The Würzburg and Bamberg Witch Trials

What happened

The episcopal principalities of Würzburg and Bamberg in Catholic Franconia experienced, between 1626 and 1631, the most intense single phase of witch prosecution in the European record. Two contemporaneous prince-bishops, each holding combined temporal and ecclesiastical authority within his territory, directed parallel campaigns:

• Würzburg under Prince-Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg (reigned 1623–1631) executed approximately 900 persons between 1626 and 1631, including 41 children, 19 Catholic priests, and members of the cathedral chapter and the prince-bishop's own court.
• Bamberg under Prince-Bishop Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim ("the Witch Bishop," reigned 1623–1633) executed approximately 600 persons between 1626 and 1631 in a parallel programme, including the burgomaster Johannes Junius, whose smuggled letter to his daughter (1628) is one of the most important surviving primary documents on witch-trial torture.

The trials in both territories were conducted in episcopal-judicial courts under the procedural framework of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (the imperial criminal code of 1532), but with the procedural safeguards of the Carolina effectively suspended. Accusations spread through the "torture-chain" pattern: confessions extracted under torture identified additional alleged co-witches, who in turn were tortured and identified further accused.

The Junius letter

Johannes Junius, burgomaster of Bamberg, was arrested in 1628, tortured for several weeks, and executed by burning. Before his death he secreted out of prison a letter to his daughter Veronica, which survives in the Bamberg State Archives. The letter is the most explicit and detailed first-person account of the conduct of a German witch-trial torture programme produced by an educated and articulate victim:

> "Now follows, dearest child, what I confessed in order to escape the great anguish and bitter torture, which it was impossible for me longer to bear... Then they bound and racked me, and put me into the strappado... All this I had to confess on pain of death, otherwise I should have been racked again. So I confessed, and not because it was true." (Junius to Veronica Junius, 24 July 1628.)

The Junius letter is reproduced and analysed in most modern scholarly treatments of the German witch panics.

Friedrich Spee and the Cautio Criminalis

The German Jesuit priest Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld served as confessor to condemned witches in Würzburg during the prosecution. In 1631, he published anonymously Cautio Criminalis seu de processibus contra sagas liber — A Caution Concerning the Criminal Procedure in Trials of Witches — the first sustained internal Catholic critique of the procedural basis of the witch trials. Spee's central argument was that the trials' reliance on confession-under-torture made their evidentiary outcomes worthless and that, in his direct experience as confessor to the condemned, the procedure had executed innocent people on an industrial scale.

The Cautio Criminalis is one of the foundational documents in the European internal-Catholic argument against judicial torture. Its publication contributed to the institutional reaction against the witch panics in subsequent decades; the German witch trials substantially declined after the 1630s, though they did not cease entirely until the late eighteenth century.

The end of the Würzburg–Bamberg episode

The arrival of the Protestant Swedish army of Gustavus Adolphus in Franconia in 1631 disrupted both prosecutions and effectively ended the episode. Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg fled Würzburg and died on 16 July 1631. Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim died in 1633 in exile.

Significance

The Würzburg–Bamberg episode is the most concentrated phase of judicial witch-execution in the European record, conducted under direct ecclesiastical-temporal authority of two Catholic prince-bishops. The institutional record is fully primary-documented in the surviving Bamberg and Würzburg episcopal archives. The Junius letter and the Spee Cautio are the principal contemporary primary sources for the procedural conduct and the contemporary Catholic counter-critique respectively. The episode anchors the European witch-hunt scholarship and pairs naturally with the Salem case as the principal Catholic and Calvinist analogues in the seventeenth-century witch-prosecution record.

Sources

• Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, Cautio Criminalis seu de processibus contra sagas liber (Rinteln, 1631; English translation: Cautio Criminalis, or A Book on Witch Trials, trans. Marcus Hellyer, University of Virginia Press, 2003).
• Johannes Junius, letter to Veronica Junius, 24 July 1628, Bamberg State Archives.
• Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 4th edition (Routledge, 2016).
• H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684 (Stanford University Press, 1972).
• Bamberg and Würzburg episcopal archives, trial records, primary documentation.