Lore - Episode 140: Potential

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

We often speak in lofty terms about all that humans are capable of achieving, and much of that is true. But looking backward in time, we can also see moments when that potential has led to horrible tragedy. And we have no one to blame but ourselves. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  Lore News: www.theworldoflore.com/now  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Humans love to plan. Whether it's a child's birthday party or a time capsule designed to last centuries, we have a knack for planning and preparing for things. Looking back on the pages of history, that much should be completely obvious. A great example is the famous stone circle at Stonehenge. Most agree that the standing stones were first put in place around 5,000 years ago, although there is evidence that an earlier wooden structure existed before that. And while it's fun to speculate all the purposes it might have served, there's one thing

most scholars can agree on. Stonehenge is a calendar. And it's not alone. In the world, there are countless Neolithic structures that serve a similar purpose. And it makes sense, really. In an era when humans were transitioning from wandering tribes of hunter-gatherers to farmers who needed to stay in one place for a long time, planning for the future became incredibly important.

When will winter finally be over? When should they plant their crops? And when should they harvest them? Planning helps us survive. It unites us. And it speaks to one of the most enduring qualities we have as human beings. We are people of hope. We look for patterns in the world around us and hope that our careful plans can thread

the needle and succeed. Oftentimes, our very survival depends on it. But our expectations, our assumptions about the future and how it will all play out, aren't always right. Broken hearts, shattered dreams, and misfortune are all a result of misplaced expectations. Yes, we planned. But those plans might crash and burn before they get off the ground. Just because we want something to happen doesn't mean it will.

In fact, that law applies to more than just the good stuff in life. Sure, it's frustrating when that much-needed vacation suddenly falls apart. But disappointment comes in all shapes and sizes. And if history is any indication, there's a powerful lesson there for us to learn. Even if we don't like what it teaches. When it comes to tragedy, the unexpected is right around the corner. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. In the wide world of historic witch hunts, it's easy to get lost in the assumptions.

We assume all witches were burned at the stake, and that they were old. We assume those trials played out against the green backdrop of the English countryside, or that frantic neighbors were always waiting with stories of sick cows or ghostly visitations. But if we did that, we would be wrong. Sure, those things happened, but the history of witch hunts is a lot deeper and a lot more nuanced, and they've been around for a very long time. We can find mentions of witches and witch trials in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, and throughout much of the medieval period, small trials were a constant occurrence.

But back then, those trials were a one-and-done sort of thing. A lot of them resembled the story of Mary Webster, the woman from Hadley in Colonial Massachusetts in the late 1600s, who was tried by the village elders and then shipped off to Boston. One victim, one community, and quick justice. But things changed in 1485 when two Catholic clergymen named Heinrich Kramer and James Springer published the book that they called Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches. That's because these two men put into print the vast collection of fears and assumptions

that people held about witchcraft. And those assumptions would go on to fuel the fire of panic all across Europe. One of the overwhelming messages of their book was just how weak and evil women were believed to be. Kramer and Springer characterized women as overly emotional, highly impressionable, incredibly superstitious and morally wicked. They were temptresses and gossips, and were inferior to men in both body and mind. Basically, women had the potential to become dangerous to society, and they needed to be

watched. And because women were thought to be more impressionable and less intelligent, they were easy targets for the devil. He would come to them and promise to give them power, so long as they served him. And if they agreed, these women would become witches, a dangerous addition to any community. These witches were said to gather for regular meetings called a Sabbath. With these gatherings, they would bring in new recruits to meet their source of power, the devil himself, before being inducted into the group.

Then each new member would receive a helper, usually an imp or some small animal known as a familiar, to help them do their work. And with their newfound power, they could kill livestock, make children sick, alter the weather, and prevent couples from becoming pregnant. All accusations that were impossible to prove, of course, and almost all of it was based on fear. If your livestock died or a blight killed your crops, your way of life would be under threat. And that made people do desperate things.

Of course, once a community used the Malleus Maleficarum to identify a witch, it also provided guidance for how to interrogate them, how to choose witnesses for their trial, how to sentence them, and what that sentence should be. It didn't help that Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull that gave approval and authority to all of that information, a pronouncement that Cromer and Springer actually included in the front of their book. And that's pretty much how things worked for the three centuries between 1450 and 1750. The results were tragic, too.

