Burning Heretics and Witches: A Story of Church and State, East and West

 

 

Today, in many people's minds, there is a strong link between "The Church" (as generic straw man) and the burning of heretics and witches.  In reality, the relationship between the Church/churches and this form of punishment is complex and uneven.  What we have here is the case of an older, pre-Christian practice creeping in via circuitous cultural and historical developments.

            First, it must be noted that up until the reign of Justinian I (reigned 527-565; portrayed in the image above), heretics were not executed, only excommunicated, i.e., barred from receiving communion or sometimes from attending public worship.  From the time of Theodosius' Edict of Thessalonica, a century and a half before Justinian, heretics had also been barred from holding public office.  Justinian introduced burning as a punishment for heresy, but it is important to emphasize that he did not invent this form of execution.  Pagan Roman law had been replete with cruel and creative sentencing options such as crucifixion, mauling by wild animals, "combing to death" with iron spiked "combs" that ripped the flesh off the condemned (as was inflicted on Rabbi Akiva following the Bar Kochba Revolt of 135), etc.  Justinian merely took an existing punishment in Roman law and applied it to a crime for which it had not yet been used.

            Burning people alive, or strangling them and then burning their bodies, or roasting them in metal cages or containers, or pouring molten metal down their throats constituted a class of punishments that went back to the most ancient times.  These punishments were employed to varying degrees for different offences by the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt, as well as later by the Romans.  The ancient Celtic Druids also punished some people this way, stitching them into a "suit" made of wicker and setting the "suit" on fire.  It was also the custom among some Celts to force the living dependents and slaves of powerful men to be burned with them on their funeral pyres.

            Despite Justinian’s introduction of burning to punish heretics, throughout most of subsequent Eastern Roman/Byzantine history, the Christian sensibilities of many judges and emperors meant that capital punishment was largely avoided in favour of an early kind of rehabilitation for offenders designed to give them a chance to repent before their natural lives ended.  The convicted offender first underwent some form of non-life-threatening physical mutilation, usually the cutting off of an ear, of the nose, or of a hand, or the blinding of one or both eyes by heat, or the cutting out of the tongue.  Rather than being sent to a prison, the convict was often assigned to a monastery where, under the tutelage of an elder monk, he was to contemplate his transgression and work off his sins.  This was seen as a more merciful way to deal with offenders.  Unfortunately, at this writing, I have no information on the fate of female offenders in this legal-cultural milieu.  However, one could extrapolate from the fact that banishment to convents for women of the palace who had fallen out of political favour (empresses, imperial mistresses, etc.) was as common as for the ousted men of the palace, that in the larger legal system, the sentences for female offenders would have been similar to those of male offenders.

 

            In the west, the influence of the Germanic aversion to capital punishment in favour of paying a weregeld(lit. “man money”) to a murdered victim’s family, also seems to have tempered Roman law for some centuries.  However, the era of the Crusades (the First Crusade was called in 1095) marks a shift in attitudes and practices, and it is from this point onward that we see first as custom, and then as statutory directive, the burning of convicted heretics.  While we usually think of the Crusades against "the Infidel" in the Levant as the defining development of this period, what may have played a larger role in the psychology of the western church was the Albigensian Crusade of 1209-1229 in southern France.  Here again, church affairs and state power became intermingled, such that the former became a handy excuse for the latter to achieve its ends—in other words, both church and state come off looking bad, but the typical historical narrative since the Enlightenment usually portrays this as a purely religious development.

            The background to this crusade in brief:  A religious teaching that called for a return of the Church to its roots of perfection, poverty, and preaching, had begun in the Balkans and spread to the west.  It was a dualistic teaching that saw the material world as evil.  It was first condemned by numerous local church assemblies, then by the Patriarch of Constantinople, and finally by the Roman Papacy at the Third Lateran Council in 1179.  In the western church (the church under the Roman Papacy), the original punishment specified for people convicted of this heresy was imprisonment and the seizure of their property.  However, the church hierarchy's efforts were unsuccessful at eliminating this teaching, which, in the meantime, had become popular in the cities of south-western France, one of the most prosperous and urbanized regions of western Europe at the time.  Furthermore, in a foreshadowing of the Reformation 300 years later, the local nobles were shielding the leaders of the movement.  When one of the papal legates who had been sent to assess the situation was killed, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against the heretics.  King Philip II of France saw this as an opportunity to assert his control over these nobles and over the revenues of the region, so he took up the banner of the crusade.

            This first internal "religious war" in western Christendom led to the creation of the Inquisition at war's end in 1229 to weed out the remaining adherents of these teachings.  At this point, the scope of possible sentences was expanded to include anything from lesser punishments, such as penances and pilgrimages, for those who recanted, to burning for the unrepentant.  And thus, these two phenomena so commonly linked in the modern popular psyche to the Middle Ages—Inquisition and the burning of heretics—were established.

