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Published on January 18, 2005 By geser nart In Politics

The Europe of Conspiracy Theories

Based upon authorities like St. Augustine and, his concept of 'Civitas Dei' a vast conspiracy leading to what is now known as the witch trials was only detected in the later Middle Ages. Starting with Thomas Aquinas and the church's opposition to ‘philosophical’ heresy, the what late became known as the ‘Cathars’ alias Waldensians and other groups in Spain and Southern France that included also the Jews in these areas (that as Norman Cohn has demonstrated where in fact not, mixed up with witchcraft) that the accusation of a diabolical conspiracy of witches emerged.

In fact in contrast to some other ‘Cathar’ related groups, the Waldensians denied the Devil's power, they also denied thewonders of the saints, the power of relics, the sacraments, pilgrimages and offerings.

As precursors of the Reformation, the Waldensians have gained the sympathy of many researchers and may be one of the reasons why historians of Waldensianism have not made any useful contribution to this particular debate.

So in order to understand why Waldensians became witches, and why the existence of this ultimate conspiracy was constructed, it seems necessary to scrutinise the historiography of Waldensianism as well as of witchcraft, and furthermore analyse the circumstances of the first appearance of the new sect of Waldensian witches.

For instance, as radical pacifists and opponents of all bloodshed, they despised any form of capital punishment, and would not even accept the execution of sorcerers. But as is known from African societies, as well as from European demonologies like the Malleus Maleficarum, the protectors of suspected witches can easily be associated with witchcraft themselves.

Thus the author of the Malleus, the Alsatian Dominican Heinrich Kramer (1430-1505) did indeed raise the question in one of his later publications on the Waldensian heresy. With their nocturnal gatherings and secret meetings, necessitated by the danger of persecution, Waldensians could therefore arouse suspicions aside from their religious practices.

Furthermore, the Waldensian clergy were famous for their ability to cure diseases, as healers and diviners. However, I would suggest that the most important factor making it possible to equate them with witches was the Waldensian clergy's ability to get in to contact with the Otherworld. Almost unnoticed by scholars of Waldensianism, and unconnected to Waldensian theology, we find in trial records from the Baltic region to Southern France that the common folk believed firmly that the Waldensian leaders were visiting otherworldly places, which they identified as paradise, and gaining superior spiritual power from their direct encounters with angels, or even God himself.

The lower orders formed the majority of this religious mass movement, and due to persecution, resulting in the so-called 'marginalisation of Waldensianism', it was particularly strong among peasants and herdsmen, with a relatively high percentage of mountain farmers and shepherds. As earlier suggested in ”The End of the Gnostic Myth” it is likely, that the average credentes were early Rationalists, or Puritans, less superstitious than their Catholic neighbours.(3)

Even in Swiss towns like Bern or Fribourg suspicions of sorcery played an important role in trials against Waldensians. And how about the peasants in the high Alpine valleys of the Piedmont, the Dauphine, the ' alais, or the Pays de Vaud?

These are exactly the places where preachers of the high and late Middle Ages, reformers of the sixteenth century, rationalists of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, as well as folklorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would expect the most exotic forms of folk-beliefs.

For example in Northern Germany in the late fourteenth century ecstatic experiences were commonly thought to be a Waldensian affair, thought to make periodic trips to paradise. One Aley, the wife of Thyde Takken of Bowmgarten confessed in March 1394, `that she had heard from a certain woman, that two of their apostolic and heresiarch brethren went to hell, and heard the pitiable cries and saw the devils attacking the souls in hell and saying, "that one was an adulterer, that one a usurer, that one a tavernhaunter", and so on of all the other sorts of vice-laden souls; and afterwards they came to paradise and heard the voice of the Lord God giving them wisdom and learning, with which they were to instruct the people committed to their care on earth'.

Confessions of otherworld-experiences of the Waldensian brethren were also found during the inquisition campaigns of Peter Zwicker in Bohemia and Austria in the last years of the fourteenth and the early years of the fifteenth centuries.The Waldensian masters' journey to the otherworld, paradise, to receive supernatural powers, authority and wisdom from an angel, or God himself, was even a question of public debate.

Yet some of the most aggressive witch-hunts in European history were launched after confessions by witch-doctors with otherworld experiences, who have been regarded as witches themselves by the authorities. None of these healers with otherworld experiences however considered himself a witch, but due to their exotic stories each of them was tortured until they became adapted to demonological theory.

