The hoax of red-haired women burnt at the stake as witches (with a long digression on the Inquisition)

Here’sSooner or later, all those interested in red hair happen to read (on the internet, but also in books) that redhaired women were burnt at the stake as witches. Since I kept reading this over and over again, at first I thought it was true, but then I realised a couple of things. First, no further information was provided: where and when were these women burnt? And how many of them? Second, the Wikipedia page Red hair (which is quite well-done from the historical point of view) doesn’t mention any witch-burning. As a matter of fact, the word “witch” is mentioned only once in the whole page, here:

Now, as you can see, this excerpt from Montague Summers is only about vampires: he doesn’t mention either werewolves or witches. As for the burning, he only talks about red-haired men burnt in ancient Egypt.


The curious thing is that this same excerpt is sometimes used as “evidence” of red-haired witches. The author of this page, for example, quotes the same passage and writes it is from the famous Malleus Maleficarum, the witch-hunting manual written in 1487 by two German Dominican friars. This other page does the same thing, adding the excerpt is from Montague Summers’ translation of the Malleus Maleficarum.

Here’s the Malleus Maleficarum translated by Summers and, as you can verify by yourself, this passage is nowhere to be found. I also searched the book to see if red hair was mentioned as a proof of being a whitch, but… surprise! No mention of it. So, the “evidence” of red-haired women burnt at the stake as witches is actually only the evidence of how much certain people are ignorant and don’t check what they write (or read).



The excerpt above is indeed from Montague Summers and precisely from his book The Vampire (also know as The Vampire – His Kith and Kin). You can find the excerpt here, in the third chapter.

Summers also wrote a book called The History of Witchcraft and Demonology where he does not mention red hair as an evidence of witchery.

There’s another reason why red hair as a mark of witchcraft is a hoax. The trials to people suspected of witchcraft left (as any ordinary trial) many papers and documents, so historians, by studying these documents, found out the reasons which led to these accusations and red hair was not among them. Today we know nearly everything about these trials, which means we know that other pieces of “information” you may have read, such as women burnt because they were good-looking, or because they knew how to read and write, or because they would cure the sick with herbs, is also nonsense.



Just to be clear, I’m not saying that in folklore or in popular belief red-haired women (or red-haired people in general) were not considered linked to the supernatural. I’m just saying that red hair was not enough to mark a woman as a witch.



Since we're talking about this topic, I want to take this opportunity to clarify a couple of issues about which there is a lot of misinformation. Because both issues are quite broad, I’ll try to be brief and I will link articles and books, so you can delve deeper. Most of the articles are in Italian, but you can easily translate them with an online translator. Most of the books are (obviously) out of print, but they are available second-hand and I will also give you the links for free-of-charge download (if you can’t access the site for the free-of-charge download, you will probably need a VPN). Only one of the books seems to be completely unavailable (at least in English).

 

THE WITCH HUNT

Although alleged witches were tried already in the Middle Ages (you can read something about it here), both by religious and secular (lay) tribunals, the peak of the witch hunt took place more or less between 1450 and 1750, so, basically, from the beginning of the Renaissance to roughly the end of the Age of Enlightement. This because the witch hunt was the consequence on the one hand of the Protestant Reformation and of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and, on the other hand, of the Renaissance interest in the occult.



Since the struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation was stronger in northern Europe, the witch hunt too was stronger in northern Europe, as you can see in the table below (please note the difference between accusations and executions). In the climate of general suspicion, any excuse could be good to accuse someone of witchcraft.

Also, as you can see in this other table, men too were accused of witchcraft.

                                    

From “Male Witches in Early Modern Europe”

This article debunks the hoax of the “9 million women” burnt as witches, which you may have read on “feminist” outlets. As a matter of fact, the total of people executed was around 30-40,000.

The reason why Catholic countries in southern Europe had so few executions is due to these countries having a strong centralised power which prevented chaos. Although it may seem paradoxical, this strong centralised power was the Inquisition.