            While the burning of witches is also associated in people's minds with the Middle Ages and the church, that practice came later and was not so much a product of medieval thought as of the power of the printing press (invented ca. 1440) to spread panic.  In 1486, the Dominican friar Heinrich Kramer published his work, Malleus Maleficarum or Der Hexenhammer (The Witch’s Hammer), in Speyer.  Kramer had recently failed to have someone condemned on charges of witchcraft because of the scepticism of the church authorities.  He wrote the book to make his case to the public.  The hierarchy of the church was reluctant to make an issue of witches and witchcraft.  There was considerable debate both in the larger church and in Kramer's own Dominican order about the issue, with many questioning the existence of witchcraft in the first place, dismissing it as a superstition of the uneducated.  In his book, Kramer pulls together an array of scriptural and theological proof texts to try to persuade his readers that witchcraft exists, that it is dangerous, and that it must be weeded out.  Realizing that getting the book approved by a sceptical church hierarchy would be difficult, Kramer forged a letter of approval from the bishop of Köln and falsely listed as his co-author another Dominican, the highly regarded Jacob Sprenger—a man who was opposed to witch trials.  Once the book was published, Sprenger complained about the misuse of his name.  Kramer was disciplined for his double fraud.  Both the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions, upon examining the work, dismissed it as "not helpful" or "inappropriate."

            However, like the Internet today, once the book was out, it took on a life of its own, and even its author's disgrace and the official dismissals of the work could not stop it from becoming a bestseller and a shaper of public opinion.  Thus, in 1532, Emperor Charles V, in his Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (his effort to emulate Justinian), made burning at the stake the punishment for any sorcery that brought harm to a person (note that sorcery as such was not illegal).  In 1572, the ruler of Saxony, a princely vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor, went the emperor's law one better, assigning that punishment to all forms of magic, even fortune telling, on his territory.

            While modern popular portrayals of the "witch craze" will sometimes claim that up to 9 million witches were killed, those high numbers have no basis in historical research.  Rather, the 9 million figure was a speculative estimate made by writers in the Enlightenment (Voltaire in particular) without benefit of any hard research or documentation: writers whose agenda it was to demonstrate that the church and its superstitions are evil.  This was part of the larger anti-church, anti-religion rhetoric of that era.  Modern research, using documentary evidence and statistical analysis puts the number at 40,000 to 50,000, the bulk of these executions taking place in the period 1550-1650, predominantly within a 500 km radius of Strasburg.

            It is also noteworthy that the civil authorities, not the ecclesiastical authorities, were largely responsible for the arrests, convictions, and executions.  The church, contrary to popular notions—and especially the Roman Catholic Church—often functioned as a mitigating influence.  The famous witch trials in the Basque country (1610-1614) serve as a case in point.  Begun by local secular authorities who burned a dozen women and men for sorcery, the matter was soon taken over by the Spanish Inquisition (originally created to pursue lapsed converts from Judaism).  The inquisitor assigned to the case, Alonso Salazar Frias, was sceptical about the whole matter.  He was given the authority of an Edict of Grace, which meant that all who confessed would be pardoned.  He gathered confessions from nearly 2,000 people across the region.  When most of them later retracted their confessions, saying that they had given them to end the torture (a common interrogation tool used by all authorities of the age), they were pardoned and released.  In other words, the local civil authorities, some of whom had probably read Malleus Maleficarum or had heard about it from others, had burned a dozen supposed sorcerers/witches, while the Inquisition, which gave its inquisitors instructions to ignore the book, pardoned all.

            Further to this topic is what Marie Theres Fögen points out in her article, "Balsamon on Magic: From Roman Secular Law to Byzantine Canon Law" [from the collection "Byzantine Magic" edited by Henry Maguire, © 1995 Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington D.C.—Dumbarton Oaks is a leading centre of Byzantine studies].  The first legal prohibitions in the Roman Empire against magic, sorcery, divining, and so on were promulgated in official decrees from emperors Constantius II, Valentian, and Valens, all during the mid 4^thcentury.  They were sweeping prohibitions that equated magic and other occult practices with treason and murder and prescribed the death penalty.  According to the contemporary writer Ammianus, a paranoid "witch hunt" (to use our modern term) ensued in which men and women of every social rank (including the highly educated who possessed books of magic or understood how to practice astrology) were rounded up, tried, and executed indiscriminately.  This came from the state, which seemed to fear the power of magic to influence or threaten those on the throne.

            Later in the same century, the bishop Gregory of Nyssa, who would go on to become one of the dominant theological figures in eastern Christianity, proposed that practitioners of magic should not be treated as criminals, but as apostates or as deceived people, and that their only punishment should be the penances prescribed for anyone who falls away from the faith (a type of graduated, temporary excommunication as laid out in the acts of the Councils of Nicaea I and Constantinople I).  The goal was not punishment but rehabilitation.  This became the normative view in the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire.  We see, then, in the 14^th century, in the documents of the patriarchal court of Constantinople, exactly that: people convicted of magic, sorcery, witchcraft, divining, and so on, being barred from communion for a time (guilty priests were "deposed", i.e., defrocked), some being sent to monasteries for a period of rehabilitation, and at worst, a few being exiled from the city of Constantinople.  By convincing the state to remove the occult from secular jurisdiction, the state's often harsh legalism (including maiming) was softened by mercy.  In the west, it would take the calamities of the Thirty Years War and the emerging Enlightenment to put an end to the burning of heretics and witches.