It's believed that during that time, the Holy Roman Empire executed over 45,000 accused witches, and roughly four out of every five victims was a woman. And socially, it's easy to understand how it happened. The typical medieval witch was an older woman, usually one who lived alone. She was poor, uneducated, and unprotected. Without someone to speak for her or defend her, a woman was incredibly vulnerable, throw in a good amount of deep superstition in an unpredictable world, and that was a recipe for disaster.

Usually. Like any other area of study, there are always exceptions. Situations that buck the trend and go against the grain. Even in something as widespread and hotheaded as European witch trials, there are moments when the tragic events took a very different path. It doesn't make those instances any better, but it certainly makes them worth a deeper look. In fact, there's one in particular that I want to share with you.

To examine it, though, we'll need to travel off the beaten path and into a place that most people wouldn't expect to find the remnants of a medieval witch trial, the hills of northern Italy. But just because it's different doesn't mean it isn't dark. The province of Imperia sits at the top left of Italy. If the country is a leg, then Imperia is the hip, a little stretch of coastline that connects Italy proper to the rest of Europe. But don't think of Imperia as a vast expanse of flatland.

No, this is hill country, and that geological texture has helped shape the region's history. Over the centuries, communities have settled on the many hills in the area, capping many of them with the forest of pale buildings and rust-colored roof tiles. And because the medieval world was a dangerous time to live, a good number of these towns wrapped themselves in a city wall. But walls work in two directions. Yes, it protected them from war or external violence, but it also isolated them and left them to fight among themselves.

A good example of that took place in the 1580s. That was a hard decade for the region, and that trouble helped highlight their isolation. Granted, life in the early modern period was never easy to begin with. Medicine wasn't what you would call state of the art, and just about everyone worked themselves to the bone from sunrise to sunset. But during that decade, things got worse. Changes in weather patterns had brought drought to the region, killing many of the crops these little farming communities needed to survive.

In fact, all over the Argentine valley to the north, famine was spreading like a plague, and desperate times forced people to do desperate things. As the crops began to yield less and less, the landowners took larger and larger shares of the harvest. This left their tenant farmers without enough to live on, adding to their already difficult life. It was an enormous amount of pressure. And while pressure produces diamonds in the world of geology, these challenges resulted

in something else. Panic. It didn't help that many of these communities were centers of trade with cities to the north in France and Germany. That meant that, yes, their walls might have protected them against invading armies, but the roads allowed a slow trickle of paranoia and superstition to eat away at their social foundations. They were, in essence, being invaded by fear.

And that's when the rumors began. Because when you live in a time when the Malleus mellifacarm had been around for a full century, roughly four or five generations, it was hard not to view everything through the lens it provided. Blighted crops, sickened livestock, and increased numbers of death among the very young and very old. All of it added up to an obvious conclusion. There were witches on the loose.

In October of 1587, the rumors had reached a crescendo. And in the small hilltop village of Triora, locals were deathly afraid that witches were everywhere, cursing the crops and livestock and killing their family and neighbors. So a letter was sent to the authorities in Genoa asking for help. What they received was a visit from Girolamo Del Pozzo. Del Pozzo was from the office of the Bishop of Albania, a city nearby on the coast. When he arrived, though, he didn't behave as you might expect, rather than seize control of the situation and place himself above the authority of Triora's mayor, as many medieval

witchfinders had done. He partnered with them, hoping to be as much help as he could. Until his arrival, all the community had was a collection of rumors. But those rumors were frightening enough to push them further along in the process. What Del Pozzo needed was proof, some kind of solid evidence to lead them to the witches. To find it, he visited a number of the local churches during their normal celebration of mass, during which he stood at the front of the church and invited anyone with evidence to come and see him later.

Based on the information he collected, Del Pozzo and the mayor were able to arrest roughly 40 people. Most of them, of course, were women, but there was one man and five children, all under the age of 13. And once they'd been taken into custody, they were interrogated. In Triora, the focus of the accusations went beyond the famine and illness that seemed to be spreading. It seems that Del Pozzo was specifically interested in all the infants that had died, thinking

that only a witch could be to blame for those. And after intense interrogations regarding that topic, he narrowed the larger group of 40 down to a total of 13. And that's when the deaths began. The first to die was a 60-year-old woman named Ezora Stella, but she wasn't executed. Instead, it was the horrible conditions inside the prison that caused her to become ill and die. Sadly, that wasn't an uncommon thing in the world of witch trials.

