Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/556

 54:0 WITCHCRAFT. wherever an inquisitor passed he was overwhelmed with accusa- tions against all who could be imagined to be guilt y, from children of tender years to superannuated crones. When Girolamo Yisconti was sent to Como he speedily raised such a storm of witchcraft that in 1485 he burned no less than forty-one unfortunates in the little district of Wormserbad in the Grisons — an exploit repeatedly referred to by Sprenger with honest professional pride.* A special impulse was given to this development when Inno- cent VIII. , December 5, 14S1, issued his Bull Summis desiderantes, in which he bewailed the deplorable fact that all the Teutonic lands were filled with men and women w^ho exercised upon the faithful all the malignant power which we have seen ascribed to witch- craft, and of which he enumerates the details with awe-inspiring amplification. Henry Institoyis and Jacob Sprenger had for some time been performing the office of inquisitors in those regions, but their commissions did not specially mention sorcery as included in their jurisdiction, wherefore their efforts were impeded by over- wise clerks and laymen who used this as an excuse for protecting the guilty. Innocent therefore gives them fall authority in the premises and orders the Bishop of Strassburg to coerce all who obstruct or interfere with them, calling in, if necessary, the aid of the secular arm. After this, to question the reality of witchcraft was to question the utterance of the Yicar of Christ, and to aid any one accused was to impede the Inquisition. Armed with these powers the two inquisitors, full of zeal, traversed the land, leaving behind them a track of blood and tire, and awakening in all hearts the cruel dread inspired by the absolute belief thus inculcated in all the horrors of witchcraft. In the little town of Eavenspurg alone they boast that they burned forty-eight in five years, f It is true that they were not everywhere so successful. In the t Mall. Malef. P. n. Q i. c. 4. Innocent's bull was not confined to Germany alone, but was operative every- where. In an Italian inquisitorial manual of the period it is included in a col- lection of bulls "contra heretkam pravitatem" which also contains a letter on the subject from the future Emperor Maximilian, dated Brussels, November 6, I486.— Molinier, Etudes sur quelques MSS. des Bibliotheques dltalie, Paris, 1887, p. 72.
 * Mall. Malef. P. I. Q. xi. ; P. n. Q. i. c. 4, 12; P. irr. Q. 15.