Every year on 5 November, the townspeople of Lewes in East Sussex get together to chant anti-Catholic slogans and burn an effigy of the pope, a business which usually occasions a minor frisson in these politically correct times. It is a continuation of a 17th-century tradition once widespread across England, and an act of symbolic revenge for seventeen Protestant martyrs burned at Lewes in the reign of Mary Tudor. The event (as well as the original episode it commemorates) exemplifies a mentality widespread in the Reformation era, and still with us in various secular and religious guises: a desire to shore up the identity of the majority group by stereotyping and dehumanizing an excluded minority. The unfolding of the Reformation involved contact and confrontation with a series of such alien presences, within and beyond the boundaries of Christian Europe. Examining the fate of these ‘others’, both real and imagined, enables us to appreciate the extent to which the Reformations were, simultaneously and paradoxically, a channel for intense bigotries and a route to pluralism and social tolerance.
On 27 October 1553, Miguel Servetus, a Spanish doctor, was burned to death outside the walls of Geneva. Servetus was an ‘anti-trinitarian’, who propounded the shocking view that Jesus was not God in human flesh, but simply human, a prophet of the Almighty. If the Calvinists had not caught and burned him, the Catholics would have done it, and there were few respectable people anywhere in Europe who felt he had got less than he deserved. Sebastian Castellio, a Genevan schoolmaster exiled by Calvin, published a text, Concerning Heretics, whether they are to be persecuted, arguing that they should not. But this was an eccentric opinion: heresy was the worst of crimes, a crime directly against God. Hanging was literally too good for the heretic, whose body was burned, as a ritual purging of society, and as a symbolic foreshadowing of the flames of hell which would undoubtedly consume the heretic’s soul.
From 1523, when two Augustinian friars, members of Luther’s order, were burned in Brussels, through to the middle of the 17th century, around 5,000 men and women were judicially executed in Western Europe on account of their religious beliefs. They were executed by state power, working in collaboration with the Church. Most of them, particularly in the early part of the period, were executed by Catholic authorities. Later, Catholics, particularly priests, were put to death by Protestants in England, Ireland, and the Netherlands, though the official rationale tended to be ‘treason’ rather than ‘heresy’, in order to maintain the moral high ground of Protestants being the ones who suffered for their faith. Modern ecumenical sensibility extends the title ‘martyr’ to all of these people, though in the 16th century that would have caused offence all round. Both Catholics and Protestants agreed with the ancient judgement of St Augustine that it is not the fact of the death but the rightness of the cause which makes a martyr (in practice, most of us still concur with this, unwilling, for example, to bestow the title of ‘martyr’ on Islamic suicide bombers). One group’s execution of a heretic was another’s heroic death of a martyr, and the same events were read and commemorated in radically different ways. Martyrdoms defined and divided the differing camps; there was no going back from them on either side. The final words of the Reformation’s first martyrs, Hendrik Vos and Johann van den Esschen, spoke for the mentality of all who accepted death rather than recant: ‘we believe in God and in one Christian Church. But we do not believe in your church.’ By definition, martyrs were those with adamantine convictions, and in eliminating them, rather than persuading them to cave in, the persecuting authorities were admitting a kind of defeat. Martyrs, and would-be martyrs, were a small minority of all religious groups, but a minority with the power to force the pace and confound compromise. They were intensely memorialized, as shining symbols of the cause and an encouragement to the weaker brethren. The printing press played a significant part in this: Catholic Europe wept with pride and anger over detailed engravings depicting the barbarities inflicted on missionary priests by Elizabeth I’s government; French Huguenots read about the witness of their martyrs in the compilation of Jean Crespin, and English Protestants, from the 16th century through to the 19th and beyond, grew up on the stories and vivid pictures in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
17. A woodcut from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs of seven Protestants burned together at Smithfield in 1556. Examination of surviving copies suggests that such stirring pictures were the most heavily studied part of Foxe’s text
