Our witch quiz is pure fun, but the people accused in the witch trials were real. Between about 1400 and 1775 some 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and British America, and historians estimate that 40,000 to 60,000 of them were executed. About four in five of those convicted were women. This is the short history of how it happened and how it ended.
The Hammer of Witches
In 1487 the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer published the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, with Jacobus Sprenger named as co-author. It described how to find, question and punish witches. It was printed 13 times by 1520 and another 16 times between 1574 and 1669, nearly thirty editions in all. It did not start the witch hunts on its own, but it gave them a handbook.
The peak: 1560 to 1630
Prosecutions peaked between about 1560 and 1630, when more than 40,000 people died. The Holy Roman Empire was hit hardest. In the prince-bishopric of Würzburg alone, around 900 people were executed between 1626 and 1631. Witches were blamed for hailstorms, failed harvests, sick animals and dead children, and torture produced confessions that named more suspects, who named more in turn. Weather magic was one of the commonest charges, and it lives on, harmlessly, in The Storm Witch.
Witch trials in Hungary and today's Slovakia
In the Kingdom of Hungary, which then included today's Slovakia, 1,644 people, 1,482 women and 160 men, are documented as tried for sorcery between 1520 and 1780, and historians estimate over 800 more cases left no record. Here the hunts came late: they were most intense between 1690 and 1750, when much of Europe had already stopped. The most notorious case is Szeged in 1728, when 13 people were burned at the stake.
The end came from Vienna. Gerard van Swieten, the court physician who had also investigated the vampire reports, persuaded Empress Maria Theresa to stop the trials. From 1756 a royal command overturned Hungarian witchcraft convictions, and a law of 1768 banned the death penalty for witchcraft. Even so, an illegal trial ended in one more execution in 1777 in Kežmarok, in today's Slovakia: the last witchcraft execution in Hungary.
How the trials ended
Doubts about torture and evidence grew through the 17th century, and the trials faded. Britain's Witchcraft Act of 1735 ended witchcraft as a crime in its old form, Maria Theresa outlawed witch burning and torture in her lands in 1768, and by the late 18th century witchcraft had ceased to be a criminal offence across Europe. Anna Göldi, executed in Glarus in Switzerland in 1782, officially for poisoning, is often called the last person executed as a witch in Europe.
Two myths about the witch trials
Nine million victims. The figure still circulates, but it goes back to a 1783 calculation by Gottfried Christian Voigt, a lawyer in Quedlinburg, who counted the trials in his own town and multiplied them out to the whole of Europe over 650 years. Historians who studied the actual trial records rejected it. The real number of executions is in the tens of thousands.
Witches burned at Salem. In the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693 more than 200 people were accused. Nineteen were hanged, Giles Corey was pressed to death under stones, and at least five died in jail. Nobody was burned. Burning was common in continental Europe, but not in England or its colonies.
Why remember them
Most of the accused were ordinary people: older women, widows, healers and neighbours in a quarrel. The trials show how quickly fear, rumour and torture can create guilt. That is a good reason to keep the witch of folklore, the clever, independent, slightly dangerous woman of the tales, as a character worth celebrating. You can meet her many faces in Types of Witches in European Folklore.
If you came for the lighter side of witchcraft, take the witch and wizard quiz.