Investigating the stories of Chonrad Stoeckhlin about his 'Nachtschar', the `Phantoms of the Night', which regularly flew to certain places in order to observe hell and paradise, and his ability to cure and to recognise witchcraft, which he claimed was obtained from his spiritual leader, an angel, more and more associated stories in neighbouring parts of Austria, and especially in Switzerland, where the vernacular terms Nachtschar and Nachtvolk (night-folk) were distributed from the German Alps in the Northeast to the Swiss Cantons of Valais and Vaud in the Southwest can be found.

In part this was caused by the fact that Stoeckhlin's best friends were migrants from the Little Walser Valley to his home town Oberstdorf in the German Alps. The Walsers are an Alemannic group, who had migrated southwards to the Upper Rhone valley in the early Middle Ages, and had been settled in the Valais (Wallis) for centuries. Due to overpopulation some of them turned northwards in the late Middle Ages, to settle in the Swiss Upper Rhine valley, in the canton of Grisons (Graubiinden) or as mountain farmers in its side valleys and some high alpine valleys in western Austria (Montafon, Walser Valleys), near the German border. These spiritual qualities ofcourse are characteristic features of shamanism.

Waldensians (‘Cathars’) also were called boni homines or bons hommes by their followers. These are however the terms which have been used for certain supernatural beings in the contemporary folk-belief: the `good ladies' and the `good men', the `good people' were terms of great ambivalence, describing for instance fairy people or powerful good spirits in opposition to demonic beings.

It was also a term for the deceased, who - according to popular belief - visited the houses of some people, who then were called `the blessed' by others. And of course there was much ambivalence in a term like `good people' or `good men', it could even serve as a euphemism, since any powerful being could be dangerous, and harm as well as heal.

A first hint is contained within a papal bull of Alexander V (ca. 1340-1410, r. 1409-1410) in 1409, which confirmed to the Franciscan inquisitor Ponce Fougeyron that innumerable Christians and Jews in a group of dioceses, roughly covering the region of the French Alps, and Savoy, constituted novas sectas, new sects, and performed and taught forbidden rites. Her however Fougeyron was playing with older concepts of conspiracy, namely the Jewish conspiracy, which had been held responsible for the Black Death in that region. Witch stereotype, like the Sabbath, or the Synagogue, were a legacy of the earlier persecution of the Jews. The Jews and Christians in this strange new sect, however, were using sorcery, divination, and devil worship. The bull was reissued to the same Franciscan inquisitor in the same region in 1418 by Pope Martin V , and in 1434 by Pope Eugenius IV.

Within the next years, however, the new cumulative crime of European witchcraft was defined: a great conspiracy of the ultimate evil. A treatise called Errores GaZariorum, most likely written in 1435, gave the first elaborate description of a witches' Sabbat..In 1437 Pope Eugenius IV issued a general decree to all inquisitors about devil worshippers, who committed 'maleficia' by words, touch, or signs. And three years later by a papal bull `ad perpetua rei memoriam', directed against the former duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy, who had been elected by the Council of Basel as the counter-pope Felix V. ( 1439-1449).

The bull connects this false pontificate with all the heresies in his duchy, devil-worshipping and sorcery, 'qui vulgari nomine stregule vel stregones seu Waudenses nuncupantur'.82 This, finally, was the name of the new sect. They were neither Christians nor Jews; they were Waldensian witches. The papal bull used this terminology for the first time in 1440, explicitly maintaining that it was the popular terminology of a specific region, namely the duchy of Savoy.

In this territory, including the later Swiss dioceses of Geneva, Sion and Lausanne, the term vauderie or Waldensianism for witchcraft was in use early in the 15th century, was predominant throughout the 16th century, and is still in use today.