Yet the great majority of people burned to death for religion were not to be found in the pages of magisterial Protestant martyrologies. This was because they were anabaptists who had died for the ‘wrong’ reasons, and Protestant governments were nearly as resolute as Catholic ones in hunting down and punishing representatives of this loose and disparate phenomenon, for which ‘movement’ is too precise a description. The Reformation first turned judicially on its own in 1527, when Felix Mantz was executed at Zürich. He was, in a characteristic gesture of Swiss Protestant authorities, not burned but drowned, a brutally droll commentary on adult rebaptism. The intensity of hostility to anabaptists allows us to read back the social and political importance to established authority of the values and practices the anabaptists rejected. Beyond often denying foundational doctrines, like the divinity of Christ, or the Trinity, anabaptists appeared shockingly antisocial, threatening the very fabric of Christian society. Believing that only members of their sect could be saved, they repudiated the conventional teaching that Church and state were the complementary faces of a single Christian community. Instead, they opted out, repudiating duties of military service and refusing the oath-swearing that underpinned the operations of courts, and the obligations of citizenship and guild membership, in all early modern towns. Their assertion of adult baptism symbolized the desire to create a parallel society of their own. Most anabaptists, particularly later in the 16th century, were pacifists, but anabaptism had its militant side, and in 1534–5 was responsible for a shocking episode – a ‘9/11’ moment that fixed the stereotype of danger and deviancy in the minds of all right-thinking Christians. In alliance with refugees from the Netherlands, a group of anabaptists violently seized control of the episcopal town of Münster in northwest Germany. Their leader crowned himself king of a new Jerusalem. Private property was abolished and civic records destroyed. With an over-supply of women in the town, polygamy was declared compulsory. It is a measure of how severely the established powers were rattled that the Protestant Philip of Hesse assisted the Catholic Bishop Franz von Waldeck in retaking the town. In the years after Münster, anabaptism was more or less persecuted out of existence in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. It survived longer in Eastern Europe, where the followers of Jakob Hutter practised community of goods in their own structured communities. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these and other anabaptists emigrated to America, where Hutterite and Amish descendants still practise a life of austere separation from corrupting worldly society.
Most executions for heresy or Catholic treason preceded 1600. Even as confessional divisions became increasingly clear and rigid, it was apparent in many places that religious minorities could not be persecuted out of existence, though efforts were made to preserve the fiction that only one religion was practised within the boundaries of the state. Non-conformists were tacitly permitted to cross borders on Sundays, a practice that in Germany was called Auslauf (running out). Catholics in the Calvinist Palatinate attended mass in the neighbouring bishopric of Speyer, and Lutherans from Habsburg Silesia crossed into Saxony for worship. Alternatively, dissidents might be allowed unofficial places of worship, so long as they gave no outside indication of being a church. Unobtrusive Catholic ‘mass houses’ proliferated in the backstreets of Irish towns, and Dutch Catholics worshipped in clandestine churches which could be remarkably elaborate on the inside, but from the street looked like ordinary merchants’ houses. Some German towns (most prominently, Augsburg) were officially ‘bi-confessional’. Here, Lutherans and Catholics competed to advertise their presence in public spaces, using song, processions, and satiric rituals. Possession of a town’s principal church was often a source of contention, the solution to which might be to share. To some, this seemed virtually blasphemous, and the papacy fulminated against the dual use of churches in the early 17th century. The practice was nonetheless widespread, though hardly ‘ecumenical’ in a modern sense. Precise civic regulations controlled when and how each confession could use the building, with the others eagle-eyed for the slightest infringement.
Toleration is not the same as tolerance. The latter is a fundamentally modern attitude, implying acceptance of diversity for its own sake, and an attempt to understand opposing points of view. Dissenters were ‘tolerated’ not from principle, but for grudging, pragmatic reasons, because peace was usually seen as preferable to religious civil war – the reason for the concession of rights to private worship in the Treaty of Westphalia. Within communities, toleration was a negotiated social practice, and there was no straightforward ‘rise of toleration’ at the end of the Reformation period. In some respects, traffic was in the opposite direction: intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants in Holland was, for example, less common at the end of the 17th century than at its beginning. Episodes of intense religious violence and intolerance occurred through to the end of the 17th century and into the 18th: Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or the 1731 expulsion of a large Lutheran minority from the archbishopric of Salzburg. Yet in the second half of the 18th century, the religious pluralism created by the Reformation did finally receive legal recognition in most of the major monarchies, with the granting of limited civil rights to Catholics in England and Prussia, surviving Huguenots in France, and Lutherans and Calvinists in Habsburg lands.