Prison conditions were consistently abhorrent, and even a century later in Salem, Massachusetts, five of the 25 deaths happened in jail rather than at the gallows. A short while later, another of the accused women died after falling from a high window in the prison. Some believed she was trying to escape the trials, while others think she intentionally took her own life. Either way, she was clearly looking for a way out of a horrible situation, and the results were tragic.

These two deaths, even before the sentencing began, caused the mayor of Triora to have second thoughts. Sure, they blamed the deaths on the powers of the devil, but deep down, the town's council of elders knew what was happening, so they sent a request to Genoa for Del Pozzo to be recalled and for the trials to be suspended. Rather than help the situation, though, their letters seemed to invite nothing more than a changing of the guard. The wheels of superstition-fueled panic were already in motion, and there was little they

could do to stop it. And as sad as that seems, things were about to get worse. Del Pozzo had been a wolf in sheep's clothing. He had arrived with an air of humility and deference, but in the end, he had driven the events toward deadly crossroads. So I imagine the people of Triora were hopeful that someone better would arrive to clean up the mess, but they were wrong. There was a moment of respite, though.

Immediately after Del Pozzo left, the inquisitor general for all of Genoa arrived and assessed the damage. After seeing all of the people that remained in the prison, he ordered the release of the 13-year-old girl. Why not more? I'm not sure. But it wasn't a simple thing. That much is clear.

This teenage girl was forced to undergo what was known as abjuration, a sort of public renouncing of past deeds. Essentially, she had to stand before the local church and confess to witchcraft and heresy, but then disavow all of it so that she might be welcomed back into the church. And this she did, and it worked. And I think it's worth stepping aside here to point out that this isn't unique to the Catholic Church. In the aftermath of the sale and witch trials, there was a lot of putting wrong to right.

One of the key investigators of the events in that community was Ann Putnam, the 12-year-old daughter of two of the chief accusers. Without her actions and claims, two dozen lives might have been saved. But 13 years later, she too stood before her church and read her confession out loud, hoping to be welcomed back into the church that she once tore apart. I've held that confession in my own hands, with its tight script and worn edges. I desire to be laid low, she wrote, in the dust of humility for accusing people that I now believe were innocent.

But in Triora, only one prisoner was given that opportunity. After her future was settled, the Inquisitor General returned to Genoa. But in his wake, a new official arrived, a man named Giulio Scribani. And he wasn't looking to work in partnership with the Council of Elders or the mayor. He was there to bring a hammer down upon what he believed was an outbreak of witchcraft. Rather than free more of the prisoners, Scribani actually arrested more suspects. And as he did, he made it clear that he had one goal, and only one goal in mind for all of them, the death penalty.

Upon hearing this news, the mayor sent another urgent letter to Genoa, who sent a trio of new officials to keep Scribani in line. Now, I don't want to inundate you with new names, as they won't help move the story forward more smoothly. But it is important to think of them as a team. The leader of the pack arrived with every intention of putting an end to Scribani's but one of his helpers convinced him otherwise. I can only imagine that this helper was equally in favor of the death penalty and used his

influence over the leader to stay the course that Scribani had set. What's important for us to remember is that before long, all four of the official government representatives in town were in full support of executing the accused witches. At the end of the spring of 1588, two more women died, this time by execution. They were burned publicly, and then the remains were buried on unconsecrated ground. And that spilling of blood had a dramatic effect. For the visiting officials, it filled them with the thirst for more. For the local leaders, though, it was one more cold shower of reality, so one more

fearful letter was sent out. This one, though, was sent to the church itself, and by the summer of 1588, Catholic representatives had arrived and took over the trials, sending Scribani and his cohorts packing. And I know what you're thinking. If this were any other witch trial, the arrival of church authorities would almost guarantee a bloodbath. But not in triora. Instead, these representatives moved the prisoners to Genoa.

Their torture was brought to an end, and all documentation was confiscated and reviewed. But when they were done, around September of 1588, a proper, level-headed trial began. Without torture hanging over them, every single one of the accused witches retracted their forced confessions. Many were set free and returned to their homes. Those that remained behind were still considered guilty, but when their sentencing took place, the worst they were offered to face was abduration, just like that 13-year-old girl months before. It's not a bloody finale, I know.

