Trier witch trials

The Witch Trials of Trier in Germany in the years from 1581 to 1593 was perhaps the biggest witch trial in European history. It certainly belonged to the four largest witch trials in Germany alongside the Fulda witch trials, the Würzburg witch trial, and the Bamberg witch trials. The persecutions started in the diocese of Trier in 1581 and reached the city itself in 1587, where it was to lead to the death of about three hundred and sixty-eight people, and was as such perhaps the biggest mass execution in Europe in peace time. This counts only the executed within the city itself, and the real number of executed, counting also those executed in all the witch hunts within the diocese as a whole, was therefore even larger. The exact number of executed has never been established; a total of 1000 has been suggested but not confirmed.

In 1581, Johann von Schönenberg was appointed archbishop of the independent diocese of Trier. Schönenberg greatly admired the order of the Jesuits in which he was “Wonderfully addicted”; he built them a college, and as a part of his efforts to demonstrate his convictions, he ordered the purging of three groups in society; first he rooted out the Protestants, then the Jews, and then the witches: three stereotypes of nonconformity. He was the one responsible for the massacres of Trier which, because of his initiative, support and patronage, became “of an importance quite unique in the history of witchcraft.”

The beginning of the persecutions was later described by an eyewitness;

Inasmuch as it was popularly believed that the continued sterility of many years was caused by witches through the malice of the Devil, the whole country rose to exterminate the witches. This movement was promoted by many in office, who hoped for wealth from the persecution. And so, from court to court throughout the towns and villages of all the diocese, scurried special accusers, inquisitors, notaries, jurors, judges, constables, dragging to trial and torture human beings of both sexes and burning them in great numbers. Scarcely any of those who were accused escaped punishment or were there spared even the leading men in the city of Trier. For the Judge, 2 with two Burgomasters, several Councilors and Associate Judges, canons of sundry collegiate churches, parish priests, rural deans, were swept away in this ruin. So far, at length, did the madness of the furious populace and of the courts go in this thirst for blood and booty that there was scarcely anybody who was not smirched some suspicion of this crime.

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