The religious confrontations and negotiations of Reformation Europe were not necessarily intra-Christian. Neighbouring Islam was the principal political and cultural ‘other’ of medieval Christian Europe, and while confrontation continued, the Reformation complicated Christianity’s relations with the world’s other universalizing monotheism. As Protestantism established itself, European Islam was on the advance in the East and in retreat in the West. Following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Islamic armies pushed into Europe through the Balkans, inflicting a crushing defeat on the king of Hungary in 1526 and capturing Buda in 1541. Meanwhile, the Islamic civilization of medieval Spain had finally crumbled, with the fall of Granada in 1492. Spanish Muslims were shortly presented with a stark choice: conversion or expulsion. The majority opted for the former, without enthusiasm or conviction. Their old Christian neighbours sneeringly dubbed them ‘Moriscos’, and the Inquisition closely scrutinized them for lapses from orthodoxy. From the end of the 15th century, progressive restrictions were placed on traditional dress and dietary customs, and when Philip II ordered the handing over of children for education by Christian families, the Morisco villagers of the Alpujarras exploded in revolt (1568–70). In its aftermath, the Moriscos were transplanted from Granada, further away from potential allies in North Africa, and in a large-scale act of ethnic cleansing were expelled totally from Spain in 1609. The militancy of Spanish Catholicism owed much to a sense of its duty to defend the faith on several fronts: against Dutch and English heretics, against Muslim advances in the Mediterranean, and against an Islamic fifth column at home. But for other West Europeans, too, Islam was more than a distant bogeyman. North African pirates were active throughout the Mediterranean and the Atlantic seaboard, raiding coastal settlements in Ireland and the west of England well into the 17th century. It is a remarkable statistic that around one million West European Christians were captured and enslaved in Africa between about 1530 and 1640. The fact that a significant number of these converted to the religion of their new masters was a recurrent cause of shock and surprise.
Protestants did not generally hail Muslims as brothers-in-arms against a common Catholic enemy. Indeed, the 1571 victory of Pius V’s Holy League against the Turkish navy at Lepanto was widely celebrated in Protestant as well as Catholic Europe. Islam denied the divinity of Christ, and thus, for Luther, Muslims were simply enemies of God. He did not indulge in any of the crusading rhetoric which continued for centuries, well past its sell-by date, in much of Catholic Europe; force should not be used to advance the gospel. But Luther firmly associated the Ottoman Empire with the coming last days, and the pope and ‘the Turk’ maintained in his mind a kind of job-share on the position of Antichrist. Some medieval commentators had regarded Islam as a deviant ‘Christian sect’ with whom common ground could in principle be found. But ‘inter-faith dialogue’ was not a phrase in Luther’s mental lexicon. He helped sponsor a printed Latin translation of the Koran in 1542, not in a spirit of religious openness, but so the views of the enemy could be known and refuted.
Yet Islam played its part in the advance of the Reformation, and not only by diverting Charles V from action against German Protestants, or preventing Philip II’s full attention to the Dutch Revolt. In occupied Eastern Europe (and in contrast to reconquered Spain) the Ottomans did not force conversion on their subject peoples, and, happy to see the forces of Christianity divided, did not impede the activities of Protestant missionaries. There was also a degree of curiosity about, and relative sympathy towards, the new faith. The pope, instigator of crusades, was Islam’s historic enemy. Calvinism’s rejection of religious imagery struck a common chord, as still more did the anti-trinitarians’ repudiation of what had always seemed to Muslims the offensive polytheism of Christianity’s three-sided God. The most radical anabaptists were in fact safer from persecution in Ottoman territory than in any Christian-controlled state, and the first broadly pluralistic Christian societies were shaped, ironically enough, under the patronage of the Sultan. Curiosity about Islam and Islamic society in the West can be traced through a growing volume of printed texts in the 16th and 17th centuries. Much of this was frankly hostile, or encouraged a voyeuristic and ‘Orientalist’ interest in slave markets and harems, and in the supposed propensity of Turks for both male and female homosexuality. But, particularly later in the period, other sources made attempts at more impartial and accurate description. Some writers, to highlight the shortcomings of Christian society, even emphasized Turkish ‘virtues’ of abstinence, charitable giving, and female modesty. Conceivably, ethnographic literature of this sort, once it started to represent Islam in other than apocalyptic terms, helped European Christians to envisage other possible belief systems, and to start recognizing the category of ‘religion’ as potentially separable from ‘society’.
