How it happened
- 16th centuryWaves of accusations swept across Europe, and confessions were considered the main evidence.
- 17th centuryTreatises began to appear, written by people who had witnessed the trials from the inside.
- 18th centuryCourts abandoned torture, and confessions stopped emerging automatically.
- LaterThe laws were still formally in force, but cases no longer reached a verdict.
The second point is especially important. The most convincing objections came not from outside skeptics, but from priests and lawyers who had personally accompanied the condemned. Their argument was not that witchcraft did not exist, but that this method could not establish the truth.
The argument went like this: under torture, anyone would confess, including an innocent person. So a confession could not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, and could not serve as evidence. This argument proved stronger than theological disputes precisely because it was procedural.
It was not a dispute about faith that stopped the practice, but a dispute about evidence. Remove the way evidence is obtained, and the verdicts disappear too.
Why the waves ended abruptly
Individual outbreaks most often ended in the same way: the accusations reached people who were effectively beyond suspicion, such as officials' wives, priests, and judges' relatives. After that, higher authorities halted the proceedings.
A well-known American case ended exactly this way. When the accusations began to circle back and the number of suspects became embarrassingly large, the governor banned the use of testimony about visions, and the cases fell apart within a few weeks.
The mechanism of expansion was the same as in other mass trials: every confession required naming accomplices. As long as this worked, the wave grew on its own, and only a change in the rules could stop it, not the review of individual cases.
Geography is worth remembering too. The trials did not happen evenly: in some places there were almost none, while elsewhere the numbers reached into the thousands. The difference was mainly explained by how the courts were structured, not by differences in what the population believed.
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Sources
- The end of witch trials is linked to changes in judicial practice: abandoning torture and refusing to accept testimony about visions
- criticism from within was published, among others, by the clergy who accompanied the condemned