The Savoy around 1400 was anything but a backward Alpine region: close to the Lombardic capital Milan, then Europe's largest town and the centre of early capitalism, with Alpine agriculture being integrated into a market economy. It was also close to Avignon, the pope's see and a major political centre. Duke Amadeus VIII made an attempt to forge his rather heterogeneous possessions between the Mediterranean Sea, and Switzerland, into a `modern' state, an Alpine core state of Europe, at the crossroads of Italy, France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire. With his ambitious policy of state formation, symbolised for instance by the Statuta Sabaudiae, a general law introduced in 1430, the duke felt strong enough to act as a European player, and indeed managed to be elected pope by the conciliarist party at the Council of Basel. His state, Savoy, served as a laboratory for religious reform movements, but it is not yet clear how political reforms and religious zeal fit together. Inquisitors were seemingly encouraged to persecute the Waldensian minority, and it is indeed in Savoy where we can find early evidence of a fusion of heresy and witchcraft.

The association of witchcraft and Waldensianism was promoted by local Franciscans,and Dominican inquisitors. The soil may have been prepared by powerful preachers like the Dominican Vincent Ferrier (ca. 1350-1419, sanctified in 1458), whose apocalyptic sermons between 1399 and 1409 excited the region where the fusion took place.

During the reign of Amadeus, Savoy was shaken by enormous waves of persecution. From the 1420s, the local Inquisitors, like the Dominican Uldry de Torrente in the diocese of Lausanne (ca. 1420-1445), stopped focusing on individuals, and began to try to execute hundreds of suspects. One can only guess at the practical requirements of such an enterprise in a world where hardly any proper prisons existed. These persecutions have not yet been explored systematically, and this is all the more regrettable, since they play a major role in our story. At least in some places these large-scale persecutions started with hunting Waldensians and ended up with burning witches.

The earliest report about these massive persecutions, written around 1431 by Johann Friind (ca. 1400-1469), chronicler of the Swiss town of Luzern, states explicitly that the new heresy of witchcraft, `die ketzerye der hexsen', had emerged 'des ersten under den Walchen and darnach under den Tutschen', first among the Romance speaking, then among the `Germans', referring of course to the Germanophone areas of Southern Switzerland alongside the language border.

After their pact with the Devil, the witches could fly through the air and visit wine cellars, banqueting and feasting whenever they wished, and could transform themselves into animals. Starting in 1428, more than a hundred men and women were burnt in Wallisian courts within just eighteen months, and on the other side of the mountain, where the persecution had begun earlier, even more were executed. The Aosta valley, where Ponce Fougeyron had been working as an inquisitor, and where the witches were called Gazzari, meaning Waldensians, also witnessed a wave of persecution.

All these valleys belonged to the duke of Savoy. The Errores GaZariorum was just one of a cluster of five lengthy reports about the new sect of witches written between 1430 and 1440, all provoked by the witch-hunts in the duchy of Savoy, including some of the southern valleys of modern Switzerland, and in neighbouring Dauphine. It was no longer the business of mendicant Inquisitors alone, since the Dauphine employed a secular chief prosecutor, and in some Swiss valleys the responsibility was given to local courts. Witchhunting, as in contemporary Africa, was a grass-roots movement, fuelled by popular demand.

Why did these persecutions start? If we compare Savoy to the South African case, we can see striking similarities: economic change, political stress, ideological pressure groups redefining the moral universe, and political actors conducting persecutions. There are, however, three decisive questions that remain unresolved: Why were the systematic individual trials transformed into large-scale persecutions, why were they targeting Waldensians, and why were these heretics redefined as witches? The answer, I think, cannot be found in texts alone, although they may give us a clue. If we put the events in chronological order, it is clear that the large-scale persecutions in Savoy, the Dauphine, the Valais, the Vaud and surrounding areas were triggered by a devastating mortality crisis in the region around 1427.

Mortality crises are not unusual in traditional societies, but may appear as `unnatural' to contemporaries. As in so many other cases where witchcraft was suspected, `unnatural events' played an important role, and only one generation after the shock waves of the Black Death had receded, new kinds of `unnatural' hardships began to threaten subsistence in Alpine regions. An unprecedented number of rainy summers and extremely cold and long winters afflicted the Northern hemisphere. The winters of 1407-1408 and 1422-1423 were so severe that not only the major rivers, but even the Baltic sea was frozen, and Norwegian wolves were economic historians and from historians of climate. Some scholars have seen in this the beginning of the `Little Ice Age'.

