How long Gilles might have continued his devastating career it would be hard to guess, had it not suited the interest of Duke Jean and of his chancellor, Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, to bring him to the stake. Both of them had been purchasers of his squandered estates, and might wish to free themselves from the equity of redemption, and both might hope to gain from the confiscation of what remained to him. To assail so redoubtable a baron was, however, a task not lightly to be undertaken: the Church must be the leader, for the civil power dared not risk arousing the susceptibilities of the whole baronage of the duchy. Gilles’s impetuous temper furnished them the excuse.
The marshal had sold the castle and fief of Saint-Étienne de Malemort to Geoffroi le Ferron, treasurer of the duke—possibly a cover for the duke himself—and had delivered seizin to Jean le Ferron, brother of the purchaser, a man who had received the tonsure and wore the habit of a clerk, thus entitling him to clerical immunity, even though he performed no clerical functions. Some cause of quarrel subsequently arose, which Gilles proceeded to settle in the arbitrary fashion customary at the time. On Pentecost, 1440, he led a troop of some sixty horsemen to Saint-Étienne, left them in ambush near the castle, and with a few followers went to the church where Jean was at his devotions. Mass was about concluded when the intruders rushed in with brandished weapons, and Gilles addressed Jean: “Ha, scoundrel, thou hast beaten my men and committed extortions on them; come out or I will kill thee!” It was with difficulty that the frightened clerk could be reassured. He was dragged to the gate of the castle and forced to order its surrender, when Gilles garrisoned it and carried him off, finally imprisoning him in Tiffauges, chained hand and foot.[519]
The offence was one for which the customs of Britanny provided a remedy in the civil courts, but the duke zealously took up the cause of his treasurer and summarily ordered his lieutenant-general to surrender the castle and the prisoners under a penalty of fifty thousand crowns. Indignant at this unlooked-for intervention, Gilles maltreated the messengers of the duke, who promptly raised a force and recaptured the place in dispute. Tiffauges, where the prisoners lay, was in Poitou, beyond his jurisdiction, but his brother, the Constable de Richemont, besieged it, and Gilles was forced to liberate them. Having thus submitted, he ventured in July to visit the duke at Josselin: he had some doubts as to his reception, but Prelati consulted his demon and announced that he could go in safety. He was graciously received, and imagined that the storm had blown over. So safe did he feel that while at Josselin he continued his atrocities, putting to death several children and causing Prelati to evoke his demon.[520]
While the powers of the State thus hesitated to attack the criminal, the Church was busily preparing his downfall. He had been guilty of sacrilege in the violence committed in the church of Saint-Étienne, and he had violated its immunities in the person of Jean le Ferron. Yet, in that cruel age, when war spared neither church nor cloister, these were offences too frequent to justify his ruin, and in the earlier stages of the proceedings they are not even alluded to. On July 30 Jean de Malestroit, in whose bishopric of Nantes the barony of Rais was situated, issued privately a declaration reciting that in a recent visitation he and his commissioners had found that Gilles was publicly defamed for murdering many children, after gratifying his lust on them, of invoking the demon with horrid rites, of entering into compacts with him, and of other enormities. Though in a general way synodal witnesses were quoted in substantiation of these charges, only eight witnesses were personally named, seven of them women, all residents of Nantes, whose subsequent testimony shows us that they had lost children, whose disappearance they thought they could connect with Gilles. The object of this paper was doubtless to loosen the tongues of those to whom it might be shown, but whatever diligence was used in gathering evidence was fruitless, for when the trial opened, two months later, but two additional witnesses had been procured, of the same indecisive kind as the previous ones. The only charge they made was the abduction of children, and this was in no sense a crime within the competence of the ecclesiastical court. Evidently the awful secrets of Tiffauges and Machecoul had not leaked out. It was necessary to hazard something, to strike boldly, and when Gilles and his retainers were in the hands of justice its methods could be relied upon to procure from them evidence sufficient for their own conviction.[521]
The blow fell September 13, when the bishop issued a citation summoning Gilles to appear for trial before him on the 19th. The recital of his misdeeds in the previous letter was repeated, with the significant addition of “other crimes and offences savoring of heresy.” This was served upon him personally the next day, and he made no resistance. Some rumor of what was impending must have been in the air, for his two chief instigators and confidants, Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville, saved themselves by flight. The rest of his nearest servitors and procurers, male and female, were seized, including Prelati, and carried to Nantes. On the 19th he had a private hearing before the bishop. The prosecuting officer, Guillaume Capeillon, cunningly preferred certain charges of heresy against him, when he fell into the trap and boldly offered to purge himself before the bishop or any other ecclesiastical judge. He was taken at his word, and the 28th was fixed for his appearance before the bishop and the vice-inquisitor of Nantes, Jean Blouyn.[522]
The records are imperfect, and tell us nothing of what was done with the followers of Gilles, but we may be sure that during this interval the methods of the inquisitorial process were not spared to extract information from them, and that it was spread among the people to create public opinion, for already, by the 28th, some of the sorrowing parents who came forward to confirm their previous complaints assert that since La Meffraye had been in the secular prison they had been told that she said their children had been delivered to Gilles. At this hearing of the 28th only these ten witnesses were heard, with their vague conjectures as to the loss of their offspring. Gilles was not present, and apparently the result of the torture of his servants had not yet been satisfactory, for further proceedings were adjourned till October 8.[523]
In the succeeding hearings the rule of secrecy seems to have been abandoned. There evidently was extreme anxiety to create popular opinion against the prisoner, for the court-room in the Tour Neuve was crowded. On October 8 proceedings opened with the frantic cries of the bereaved parents clamoring for justice against him who had despoiled them and had committed a black catalogue of crimes, which shows that since their last appearance their ignorance had been carefully enlightened. Like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, the same dramatic use was made of them on the 11th, after which, as the object was presumably accomplished, they disappear.[524]
At the hearing of the 8th the articles of accusation were presented orally by the prosecutor. Gilles thereupon appealed from the court, but as his appeal was verbal it was promptly set aside, though no offer was made to him of counsel, or even of a notary to reduce it to writing. If anything could move us to commiseration for such a criminal it would be the mockery of justice in a trial where, alone and unaided, he was called upon to defend his life without preparation or the means of defence. He doubtless was guilty, but if he had been innocent the result would have been the same. Yet the trial was not carried on “simpliciter et de plano” according to the forms of the Inquisition. There was a semblance of a litis contestatio. The prosecutor took the juramentum de calumnia, to tell the truth and avoid deceit, and demanded that Gilles should do the same, as prescribed by legal form, but the latter obstinately refused, though summoned four times and threatened with excommunication. The only notice he would take of the proceedings was to denounce all the charges as false.[525]