First of all, Inquisition did not accept the testimony of an alleged witch against other people. Second, the Inquisition did not accept the so-called “mark of the devil”. Third, Catholic religion did not believe in witches, that is, it didn’t believe women could, for example, fly to the sabbath and have intercourse with the devil. According to the Church, these women only believed they were witches and for that reason witchcraft was treated as a heresy. Unlike secular courts, which, without exception, imposed the death penalty for witchcraft when the accused confessed to having participated in a sabbath, or apostatised from the devil, or cast a spell, the Inquisition treated witchcraft as heresy; thus, a convicted person who did not recidivate and declared him/herself repentant, could reconcile with the Church.

Most of the women tried as witches in Catholic countries were just “enchantresses”, eldery women who would prepare love or health potions or would suggest “rituals” for love or something else. Sometimes, the ingredients used for these potions were poisonous herbs, or the rituals could endanger the person, and if someone died, obviously the woman was taken to trial (often by a secoular court).

THE INQUISITION

The Inquisition is another subject about which there is a lot of misinformation and I’d like to shortly (hopefully) address it.

How many Inquisitions?

In the modern time (that is, after the Middle Ages) there were three Inquisitions, roughly based on the previous medieval Inquisition.

The first one was the Spanish Inquisition, set up in 1478 and dismantled definitively in 1834, although it had been inactive for nearly a century. It was an institution dependent on the crown of Spain and independent of papal authority, and had jurisdiction not only in Spain, but also in all countries belonging to the Spanish crown, such as Sicily, Sardinia and South America (but not over the natives). Milan and Naples too were under Spanish jurisdiction, but they took position against the establishment of the Inquisition.


Then we have the Portuguese Inquisition, set up in 1536 and officially abolished in 1821, although it had been inactive since the end of 1700.

Finally, in 1542 the Roman Inquisition was set up, to counter Martin Luther’s Reform. Outside of Italy, this Inquisition is often called Italian, but technically speaking this adjective is incorrect, since at the time Italy was not yet a unified state, but was divided into many states, with different forms of government. The official name of this instituion was Congregazione del Sant’Uffizio (Congregation of the Holy Office). Roman Inquisition worked on mandate both of secular and of religious justice and most of its trials were about bigamy, blasphemy, Christian renegades, forgers of ecclesiastical documents, fake Inquisition officials, fake priests, Inquisition officials guilty of infringements or embezzlement, soliciting during the confession, superstition, heresy.



Keep in mind these Inquisitions had jurisdiction only on Catholics, included those who converted to Catholic faith from other religions, so if, for example, a Muslim converted to the Catholic faith, but then he wanted to come back to Islam, the Inquisition could step in. The Inquisition could step in also if someone belonging to a different religion tried to convert Catholics.

Italy at the end of 1400

As for Protestant countries, although they didn’t establish a centralised Inquisition, they too had the need to repress dissent, and since for them religious and secular power were one and the same thing, the repression came from civil tribunals (here’s an article about the witch hunt in Newcastle).

The same happened in France, even though there secular judges were called “inquisitors”. This is probably due to the origin of this word, which has the same root of English terms such as inquiry, inquest, query, question and similar. They come from the Latin verb inquīro (to investigate, to search, to seek grounds for accusation), which, on its turn, comes form the verb quaero: seek, ask, inquire.

The black legend

The Inquisition “black legend” has its first origin in the negative propaganda from Protestants, in particular from the Dutch, who, in the XVI century, were rising up against Philip II of Spain. In an attempt to create a network of alliances with the Protestant powers, they made propaganda one of their main weapons. For that reason, they flooded Europe with leaflets and books all speaking of the cruelty of that tribunal. However, for a long time interest in the Inquisition was limited to polemical literature.


It was the Age of Enlightement, and in particular Voltaire and other French philosophes, to reopen the fire against the Inquisition. Today, a part of modern critique is abandoning the totally positive vision of the Enlightenment, also highlighting its negative consequences and a certain hypocrisy. Enlightement thinkers deified reason and rejected religion, thus forgetting (or pretending to) that, for example, all European universities and hospitals of that time were Christian inventions of the Middle Ages, or that the list of Catholic clergymen who made contributions to science is endless. Philosophes like Volatiare, Le Chalotais, Coyer and La Madeleine were also classist, because they despised the working-class and were against its education (on the contrary, in the Middle Ages schools were open to anybody and for the poor education for free). Two philosophes like Voltaire and Buffon, although criticising the bad treatment of slaves, did not question slavery itself, because they deemed it necessary in the plantations (Voltaire himself was a slave trader).