If the witchcraft persecutions succeeded the persecutions of the Jews, this was not only because the latter became less accessible as victims due to their expulsions from large parts of Western Europe, another reason may well be that Jews had never been held responsible for the weather. European mythology attributed weather magic to witchcraft. There was, however, a problem: since the earliest missionaries, Christian theology had denied the competing spiritual powers of sorcerers and diviners, and the efficacy of witchcraft in particular. As with the colonial law in Africa, medieval canon law did not punish witches, but those who believed in witchcraft.

The Roman church and the Christian states of Europe consequently suppressed any attempts at witch-hunting throughout the Middle Ages. This major impediment could only be overcome by means of constructing a new, unusual, and unprecedented crime, `an ultimate conspiracy'. Only the language of heresy trials enabled secular and spiritual authorities to persecute witchcraft. Only by hunting Waldensians was it possible to persecute witches.

The fusion of Waldensianism and witchcraft, however, was only transitory. Savoyan Inquisitors and authors imagined witchcraft as the modernised version of Waldensianism ('modernorum hereticorum Waldensium'), and the curial party used this particularity to label Savoy as a hothouse of new heresies and witchcraft, a political argument against the unwelcome Savoyan counter-pope. But although it was not implied in the contemporary papal bulls, nor in the first treatises about the new sect, its members were portrayed as predominantly female. And the illustrator of a manuscript of 'Le champion des Dames' clearly felt attracted by this interpretation of Waldensianism. He sketched witches riding through the air on sticks and broomsticks and decided to call them 'Vaudoises'.

This use of the term 'Vaudois' seems to have irritated and confused contemporaries. The chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet mentions that he could not explain why these witches were now called 'Vaudois'. Even the papal bull of 1440 had to explain that these Waldensians were normally called `stregule vel stregones' by the people, that means witches. The chief prosecutor of the Dauphine, Claude Tholosan, preferred to use the local term for sorcerers, 'faicturier' in his courts,i07 and the Swiss chronicler Friind used the Latin term 'sortilei' or the local vernacular term 'Hexen', then almost unknown but later the general term for witches in German. The Council of Basel (1431-1449) provided the opportunity to discuss the new crime.

In the 1430s the frequency of extreme winters increased, climaxing in 1431-1432, 1433-1434 and 1437-1438, causing a series of Europe-wide famine years and mortality crises. The climate was unfavourable for agriculture in general, and for Alpine life in particular. The 1430s have attracted some attention from surprising. Despite many reflections about the new sort of witches, and their relation to Canon Law, only a few authors accepted the equation of witchcraft and Waldensianism. Among them was the Franciscan Ponce Fougeyron, possibly the author of the Errores Gaariorum, and Jean Taincture (ca. 1400-1469) from Tournai, for whom the sect was more terrible than paganism, Islamic unbelief or even heresy, and implied the destruction of Christianity and the end of the world.

But most of the authors taking part in the debate, whether they accepted the reality of the new crime or not, preferred to avoid the identification of Waldensians and witches. Latin authors like John Nider preferred the neutral term Malefici, and many used vernacular terms like bruxas, streghe, or Hexen. Some famous theologians, such as Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), rejected the idea of a new sect on the basis of the Canon Episcopi, which had defined witchcraft as an illusion.

Others, including the Swiss Felix Malleolus (1389-1460), discussed the authority of Canon Law, even if they were inclined to accept the change of paradigm, as were the Dominican cardinal Johannes a Turrecremata (1388-1468), or the French Dominican inquisitors Jean Vineti (ca. 1400-ca. 1475) and Nicholas Jacquier (ca. 1400-14??). Heinrich Kramer, the dominican Inquisitor and author of the Malleus Maleficarum, avoided the issue of Waldensianism altogether and defined witchcraft as the ultimate crime, the ultimate conspiracy.

All of this enable us to understand why it was necessary for contemporaries to interpret `why bad things happened to good people'. In their `management of misfortune', at least parts of the intellectual elites eventually accepted the popular concept that `unnatural' hardship was caused by sorcery. To make it acceptable theologically, sorcery had to be recast as `Vauderie'. Only afterwards could it be superseded by the new concept of a cumulative crime, consisting of apostasy and magic. Witchcraft, the crime of the Little Ice Age, was born. And in the following centuries, the Central European waves of persecution followed neatly the conjunctures of price movements, mirroring crop failure, malnutrition and `unnatural' diseases, the immediate results of unfavourable weather in a traditional agrarian society.

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