It was worse at the hearing of the 13th, when the accusations had been reduced to writing in a formidable series of forty-nine articles. When the bishop and inquisitor asked him what he had to say in defence, Gilles haughtily retorted that they were not his judges; he had appealed from them and would make no reply to the charges. Then, giving rein to his temper, he stigmatized them as simoniacs and scoundrels, before whom it was degradation for him to appear; he would rather be hanged by the neck than acknowledge them as his judges; he wondered that Pierre de l’Hôpital, president or chief judicial officer of Brittany, who was present, would allow ecclesiastics to meddle with such crimes as were alleged against him. In spite of his reclamations the indictment was read, when he simply denounced it as a pack of lies and refused to answer formally. Then, after repeated warnings, the bishop and inquisitor pronounced him contumacious and excommunicated him. He again appealed, but the appeal was rejected as frivolous, and he was given forty-eight hours in which to frame a defence.[526]
The charges formed a long and most elaborate paper, showing by its detail of individual cases that by this time Gilles’s servitors must have been induced to make full confessions. For the first time there appear in it the sacrilege and violation of clerical immunity committed at Saint-Étienne, and the charge of child-murder only figures as an accessory to the other crimes to which it was connected. Everything, however, that could be alleged against him was gathered together, even to inordinate eating and drinking, which were assumed to have led to his other excesses. His transient fits of repentance and vows of amendment were utilized ingeniously to prove that he was a relapsed heretic and thus deprived of all chance of escape. In the conclusion the prosecutor apportioned the charges between the two jurisdictions. The bishop and inquisitor conjointly were prayed to declare him guilty of heretical apostasy and the invocation of demons, while the bishop alone was to pronounce sentence on his unnatural crimes and sacrilege, the Inquisition having no cognizance of these offences. It is worthy of note that there is no allusion to alchemy; apparently it was not regarded as an unlawful pursuit.[527]
It is not easy to understand what followed. When two days later, on the 15th, Gilles was brought into court he was a changed man. We have no means of knowing what influences had meanwhile been brought to bear upon him, but the only probable explanation would seem to be that he recognized from the details of the charges that his servants had been forced to betray him, that further resistance would only subject him to torture, and, in his earnest care for the salvation of his soul, that submission to the Church and endurance of the inevitable was the only path to heaven. Still, he could not at once summon resolution to incur the humiliation of a detailed public confession. While he humbly admitted the bishop and inquisitor to be his judges, and on bended knee, with tears and sighs, craved their pardon for the insults which he had showered upon them, and begged for absolution from the excommunication incurred by contumacy; while he took with the prosecutor the juramentum de calumnia; while in general terms he acknowledged that he had no objection to make to the charges and confessed the crimes alleged against him, yet when he was required to answer to the articles seriatim he at once denied that he had invoked, or caused to be invoked, any malignant spirits; he had, it is true, dabbled in alchemy, but he freely offered himself to be burned if the witnesses to be produced, whose testimony he was willing to accept in advance, should prove that he had invoked demons or entered into pacts with them and offered them sacrifices. All the rest of the charges he specifically denied, but he invited the prosecutor to produce what witnesses he chose, and he (Gilles) would admit their evidence to be conclusive. Although in all this there is a contradiction which casts doubt upon the frankness of the official record, it may perhaps be explained by vacillation not improbable in his terrible position. He did not shrink, however, when his servants and agents, Henriet, Poitou, Prelati, Blanchet, and his two procuresses were brought forward and sworn in his presence; he declined the offer of the bishop and inquisitor to frame the interrogatories for their examination, and he declared that he would stand to their depositions and make no exceptions to them or to their evidence. It was the same when, on the 15th and 19th, additional witnesses were sworn in his presence. The examinations of these witnesses, however, were made by notaries in private. The depositions made by Henriet and Poitou, which have been preserved to us, are hideous catalogues of the foulest crimes, minute in their specifications, though the identity between them in trifles, where omissions or discrepancies would be natural, strongly suggests manipulation either of witnesses or of records. That of Prelati is equally full in its details of necromancy, and raises at once the question, not easily answered, why the necromancer, who had richly earned the stake, seems to have escaped all punishment; and the same may be said as to Blanchet, La Meffraye and her colleague, and some others of those involved. It is worthy of note, that in these confessions or depositions the customary formula that they are made without fear, force, or favor is conspicuous by its absence.[528]
At the hearing of October 20 Gilles was again asked if he had anything to propose, and he replied in the negative. He waived all delay as to the publication of the evidence against him, and when the depositions of his accomplices were read he said he had no exceptions to make to them; in fact, that the publication was unnecessary in view of what he had already said, and what he intended to confess. One would think that this was quite sufficient, for his guilt was thus proved and admitted, but the infernal curiosity of the jurisprudence of the time was never satisfied until it had wrung from the accused a detailed and formal confession. The prosecutor, therefore, earnestly demanded of the bishop and inquisitor that Gilles should be tortured, in order, as he said, to develop the truth more fully. They consulted with the experts and decided that torture should be applied.[529]
The proud man had hoped to be spared the humiliation of a detailed confession, but this was not to be allowed. On the next day, October 21, the bishop and inquisitor ordered him to be brought in and tortured. Everything was in readiness for it, when he humbly begged them to defer it until the next day, and that meanwhile he would make up his mind so as to satisfy them and render it unnecessary. He further asked that they should commission the Bishop of Saint-Brieuc and Pierre de l’Hôpital to hear his confession in a place apart from the torture. This last prayer they granted, but they would only give him a respite until two o’clock, with the promise of a further postponement until the next day, in case he confessed meanwhile. When the confession made that afternoon, under these circumstances, is officially declared to have been made “freely and willingly and without coercion of any kind,” it affords another example of the value of these customary formulas.[530]
Before the commissioners he made no difficulty of accusing himself of all the crimes wherewith he stood charged. Pierre de l’Hôpital found the recital hard of credence, and pressed him vigorously to disclose the motive which had led to their commission. He was not satisfied with Gilles’s declaration that it was simply to gratify his passions, till he exclaimed, “Truly, there was no other cause, object, or intention than I have said. I have told you greater things than that—enough to put ten thousand men to death.” The president pressed the matter no further, but sent for Prelati, when the two accomplices freely confirmed each other’s statements, and they parted in tears with the affectionate farewell already alluded to.[531]
