Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/550

 534 WITCHCRAFT. cerning witchcraft was to a great extent artificial — the creation of a comparatively few credulous ecclesiastics and judges : the mass of educated clerks and jurists were disposed to hold fast to the defi- nition of the Cap. Episcopi, and to regard it as a delusion. Had the Church resolutely repressed the growing superstition, in place of stimulating it with all the authority of the Holy See, infinite bloodshed and misery might have been spared to Christendom. The development of the witchcraft epidemic, in fact, had not been rapid. The earliest detailed account which we have of it is that of Xider, in his Formicarixis, written in 1337. Although Xider himself seems to have sometimes acted as inquisitor, he tells us that his information is principally derived from the experience of Peter of Berne, a secular judge, who had burned large numbers of witches of both sexes, and had driven many more from the Bernese territory, which they had infested for about sixty years. This would place the origin of witchcraft in that region towards the close of the fourteenth century, and Silvester Prierias, as we have seen, attributes it to the first years of the fifteenth. Ber- nardo di Como, writing about 1510, assigns to it a somewhat earlier origin, for he says the records of the Inquisition of Como showed that it had existed for a hundred and fifty years. It is quite likely, indeed, that the gradual development of witchcraft from ordinary sorcery commenced about the middle of the fourteenth century. The great jurist Bartolo, who died in 1357, when acting as judge at Xovara, tried and condemned a woman who confessed to hav- ing adored the devil, trampled on the cross, and killed children by touching and fascinating them. This approach to the later witch- craft was so novel to him that he appealed to the theologians to explain it. In this there seems no reference to the distinctive feature of the Sabbat, but the popular beliefs concerning Holda and Dame Habonde and their troop were rife, and the coalescence of the various superstitions was only a question of time. As early as 1353 an allusion to the witches' dance occurs in a trial at Tou- louse. Thus the stories grew, under the skilful handling of such Mantes of belonging to the accursed sect. He was burned August 26, 1460. His wife, whom he had implicated, escaped sharing his fate by an appeal to the Parlement. — Duverger, La Vauderie dans les £tats de Philippe le Bon, pp. 52-3, 84.