516 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1204-1517.
Ages, was in Innocent's age regarded as the imminent danger to which the Church was exposed.
Witchcraft was one of the forms of maleficium^ the general term adopted by the jMiddle Ages from Roman usage for demonology and the dark arts, but it had characteristic features of its own.i These were the transport of the bewitched through the air, their meetings with devils at the so-called sabbats and indulsrence in the lowest forms of carnal vice with them. Some of these features were mentioned in the canon episcopi, — the bishop's canon, — which appeared first in the 10th century and was incorporated by Gratian in his collection of canon law, 1150. But this canon treated as a delusion the belief that wicked women were accustomed to ride together in troops through the air at night in the suite of the Pagan goddess, Diana, into whose service they completely yielded themselves, and this in spite of the fact that women confessed to this affinity.^ The night-riding, John of Salisbury, d. 1182, treated as an illusion with which Satan vexed the minds of women ; but another Englishman, Walter Map, in the same century, reports the wild orgies of demons with heretics, to whom the devil appeared as a tom-cat.^
From the middle of the 13th century the distinctive features of witchcraft T)egan to engage the serious attention of the Ciiurch authorities. During the reign of Gregory IX., 1227- 1241, it became evident to them that the devil, not satisfied with inoculating Western Europe with doctrinal heresy, had determined to vex Christendom with a new exhibition of his malice in works of sorcery and witchcraft. Strange cases were occurring which the inquisitors of heresy were quick to detect. The Dominican Chantimpre tells of the daughter of a count of
1 Alexander Hales distinguished eight sorts of maJeficUnn. Martin V. and Eugenius TV. call the workers of the dark arts soi-tiler/i, divinatores, dpmonum invocatores, carminatores^conjuratores, stiperstitiosi, augtires, utentes artibus nefariis et prohibitis. See Hansen, $i<p/Ze«, p. 16 sqq. Henry IV. 's council of bishops, met at Worms, 107(5, in deposing Gregory VII., accused him of witchcraft and making covenant with the devil.
^ Sceleratce mulieres . . . credunt sp et projitenturnoctiirnis horisciim Diana paganorxim dea et inmimera muUitudine muUerum equitare super quasdam bestias, etc. Hansen, Quelleu, p. 38 srj.
8 See Vol. v., I. 889-897, and Hansen, Zauberwahn, p. 144.
§ 59. WITCHCRAFT AND ITS PUNISHMENT. 517
Schwanenburg, who was carried every night through the air, even eluding the strong hold of a Franciscan who one night tried to hold her back. In 1275 a woman of Toulouse, under torture, confessed she had indulged in sexual intercourse with a demon for many years and given birth to a monster, part wolf and part serpent, which for two years she fed on murdered children. She was burnt by the civil tribunal.
But it is not till the 15th century that the era of witchcraft properly begins^ From"about 1430 it was treated as a distinct cult^ carefully defined andTmade the subject of many treatises. fhe punishments to be meted out for it were carefully laid down, as also the methods by which witches should be detected and tried. The cases were no longer sporadic and exceptional ; they were regarded as being a gild or sect marshalled by Satan to destroy faith from the earth.
It is probable --that_ the responsibility for the spread of the wild witch mania rests chiefly with the popes. Pope after pope countenanced and encouraged the belief. Not a single utterance emanated from a pope to discourage it.^ Pope after pope called upon the Inquisition to punish witches.
The list of papal deliverances opened in 1233, when Gregory IX., addressing the bishops of Mainz and Hildesheim, accepted the popular demonology in its crudest forms. ^ The devil, so Gregory asserted, was appearing in the shapes of a toad, a pallid ghost and a black cat. In language too obscene to be repeated, he described at length the orgies which took place at the meetings of men and women with demons. Where medicines did not cure, iron and fire were to be used. The rotting flesh was to be cut out. Did not Elijah slay the four hundred priests of Baal and Moses put idolaters to death?
1 Michelet, p. 9, says: " I unfalteringly declare that the witch appeared in the age of that deep despair which the gentry of the Church engendered. The witch is a crime of their own achieving." Zollinger, Papstthum^ p. 123, says that witchcraft in its different manifestations, from the 13th to the 17th century, is " a product of the faith in the plenary authority of the pope. This may seem to be a paradox, but it is not hard to prove." Hoensbroech's language, I., 381, is warm but true, when he says, " In all this period the pope was the patron and the prop of the belief in witchcraft, spreading it and confirming it."
2 A translation of Gregory's bull, Vox rama, is given by Hoensbroech, I. 215-218. See DoUinger: Fapstthum, pp. 125, 144,