There was no further talk of torture. Gilles was now fairly embarked in his new course. Apparently resolved to win heaven by contrition and by the assistance of the Church, this extraordinary man presents, during the remainder of the trial, a spectacle which is probably without an example. When, on the next day, October 22, he was brought before his judges, the proud and haughty baron desired that his confession should be read in public, so that his humiliation should aid in winning pardon from God. Not content with this, he supplemented his confession with abundant details of his atrocities, as though seeking to make to God an acceptable oblation of his pride. Finally, after exhorting those present to honor and obey the Church, he begged with abundant tears their prayers, and entreated pardon of the parents whose children he had murdered.[532]
On the 25th he was brought up for sentence. After the bishop and inquisitor had duly consulted their assembly of experts, two sentences were read. The first, in the name of both judges, condemned him as guilty of heretical apostasy and horrid invocation of demons, for which he had incurred excommunication and other penalties of the law, and for which he should be punished according to the canonical sanctions. The second sentence, rendered by the bishop alone, in the same form, condemned him for unnatural crime, for sacrilege, and for violating the immunities of the Church. In neither sentence was there any punishment indicated. He was not pronounced relapsed, and therefore could not be abandoned to the secular arm, and it was apparently deemed superfluous to enjoin on him any penance, as a prosecution had been going on pari passu in the secular court, of which the result was not in doubt. The ecclesiastical court had dropped the accusation of murder, after it had served its purpose in exciting popular odium, and had left it to the civil authorities to which it belonged. In fact, the whole elaborate proceedings were a nullity, except so far as they served as a shield for the civil process, and as a basis for confiscating his estates.[533]
After the reading of the sentences he was asked if he wished reincorporation in the Church. He replied that he had not known what heresy was, nor that he had lapsed into it, but as the Church had declared him guilty, he begged on his knees, with sighs and groans, to be reincorporated. When this ceremony was accomplished he asked for absolution, which was granted. It shows the deceptive nature of the whole proceedings, and how little the bishop and inquisitor thought of anything but the secret object to be attained, that although Gilles was condemned for heresy, he was absolved without subjection to the indispensable ceremony of abjuration, and his request for a confessor was promptly met by the appointment of Jean Juvenal, a Carmelite of Ploermel.[534]
From the Tour Neuve, where the ecclesiastical court held its sittings, Gilles was at once hurried before the secular tribunal in the Bouffay. It had commenced its inquest on September 18, and had been busily employed in collecting evidence concerning the child-murders, besides which, its presiding judge, Pierre de l’Hôpital, had been present at much of the ecclesiastical trial, and had personally received Gilles’s confession. It was thus fully prepared to act, and indeed had already condemned Henriet and Poitou to be hanged and burned. When Gilles was brought in and arraigned he immediately confessed. Pierre urged him to confess in full, and thus obtain alleviation of the penalty due to his sins, and he freely complied. Then the president took the opinions of his assessors, who all voted in favor of death, although there was some difference as to the form. Finally Pierre announced that he had incurred the “peines pecunielles” which were to be levied on his goods and lands “with moderation of justice.” As for his crimes, for these he was to be hanged and burned, and that he might have opportunity to crave mercy of God, the time was fixed for one o’clock the next day. Gilles thanked him for the designation of the hour, adding that as he and his servants, Henriet and Poitou, had committed the crimes together, he asked that they might be executed together, so that he who was the cause of their guilt might admonish them, and show them the example of a good death, and by the grace of our Lord be the cause of their salvation. If, he said, they did not see him die they might think that he escaped, and thus be cast into despair. Not only was this request granted, but he was told that he might select the place of his burial, when he chose the Carmelite church, the sepulchre of the dukes, and of all that was most illustrious in Brittany. As a last prayer, he begged that the bishop and clergy might be requested to walk in procession prior to his execution the next day, to pray God to keep him and his servants in firm belief of salvation. This was granted, and the morning saw the extraordinary spectacle of the clergy, followed by the whole population of Nantes, who had been clamoring for his death, marching through the streets and singing and praying for his salvation.[535]
On the way to execution Gilles devoted himself to comforting the servants whom he had brought to a shameful death, assuring them that as soon as their souls should leave their bodies they would all meet in paradise. The men were as contrite and as sure of salvation as their master, declaring that they welcomed death in their unbounded trust in God. They were all mounted on stands over piles of wood, with halters around their necks attached to the gallows. The stands were pushed aside, and as they swung the fagots were lighted. Henriet and Poitou were allowed to burn to ashes, but when Gilles’s halter was burned through and his body fell, the ladies of his kindred rushed forward and plucked it from the flames. It was honored with a magnificent funeral, and it is said that some of the bones were kept by his family as relics of his repentance.[536]
Under the Breton laws execution for crime entailed confiscation of movables to the seigneur justicier, but not of the landed estates. Condemnation for heresy, as we have seen, everywhere carried with it indiscriminate confiscation and inflicted disabilities for two generations. Gilles was convicted as a heretic, but the secular sentence is obscure on the subject of confiscation, and in the intricate and prolonged litigation which arose over his inheritance it is difficult to determine to what extent confiscation was enforced. Some twenty years later the “Mémoire des Héritiers” argues that death had expiated his crimes and removed all cause of confiscation, which would seem to indicate that it had taken place. Certain it is that, to assist the Duke of Brittany, René of Anjou in 1450 confiscated Champtocé and Ingrandes, which were under his jurisdiction, and ceded them to the duke to confirm his title. Charles VII., on the other side, had already decreed confiscation in order to help the heirs.[537]
No disabilities were inflicted upon the descendants, and the house was still regarded as eligible to the noblest alliances. After a year of widowhood, Catharine de Thouars married Jean de Vendôme, Vidame of Chartres, and in 1442 Gilles’s daughter, Marie, espoused Prégent de Coétivy, Admiral of France and one of the most powerful men in the royal court. He must have considered the match most desirable, for he submitted to hard conditions in the marriage contract. He resolutely set to work to recover the alienated or confiscated lands, and succeeded in gaining possession of some of the finest estates, including Champtocé and Ingrandes, though his death at the siege of Cherbourg, in 1450, prevented his enjoying them. Marie not long after was remarried with André de Laval, Marshal and Admiral of France, who caused her rights to be respected, but on her death without issue in 1457 the inheritance passed to Gilles’s brother, René de la Suze. The interminable litigation revived and continued until after his death in 1474. He left but one daughter, who had been married to the Prince de Déols in 1446; they had but one son, André de Chauvigny, who died without issue in 1502, when the race became extinct. The barony of Rais lapsed into the house of Tournemine, and at length passed into that of Gondy, to become celebrated in the seventeenth century through the Cardinal de Retz.[538]
