Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting The Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities   Page 2 Wolfgang Behringer   The resumption of witch-hunting in the 1560ies was accompanied by a debate about weather-making, because this was the most important charge against suspected witches. Though witches were certainly made responsible for all kinds of bad luck, in an agrarian society weather is especially important. Crop failure caused increases in prices, malnutrition, rising infant mortality, and finally epidemics. Through sources we can observe that while individual "unnatural" accidents resulted in individual accusations of witchcraft, in case of "unnatural" weather and collective damage whole peasant communities demanded persecution. In comparison to individual accusations, which tended to lead to trials against individual suspects, collective demands for persecution - when accepted by the authorities - regularly resulted in large-scale witch-hunts (Behringer 1995). Without going into details, the fundamental interdependance of meteorological desaster, crop failure, and a popular demand for witch-hunts can be demonstrated by two further examples: the largest witch-hunt of the sixteenth century, and the largest witch-hunt of the seventeenth century, which occurred between 1626-1630 and was the climax of European witchcraft persecutions. The mechanisms detected in the background of these persecutions can be applied to all large witchcraft persecutions in traditional Europe. Starting in the 1560ies a series of witch-panics shook the European societies, followed by attempts to legalise witchcraft persecutions (e.g. the English and Scottish witchcraft statutes of 1563). After the initial witch-hunts of 1562/63 a wave of persecutions followed the hunger crisis of the years around 1570 (Bidembach 1570), resulting from the catastrophic coldness of the previous two years (Pfister 1988, 119f.). But a totally new persecutory zeal can be observed during the 1580ies. In the end of the 1570ies crop-failure and price rise again caused a hunger crisis in parts of central Europe (Rhode 1580) with the effect of witch-burnings in many places (Zwo Newe Zeittung, was man für Hexen und Unholden verbrendt hat, 1580). After 1580 the persecutions began to reach a previously unknown extent. Between 1580 and 1620 in the Pays de Vaud, subject of the reformed Swiss town of Berne, more than 1000 persons were burned for witchcraft (Kamber 1982). Between 1580 and 1595 more than 800 witches were burned in the duchy of Lorraine, subject to the Catholic dukes so heavily involved in the struggle for power in the French religious wars. If recent estimations are true that until 1620 ca. 2.700 persons had been legally killed as witches, this was the largest witch-hunt in European history in one territory (Briggs 1989, 67; Behringer 1998, 61). The Lorraine witch-hunts were closely connected with those in the neighbouring prince-archbishopric of Treves where 350 witch-burnings occured between 1581 and 1595. A local chronicler gave an account over the reasons for that witch-hunt which was the biggest one in German-speaking territories in the 16th century. Johann Linden, canon at St. Simeon in Treves, explains in his Gesta Treverorum the tremendous persecutions under Archbishop Johann VII. von Schönenberg (gov. 1581-1599) as follows: "Hardly any of the Archbishops governed their diocese with such hardship, such sorrows and such extreme difficulties as Johann (...). During the whole period he had to endure with his subjects a continuous lack of grain, the rigours of climate and crop failure. Only two of the nineteen years were fertile, the years 1584 and 1590 (...). Since everybody thought that the continuous crop-failure was caused by witches from devilish hate, the whole country stood up for their eradication ..." (Behringer 1988). Until recently this explanation was not taken seriously, but new research demonstrates that the persecution was indeed not only demanded but also organized by the population. Since the legal administration of the territory was rather inefficient and the officials were reluctant to persecution, village committees began to extend their competence and organized the witch-hunts themselves. Elected committees collected informations, captured and tried the suspected persons, and delivered them to the authorities only after they had already confessed. The persecution thus resembled a popular uprising where the people usurpated functions usually reserved to state authorities. It was only in 1591, when the popular acceptance of the persecution in the Archbishopric declined, that the Electoral Prince tried to deprive the local committees of their power and to recover authority (Rummel 1991). A woodcut on a contemporaneous broadsheet gives an impresson of the reason for these persecutions: It shows a