Europe's inner demons

Later a similar development took place in the vast Carolingian empire. In 787 Charlemagne, in his capitulary for the Saxons, decreed that not only maleficent sorcerers but also fortune-tellers should be handed over to the ecclesiastical authorities as slaves; while anyone offering sacrifices to the Devil — meaning Donar, Wotan and the other Germanic gods — should be put to death.⁽⁴⁶⁾ These measures were part of a policy for the forcible assimilation of a pagan people which had only recently been conquered and was still refractory; but even in lands where Christianity had long been established, the bishops sometimes prescribed very severe measures for stamping out magical practices. In 799 a Bavarian synod forwarded a recommendation to Charlemagne: anyone arrested on a charge of practising magic — whether storm-raising and other maleficia, or mere fortune-telling — was to be imprisoned and interrogated until he or she confessed. Torture could be used, though not to such a point that the prisoner died — the object must always be to induce repentance and to save a soul. Responsibility for seeing that these measures were enforced lay with the chief priest of the locality. If the secular authorities — the count and his officials — accepted bribes and let such prisoners go, the chief priest was to report them to the bishop, and the bishop was to punish them.

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Church and State were drawing closer together, as they had once done in the Visigothic kingdom, and with similar results: the clergy felt free to call on the secular authorities to pursue and punish those whom they regarded as Devil-worshippers. And this tendency became still more marked under Charlemagne’s successors. After preliminary discussions at the synod of Paris, the bishops presented a recommendation to the Emperor Louis the Pious, at the imperial diet of 829. The cult of paganism, they complain, still survives in the activities of magicians, fortune-tellers and sorcerers. And they continue: “It is said that their maleficia can disturb the air, bring down hail, foretell the future, remove the fruits and milk from one person and give them to another, and perform innumerable marvels. As soon as they are found out, the guilty men and women must be subjected to discipline and punished by the prince; all the more severely because their wicked and overweening audacity does not shrink from serving the Devil.”⁽⁴⁸⁾

No particular punishment is specified, but it would seem that death was not excluded. The very injunctions from the Pentateuch that were to resound so loudly during the great witch-hunt, five, six and seven centuries later, were already quoted by the Frankish bishops for the benefit of Charlemagne’s son: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”⁽⁴⁹⁾ — “The soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a-whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.”⁽⁵⁰⁾

Like his father, Louis gave legal sanction to the bishops’ recommendation. And after the division of the Carolingian empire, similar situations continued to arise in both the western and the eastern halves: synods condemned in the name of God, and monarchs legislated accordingly. Maleficium, which had always been condemned as criminal, now evoked in addition such a deep religious horror that even secular laws were coloured by it. “The saints of God,” proclaimed the Emperor Charles the Bald in 873, “have written that it is the king’s duty to get rid of the impious, to exterminate the makers of maleficia and of poisons. We therefore expressly adjure the counts to show great diligence in seeking out and seizing, in their counties, those guilty of these crimes....And not only the guilty but their associates and accomplices, male or female, shall perish, so that all knowledge of so great a crime shall vanish from our land.”⁽⁵¹⁾

So already in the early Middle Ages the secular authorities did sometimes, at the urging of the ecclesiastical authorities, concern themselves with maleficium as a religious transgression. Nevertheless it would be quite wrong to try to link what happened in the Visigothic kingdom and the Carolingian empire with the great witch-hunt of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The differences, both in scale and in motivation, are vast. It may be that in the earlier period some tempestarii and suchlike really were flogged, or tortured, or even executed, but there was certainly no widespread witch-hunt. Above all, whatever repressive measures were taken, they were taken as part of a campaign to stamp out the remnants of paganism. The notion of witchcraft as a form of heresy was utterly foreign to early medieval civilization.