The Papal court was then at Avignon and the Papacy was almost as corrupt as ever. Petrarch, who lived not far away at the time, called the "sacred palace" at Avignon "the sink of all vices"; and there were certainly not many vices that were not richly represented by the cardinals.

In every part of Europe the tribunals of the Inquisition now became busy with witches. Between 1320 and 1350 the tribunal at Carcassonne tried more than four hundred cases of magic, and of these one-half were executed. At Toulouse six hundred were charged, and two-thirds of them were handed over to "the secular arm" for execution; There was a terrible massacre at Berne, and large numbers were burned in Italy.

In 1390 the Paris Parliament had checked the persecution by transferring trials to the civil tribunals, but some decades later the clerics regain their power.

And it was again the Popes who were responsible for the new epidemic. Engenius IV had in 1437 urged the Inquisitors to look out for witches. They found plenty in France, Italy, and Switzerland, but in Germany their zeal was checked by comparatively humane rulers and bishops.

The spirit that begot the Reformation was growing. But the German Inquisitors, Institor and Sprengel, reported to Rome that Germany was full of witches of both sexes, and that they formed a well organized sect. A book had been published in German in which witchcraft was condemned as an alliance with the Devil himself. The Pope, Innocent VIII, thereupon issued his famous Bull, "Summis Desiderantes," in 1484, lashing the clergy everywhere to the attack on witches. Actual trials and execution of witches started in 1444 near Hamburg, Germany.

 The Church had gone from a somewhat tolerant disbelief in witches to a fanatical doctrine toward the existence of witches and their alleged alliance with Satan. The persecutions and the terror would eventually spread from the Catholic Church to the Protestant religions and from Europe to the New World in America. Accused witches were burned to death, hanged, drowned or crushed to death under heavy stones. Many would die under torture during the inquisitor's attempt to extract a confession of witchcraft.

 The Inquisition alone is said to have put thirty thousand to death. One judge, Remy, boasted that he sentenced nine hundred in fifteen years in Lorraine. In the diocese of Como a thousand were executed in a year. In three months in 1515 there were six hundred witches burned in the bishopric of Bamberg and nine hundred in the bishopric of Wiirzburg. In five years one hundred and twenty of the six hundred inhabitants of the small town of Lindheim were burned as witches. Some historians estimate that Henri III of France alone accounted for thirty thousand.

 It was the Protestant emphasis on the devil and on the Bible that caused greater massacres in Reformed countries than in Roman Catholic lands. Far more witches were burned in Britain after the Reformation than before it. James I was one of the fiercest opponent, he even believed that witches had caused the terrible storms that kept his bride in Denmark.. The loathsome activity of Hopkins and other witch-finders is in one sense as bad as the activity of the Inquisition.

 A letter written at the time, the year 1629, in the city of Würzburg (Germany, and by no less a person than the bishop's chancellor :

There are still four hundred in the city, high and low, of every rank and sex -- nay, even clerics -- so strongly accused that they may be arrested any hour. Some out of all offices and faculties must be executed; clerics, counselors, doctors, city officials and court assessors.

There are law students to be arrested. The prince-bishop has over forty students here who are to be pastors; thirteen or fourteen of these are said to be witches. A few days ago a dean was arrested; two others who were summoned have fled. The notary of our church consistory, a very learned man, was yesterday arrested and put to torture. In a word, a third part of the city is involved.

A week ago a maiden of nineteen was put to death, of whom it is everywhere said that she was the fairest in the whole city and was held by everybody a girl of singular modesty and purity. She will be followed by seven or eight others of the fairest. There are three hundred children of three or four years of age who are said to have had intercourse with the devil. I have seen put to death children of ten, promising students of ten, twelve, fourteen, fifteen, etc.

There are no reliable accounts as to the exact number of witches executed. Only estimates can be made. During the 150 year period of the Inquisition, in Germany where the most fierce witch hunts occurred, the minimum estimates range from 30,000 to 100,000.

By the 1700s witch trials were becoming a thing of the past. Louis XIV of France, for example, enacted an edict in 1682 that reduced the presence of witch trials. Deists and Rationalists, who could strike at the very root of the principle of religious persecution, criticized and killed the superstitions that were behind the witchcraze. Colbert, Montaigne, Bayle, Beccaria, Voltaire, and other such men brought the world gradually back to sanity and humanity.