Or, not everyone knows that Isaac Newton, behind his scientistic and rationalist facade, cultivated a great interest in alchemy. This perhaps means that rationalism was fed (and perhaps still is fed) only to the masses, while people “high above” knew very well that the world was not made up only of matter.

Here are some short articles about modern critique of the Age of Enlightement: Criticisms from Contemporary and Later Perspectives, Controversiesand Ongoing Debates, Historiographyand Modern Assessments.

Then, as often happens when ideology reigns supreme, a huge lie was needed to deliver a fatal blow to the Inquisition. After Napoleon invaded Spain, the last Secretary General of the Inquisition, Juan Antonio Llorente (1756 – 1823) was charged with writing a history of the Spanish Inquisition. Since he was enamoured of the Enlightement ideas, he inflated and exaggerated the figures of trials and convictions/executions. Today, no historian takes Llorente's figures as true anymore, but for a long time they provided the propaganda basis necessary for the denigration of the Spanish (and not only Spanish) Inquisition by Protestant countries and liberals.

For example, many modern historians are so biased they remain perplexed by the fact that the Spanish siglo de oro (golden age) coincided with the period of maximum activity of this tribunal.


In the XX century we have Henry Charles Lea, a rich publisher from Philadelphia. He never came to Europe, but could afford to hire a large team of transcribers who copied a vast mass of documents for him. Personally convinced of the evils of "popery," he wrote three volumes on the medieval Inquisition that used indeed contemporary documents, but with overly biased commentary. The sheer volume of work long discouraged others from attempting it, and for the following decades it served as Llorente's book had done in the previous century.

The "black legend" was then relaunched by low-quality novels, films and TV series and is therefore today considered a historical fact, and although (as I said before) the opening of the Inquisition archives all over Europe shows us a completely different reality, it seems that nothing can undermine this legend. For example, this article was written by Italian historian Anna Foa (who is not a Catholic, so she doesn’t have any axe to grid) in 2018, twenty years after the opening of the Vatican archives of the Holy Office. She complains that “No document can defeat prejudice. Since the archives were opened, the black legend has not only not been debunked, but has actually been strengthened, and the impression is that the gap between rational knowledge and mythological imagination has now widened.”

Now, according to the black legend, inquisitors were bloothirsty lunatics who spent their days torturing and burning people, but, as I said, the reality was the opposite, because Inquisition courts proved to be far milder than secular courts. Most of the punisments given by inquisitors were prayers, public repentance, piligrimages to certain churches or sanctuaries, or (in more serious cases) to the Holy Land. Death penalty was only for recidivists and people who did not want to repent (consider that death penalty is still used today in 53 countries of the world). Fire was used because heresy was considered a crime of divine lese-majesty. On the contrary, in Protestant countries hanging was used, because religious dissidents were accused of high treason.


A good example of the Inquisition mildity is the case of Pablo de Olavide. How many prisoners do you know who are allowed to go to the spa?

Tomàs de Torquemada, first inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. He came from a family of Jews converted to Christianity (conversos)

How many victims?

As far as the Roman Inquisition is concerned, calculating the exact number of death sentences is not easy, because, unlike the Spanish Inquisition (whose data were archived in a more organised and centralised way), the paperwork from various Italian courts was scattered around the local Inquisition offices and only few of them reached the central archive in Rome (as I said above, Italy was not united under a single sovereign). For this reason, usually historians take into account the activity of specific local courts over a certain period of time. However, Italian historian Andrea Del Col has tried to make an overall estimate of the death sentences: according to him, they are about 1250 (over about 250 years), that is, between 1,6 and 2,4% out of a number of trials between 51,000 and 75,000. Historians John Tedeschi and Christopher Black (I will mention their books in a moment) both agree that only a small percentage of trials ended with a death sentence.