If the Turks were a nearby but external ‘other’, a mirror to Christian society, Jews represented a different sort of challenge because of their longstanding presence as an irritant foreign body within the societas Christianorum. While relations between Christians and Jews had always been difficult, the high and later Middle Ages witnessed an intensification of popular and official hostility, with Jews expelled from England in 1290, France in 1306, Spain (in celebration of the conquest of Granada) in 1492, and Portugal in 1497. Even where Jews were allowed to remain, outbursts of fury against them were a recurrent possibility, often fuelled by the ‘blood libel’ that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian boys to use their blood in the baking of Passover bread. A related charge was that of host desecration: Jews were believed to wish to steal consecrated eucharistic wafers in order to torture them, and thus perpetuate their violence against the body of Jesus. Hostility to Jews was often stirred up by the preaching of the friars, but by and large secular and religious authorities sought to restrain popular violence against them, mindful of their importance to the urban economy and state financing arrangements.
Luther’s pamphlet of 1523, That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew, seemed to promise a new start in relations, urging courteous and kind treatment. This, however, was not respect for difference but a conversion strategy, and similar approaches had been advocated before. Not only did Jews not turn to the gospel, but news reaching Luther of a radical sect in Moravia advocating the readoption of Saturday as the Christian day of observance seemed to presage a Jewish revival. Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies (1543) makes for depressing reading: he advocated the confiscation and destruction of the Talmud (compilations of Jewish laws and traditions), the prohibition of rabbinic teaching, the burning of synagogues, and expulsions. The vitriol behind this text was theological, not ‘racial’ in our modern sense, but it was to be favoured reading in 1930s Germany. Some reformers felt Luther had gone too far, yet none moved beyond the position that Jews were at best wilfully perverse in spurning the offer of the gospel. Indeed, it was a staple of Protestant propaganda that papists and Jews were remarkably similar, in thrall to ‘works-righteousness’, and obsessed with rituals and rules.
If the Reformation provided no new dawn for Jews, the Sun was setting further in the Catholic world. Paul IV, the most unbending of Counter-Reformation popes, forced the Jews of Rome into a ghetto in 1555, amidst seizure and burning of Talmudic writings. Italian Jews were ghettoized almost everywhere in the course of the following century – an expression of Tridentine zeal, but also an opportunity for secular rulers to supervise Jewish economic activity more effectively. Catholic intolerance was most acute in Spain, which in theory had solved its ‘Jewish problem’ at a stroke in 1492, but in fact employed a governmental industry – the Spanish Inquisition and its army of informers – to check for backsliding on the part of ‘New Christians’, or conversos. The Inquisition burned about 2,000 ‘judaisers’ in its first half-century between 1480 and 1530, the only period for which it really deserves its bloodthirsty reputation. The processes were arbitrary, but bureaucratic and evidence-based, so conversos were at least prosecuted for the real ‘crimes’ of avoiding pork or observing the Jewish Sabbath, rather than for such fantasy transgressions as ritual murder or defilement of the host. Anti-Jewish sentiments in 16th-century Spain were enshrined in legislation requiring non-Jewish ancestry, limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), as a condition for the holding of ecclesiastical office. Philip II endorsed the development with the comment that ‘all the heresies in Germany, France, and Spain have been sown by descendants of Jews’, but it was opposed by the Jesuits, and in the early 17th century by the Inquisition itself. Some historians have identified Spain as the birthplace of modern racial ‘anti-Semitism’, but since the antagonisms were overtly religious in nature it seems safer to speak of anti-Judaism.
