The Würzburg witch trials of 1625–1631, which took place in the self-governing Catholic Prince-Bishopric of Würzburg in the Holy Roman Empire in present-day Germany, formed one of the biggest mass trials and mass executions ever seen in Europe, and one of the largest witch trials in history.
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 or strangled but other times alive. One hundred fifty-seven women, children and men in the city of Würzburg are confirmed to have been executed; 219 are estimated to have been executed in the city proper, and an estimated 900 were executed or died in custody in the Prince-Bishopric. The witch trials took place during the ongoing religious Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics, in an area on the religious border between Catholic and Protestant territories and were all conducted by Catholic Prince-Bishops intent on introducing the Counter-Reformation and extirpating Protestantism in their territories.
The Würzburg witch trials were among the largest Witch trials in the Early Modern period: the series was one of the four largest in Germany along with the Trier witch trials, the Fulda witch trials, and the Bamberg witch trials.Midelfort, H.C. Erik, Witch hunting in southwestern Germany 1562–1684: the social and intellectual foundations, University Press, Stanford, California, 1972. ISBN 978-0-8047-0805-0. Chapter 6, note 101: "Generally in Germany the largest witch hunts occurred at Trier, Bamberg, Fulda, and Würzberg, all ecclesiastical [Catholic] lands."
History
Context
The Protestant Reformation, which Martin Luther (Not to be confused with Martin Luther King Jr) started in 1517 with his Ninety-Five Theses put on the door of the All-Saints' Church in Wittenberg. They challenged the Catholic Church's authority and it started a great religious divide. This split Christianity in Germany into opposing Catholic and Protestant factions, which led to conflicts like the Schmalkaldic War. (1546-1547) In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg, a treaty between Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the Schmalkaldic League granted local rulers the authority to choose either Catholicism or Lutheranism as the official religion of their territories. It brought peace, but it didn't resolve other religious tensions. This led to the Thirty Years War. Continuous warfare caused social and economic instability. This made citizens fearful and superstitious, and led to accusations of witchcraft. Wurzburg, a Catholic stronghold under the Prince-Bishopric, became a center of witch trials during the Thirty Years War. Prince-Bishops such as Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg, were determined to eliminate heresy and consolidate their power. They used witch hunts to enforce religious conformity and maintain social balance.
During the 1620s, with the destruction of Protestantism in Bohemia and the Electorate of the Palatinate, the Catholic reconquest of Germany was resumed. In 1629, with the Edict of Restitution, its basis seemed complete. Those same years saw the worst of all witch persecutions, at least in central Europe. It was the climax of the European craze. Many of the witch-trials of the 1620s multiplied with Catholic reconquest. In some areas the lord or bishop was the instigator, in others the Jesuits. Sometimes local witch-committees were set up to further the work. Among prince-bishops, Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg of Würzburg was particularly active. During his reign (1623–31), he executed around 900 persons, including his own nephew, between 19-43 Catholic priests, and children as young as seven who were said to have had intercourse with demons. From 1627–29, in Baden, recently reconquered for Catholicism by Tilly, there were 70 victims in Ortenau and 79 in Offenburg. In Eichstätt, a Bavarian prince-bishopric, 274 were put to death in 1629. At Reichertshofen, in the district of Neuburg an der Donau, 50 were executed between November 1628 and August 1630. In the three prince-archbishoprics of the Rhineland the fires were also relit. 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.
Local background and outbreak The witchcraft persecutions in Würzburg was initiated by the Reform Catholic and Counter-Reformation Catholic Prince Bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, Prince Bishop of Würzburg (1609–22). In 1612, he incorporated the Protestant city of Freudenburg in the Catholic Bishopric, which resulted in a witch trial with fifty executions.Burns, William E., Witch hunts in Europe and America: an encyclopedia, Greenwood, Westport, Conn., 2003 This was followed by a witch trial in Würzburg itself, where some 300 people were executed between July 1616 and July 1617, before the persecutions suddenly stopped at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618.Rapley, Robert. Witch Hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt819pr. Accessed 26 April 2021.
