Rise of Witchcraft Accusations in Medieval Times

The trials of the Knights Templar saw prosecutors using accusations of demonic magic and necromancy. It was an early sign that witchcraft and sorcery were moving into the medieval mainstream. Previously, wizards and witches, while being condemned, were viewed as a fringe threat to Christian belief – a hangover from paganism. But in the late Middle Ages – witchcraft was seen increasingly as an existential threat to the church. One pope was even convinced that assassins were trying to kill him by use of spells and potions!

Pope John XXII became head of the Roman Catholic church in the years after the Templars were crushed. Like Pope Clement V, who oversaw the trials of the Templars, he was based at Avignon in France. John believed that enemies within the clergy wanted him dead and were casting spells on magical dolls and preparing poisonous potions to bump him off. He put bishops and nobles on trial for their life – accused of conjuring up demons to slay him.

This was the first rumblings of a witch-hunting mania that would sweep Europe from the next century and last about 250 years jumping the Atlantic in the 17th century, leading to the infamous Salem witch trials in colonial America. You can draw an upward line from the trials of the Templars to Salem charting the rising hysteria about witches and the evil they were capable of perpetrating.

Growing anti-witchcraft hysteria

In the tenth century, a document called the Canon Episcopi detailed surviving pagan practices in Europe and why they needed to be rooted out if Christian belief was to thrive. These practices were not viewed as real. The church at this stage wasn’t claiming that witches were abroad the face of the earth causing genuine harm. The argument was that witchcraft was superstitious nonsense that priests had to challenge and replace with the truth as revealed in scripture.

But in the fourteenth century, there was a change of view. Pope John XXII claimed that witches were not a fiction – but very real and powerful. No longer was the church simply challenging lingering pagan practice – instead it was waging an existential war against demons and their earthly allies. As the Templars were to discover, this meant being burned at the stake if found guilty. Because the pope – and secular authorities – now meshed together the concept of heresy, a capital crime, with witchcraft.

Inquisition unleashed against witchcraft

Pope John unleashed the full power of the inquisition to interrogate suspected sorcerers and authorised the use of torture to extract confessions. He accused the Bishop of Cahors of using wax dolls and poison, smuggled into the papal palace at Avignon, to murder him. The bishop was found guilty and burned. Similar charges were levied against an archbishop but fell through – however, others were not so lucky.

Paranoia gripped the papacy with papal ‘bulls’ – decrees by the pope – stating that the devil was active and seeking willing accomplices to fulfil his diabolical mission. Heretics were no longer people who interpreted the bible incorrectly but followers of Satan – out to overthrow the natural order. We get a glimpse of this thinking in the trial of the Templars when they are accused of venerating the head of a demon, Baphomet, and engaging in secret, lewd rituals.

FIND OUT MORE: Templar head worship and Baphomet

Others now faced similar charges including those who dared to suggest that the church was too rich and opulent. That was now regarded as evidence of Satanic influence. How dare you suggest the pope wasn’t poor enough!