Well into the 16th century there were few signs that the position of Jews in Europe was changing for anything but the worse. But ultimately the Reformation opened spaces for Judaism to breathe more easily. Inquisitorial scepticism about host desecration was shared in Protestant societies for the simple reason that the denial of transubstantiation rendered the fantasy culturally meaningless. Some places of settlement closed to Jews began to reopen. The Habsburg emperors Maximilian II and Rudolph II allowed Jews to settle in Bohemia at the end of the 16th century, and a few decades later, Cromwell’s Protectorate readmitted them to England. Yet it was the diverse society of the Dutch Republic, where the authorities asked few questions about the private practice of faith, which offered the most attractive destination. New Christians from Portugal and Spain began emigrating there in large numbers in the early 17th century, and quietly returned to the faith of their ancestors. These ‘Sephardic’ Jews shared the strongly anti-Catholic sentiments of Calvinist society, and also regarded Reformed Protestantism as a welcome, though deficient, return to the values of the Hebrew bible. For their part, Protestants’ extensive scriptural reading, as both edification and entertainment, laid the basis for a more positive assessment of Jewish neighbours, who might now remind them more of the heroic figures of the Old Testament than of the vengeful Pharisees of the New. The Protestant vogue for scriptural names – Abraham, Benjamin, Daniel – probably also helped to muddy a sense of the total otherness of the Jew. The attempted realism of Protestant history painting tended in a similar direction. In a radical break with traditional iconography, Rembrandt’s 1645 painting of the Holy Family portrayed Mary as a recognizably Jewish mother, reading a Hebrew book while rocking her son’s cradle.
The most perplexing confrontations with the non-Christian other took place not within, or even on the borders of, Christian Europe, but far overseas, as the imperatives of Reformation caused Catholics (and belatedly, Protestants) to carry the message of Christ to distant lands. Those who did so never doubted the truth of the ancient adage, extra ecclesiam nulla salus (‘there is no salvation outside the Church’). This, the ultimate exclusionary statement, was also an urgent call to inclusion, to work tirelessly to convert pagans and save their souls from eternal damnation. The opportunities were almost literally boundless. But how was conversion to be accomplished, and what if any concessions were to be made to the expectations of host cultures in the process? These dilemmas forced Catholic missionaries to confront questions about what was fundamental to Christianity which were in their way no less profound than those pondered by Luther and Calvin. Remarkably, it did not generally prompt them to ask why, if Christianity was the only door to salvation, God had created millions of souls that for centuries had no opportunity to experience it.
The first major missionary venture was a story in miniature of the successes and screw-ups attending Catholic evangelism beyond Europe. The Portuguese establishment of trading posts along the coast of West Africa at the end of the 15th century netted a few local converts, and one very big fish, the ruler of the powerful kingdom of Kongo, Nzinga Nkuvu, who in 1491 (a year before Columbus) accepted baptism as João I. He had evidently not read all the small print, however, and rejected Christianity after tiring of the missionaries’ insistence on the burning of fetish objects and the restriction to just one wife (a prescription with profound social and political implications). Yet one of his sons, Mvemba Nzinga (Afonso I), remained fervently Christian, and reigned for 39 years. For a century, Kongo was a thriving Catholic African kingdom, but the attempts of the Portuguese crown to control appointments of bishops produced a crippling shortage of clergy, and with the political collapse of the kingdom in the 17th century Kongolese Catholicism effectively fused with native religion. Hampering the Portuguese efforts to spread Christianity more widely and deeply in West Africa was European sponsorship of the burgeoning slave trade. It would be long after the close of the Reformation period before any kind of consensus emerged that Christian faith was incompatible with slavery.