There was no courtyard or town square filled with a forest of tall poles and burning bodies. There were no gallows to dismantle or mass graves to dig. There was just a lot of regret, a bit of relief, and much mourning to do for the few who lost their lives. And, of course, finding a way to move on. Humans have the potential for so much. Looking back on history, it's remarkable to see the things that we have accomplished, yet it's also frightening.

It seems our potential for greatness is only eclipsed by our propensity for darkness. So while the Triorah witch trials were tragic and painful, it's encouraging to find one rare example of a community that managed to write the ship and save lives. In the medieval battle against the power of the devil, there was rarely anything good discovered. But in Triorah, at least, we have a story of a community that actually walked away with something valuable. Hope.

Triorah today is a beautiful hilltop community. It's frequently placed on lists of the most beautiful medieval towns in the country. Most visit for the rustic atmosphere and gorgeous views of the countryside. But they also come for the festivals. Every September, the town hosts a mushroom festival. Now, I'm not a fan of fungus myself, so I can only imagine what sort of activities a thing like that might include. And, of course, in October, they celebrate Halloween, drawing visitors from all around.

But it's their summer festival that's the most popular. It is a witchcraft festival. Much like Salem, Massachusetts, who has spent decades reinventing itself as the witch city, complete with a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery from the classic TV show Bewitched, Triorah has found their own way to capitalize on their brush with tragedy in 1588. They even have their own museum dedicated to the trials. And while some of the rooms are archival in nature, holding the actual documents connected to the events of 1588, there are also rooms filled with wax figures and wooden contraptions

that show off the torture techniques used on the victims. And everywhere you look around town, you'll find advertisements for mediums and witches for hire. Palm reading, tarot cards, and charms. If you can dream it up, it's probably in a shop somewhere in Triorah. Yes, there is a memorial, but it's easy to feel like it's lost in the noise of everything else. It only forces us to ponder the line that separates honoring the dead and capitalizing

on their tragedy. The witch trials that took place in Triorah were the last we know of in Italy. And that's obviously a good thing. But they weren't without their impact. In fact, those trials happened at a time when the public perception of witch trials was darkening. Many believe that communities had been too lenient. And while some writers continue to urge restraint and grace, the Catholic Church steered the

public in a different direction. In 1626, Pope Gregory XV published a papal bull that recommended the death penalty for anyone connected to witchcraft, even if it was their first offense. It was a zero-grace attitude that would throw gasoline on the flames of superstition, and the resulting fires would burn across Europe and claim even more lives. Looking back, it's sadly more than a little ironic. Because of Triorah's success in stopping their own trials, future outbreaks of panic became even more violent and drawn out.

Rather than see the people of that small town as a rare example of caution over fear, they were viewed as failures. And as a result, tens of thousands of innocent people were murdered. Like I said before, we humans are capable of so very much. But I often wish that weren't the case. The story of the witch trials of Triorah, Italy are tragic to learn about, but they still show us the potential for goodness. The madness could be stopped, and lives were saved as a result.

But not all European trials were so level-headed. In fact, there was a wave of trials that took place in one location over the course of fifty years and claimed the lives of thousands. Stick around after this brief sponsor break, and I'll tell you all about it. It's easy to think of England when you hear about witch trials. Yes, Salem, Massachusetts is a lot closer to home for most of us, but that wasn't isolated 13-month event. And I think it's fair to say that most of us are aware that things were much worse in

England. And they were. But England wasn't the true hotbed of witchcraft accusations, trials, and executions. No, that honor falls to Germany, and the decades that cover the end of the 1500s and the beginning of the 1600s. And while I don't have time to walk through each and every trial from that era in one small epilogue, I do think it's worth doing a 30,000-foot flyover, because there's a lot that we can learn from it all.

Keep in mind that there were small scatterings of witch trials all over Europe and even within Germany for decades before these specific trials. So it's impossible to point at one person or moment in time and say, yes, that's the first one, the one that kicked it all off. But what makes historians sit up and take notice is when the normal stuff, however tragic it might be, suddenly becomes abnormal. And that's what happened in 1581. That was the year that Johann von Schoenenberg was appointed to the position of Archbishop

over the German city of Trier. Now keep the historical context in mind. The people of Europe were just a few decades into the Protestant Reformation, a time when churches were breaking off from the Catholic Church in waves, and that massive change had deep impacts everywhere. The biggest effect the Reformation had was that it created an atmosphere of hatred. Catholics hated the churches who left their fold, and those that left in protest, the Protestants, hated the authority the Catholics tried to hold over them.

