When Burning People Became a Business

A bucket of water slams into the unconscious woman’s face. She feels the strappado haul her up again by the wrists. A boot kicks her back, ankle weights yanking her down. Her shoulders pop from their sockets, and she screams. Finally, she whispers yes—to dancing with the devil, to blighting the crops. Pressed for accomplices, she names neighbors, friends, family. By the end of 1631, hundreds in Bamberg will be killed, turning the German town into one of the deadliest places in Europe. The witch hunt frenzy spared no one, not even the rich and powerful.

A Perfect Storm of Fear and Profit

Two hundred years earlier, magic was old news in Bamberg, a Catholic state in the Holy Roman Empire. Most people lived scattered across the countryside, where every village had cunning folk who healed livestock or found lost objects. The church mostly tolerated these harmless superstitions—until Heinrich Kramer argued that witches were destroying Christianity. The Inquisitor secured backing from the Pope that witches were a real threat, then wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (the Witch Hammer), a field guide on hunting them. Kramer argued that women’s weaker nature and desire made them easy targets for the devil. The spicy descriptions of pacts with demons and satanic banquets turned the book into a bestseller, hardening the belief that witchcraft was heresy.