Admitting as we must the guilt of Gilles de Rais, all this throws an uncomfortable doubt over the sincerity of his trial and conviction, and this is not lessened by the fate of his accomplices. Only Henriet and Poitou appear to have suffered; there is no trace of the death-penalty inflicted on any of the rest, though their criminality was sufficient for the most condign punishment, and the facility with which self-incriminating evidence was obtainable by the use of torture rendered unknown the device of purchasing testimony with pardon. Gilles de Sillé, who was regarded as the worst of the marshal’s instigators, disappeared and was heard of no more. Next to him ranked Roger de Briqueville. It is somewhat mysterious that the family seem to have regarded this man with favor. Marie de Rais cherished his children with tender care. In 1446 he obtained from Charles VII. letters of remission rehabilitating him, which he certainly could not have procured had not Prégent de Coétivy favored him, and the latter, in a letter to his brother Oliver, in 1449, desires to be remembered to Roger.[539]
If the student feels that there is an impenetrable mystery shrouding the truth in this remarkable case, the Breton peasant was troubled with no such doubts. To him Gilles remained the embodiment of cruelty and ferocity. I am not sufficiently versed in folk-lore to express an opinion whether M. Bossard is correct in maintaining that Gilles is the original of Bluebeard, the monster of the nursery-tale rendered universally popular in the version of Charles Perrault. Yet, even without admitting that the story is of Breton origin, there would seem to be no doubt that in Brittany, La Vendée, Anjou, and Poitou, where the terrible baron had his chosen seats of residence, he is known by the name of Bluebeard, and the legend—possibly an older one—of cruelty to seven wives, has been attached to him who had but one, and who left that one a widow. Tradition relates how the demon changed to a brilliant blue the magnificent red beard that was his pride; and everywhere, at Tiffauges, at Champtocé, at Machecoul, for the peasant, Bluebeard is the lord of the castle where Gilles ruled over their forefathers. Even yet, when the dreaded ruins are approached at dusk, the wayfarer crosses himself and holds his breath. In one ballad the name of Bluebeard and of the Baron de Rais are interchanged as identical, and Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, is the champion who delivers the terrorized people from their oppressor.[540]
Another phase of the popular belief in magic is illustrated in Don Enrique de Aragon, commonly known as the Marquis of Villena. Born in 1384, uniting the royal blood of both Castile and Aragon, his grandfather, the Duke of Gandia and Constable of Castile, destined him for a military life, and forbade his instruction in aught but knightly accomplishments. The child’s keen thirst for knowledge, however, overcame all obstacles, and he became a marvel of learning for his unlettered companions. He spoke numerous languages, he was gifted as a poet, and he became a voluminous historian. The occult arts formed too prominent a portion of the learning of the day for him to neglect them, and he became noted for his skill in divination, and for interpreting dreams, sneezes, and portents—things, we are told, not befitting a royal prince or a good Catholic, wherefore he was held in slight esteem by the kings of his time, and in little reverence by the fierce chivalry of Spain. In fact, he is spoken of in terms of undisguised contempt, as one who with all his acquirements knew little that was worth knowing, and who was unfit for knighthood and for worldly affairs, even for regulating his own household; that he was short and fat, and unduly fond of women and of eating. His astrological learning was ridiculed in the saying that he knew much of heaven and little of earth. He left his wife and gave up his earldom of Tineo in order to obtain the mastership of the Order of Calatrava, but the king soon deprived him of it, and thus, in the words of the chronicler, he lost both. After his death, at the age of fifty, in 1434, the King Juan II. ordered all his books to be examined by Fray Lope de Barrientos, afterwards Bishop of Cuenca, a professor of Salamanca and tutor of the Infante Enrique. A portion of them Fray Lope burned publicly on the plaza of the Dominican convent of Madrid, where the marquis lay buried. He kept the rest—probably to aid him in the books on the occult sciences which he wrote at command of the king.
Don Enrique evidently was a man of culture despised by a barbarous age which could see in his varied accomplishments only the magic skill so suggestive to the popular imagination. He was no vulgar magician. In his commentary on the Æneid he speaks of magic as a forbidden science, of whose forty different varieties he gives a curious classification. The only one of his writings that has reached us on a topic of the kind is a treatise on the evil eye. In common with his age he regards this as an admitted fact, but he attributes it to natural causes; and in the long and learned catalogue of remedies employed by different races from ancient times, he counsels abstinence from those which savor of superstition and are forbidden by the Church. Had he seriously devoted himself to the occult sciences he would scarce have written his “Art of Carving,” which was printed in 1766. In this work he not only gives the most minute directions for carving all manner of flesh, fowls, fish, and fruits, but gravely proposes that there shall be a school for training youth of gentle blood in this indispensable accomplishment, with privileges and honors to reward the most efficient graduates.
Yet of this unworldly scholar, neglected and despised during life, popular exaggeration speedily made a magician of wondrous power. His legend grew until there was nothing too wild to be attributed to him. He caused himself to be cut up and packed in a flask with certain conjurations, so as to become immortal; he rendered himself invisible with the herb Andromeda; he turned the sun blood-red with the stone heliotrope; he brought rain and tempest with a copper vessel; he divined the future with the stone chelonites; he gave his shadow to the devil in the cave of San Cebrian. Every feat of magic was attributed to him; he became the inexhaustible theme of playwright and story-teller, and to the present day he is the favorite magician of the Spanish stage. From this example it is easy to trace the evolution of the myths of Michael Scot, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Pietro d’ Abano, Dr. Faustus, and other popular necromantic heroes.[541]
WHILE, as we have seen, princes and warriors were toying with the dangerous mysteries of the occult sciences, influencing the destinies of states, there had been for half a century a gradually increasing development of sorcery in a different direction among the despised peasantry, which, before it ran its course, worked far greater evils than any which had thus far sprung from the same source, and left an ineffaceable stain upon the civilization and intelligence of Europe. There is no very precise line of demarcation to be drawn between the more pretentious magic and the vulgar details of witchcraft; they find their origin in the same beliefs and fade into each other by imperceptible gradations, and yet, historically speaking, the witchcraft with which we now have to deal is a manifestation of which the commencement cannot be distinctly traced backward much beyond the fifteenth century. Its practitioners were not learned clerks or shrewd swindlers, but ignorant peasants, for the most part women, who professed to have skill to help or to ban, or who were credited by their neighbors with such power, and were feared and hated accordingly. Of such we hear little during the darkest portion of the Middle Ages, but with the dawn of modern culture they confront us as a strange phenomenon, of which the proximate cause is exceedingly obscure. Probably it may be traced to the effort of the theologians to prove that all superstitious practices were heretical in implying a tacit pact with Satan, as declared by the University of Paris. Thus the innocent devices of the wise-women in culling simples, or in muttering charms, came to be regarded as implying demon-worship. When this conception once came to be firmly implanted in the minds of judges and inquisitors, it was inevitable that with the rack they should extort from their victims confessions in accordance with their expectations. Every new trial would add fresh embellishments to this, until at last there was built up a stupendous mass of facts which demonologists endeavored to reduce to a science for the guidance of the tribunals.
