Francis I.

* * * * *

On the contrary, Spain, under the pious Isabella (1506) and the
Cardinal Ximenes, began burning witches. In 1515, Geneva, being then
under a Bishop, burned five hundred in three months. The Emperor
Charles V., in his German Constitutions, vainly sought to rule, that
"Witchcraft, as causing damage to goods and persons, is a question for
_civil_, not ecclesiastic law." In vain did he do away the right of
confiscation, except in cases of treason. The small prince-bishops,
whose revenues were largely swelled by trials for witchcraft, kept on
burning at a furious rate. In one moment, as it were, six hundred
persons were burnt in the infinitesimal bishopric of Bamberg, and nine
hundred in that of Wurtzburg. The way of going to work was very
simple. Begin by using torture against the witnesses; create witnesses
for the prosecution by means of pain and terror; then, by dint of
excessive kindliness, draw from the accused a certain avowal, and
believe that avowal in the teeth of proven facts. A witch, for
instance, owns to having taken from the graveyard the body of an
infant lately dead, that she might use it in her magical compounds.
Her husband bids them go the graveyard, for the child is there still.
On being disinterred, the child is found all right in his coffin. But
against the witness of his own eyes the judge pronounces it _an
appearance_, a cheat of the Devil. He prefers the wife's confession to
the fact itself; and she is burnt forthwith.[77]

[77] For this and other facts regarding Germany, see Soldan.

So far did matters go among these worthy prince-bishops, that after a
while, Ferdinand II., the most bigoted of all emperors, the emperor of
the Thirty Years' War, was fain to interfere, to set up at Bamberg an
imperial commissary, who should maintain the law of the empire, and
see that the episcopal judge did not begin the trial with tortures
which settled it beforehand, which led straight to the stake.

* * * * *

Witches were easily caught by their confessions, sometimes without the
torture. Many of them were half mad. They would own to turning
themselves into beasts. The Italian women often became cats, and
gliding under the doors, sucked, they said, the blood of children. In
the land of mighty forests, in Lorraine and on the Jura, the women, of
their own accord, became wolves, and, if you could believe them,
devoured th