panoramatic landscape with three tremendous thunderstorms, coming down on villages and fields while witches are flying through the air, casting their spells (Sigfriedus, sine dato, ca. 1590). Similary a 1590 printed broadsheet about the witch-hunt in Southern Germany reads like a collection of meteorological desasters and their consequences on physical and mental health (Erweytterte Unholden Zeyttung 1590). Traditional historical explanations certainly drew on the impact of the counter-reformation during these years, but it seems necessary to mention that since 1586 the long and cold winters were complemented by cold and wet springs and summers, thus causing hunger and epidemics and creating an enormous psychological stress among the contemporaries. In 1586 the famous news-collection of the Fuggers (Fugger-Zeitungen) reported explicitly of a "great fear" among the people, a term which reminds us of "la grand peur" in advance of the French Revolution. The beginning witch-hunts indeed grew into revolutionary dimensions, involving for the first time members of the ruling oligarchies: magistrates as well as clerics or noblemen (Behringer 1988). Unlike the hunger-crisis of 1570, the crisis of the 1580ies carried on for ten or more years. Socio-economic explanations of the crises pointed out that since the 1560ies a general decline of living standards was due to a conflict between the demographic movement, continuous population growth on the one hand, and the narrowing of food supply by reasons of ecological crisis on the other side (Pfister 1988, 2nd book). In addition, in the vine-growing areas of Central Europe, from Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Germany into Northern France, there was a permanent decline of income due to the deterioration of wine harvests (see Landsteiner, this volume). Basket-of-goods-calculations on the basis of statistical data of the Imperial City Augsburg have demonstrated that since 1586 an average craftsman with a familiy of four was no longer able to achieve the necessary living costs without help from other members of his family (Saalfeld 1971). The socio-economic desaster affected the society as a whole. But meteorological disfavour was hardest felt in the disadvantaged areas like the Bernese highlands, the scottish highlands, the mountaineous regions of Lorraine, the Archbishopric Treves, the Alsatian Vosges or the Ardennes in Northern France. It was foremost in these regions that the growing of cereals or wine was in danger through increasing wetness, decreasing temperature, shortening vegetation periods, and the enhanced frequency of hailstorms. Since 1586 the impact of a series of cold and prolonged winters was sharpened by a period of wet and cold springs and summers. In Switzerland in 1587 snow covered the surface until late spring, snowfall returned on the 4th of July down to 400 meter (Schweizer Mittelland), and again in the middle of September. 1588, when the invincible Armada failed in heavy storms, was one of the most rainy years in history. Swiss chronicler Renward Cysat reports, that there were severe thunderstorms starting in June almost every day (Pfister 1988). It was during these two years that witchcraft accusations reached their climax in England and France, while the large-scale witch-hunts in Scotland and Germany started (Behringer 1998). The synchronicity of accusations and persecutions in these far-away countries, not connected by dynastic, confessional, economic or other links, demonstrates the importance of the climatic factor climate for explanation. It can be shown from many individual witch-trials that meteorological events contributed decisively to many individual suspicions and accusations, and as we know now from climatic history, these events often had super-local, super-regional, or "super-national" character. Areas of low pressure could cover large regions; the advance of arctic air could harm at least the northern part of the continent or even the northern hemisphere. What we can learn from this is that contemporary lamentation about decrasing fruitfulness of the fields, of the cattle, and even of men where far from being just rethoric devices, but rested on empirical observation (Lehmann 1986). The rising tide of demonological literature did in no way ridicule such lamentations, but was written by members of the contemporary élites like the famous French jurist Jean Bodin, the suffragan bishop of Treves Peter Binsfeld, the chief public prosecutor of Lorraine Nicolas Rémy, or the king of Scotland James VI. who was about to become James I. of England. They all shared the idea that witches could be responsible for the weather theologically based on the theory that on the basis of the evil compact, the devil could exercise his wishes (Clark 1996). http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/hist/staff/wmb1 NEXT PAGE