Questions of the intrinsic value of human beings were, however, debated earnestly during the evangelization of the Americas. Cortes’ and Pizarro’s destruction of the Aztec and Inca empires was a political fait accompli, but some churchmen saw the subsequent exploitation of native labour by conquistador landlords as a barrier to missionary work. Others, including the leading Spanish humanist Juan de Sepulveda, inclined to the view that Indians fitted Aristotle’s category of the ‘natural slave’: they were incapable of free will, and thus the legitimate targets of ‘just war’. In 1550, he debated the issue at Valladolid in the presence of Charles V against a fellow Dominican, Bartolomé de las Casas, an indefatigable critic of the crimes of the conquistadors and passionate advocate of the rights of indigenous peoples. The result was inconclusive, but the Spanish crown was inclined to protect ‘its’ Indian subjects from exploitation by self-aggrandizing settlers, and the papacy had already affirmed in a bull of 1537 that Indians were entitled to liberty and to own property. The early years of evangelization in the Americas, largely undertaken by the friars, were full of optimism, as thousands willingly received baptism. But disillusionment at the level of converts’ religious understanding began to set in, and in 1555 a Mexican provincial council forbade the ordaining of Indians to the priesthood, a barrier not broken in Latin America until 1794. Suspicions that his Mayan charges were still secretly worshipping idols led the Franciscan Provincial in Yucatan, Diego de Landa, to launch a vicious inquisitorial campaign over three months in 1562, in the course of which thousands of Indians were tortured (over 150 dying in the process) before Landa was removed from office.
It would be crass to maintain, however, that Amerindians (or the inhabitants of the Philippines in the same period) typically ‘rejected’ Christianity, or continued self-consciously to preserve traditional beliefs under a cynical veneer of official Catholicism. Rather, they adopted the new faith on terms that made sense to them, accentuating some aspects and downplaying others. Churches occupied the sites of temples, and served comparable functions as centres of ceremonial and community life. Public festivals, outdoor processions, and the patronage of guardian saints all resonated with established ways of doing things, and the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’, involving the placing of food and drink as offerings on family graves, exemplifies a syncretic fusion between pre-conquest practices and Catholic celebration of the Feast of All Souls.
Christianity faced different challenges among the ancient civilizations of the Far East, where there were few military conquests to argue the powerlessness of the old gods. In India, the Portuguese made some progress in the vicinity of their coastal bases, including mass conversion of the Paravas, fishing people of the Coromandel Coast, who sought European help against Muslim raiders. But beyond the Portuguese enclaves, Christianity was generally disdained as a low-caste and foreign phenomenon. Attempts to widen its appeal in the East, especially to social elites, were pioneered by Francis Xavier (1506–52), an original Jesuit companion of Loyola’s. As a missionary in Japan, Xavier took the ‘adaptionist’ line that local traditions not directly contrary to Christianity were to be embraced, and laid the foundations for a thriving Japanese Church. Another Jesuit, Roberto Nobili, developed the approach in India, dressing and eating as a high-caste Brahmin, and sanctioning such ‘social’ customs for Christian converts as ritual bathing and the wearing on the body of sacred ashes. The accommodationist technique was also employed by Jesuits in China, where Matteo Ricci (1551–1610) and his successors dressed like Mandarins, impressing the scholarly Chinese administrative class with their cartographic and astronomical skills. In an effort to suggest that Christianity was not an alien import, but the perfection of existing principles, Ricci encouraged the use of roughly analogous Chinese terms for concepts such as ‘God’ and ‘heaven’, and argued that Confucian ancestor worship was a civil ceremony fully compatible with Catholicism.
18. The Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1551–1610) encouraged Christian accommodation with local culture, and here strikes the pose of a Chinese Mandarin
All of these efforts bore fruit: there was unspectacular but steady growth of Christian communities in India, Ceylon, Vietnam, and China, and more dramatic expansion in Japan, under the patronage of regional barons, or daimyos, before it was terminated by the onset of an intense and cruel political persecution. The congregation of Propaganda Fidei showed in the 17th century remarkable openness to the notion that native customs must be respected. But Jesuit methods were opposed by rival missionary groups, especially the Dominicans, who lobbied avidly against them in Europe. In 1704, after years of prevarication, the papacy prohibited ‘Chinese rites’, causing massive offence at the Manchu imperial court, and stifling the expansion of Christianity in China. The global expansion of Catholic Christianity was nonetheless a success story, but one that raised fundamental questions about the nature of the exercise. The struggles of Protestant reformers in Europe to decide what was ‘adiaphora’ paled alongside the calculations made by Jesuits in India and China. Subsequent history proved the missionaries right to believe that Christianity need not be so identified with the norms of European society that it was incapable of speaking meaningfully to peoples in other parts of the world (and in fact there were already centuries-old non-European Christian communities – in the Middle East, in Ethiopia, in China, and among the Syrian-Malabar, or ‘St Thomas Christians’, of India). But if the ‘essence’ of Christianity was detachable from social and cultural structures in Asia, might that not ultimately be true of Europe itself? The valorizing, for purposes of evangelization, of the customs and rituals of strange societies may have had unforeseen and long-term consequences, fostering among European intellectuals a cultural and religious relativism to which Christianity itself was eventually subject.