The exact cause of the witch trials of 1625-1631 is not entirely clear due to the incomplete documentation. A first witch trial took place in 1625, though it was an isolated case. In 1626, the vine grape harvest was destroyed by frost. Upon rumours that the frost had been caused by sorcery, some suspects were arrested and confessed under torture that they had caused the frost by use of magic.
Legal process
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, and when witchcraft was rumoured to exist in the city, he ordered an investigation.
A special commission was organized with the task to handle all cases of witchcraft. The Witch Commission used torture without any of the restrictions regulated by the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, in order to force the accused to first confess to their own guilt and then to name accomplices and other they had seen performing magic or attending the Witches' Sabbath. Those who had been named as accomplices were arrested in turn and tortured to name new accomplices, which caused the witch trial to expand rapidly in number of arrests and executions, especially since the Witch Commission did not discriminate in which names to accept but arrested men and women of all ages and classes indiscriminately.
Cases and accused
Typical for both the Würzburg witch trial as well as the parallel witch trial in Bamberg, members of the elite were arrested after having been named by working-class people under torture, which was a phenomenon which would normally not have happened in contemporary society, if the process had been about a different crime. Würzburg and Bamberg, however, differed somewhat in that in Würzburg, many members of the clerical elite were arrested, and many children were among the accused.
The first arrests in the city were of the traditional suspects: poor working-class women. But as the trials expanded in size, more and more men and children from all classes were among the accused, and in the later years of the trials, men were sometimes in the majority of the executed. Between 19 and 43 priests were executed, as well as Ernst von Ehrenberg, a nephew of the Prince Bishop himself. Ernst was beheaded and his body burnt posthumously. At least 49 children under the age of twelve are confirmed to have been executed, many of them from the orphanage and school Julius-Spital."WITCH-HUNTING IN EICHSTÄTT", Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany, by Jonathan B. Durrant, Brill, LEIDEN; BOSTON, 2007, pp. 3–44. JSTOR. Accessed 26 April 2021.
A contemporary letter from 1629 describes how people of all ages and classes were arrested every day. 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. 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 vagrants.
The exact number of executions is not known, since documentation is only partially preserved. A list describes 157 executions from 1627 until February 1629 in the city itself, but Hauber who preserved the list in Acta et Scripta Magica, noted that the list was far from complete and that there were a great many other burnings, too many to specify. February 1629 was furthermore in the middle of the witch trials, which continued for two more years until 1631. The executions within the city itself have been estimated at 219, with another 900 in the areas under the authority of the Prince Bishop outside the city.
The end The ongoing mass process in Würzburg attracted considerable attention. 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. These people had the resources to escape the territory and issue complaints against the Prince-Bishop and his witch trials to his superiors, all the way to the Pope and 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. On 16 July 1631, the Prince Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg died. 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.
Legacy and aftermath
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. The Würzburg witch trials influenced the start of the Mergentheim witch trials in 1628, and unrestricted witchcraft persecutions came to be known as "Würzburgisch work".
Accounts While the parallel Bamberg witch trials are famous for the contemporary letter of the prisoner Johannes Junius to his daughter, the Würzburg witch trials are famous for the contemporary letter written by a councillor of the Prince Bishop to a friend, describing the ongoing witch hunt.
In August, 1629, the Chancellor of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg thus wrote (in German) to a friend:
Historian Robert Meier argues that the unnamed nineteen-year-old maiden described in this account likely refers to Barbara Göbel, who appears in the execution list as "Das Göbel Babelin", "the most beautiful maiden in Würzburg".
Friedrich Spee 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. He wrote a book which he intended to circulate in manuscript, anonymously. However, a friend secretly conveyed it to the Protestant city of Hameln, where it was printed in 1631 under the title Cautio Criminalis.
Fiction