I quote Tedeschi “Although generally believed to the contrary, only a small percentage of inquisitorial proceedings resulted in a death sentence. The stake was reserved for three main categories of criminals: the obstinate, unwilling under any circumstances to reconcile with the Church; the relapsed, already found guilty of formal heresy; and those who had attempted to subvert certain doctrinal tenets of Catholicism, such as the virginity of Christ's mother and the divinity of the Son of God. In practice, however, I have encountered a very large number of cases in which people found guilty of the aforementioned heresies were sentenced to less severe penalties.”

As for the Spanish Inquisition, the total of death sentences was about 6% out of 200,000 trials (12,000 death sentences) over 356 years.

Portuguese Inquisition too had a 6% of death sentences, out of 30/45,000 trials (so, between 1800 and 2700 death sentences) over 285 years.

For comparison, Henry VIII, during his 36-year reign, sentenced to death between 57,000 and 72,000 people (political opponents and those who did not accept his marriage to Anne Boleyn). Or, during the French Reign of Terror (between September 1793 and July 1794) about 35/40,000 people (or even 50,000, according to some) were sentenced to death (including people sentenced to death without a trial), to the cry of liberté, egalité, fraternité.

Inquisition’s manuals

This article quotes some passages form a 1621 Inquisition manual written by Eliseo Masini, called Sacro arsenale overo Prattica dell’Officio della Santa Inquisitione.

The article lists all the “clues” to identify witches and wizards and red hair is not mentioned. The article also quotes some passages about the correct procedure during the trial, and, as you can read, these procedures were very modern for the time, so modern that historian John Tedeschi writes Inquisition was a pioneer of the judicary reform. For example, as you can read in this article, imprisonment as a punishment made its appearance in Europe in the last decades of the 1500s. Before that date, inprisonment was only used as a precautionary measure during trial and for that reason judges were forced to inflict rather drastic penalties, so to speak, such as burning at the stake, mutilation, forced labour on the galleys or exile. However, Inquisition started using inprisonment as a punishment and in this way many lives were saved. Besides, since the Inquisition only had prisons in Rome and in few other cities, usually inprisonment took place either in convents or in the convicted’s house/city. The article I linked also describes the Inquisition’s prison in Rome, which was far better than many modern prisons!

If you want to read something more about the Inquisition procedures, you can read this excerpt: The Roman Inquisition and Witchcraft. An Early Seventeenth-Century“Instruction” on Correct Trial Procedure.

As for the Malleus Maleficarum, we have to keep in mind that it was not part of the Church teachings (although it was written by two Dominican friars), which means that the Inquisition kept it in very little consideration and preferred other manuals (like the Instruction and the Sacro arsenale mentioned above). For example, the Spanish Inquisition warned its inquisitors not to believe everyting this manual wrote, because the authors may have made mistakes.

Other manuals are the Tractatus de officio Sanctissimae inquisitionis et modo procedendi in causis fidei by Cesare Carena and Lucerna inquisitorum haereticae pravitatis by Bernardo da Como.

Torture

And here comes the subject you were all waiting for: torture! Obviously, when Inquisition is mentioned, everybody thinks of the most heinous cruelties, but facts are very different.

Now, first of all, torture was used by secular tribunals since the XIII century, so, it wasn’t an Inquisition exclusive. However, from the analysis of the archive material it emerged that secular tribunals used it far more than the inquisitorial tribunals, and this because the latter had strictly regulated it.

Usually, Inquisition used torture only when the defendant would deny his guilt without being able to refute the charges, but there was overwhelming evidence against him. However, as far as Roman Inquisition is concerned, torture had to be authorised from Rome and a physician had to visit the defendant, to see if he could stand the torment. Torture was not used on children, pregnant women or women who had had a child in the previous forty days, disabled or very ederly people (although it seems that Spanish Inquisition did not have these age limits). Everything was said under torture had to be confirmed after 24 hours, without torture, otherwise the testimony was not valid. During the “session”, an inquisitor, a representative of the bishop and a notary were to be present and the latter had to write down everything the defendant would say.

