There was a time in Europe when the wind did not merely move the trees―it carried accusation. Between roughly 1500 and 1700, tens of thousands of people were tried for witchcraft across Europe and many were executed.
To understand why it happened, we must try and understand that world. A world of cold harvests, divided faith, courts, and churches that believed they were fighting the Devil himself.
The 16th and 17th centuries were marked by bitter climatic instability during what historians now call the ‘Little Ice Age’. Winters were harsher. Summers were wet or unseasonably cold. Crops failed with frightening regularity.
In 1626, the German town of Würzburg recorded such catastrophic weather that vineyards were destroyed and grain rotted in the fields. In that same region, within a few decades, hundreds would be executed for witchcraft. It was not coincidence in the minds of those living there. If a hailstorm struck only one valley, someone must have summoned it. If cattle died inexplicably, someone must have cursed them.
Consider Anna Göldi, executed in Switzerland in 1782, long after the height of the witch craze but still caught in its logic. She was accused of causing illness by supernatural means after needles were supposedly found in a child’s milk.
But the most ferocious examples lie earlier, in the fractured heart of central Europe. In territories of the Holy Roman Empire where religious tension, war, famine and judicial zeal collided with devastating force. Few places illustrate this more chillingly than Würzburg between 1626 and 1631. These were the years of the Thirty Years’ War. Armies moved like plagues across German lands. Crops were trampled and taxes raised to sustain conflict. Disease followed soldiers―so did hunger. In a world already strained by cold harvests and political chaos, fear found fertile ground.
Under the rule of Prince/Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg, Würzburg became the site of one of the largest witch hunts in European history. The bishop was a committed Counter-Reformation figure, determined to purify his territory spiritually and politically. Witchcraft prosecutions became part of that purification. Special prisons were built and torture chambers were equipped. Between 1626 and 1631, an estimated 600 to 900 people were executed in Würzburg and its surrounding areas―the numbers are staggering.
Among them was Margaretha Geissler, the wife of a respected merchant. She was not a wandering outcast or an eccentric healer. She belonged to the town’s economic life. Yet that did not protect her. Once accused, likely under torture-induced testimony from another prisoner, she was arrested and condemned. Her name appears in execution records―one among hundreds.
Children were not spared. Records show that boys and girls as young as nine or ten were imprisoned and forced to confess to attending witches’ sabbaths. One pamphlet from the time describes entire classrooms accused of consorting with the Devil. Whether these confessions were extracted under torture or coerced through terror, they fuelled the narrative that witchcraft was everywhere.
Perhaps most haunting is the case of Johannes Junius, the former burgomaster of Bamberg. Arrested in 1628, he was tortured until he confessed to attending sabbaths―flying through the air and renouncing God. He denied the crimes in a secret letter smuggled to his daughter before his execution. In that letter, he described how he was stretched on the strappado―how pain forced words from his mouth that were not his own.
The Würzburg trials demonstrate something crucial―witch hunts at their most extreme were not chaotic mob violence. They were organized. The executions were approved by authorities who believed they were cleansing their land of satanic corruption. These were not isolated, ignorant villages. These were structured towns with legal systems and educated elites. What made it possible was a belief that witches were not merely troublesome individuals but part of a vast demonic conspiracy. Manuals like the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ insisted that witches made pacts with Satan and attended nocturnal gatherings to plot harm.
The Reformation intensified this urgency. After 1517, Europe fractured along Catholic and Protestant lines. Entire regions shifted allegiance. In territories where religious identity was contested, especially within the Holy Roman Empire, leaders competed to demonstrate their moral authority.
In Scotland, Janet Horne became the last person executed for witchcraft in Britain in 1727. She was accused of turning her daughter into a pony and riding her at night, an allegation rooted in folklore and fear. Though late in the timeline, her death shows how long these beliefs lingered.
In England, the notorious witchfinder Matthew Hopkins fuelled panic during the English Civil War in the 1640s. In East Anglia, dozens were hanged after coerced confessions and dubious “tests.”
Gender played a decisive role. Roughly three-quarters of those accused were women. Many were widows or elderly women living without male protection. Others were midwives or healers, occupying ambiguous spaces between care and suspicion. In times of crisis, the socially marginal are easiest to name. Agnes Waterhouse, one of the first women executed for witchcraft in England in 1566, was accused of causing death through a familiar spirit in the form of a cat. The charges reflect both superstition and cultural narratives that framed women as spiritually weaker, more susceptible to temptation.
Yet it is important to recognize that men were also accused, particularly in certain regions. In Iceland and parts of Scandinavia, men comprised a significant proportion of those tried. Witch hunting was not purely misogyny, though misogyny shaped its contours. It was a system that targeted the vulnerable, and vulnerability often wore a woman’s face.
And then slowly, the fires diminished. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 stabilized religious borders across much of Europe, easing some confessional tensions. Courts grew more cautious about spectral evidence. Intellectual currents shifted toward scepticism and rational inquiry. By the late 17th century, large-scale witch hunts had waned.
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