Witches: a personal addendum

[selenak]

In Britain, England and Scotland alike, I'm told, witches were mostly hanged. In my hometown of Bamberg, and in a great many of the German principalities during the worst waves of persecution, they were burned. Our most infamous era of town history, not counting More Recent Events (i.e. 1933 - 1945), was smack in the middle of the Thirty-Years-War, when in addition to bad weather, sickness and the Swedes coming, the years between 1626 and 1631 saw roughly a 1000 people of a town population o f 8000 executed as witches. In other words, every eighth person. It's also one of the best documented eras, and not just because the local authorities kept files. From it, we have one of the few documents written by a victim after various torture sessions and before his execution, describing what happened during a witch trial.

The man in question was none other than the mayor, Johannes Junius. His wife had been the first of the family to be accused of witchcraft, and she'd already been burned when they arrested him. He was tortured four times, confessed, but managed to write a letter to one of his daughters, Veronica. It never reached her - she'd already fled to Nuremberg -, which is probably why it survived; it was caught and ended up with the rest of the files. This is what it looks like:



This letter is also a big reason why I'm always a bit touchy when stories use "real" witches. It's incredibly raw and devastating to read, especially considering Junius was but one of many. A complete transcription of the German original is here, and a translation of the majority of it into English is here. From the first sentence onward - "Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die" it wrecks me, every time. Even the executioner showed more compassion than the judges: When at last the executioner led me back into the prison, he said to me: “Sir, I beg you, for God’s sake confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture which you will be put to; and, even if you bear it all, yet you will not escape, not even if you were an earl, but one torture will follow after another until you say you are a witch. Not before that,” he said, “will they let you go, as you may see by all their trials, for one is just like another.”

Here are excerpts read in the original Baroque German, with documents shown:

"EIN BEDRÜCKENDES ZEITDOKUMENT - DER BRIEF DES JOHANNES JUNIUS" (Watch on YouTube)

The families of the people burned in Bamberg, if there were still families, had to pay for the wood used for the execution, because wood had become rare with so many burnings.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Yikes. 1000? That is a lot of people. Around here in Hamburg far fewer were killed. There are only about a hundred documented in total from when they first included in the legal codes until the last execution 1642. There were still trials later but they were found inncocent, the last in 1676. And before that here around 80% of the accused were executed, but there were innocent verdicts, even if your chances were pretty bad. Some were punished with beatings or banishment too.

But we now have two streets named after known victims (if rather small ones) and a memorial stone on the main city cemetery.

[selenak]

They had to build an extra prison just for the witches, the Drudenhaus, and then that wasn't enough and the prisoners were outsourced to nearby Zeil (= small town between Bamberg and Würzburg). Mind you, the other persecution waves demand far fewer victims, too, but in this particular era, Bamberg had the bad luck of being governed by a Prince Bishop who got the nickname Hexenbrenner because he was so eager, and the Weihbishop who did most of the actual governing of the principality, Förner, was basically the chief ideologue for German witch trials of his era. It only ended when the approaching Swedes caused the Prince Bishop to hightail it out of there, leaving Bamberg to the Swedes and removing himself to Brixen (which he also owned). When the Swedes conquered the city and freed the last surviving prisoners in the Drudenhaus, they were in a terrible state.

[ratcreature]

It probably helped that we were governed by citizen traders and their economic interests not clergy or nobles, and killing off too many people too zealously would have been probably bad for business. And generally things seems to have been just less horrible here at that time compared to the general catastrophe all around, though it took plenty of ransom payments not to be ransacked all the time and such. But I think if you had to pick a spot in German areas in the 17th century, Hamburg would have been one of the better choices.

[selenak]

Oh, so much agreed, for all those reasons. I mean, the Dutch were probably an even safer bet, but Hamburg was easier to reach than Amsterdam. In fact, googling tells me Hamburg was one of the only places which had more, not fewer citzens when it was all over. All hail the merchants, I say.