One outsider to Christian society could not be accommodated, tolerated, or negotiated with: the witch. The belief that certain persons possess magical powers which they employ for evil and destructive purposes is known to many cultures, and was commonplace in the Middle Ages. But, contrary to careless popular usage, the large-scale pursuit and punishment of witches in Europe was not a ‘medieval’ phenomenon, but an aspect of early modernity. Over a period starting in the late 15th century, gathering pace after c. 1560 and drawing to a close in the early 18th century, around 100,000 people (mostly women) were judicially accused of witchcraft in Europe. Of these, perhaps 40,000 were put to death, a figure significantly larger than the number of those executed for religious unorthodoxy in the same epoch, but much smaller than the death-rate for other, more tangible crimes, such as murder or serious theft. The relationship between the Reformation and what is sometimes sensationally termed the ‘European witch craze’ is a complex one. The chronology loosely fits, though intense witch-hunting preceded the onset of the Reformation, and actually died down during its first generation. In spite of often extreme religious rhetoric, Catholics and Protestants generally did not accuse each other of witchcraft. Nor was the principal charge against witches directly linked to major Reformation controversies. Villagers had always suspected antisocial old women of spell-casting and malevolent cursing, but what created a dynamic of official persecution was the growing conviction of theologians that witches constituted a vast army of apostates, who had sworn allegiance to the devil and under his command were at war with Christian society.
It seems unlikely, however, that witch-hunting would have developed in the way or with the ferocity it did without the background of religious conflict. The period of most intense persecution, the two to three decades either side of 1600, coincided with the confessionalization of Protestant and Catholic states, and the most intense bouts of ideological warfare. There was a heightened sense of the need for societal purity and uniformity, which manifested itself in action against these most abnormal of deviants, as well as an apocalyptic atmosphere which directed attention to the machinations of the devil. Whether Catholics or Protestants did more to ramp up the persecution is a moot point. The worst offenders were Catholic prince-bishops of generally small German territories: in 1616–17 over 300 witches were burned by the bishop of Würzburg, Julius Echter von Mespelbrünn, a stalwart of Catholic Reform. But some of the lowest rates of execution were in Catholic southern Europe, where the Spanish Inquisition, like its Roman cousin, was sceptical about the deeds ascribed to witches. Few witches were burned in Calvin’s Geneva, and there were virtually no trials in the Protestant Netherlands or the Calvinist Palatinate. But other Calvinist territories, notably Scotland, witnessed some of the most intense persecutions anywhere, continuing into the 1660s. While witch trials were generally on the wane from the middle of the 17th century, there were nasty outbreaks in English East Anglia during the closing stages of the Civil War, in Lutheran Sweden in 1668–76, and, famously, in the exported Puritan community of Salem, Massachusetts, as late as 1692. A compound alchemy of factors brought the witch trials to a close: more exacting standards of proof in various legal systems, and restrictions on the use of torture, scientific scepticism, and an increased elitist reluctance to take seriously the frenzied accusations of grubby villagers. But the end of religious warfare and halting steps towards pluralism were important parts of the story. As real ‘others’ were grudgingly accepted and integrated into European societies, the imaginary ones lost their existential menace – another indication of the Reformation’s failure to create rigidly uniform Christian communities, and its accidental success in generating something else.
19. A diabolic baptism, from Francesco Maria Guazzo’s Compendium maleficarum (1626): theologians were inclined to imagine witchcraft as an organized and ritualistic ‘counter-church’