That such was the origin of the new witchcraft is rendered still more probable by the fact that its distinguishing feature was the worship of Satan in the Sabbat, or assemblage, held mostly at night, to which men and women were transported through the air, either spontaneously or astride of a stick or stool, or mounted on a demon in the shape of a goat, a dog, or some other animal, and where hellish rites were celebrated and indiscriminate license prevailed. Divested of the devil-worship now first introduced, such assemblages have formed part of the belief of all races. In Hindu superstition the witches, through the use of mystic spells, flew naked through the night to the places of meeting, where they danced, or to a cemetery, where they gorged themselves with human flesh or revived the dead to satiate their lust. The Hebrew witch flew to the Sabbat with her hair loosened, as when it was bound she was unable to exercise her full power. Among the Norsemen we have seen the trolla-thing, or assemblage of witches, for their unholy purposes.[542] In the Middle Ages the first allusion which we meet concerning it occurs in a fragment, not later than the ninth century, in which it is treated as a diabolical illusion—“Some wicked women, reverting to Satan, and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that they ride at night with Diana on certain beasts, with an innumerable multitude of women, passing over immense distances, obeying her commands as their mistress, and evoked by her on certain nights. It were well if they alone perished in their infidelity and did not draw so many along with them. For innumerable multitudes, deceived by this false opinion, believe all this to be true, and thus relapse into pagan errors. Therefore, priests everywhere should preach that they know this to be false, and that such phantasms are sent by the Evil Spirit, who deludes them in dreams. Who is there who is not led out of himself in dreams, seeing much in sleeping that he never saw waking? And who is such a fool that he believes that to happen in the body which is only done in the spirit? It is to be taught to all that he who believes such things has lost his faith, and he who has not the true faith is not of God, but the devil.” In some way this utterance came to be attributed to a Council of Anquira, which could never be identified; it was adopted by the canonists and embodied in the successive collections of Regino, Burchard, Ivo, and Gratian—the latter giving it the stamp of unquestioned authority—and it became known among the doctors as the Cap. Episcopi. The selection of Diana as the presiding genius of these illusory assemblages carries the belief back to classical times, when Diana, as the moon, was naturally a night-flyer, and was one of the manifestations of the triform Hecate, the favorite patroness of sorcerers. Under the Barbarians, however, her functions were changed. In the sixth century we hear of “the demon whom the peasants call Diana,” who vexed a girl and inflicted on her visible stripes, until expelled by St. Cæsarius of Arles. Diana was the dæmonium meridianum, and the name is used by John XXII. as synonymous with succubus. In some inexplicable way Bishop Burchard, in the eleventh century, when copying the text, came to add to Diana Herodias, who remained in the subsequent recensions, but Burchard in another passage substitutes as the leader Holda, the Teutonic deity of various aspect, sometimes beneficent to housewives and sometimes a member of Wuotan’s Furious Host. In a tract attributed to St. Augustin, but probably ascribable to Hugues de S. Victor, in the twelfth century, the companion of Diana is Minerva, and in some conciliar canons of a later date there appears another being known as Benzozia, or Bizazia; but John of Salisbury, who alludes to the belief as an illustration of the illusions of dreams, speaks only of Herodias as presiding over the feasts for which these midnight assemblages were held. We also meet with Holda, in her beneficent capacity as the mistress of the revels, under the name of the Domina Abundia or Dame Habonde. She was the chief of the dominæ nocturnæ, who frequented houses at night and were thought to bring abundance of temporal goods. In the year 1211 Gervais of Tilbury shows the growth of this belief in his account of the lamiæ or mascœ, who flew by night and entered houses, performing mischievous pranks rather than malignant crimes, and he prudently avoids deciding whether this is an illusion or not. He also had personal knowledge of women who flew by night in crowds with these lamiæ, when any one who incautiously pronounced the name of Christ was precipitated to the earth. Half a century later Jean de Meung tells us that those who ride with Dame Habonde claim that they number a third of the population, and when the Inquisition undertook the suppression of sorcery, in its formula of interrogatories, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, there was a question as to the night-riding of the good women.[543]
Thus the Church, in its efforts to suppress these relics of pagandom, preferred to regard the nocturnal assemblages as a fiction, and denounced as heretical the belief in the reality of the delusion. This, as part of the canon law, remained unalterable, but alongside of it grew up, with the development of heresy, tales of secret conventicles, somewhat similar in character, in which the sectaries worshipped the demon in the form of a cat or other beast, and celebrated their impious and impure rites. Stories such as this are told of the Cathari punished at Orleans in 1017, and of their successors in later times; and the Universal Doctor, Alain de Lille, even derives the name of Cathari from their kissing Lucifer under the tail in the shape of a cat.[544] How the investigators of heresy came to look for such assemblages as a matter of course, and led the accused to embellish them until they assumed nearly the development of the subsequent Witches’ Sabbat, is seen in the confessions of Conrad of Marburg’s Luciferans, and in some of those of the Templars.
Yet the belief in the night-riders with Diana and Herodias continued, until the latter part of the fifteenth century, to be denounced as a heresy, and any one who persisted in retaining it after learning the truth was declared to be an infidel and worse than a pagan.[545] It was too thoroughly implanted, however, in ancestral popular superstition to be eradicated. In the middle of the thirteenth century the orthodox Dominican, Thomas of Cantimpré, speaks of the demons who, like Diana, transport men from one region to another and delude them into worshipping mortals as gods. Others, he says, carry away women, replacing them with insensible images, who are sometimes buried as though dead. Thus, when the peasant wise-women came to be examined as to their dealings with Satan, they could hardly help, under intolerable torture, from satisfying their examiners with accounts of their nocturnal flights. Between judge and victim it was easy to build up a coherent story, combining the ancient popular belief with the heretical conventicles, and the time soon came when the confession of a witch was regarded as incomplete without an account of her attendance at the Sabbat, which was the final test of her abandonment to Satan. These stories became so universal and so complete in all their details that they could not be rejected without discrediting the whole structure of witchcraft. The theory of illusion was manifestly untenable, and demonologists and inquisitors were sadly at a loss to reconcile the incontrovertible facts with the denunciations by the Church of such beliefs as heresy. A warm controversy arose. Some held to the old doctrine that the devil cannot transport a human body or make it pass through a disproportionate opening, but they endeavored to explain the admitted facts by enlarging on his powers of creating illusions. The witch consecrated herself to him with words and with anointing, when he would take her figure or phantasm and lead it where she wished, while her body remained insensible and covered with a diabolical shadow, rendering it invisible; when the object had been accomplished, he brought back the phantasm, reunited it to the body, and removed the shadow. The question turned upon the ability of the devil to carry off human beings, and this was hotly debated. A case adduced by Albertus Magnus, in a disputation on the subject before the Bishop of Paris, and recorded by Thomas of Cantimpré, in which the daughter of the Count of Schwalenberg was regularly carried away every night for several hours, gave immense satisfaction to the adherents of the new doctrine, and eventually an ample store of more modern instances was accumulated to confirm Satan in his enlarged privileges.[546]
