torture, the more the authorities believed the devil's conspiracy was real. By the end of 1626, the Witch Commission's prisons were overflowing and its executioners were overworked.
Speaker 1:But the system was in place. And terrifyingly enough, this was only the beginning. This was true crime of the historical kind. Make sure you're following on whatever platform you're hearing this on so that you don't miss next week's part two.
Speaker 1:Until next time.
Speaker 1:Bye.