Bamberg witch trials

Prince-Bishop of Bamberg Neytard von Thüngen (died 1598) was the first to allow witch trials in his diocese. However, he was mostly occupied with fighting the Reformation. Under his successor, Johann Philipp von Gebsattel (died 1609), no one was executed for witchcraft. Only under Johann Gottfried von Aschhausen (died 1622), did prosecutions take off. Supported by the theologian , the bishop allowed a trial to go ahead that grew out of a family quarrel. In its course, several other people were charged with witchcraft and within one year 15 had been executed. A larger set of prosecutions came in 1616 following a series of crop failures. Through 1622, a total of 159 trials were registered, most resulting in deaths. The trials stopped in 1622, partially through the efforts of councillor Georg Haan, who successfully pointed out that the city funds were needed to protect the city during the Thirty Years' War. ==Witch trials of 1626-1632==

Outbreak The Bamberg witch trials of 1626-1631 were initiated by the Reform Catholic and Counter-Reformation Catholic Prince Bishop Johann Georg Fuchs von Dornheim, Prince Bishop of Bamberg in 1623–1633. The territory was close to the Catholic-Protestant religious border, and the goal of the new Prince Bishop was to create a "Godly state" in accordance with the ideals of the Counter-Reformation, and to make the population obedient, devout and conformally Catholic. The Witch Commission used torture without any of the restrictions regulated by the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina. Cases and accused Typical for both the Bamberg witch trials as well as the parallel witch trials in Würzburg, members of the elite were arrested after having been named by working-class people under torture, a phenomenon which would normally not have happened in early modern society had the process been about a different crime. Würzburg and Bamberg differed in that, in Würzburg, many members of the clerical elite were arrested, and a large number of children were among the accused, while Bamberg focused on secular adult elites. Many of the accused came from the class Bamberg officials and public servants, who would not normally have been arrested after having been accused by members of the working class. Georg Haan was in a difficult situation when the persecutions began in 1626, because he was known for his opposition to witch craft persecutions, having stopped the previous persecutions of 1622. The total number of executions is unknown as only some were documented. Of the confirmed numbers, 15 men and women were charged with witchcraft in the year 1626; 85 are noted for the year 1627, 137 for 1628, and 167 for 1629, which was the peak year of the witch trials, followed by 54 in 1630, and a lesser number in 1631, but these are only the confirmed cases and are not complete. All of the accused were executed by burning: sometimes the condemned could be decapitated beforehand, but the majority appear to have been burnt alive. The end of the witch trials The ongoing mass process in Bamberg attracted considerable attention. The fact that the Witch Commission accepted the names of accomplices given by accused witches under torture indiscriminately regardless of class, had resulted in many people arrested had influential relatives, family members and friends of the upper classes, with sufficient resources and knowledge to escape the territory and to issue complaints against the Prince Bishop and his witch trials to his superiors, such as the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope. A turning point was the case against Dorothea Flock, a member of a well-off merchant family from Nuremberg, whose spouse had fled to a colony of Bamberg refugees in Nuremberg and issued a complaint of her arrest to the Emperor. In April 1630, the Emperor called upon the Prince-Bishop to defend himself against the accusation made against him and to put an immediate stop to the case against Flock. The Prince-Bishop defied the Emperor and resumed the case on 28 April, which resulted in a new protest from the Emperor on 11 May. The Pope was asked to intervene. An Imperial edict was issued by the Hofrat, but the witch hunters learned about its imminent delivery and executed Dorothea Flock on 17 May shortly before its arrival. The problem of the ongoing Bamberg witch trials was then placed on the agenda of the Imperial Diet of Regensburg on 20 September 1630. This caused outrage among the leadership of the Catholic church in Germany, who held the bishop responsible. An investigation by the Hofrat prevented any further trials from being launched. In parallel, Germany was devastated by the Swedish army under king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who commented that he was willing to intervene against the witch trials of Bamberg. In Bamberg, the assisting Bishop and theologian , who was a leading figure in the witch trials, died in 1630. Support among the population began to fade as people increasingly realized that everyone was at risk of ending up at the stake. Peasants refused to supply wood for the burnings. Under pressure, the Prince-Bishop stopped the Witch Commission from making new arrests. This did not mean, however, that ongoing trials were ended as those already arrested were still kept in prison. In July 1631, the Emperor had Anton Winter, known for his opposition to witch hunts, appointed to become the new head of the Prince-Bishop's Witch Commission in Bamberg. When Anton Winter arrived in Bamberg, the Prince-Bishop fled the city. The bishop fled to Austria. The Witch Commission under Anton Winter released all the prisoners of the witch prison. They ended for good when the Protestant Swedish troops approached Bamberg in 1632. ==Legacy and aftermath==

Several smaller witch trials followed until the last one in 1680. By that time, a total of around 1,000 people had been killed in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg. In contemporary Germany, the gigantic, parallel mass witch trials of Würzburg and Bamberg were seen as role models by other Catholic states and cities interested in investigating witchcraft, notably Wertheim and Mergentheim. == References ==