Würzburg witch trials

The trials resulted in the execution of hundreds of people of all ages, sexes and classes, all of whom were burned at the stake, sometimes after having been beheaded, sometimes alive.

As so often with the mass trials of sorcery, the victims soon counted people from all society, including nobles, councilmen and mayors.

Among prince-bishops, Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg of Würzburg was particularly active: in his reign of eight years (1623–31) he burnt 900 persons, including his own nephew, nineteen Catholic priests, and children of seven who were said to have had intercourse with demons.

At Coblenz, the seat of the Prince-Archbishop of Trier, 24 witches were burnt in 1629; at Sélestat at least 30—the beginning of a five-year persecution.

In 1612 he incorporated the Protestant city of Freudenburg in the Catholic Bishopric, which resulted in a witch trial with fifty executions.

[3] The Würzburg witch trials of 1625-1631 was initiated by the Reform Catholic and Counter-Reformation Catholic Prince Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg, Prince Bishop of Würzburg in 1623–1631, who was the nephew and successor of Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn.

The territory was close to the Catholic-Protestant religious border, and the goal of the new Prince Bishop was to create a "godly state" in accordance with the ideals of the Counter-Reformation, and to make the population obedient, devout and conformally Catholic,[3] and when witchcraft was rumoured to exist in the city, he ordered an investigation.

A third of the population was suspected of having attended the Witches' Sabbath and being noted in the black book of Satan that the authorities were searching for.

[3] People from all walks of life were arrested and charged, regardless of age, profession, or sex, for reasons ranging from murder and satanism to humming a song including the name of the Devil, or simply for being vagrants and unable to give a satisfactory explanation of why they were passing through town: 32 appear to have been vagrant.

That the Witch Commission accepted the names of supposed accomplices given by people undergoing torture indiscriminately, regardless of societal standing, had the result that many of those arrested had influential relatives and connections among the upper class.

Such persons had resources to escape the territory and to issue complaints against the Prince Bishop and his witch trials to his superiors, all the way to the Pope himself, as well as to the Holy Roman Emperor.

In 1630, after just such a complaint to the Imperial Chamber Court in Speyer, a public condemnation against the persecutions was issued by the Emperor.

That same year, the city was occupied by the Swedish Army under King Gustavus Adolphus, and the witch trials were finally brought to an end.

In contemporary Germany, the gigantic, parallel mass witch trials of Würzburg and Bamberg were seen as role models by other states and cities interested in investigating witchcraft, notably Wertheim and Mergentheim.

In August, 1629, the Chancellor of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg thus wrote (in German) to a friend:As to the affair of the witches, which Your Grace thinks brought to an end before this, it has started up afresh, and no words can do justice to it.

Ah, the woe and the misery of it--there are still four hundred in the city, high and low, of every rank and sex, nay, even clerics, so strongly accused that they may be arrested at any hour.

It is true that, of the people of my Gracious Prince here, some out of all offices and faculties must be executed: clerics, electoral councilors and doctors, city officials, court assessors, several of whom Your Grace knows.

A week ago a maiden of nineteen was executed, of whom it is everywhere said that she was the fairest in the whole city, and was held by everybody a girl of singular modesty and purity.

She will be followed by seven or eight others of the best and most attractive persons ... And thus many are put to death for renouncing God and being at the witch-dances, against whom nobody has ever else spoken a word.

[3]A Jesuit, Friedrich Spee, was more radically converted by his experience as a confessor of witches in the great persecution at Würzburg.

That experience, which turned his hair prematurely white, convinced him that all confessions were worthless, being based solely on torture, and that not a single person whom he had led to the stake had been guilty.

However, a friend secretly conveyed it to the Protestant city of Hameln, where it was printed in 1631 under the title Cautio Criminalis.

There is a famous list of the executions in the Würzburg witch trials, published in 1745 in the Eberhard David Hauber: Bibliotheca sive acta et scripta magica.

The list is, however, incomplete, being based on a document which explicitly states that it has cited only a selection of the executions, and that there were numerous other burnings beside those enumerated.

Furthermore, the list includes only executions carried out before the date 16 February 1629, at which time the trials were still ongoing, continuing for more than another two years.