In 1458 the Inquisitor Nicholas Jaquerius hit upon the true solution of the difficulty by arguing that the existing sect of witches was wholly different from the heretics alluded to in the Cap. Episcopi, and adduced in evidence of their bodily presence in the Sabbat numberless cases which had come before him in his official capacity, including one of a man who, as a child, fifty-five years before, had been carried thither by his mother in company with an infant brother, and presented to Satan wearing the form of a goat, who with his hoofs had imprinted on them an indelible mark—the stigma diabolicum. Jaquerius, however, adds, reasonably enough, that even if the affair is an illusion, it is none the less heretical, as the followers of Diana and Herodias are necessarily heretics in their waking hours. These speculations of Jaquerius attracted little attention at the time. Thirty years later, Sprenger, who did so much to formulate belief and organize persecution, found the Cap. Episcopi a constant stumbling-block in his path, as sceptics were apt to argue that, if the Sabbat was an illusion, all witchcraft was illusory. He endeavored, therefore, to argue it away, assuming that, while the devil undoubtedly possessed the power of transportation, the presence of the witch frequently was only mental. In such case she lay down on the left side and invoked the devil, when a whitish vapor would issue from her mouth, and she saw all that occurred. If she went personally, and had a husband, an accommodating demon would assume her shape and take her place to conceal her absence. Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola takes the same ground, that presence at the Sabbat was sometimes real and sometimes imaginary; the place of assemblage was beyond the river Jordan, and transportation thither took place instantaneously. He avoids the definition of the Cap. Episcopi by assuming that the Decretum of Gratian had not the authority of law, and was corrupt in many places. The Inquisitor Bernardo di Como, about 1500, in addition to these arguments, had triumphantly adduced the fact that numerous persons had been burned for attending the Sabbat, which could not have been done without the assent of the pope, and this was sufficient proof that the heresy was real, for the Church punishes only manifest crimes.[547]
About this time the learned jurist, Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio, wrote a tract on the subject of witchcraft in which he upheld the doctrine of the Cap. Episcopi and boldly applied it to all magic and sorcery, which he treated as delusions. With a vast array of authorities he proved his case; he exposed the baldness of the pretence that existing witches belonged to a different sect; he argued that their confessions are not to be received, as they confess what is illusory and impossible, and that their evidence as to their associates is to be rejected, as they are deluded and can only delude others. Lawyers, he added, ought to take part in trials before the Inquisition, as they are trained to deal with criminal cases. This aroused the learned theologian, Silvestro Mozzolino of Prierio, Master of the Sacred Palace and subsequently Dominican General, who, in 1521, responded in a voluminous treatise devoted to the disputed canon. As the utterance of the Council of Anquira, presumably confirmed by the Holy See, he does not dare to deny its authority, but he adopts the same reasoning as Jaquerius, and laboriously argues that the heretics to whom it refers had disappeared, that the existing witches are a new sect, originating in 1404, and that the definitions of the canon are, therefore, obsolete and inapplicable to existing circumstances. To deny the bodily presence of witches at the Sabbat, he says, is to discredit the infinite number of cases tried by the Inquisition, and consequently to discredit the laws themselves.[548] He was followed by his successor in the mastership of the Sacred Palace, Bartolomeo de Spina, who devoted three tracts to the annihilation of Ponzinibio. The latter had suggested, logically enough, though maliciously, that as the Cap. Episcopi had defined as a heresy the belief that witches are corporally carried to the Sabbat, inquisitors in administering abjuration to their penitents ought to make them abjure this heresy among others. The absurd position in which this placed the Inquisition aroused Spina’s indignation to the utmost. “O wonderful presumption! O detestable insanity!” he exclaimed. “Only heretics abjure, only heresies are abjured before inquisitors. Is then that belief a heresy which inquisitors defend, and according to which they judge the enemies of the faith to be worthy of extreme damnation?—that opinion which illustrious theologians and canonists prove to be true and catholic? O the extreme stolidity of the man! Must, then, all theologians and judges, the inquisitors themselves, of all Italy, France, Germany, and Spain, holding this opinion abjure before the Inquisition?”—and he concludes by calling upon the Inquisition to proceed against Ponzinibio as vehemently suspect of heresy, as a fautor and defender of heretics, and as an impeder of the Holy Office.[549] This sufficiently shows that the new beliefs had completely conquered the old. The question had passed beyond the range of reason and argument, and everywhere throughout Europe the Witches’ Sabbat was accepted as an established fact, which it was dangerous to dispute. Jurists and canonists might amuse themselves with debating it theoretically; practically it had become the veriest commonplace of the courts, both secular and ecclesiastical.
That the details of the Sabbat varied but little throughout Europe is doubtless to be ascribed to the leading questions habitually put by judges, and to the desire of the tortured culprits to satisfy their examiners, yet this consentaneity at the time was an irrefragable proof of truth. The first step of the witch was to secure a consecrated wafer by pretending to receive communion, and carrying the sacrament home. On this was fed a toad, which was then burned, and the ashes were mixed with the blood of an infant, unbaptized if possible, powdered bone of a man who had been hanged, and certain herbs. With this mixture the witch anointed the palms of her hands, or her wrist, and a stick or stool which she placed between her legs, and she was at once transported to the place of meeting. As a variant of this the ride was sometimes made on a demon in the shape of a horse, or goat, or dog. The assembly might be held anywhere, but there were certain spots specially resorted to—in Germany the Brocken, in Italy an oak-tree near Benevento, and there was, besides, the unknown place beyond the Jordan. At all these they gathered in thousands. Thursday night was the one generally selected. They feasted at tables loaded with meat and wine which rose from the earth at the command of the presiding demon, and they paid homage to the devil, who was present, usually in the form of a goat, dog, or ape. To him they offered themselves, body and soul, and kissed him under the tail, holding a lighted candle. They trampled and spat upon the cross and turned up their backs to heaven in derision of God. The devil preached to them, sometimes commencing with a parody of the mass; he told them that they had no souls and that there was no future life; they were not to go to church or confession, or to use holy water, or, if they did so to avoid suspicion, they must say “By leave of our Master,” and they were to bring him as many converts as they could, and work all possible evil to their neighbors. There was usually a dance, which was unlike any seen at honest gatherings. At Como and Brescia a number of children from eight to twelve years of age, who had frequented the Sabbat, and had been reconverted by the inquisitors, gave exhibitions in which their skill showed that they had not been taught by human art. The woman was held behind her partner and they danced backwards, and when they paid reverence to the presiding demon they bent themselves backwards, lifting a foot in the air forwards. The rites ended with indiscriminate intercourse, obliging demons serving as incubi or succubi as required. The reality of all this did not depend alone upon the confessions of the accused, for there was a well-known case occurring about the year 1450, when the Inquisitor of Como, Bartolomeo de Homate, the podestà Lorenzo da Concorezzo, and the notary Giovanni da Fossato, either out of curiosity or because they doubted the witches whom they were trying, went to a place of assembly at Mendrisio and witnessed the scene from a hiding-place. The presiding demon pretended not to know their presence, and in due course dismissed the assembly, but suddenly recalled his followers and set them on the officials, who were so beaten that they died within fifteen days.[550]