And that hatred became violence in places all around Europe. Kingdoms rose and fell over the issue of Protestant versus Catholic. It was like the tension of the Red Scare in early 20th century America, but orders of magnitude larger and much more violent. And when Schoenenberg became Bishop of Trier in 1581, he brought a lot of that hatred with him. The first people he persecuted were the Protestants, but then he moved on to the Jewish people of the area.

And after that, he went after a group of people that were just as feared and hated as the rest. Witches. And he was ruthless, too. It's estimated that in the six years between 1587 and 1593, Schoenenberg had over 360 people convicted of witchcraft and that had all of them burned alive. Not 25, not even 100, over 360 innocent people. Please let that sink in, because it should be utterly horrifying.

Not only were those people murdered, but once they were dead, the Archbishop took all of their possessions. And if the victims had any surviving family members, those people were exiled from their communities. I'd like to say that it all came to a close because people finally saw the error of their ways. But that wasn't the case. Instead, the witch trials stopped when it was no longer profitable, when there were no

longer funds available to pay witch examiners and executioners. A decade later, they started up again, this time in the city of Fulda, to the east. During the four years that those trials occurred, another 250 people were executed for witchcraft. Those trials came to an end when it was discovered that the man in charge of them, an official named Balthazar Nus, was getting rich off the process. He was sent to prison and was executed for his crimes in 1618. But people had yet to learn their lesson, it seems. A generation later in 1626, more trials broke out in the region around the city of Wurzburg,

to the south of Fulda. Just in the city alone, roughly 160 people were burned at the stake, although the gruesome silver lining is that most of them had been beheaded prior to that. Outside the city, things were even worse, with a rough estimate placing the death toll at around 900. That same year, the German city of Bamberg had their own encounter with witch trials. After decades of similar mass executions all across Germany, the people of Bamberg applied lessons and ideas that made the process easier.

I know we love to praise that good old German engineering and efficiency, and as someone of mostly German ancestry, I've done that most of my life, but these people took a noble gift and turned it into a weapon. Rather than fill the town square with hundreds of poles for burning witches, they simply built a walk-in crematorium. There were so many people arrested on suspicion of witchcraft that they had to build a brand new prison just to hold them all. And over the course of the next five years, hundreds of people would be tortured inside

those walls before offering up a desperate confession, a confession that almost certainly brought on a violent death. Those trials ended when it became clear that no one was safe from the inquisition like hunt for witches. When the pregnant wife of a wealthy merchant was taken into custody in December of 1629, that was the final straw. You can come for the outsiders and strangers and underprivileged, they seem to say, but don't you dare comfort those of us with a bit of power.

That merchant's wife was a woman named Dorothea Flock. When the people of Bamberg learned about her arrest, they were enraged. They managed to get the authorities to write a letter demanding her immediate release, and the messenger was dispatched to the prison to make that happen. When the prison learned that an order for her release was headed their way, they panicked. Knowing that their time was running out, they dragged Dorothea out of her cell on May 14th and tortured her until she confessed to witchcraft. And then she was immediately burned at the stake.

By the time the messenger arrived, Dorothea Flock was nothing more than a pile of ash. When the Bamberg trials were over, the list of victims was staggering. Most historians believe that those specific trials resulted in the execution of roughly 1,000 innocent people. To add insult to injury, the people responsible for it all simply fled the country, escaping the justice they so very much deserved. And look, I'll be honest with you, I don't have a neat and tidy way to wrap up a story like this.

It's appalling just how brutal we can be toward people who are different from us, or who don't follow our rules, or we just don't like, that I want to be able to tell you that in the centuries since this all happened, we've learned our lessons and become better human beings. But I'm not sure that I can do that. Instead, I can only tell you that there's hope. The people of Trier Italy taught us that, after all, that even in the face of horrible injustice, there's always a chance that good will triumph over evil.

But of course, that's the trouble, isn't it? Because history has shown that the power to be either is inside each and every one of us. And that's a battle that's difficult to win. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Alexandra Steed and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television

show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn more about both of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Search for Lore podcast, all one word, and click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.