Le Chat Noir�
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THE MIDDLE AGES
Popular belief in witches was universal in Europe. But the church considered witchcraft a delusion; And civil authorities did not legislate against sorcery as such and prosecuted witches only for a specific cause, such as murder. Witches were often charged with poisoning and other injuries as well as murder. A practice which might involve the charge of murder was the making of an image of a hated person and consuming it over a slow fire or sticking it with pins.
Comunities were sometimes impelled into witch hunts by epedemics or abnormal weather patterns destructive to crops. Such manifestations were local and tended to pass with the occasion. One phenomenon that did not pass so quickly was the devastating plague known as The Black Death, which in the 14th century destroyed about a quarter of the population in Europe. The terror and deep social dislocation of this epedemic led to manifestations of mass hysteria, to the crazed pilgrimages of the Flagellants and, by 1348, to persecution of the Jews in the belief that they had caused the plague by poisoning wells and the air. Pope Clement VI (1342-1352) tried in vain to dispel the illusion and to stop the persecution, and offered the Jews what protection he could at his court at Avignon. Such stress and and social disorganization provided the climate of opinion which made the witch terror possible.
In the 15th century prosecution sponsored by the church began in earnest, and a number of prominent persons in Western Europe where executed as witches. The most famous was Joan of Arc . In this prosecution the issue was not whether she had done harm, but whether the voices she claimed to have heard, and which commanded her to wears man's garb and to lead the French armies, were sent, by God or the devil. Several years after her death in1431, a second trial was held at which she was exonerated, and in 1920 she was canonized.
During the principal period of witch persecution during the 16th and 17th centuries, large numbers of people were killed. Estimates of the men, women and children executed by hanging or burning range from 300,000 to as many as 9,000,000. In America the most famous outbreak of witch persecutions occured at the end of this period, in 1692, at Salem, Mass. The last trial for witchcraft in England took place in 1712 and in France in 1718.
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