All this was, of course, well fitted to excite the horror of the faithful and stimulate the zeal of the inquisitor, but it was only the pastime of the witch, and the reward given to her by her master for her labors and her allegiance. Her serious occupation was in works of evil. She was abandoned, body and soul, to Satan, and was the instrument which he used to effect his malignant purposes. The demonologists argued that the witch was as necessary to the demon as the demon to the witch, and that neither could operate without the other. She was not like the magicians and sorcerers, who merely earned their livelihood by selling their services, sometimes for good purposes and sometimes for bad, but she was a being wholly evil, delighting in the exercise of her powers for the destruction of her neighbors, and constantly exhorted to activity by her master. Those powers, moreover, were sufficient to justify the terror in which she was held by the people. Sprenger divides witches into three classes, those who can injure and not cure, those who can cure and not injure, and those who can do both, and the worst are those who unite these faculties, for the more they insult and offend God, the greater power of evil he gives them. They kill and eat children, or devote them to the devil if unbaptized. They cause abortion by merely laying a hand upon a woman, or dry up her milk if she is nursing. By twirling a moistened broom, or casting flints behind them towards the east, or boiling hogs’ bristles in a pot, or stirring a pool with a finger, they raise tempests and hail-storms which devastate whole regions; they bring the plagues of locusts and caterpillars which devour the harvests; they render men impotent and women barren, and cause horses to become suddenly mad under their riders. They can make hidden things known and predict the future, bring about love or hatred at will, cause mortal sickness, slay men with lightning, or even with their looks alone, or turn them into beasts. We have the unquestioned authority of Eugenius IV. that by a simple word or touch or sign they can bewitch whom they please, cause or cure sickness, and regulate the weather. Sometimes they scattered over the fields powders which destroyed the cattle. They constantly entered houses at night, and, sprinkling a powder on the pillows of the parents which rendered them insensible, would touch the children with fingers smeared with a poisonous unguent causing death in a few days; or they would thrust needles under the nails of an infant and suck the blood, which was partly swallowed and partly spit into a vessel to serve in the confection of their infernal ointments; or the child would be put upon the fire and its fat be collected for the same purpose. Witches, moreover, could transform themselves into cats and other beasts, and Bernardo di Como gravely cites the case of the companions of Ulysses, as adduced by St. Augustin, to prove the reality of such illusions. Ludicrous as all this may seem, every one of these details has served as the basis of charges under which countless human beings have perished in the flames.[551]
One very peculiar power ascribed to witches was that of banqueting in the Sabbat on infants and cattle, and then restoring them to life. We have seen the belief in early times, and among races far apart, that sorceresses could gnaw and eat men internally, which probably arose from painful gastric maladies ascribed to sorcery. In the genesis of the Sabbat this took the shape, as described by Bishop Burchard in the eleventh century, that in the nocturnal meetings under the guidance of Holda men would be slain without weapons, their flesh cooked and eaten, and then they would be brought to life again, with straw or a piece of wood substituted for their hearts. The Church was not as yet ready to accept these marvels, and Burchard penances belief in them with fasting on bread and water for seven Lents. In the next century John of Salisbury ascribes to the illusion of dreams the popular superstition that lamiæ tore children to pieces, devoured them, and returned them to their cradles; and about 1240 Guillaume d’Auvergne speaks of the superstition spread by old women of the “ladies of the night” or “good women” who appear to tear children to pieces, or to cook them on the fire. Of course this formed part of the perfected stories of the Sabbat. In some witch-trials in the Tyrol, in 1506, there are frequent allusions to children and domestic animals carried to the feast and devoured, and though they remained alive, they were doomed to die soon afterwards. The witches of the Canavese confessed that their practice was to select fat cattle from a neighboring farmer, slaughter and eat them, and then, collecting the bones and hides, resuscitate them with the simple formula “Sorge, Ranzola.” In one case a farmer of Levone, named Perino Pasquale, killed a sick ox and skinned it, and, naturally enough, himself died within a week, as well as his dog, which lapped some of the blood; and the occurrence, according to custom, was subsequently explained by a witch on trial, who confessed that the ox was one which had thus been eaten and resuscitated, when the assembled witches resolved that whoever killed it, and the first who should eat of it, should perish. Such feats as these, it is true, gave the opponents of witchcraft the advantage of arguing that they attributed to Satan the power of God in resuscitating and recreating the dead, and the demonologists, thus hard pushed, were obliged to admit that this portion of the Sabbat was illusory, but they triumphantly added that this only proved the empire of Satan over his dupes.[552]
The killing of unbaptized children was one of the special duties imposed by Satan on his servants, which the theologians explained by the fact that they were thus damned for original sin, and, therefore, the Day of Judgment was postponed, as the number of the elect requisite before the destruction of the world is thus more tardily completed. At a little town near Basle a witch who was burned confessed that while acting as midwife she had killed more than forty infants by thrusting a needle into the superior fontanelle. Another, of the diocese of Strassburg, had thus disposed of innumerable children, when she was detected by accidentally letting fall the arm of a new-born child while passing the gate of a town in which she had been performing her functions. Witch midwives, when they abstained from this, were in the habit of dedicating to Satan the babes whom they delivered. It was doubtful whether the infants were thus in reality surrendered to Satan, but at least they were subjected to his influence, and likely to grow up witches. This, and dedication by witch mothers, explain the fact that girls even of eight and ten years of age were able to bewitch people and to raise tempests of hail and rain. In Swabia a case occurred of one who, at the age of eight, innocently revealed her power to her father, in consequence of which her mother, who had thus dedicated her, was burned. The witch midwives were so numerous that there was scarce a hamlet without them.[553]
There was apparently no limit to the evil wrought by Satan through the instrumentality of those who had thus surrendered themselves to him. Sprenger relates that one of his colleagues on a tour of duty reached a town almost depopulated on account of pestilence. Hearing a report that a woman lately buried was swallowing her winding-sheet, and that the mortality would not cease until she had accomplished the deglutition, he caused the grave to be opened and the sheet was found half swallowed. The mayor of the town drew his sword and cut off the head of the corpse and threw it out of the grave, when the pest ceased at once. An inquisition was held and the woman was found to have long been a witch. Sprenger might well deplore the threatened devastation of Christendom arising from the neglect of the authorities to suppress these crimes with due severity.[554]
To understand the credulity which accepted these marvels as the most portentous and dreadful of realities, it must be borne in mind that they were not the wild inventions of the demonologists, but were facts substantiated by evidence irrefragable according to the system of jurisprudence. Torture by this time had long been used universally in criminal trials when necessary; no jurist conceived that the truth could be elicited in doubtful cases without it. The criminal whom endless repetition of torment had reduced to stolid despair naturally sought to make his confession square with the requirements of his judge; the confession once made he was doomed, and knew that retraction, in place of saving him, would only bring a renewal and prolongation of his sufferings. He therefore adhered to his confession, and when it was read to him in public at his condemnation he admitted its truth.[555] In many cases, moreover, torture and prolonged imprisonment in the foulest of dungeons doubtless produced partial derangement, leading to belief that he had committed the acts so persistently imputed to him. In either case, desire to obtain the last sacrament, which was essential to salvation and which was only administered to contrite and repentant sinners, would induce him to maintain to the last the truth of his confession. No proof more unquestionable than this could be had of any of the events of life, and belief in the figments of witchcraft was therefore unhesitating. To doubt, moreover, if not heresy, was cause for vehement suspicion. The Church lent its overpowering authority to enforce belief on the souls of men. The malignant powers of the witch were repeatedly set forth in the bulls of successive popes for the implicit credence of the faithful, and the University of Cologne, in 1487, when expressing its approval of the Malleus Maleficarum of Sprenger, warned every one that to argue against the reality of witchcraft was to incur the guilt of impeding the Inquisition.[556]
