1484 Pope Innocent VIII issues the witch-hunting bull Summis desiderantes.
Though using magic in harmful ways (maleficium) was illegal in most cultures, we cannot speak of a witch craze in Europe until the late fifteenth century when Dominican Inquisitors began to persuade the Church that witchcraft was a variety of heresy and thus worthy of extirpation. Two documents were instrumental in provoking a social concern with witchery that lasted over two centuries. One was Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of Witches by Sprenger and Kramer, two German Dominicans; the second was the papal decree of 1484 Summis desiderantes. The latter begins:
It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that in some parts of upper Germany, as well as in the provinces, cities, territories, regions, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth, the grapes of vines, and the fruits of trees, as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind, vineyards also and orchards, meadows, pastures, harvests, grains and other fruits of the earth; that they afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women, cattle, flocks, herds, and animals, and hinder men from begetting and women from conceiving, and prevent all consummation of marriage; that, moreover, they deny with sacrilegious lips the faith they received in holy baptism; and that, at the instigation of the enemy of mankind, they do not fear to commit and perpetrate many other abominable offences and crimes, at the risk of their own souls, to the insult of the divine majesty and to the pernicious example and scandal of multitudes.
Over the next 200 years the Church and local authorities in some parts of Europe, especially Germany, arrested thousands of suspected witches, executing probably about 50,000 of them. This was not a “Female Holocaust” with 9,000,000 victims as some, including the National Film Board of Canada, have laughably asserted but a set of panicked reactions to an age of upheaval and violence. The Church feared heresy, secular officials feared disorder and ordinary people feared supernatural harm. Where judicial torture was legal, bizarre confessions were the result; where torture was illegal, as in England or Ireland, witchcraft confessions were few. Despite its black reputation the Spanish Inquisition was among the first to call a halt to these trials, seeing in them only deluded ravings.