What rendered the powers of the witch peculiarly dreadful was the deplorable fact that the Church had no remedy for the evils which she so recklessly wrought. It is true that the sign of the cross, and holy water, and blessed oil, and palms, and candles, and wax and salt, and the strict observance of religious rites were in some sense a safeguard and a preventive. A witch confessed that she had been employed to kill a certain man, but when she invoked the devil for the purpose he replied that he could not do it, as the intended victim kept himself protected by the sign of the cross, and that the utmost injury that could be inflicted on him was the destruction of one eleventh of his harvests; and another one stated that on their nocturnal rounds to destroy children they were unable to enter houses in which were kept palms and blessed bread or crosses of palms or olive, or to injure those who habitually protected themselves with the sign of the cross. But it was acknowledged that, when once the spell had been cast, the victim could find no relief on earth or in heaven—human means were useless, and exorcism and the invocation of saints were powerless except in demoniacal possession. The only cure was from the devil through other witches. Curative sorcery had long been a subject of debate in theologic ethics, but it had been formally condemned as inadmissible. It not only was a pact, tacit or expressed, with Satan, but it was ascertained that one of his leading objects in urging his acolytes to injure their neighbors was to force the sufferer in despair to have recourse to sorcery and thus be drawn into evil ways. This was illustrated by a case, celebrated among demonographers, of a German bishop who, in Rome, fell madly in love with a young girl and induced her to accompany him home. During the journey she undertook to kill him by sorcery, that she might make off with the jewels with which he had loaded her, and he was nightly attacked with a burning pain in his chest which resisted all the resources of his physicians. His life was despaired of, when recourse was had to an old woman who recognized the source of his affection and told him he could only be saved by the same methods, involving the death of the bewitcher. His conscience would not allow him to assent to this without permission; he applied to Pope Nicholas V., who kindly granted him a dispensation, and then he ordered the old woman to do what she proposed. That night he was perfectly well, and word was brought him that his young paramour was dying. He went to console her, but she naturally received him with maledictions, and died devoting her soul to Satan. As Bodin admiringly remarks, the devil was cunning enough to make a pope, a bishop, and a witch all obey him, and all become accomplices in a homicide.[557]
Thus a very profitable trade sprang up in counteracting witchcraft, and many witches confined themselves to this branch of the profession, although they were as liable as their adversaries to condemnation for compact with the devil, for it was an incontrovertible fact that they could only relieve a sufferer by transferring his disease to some one else or by performing some equivalent evil act. Sprenger tells us that they were to be found every German mile or two. At Reichshofen was one whose business was so large that the lord of the place levied a toll of a penny on every one who came to her for relief, and used to boast of the large revenue which he derived from this source. A man named Hengst, at Eningen, near Constance, had more applicants than any shrine of the Virgin—even than that at Aix—and in winter, when the highways were blocked with snow, those which led to his house were trampled smooth by the crowds of his patients.[558]
When once the belief was fairly started in the existence of beings possessed of the powers which I have described, and actuated by motives purely malignant, it was destined to inevitable extension under the stimulus afforded by persecution. Every misfortune and every accident that occurred in a hamlet would be attributed to witchcraft. Suspicion would gradually attach to some ill-tempered crone, and she would be seized, for inquisitors held that a single careless threat, such as “You will be sorry for this,” if followed by a piece of ill-luck, was sufficient to justify arrest and trial.[559] All the neighbors would flock in as accusers—this one had lost a cow, that one’s vintage had been ruined by hail, another’s garden-patch had been ravaged by caterpillars, one mother had suffered an abortion, another’s milk had suddenly dried, another had lost a promising child, two lovers had quarrelled, a man had fallen from an apple-tree and had broken his neck—and under the persuasive influence of starvation or of the rack the unfortunate woman would invent some story to account for each occurrence, would name her accomplices in each, and tell whom she had met in the Sabbats, which she attended regularly. No one can read the evidence adduced at a witch-trial, or the confessions of the accused, without seeing how every accident and every misfortune and every case of sickness or death which had occurred in the vicinage for years was thus explained, and how the circle of suspicion widened so that every conviction brought new victims; burnings multiplied, and the terrified community was ready to believe that a half or more of its members were slaves of Satan, and that it would never be free from their malignant vengeance until they should all be exterminated. For more than two centuries this craze was perpetually breaking out in one part of Europe after another, carefully nursed and stimulated by popes and inquisitors like Innocent VIII. and Leo X., Sprenger and Institoris, Bernard of Como and Bishop Binsfeld, and the amount of human misery thence arising is simply incomputable.
Fortunately on one side there was a limitation upon the otherwise illimitable powers of the witch. The contrast was so absurd between the faculties attributed to her and her utter inability to protect herself against those who tortured and burned her with impunity, that some explanation of the inconsistency was requisite. The demonologists therefore invented the comforting theory that through the goodness of God the witch instantaneously lost her power as soon as the hand of an officer of justice was laid upon her. But for this, indeed, it might have been difficult to find men hardy enough to seize, imprison, try, and execute these delegates of Satan, whose slightest ill-will was so dangerous. Judges and their officials thus were encouraged to perform their functions and were told that they need dread no reprisals. It was true that, like all theories framed to meet artificial conditions, this one was not always reconcilable to the facts. The strange fortitude with which the culprits occasionally endured the severest and most prolonged tortures, so far from being a proof of innocence, was regarded as showing that even in the hands of justice the devil was sometimes able to protect his servants by endowing them with what was called the gift of taciturnity, and the ingenuity of the inquisitors was taxed to the utmost to overcome his wiles. When this was once admitted it was difficult to deny that he could assist them in other ways, and it was recommended to the officers charged with the arrest that when they seized a witch they should on no account allow her to enter her chamber, lest she should secure some charm that would enable her to endure the torture. Such charms might be secreted about her person, or under the skin, or even in accessible cavities of the body, so the first thing to be done was to shave the prisoner from head to foot and subject her to the most indecent examination. It was on record that in Ratisbon some heretics condemned to be burned remained unhurt in the flames; vainly were they submerged in the river and roasted again. A three days’ fast was ordered for the whole city, when it was revealed that they had charms concealed in a certain spot under the skin, and after the removal of these there was no further trouble in reducing them to ashes. Charms could also be used from a distance. At Innsbruck a witch boasted that if she had a single thread of a prisoner’s garment she could cause him to endure torture to the death without confessing. Some inquisitors, to break the spell of taciturnity, were wont to try sacred magic by administering to the prisoner, on an empty stomach, after invoking the Trinity, three drinks of holy water in which blessed wax had been melted. In one case the most excruciating torture, continued through two whole days, failed to elicit confession, but the third day chanced to be the feast of the Virgin, and during the celebration of the holy rites the devil lost the power with which he had thus far sustained the prisoner, who revealed a plot to make way with the implacable judge, Peter of Berne, by means of sorcery. These were simple devices; a more elaborate one was to take a strip of paper of the length of the body of Christ, and write on it the seven words uttered on the cross; on a holy day, at the hour of mass, this was to be bound around the waist of the witch with relics, she was to be made to drink holy water, and be at once placed on the rack. When all these efforts failed it was a mooted question whether the Church in her extremity could have recourse to the devil by calling in other magicians to break the spell, and Prierias succeeds by ingenious casuistry in proving that she could. One precaution, held indispensable by some experienced practitioners, was that the witch on arrest was to be placed immediately in a basket and thus be carried to prison, without allowing her feet to touch the earth, for if she were permitted to do so she could slay her captors with lightning and escape.[560]