Inquisition used torture less (compared to secular courts) mainly because inquisitors knew that people would say anything to end the torment (only to retract the day after) and that physically and psycologically strong people could resist torture. All in all, inquisitors didn’t want to harm the defendant permanently, because if he was innocent, he had the right to go on with his life as usual.

And now, let’s talk about the “torture tools”. Truth is that most of the Inquisition torture tools you see in films and in “torture museums” are modern forgeries. As you can read in the article I’ve linked, the most used tool by the Roman Inquisition was the corda (rope), because inquisitors were forbidden to spill the defendants’ blood. The suspect’s hands were tied behind his back with a rope, and then, using that rope or a hook, the suspected was lifted and sometimes dropped for a short trait. Obviously, this risked damaging the shoulder joints, and for this reason (as Eliseo Masini writes in his manual), no weights or stones should be attached to the suspect's feet, nor should excessive force be applied when dropping the suspect.

Another method consisted in getting a flame near the defendant’s feet, taking it away and getting it near again. However, since it could be dangerous (it could cause a fire), it was used rarely.

Spanish Inquisition also used a form of torture similar to the modern waterboarding (about which, by the way, there is still debate whether it is or not a form of torture). Obviously, there were people who died nonetheless (sometimes because of strokes), but that was not the inquisitors’ aim.

The nonexistent Iron Maid

Please keep in mind that today, although torture has been banned by most countries of the world, it is still used, as it emerged in the horrible scandal of torture ad abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison (Iraq) by the US Army and CIA (discretion is advised).


Also, I said above, some argue it is not clear whether waterboarding should be considered a form of torture or not.

Books

One of the first historians to bring aspects of the Roman Inquisition to an anglophone global audience is the aforementioned Italian-born American scholar John Tedeschi (1931–2023). Unfortunately, his book The Prosecution of Heresy. Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy seems to be not only out of print, but also unavailable either second-hand or in digital format, so you can try looking for it in a library. I managed to find a remainder copy in Italian and if you can read Italian here’s a free download. This book was published in 1991, that is, seven years before the opening of the Vatican archive of the Holy Office, but what emerged from the opening of that archive only confirmed what Tedeschi had written in his book. Just like the aforementioned Anna Foa, John Tedeschi was not a Catholic, so he didn’t have an axe to grind either.

Tedeschi collaborated with historian Gustav Henningsen for the book The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe : Studies on Sources and Methods (1986) a collection of essays on Roman, Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.

The latest book on this subject is The Italian Inquisition (2009) by Christopher Black (free download here).



As for the Spanish Inquisition, it suffered an even worse destiny than the Roman one, both for what I said before about Juan Antonio Llorente and for reasons you can easily understand if you know Spanish history, but in this case too the black legend has been debunked.

A first attempt to debunking is the book The Spanish Inquisition by Joseph de Maistre. It is a collection of six letters written by De Maistre in 1815, while he was in Russia.

Then we have The Witches' Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609-1614 (1980) by Gustav Henningsen. This book is about a case of witchcraft in the Basque Country and inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frias. I quote from Wikipedia:

“Alonso de Salazar Frías has been given the epithet "The Witches’ Advocate" by historians, for his role in establishing the conviction, within the Spanish Inquisition, that accusations against supposed witches were more often rooted in dreams and fantasy than in reality, and the inquisitorial policy that witch accusations and confessions should only be given credence where there was firm, independent, corroborating evidence. He was probably the most influential figure in ensuring that those accused of witchcraft were generally not put to death in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain. The Spanish Inquisition was one of the first institutions in Europe to rule against the death penalty for supposed witches. Its Instructions of 1614, which embodied Salazar's ideas, were influential throughout Catholic Europe.”

By the way, did you know that the witches’ pet was not the black cat, but the toad?

A very peculiar case was that of historian Henry Kamen. He wrote a first book about the Spanish Inquisition in 1965, where he gave a very grim depiction of it. However, over the following forty years, he kept on researching the subject and, showing a humility and an intellctual honesty quite rare among scholars, he realised what he wrote in the book was partly wrong. So, he published four more versions of it, the last one in 2014 with the title The Spanish Inquisition: A Historucal Revision. Free download here.



As for the Medieval Inquisition (which I have not discussed here), as I said, H. C. Lea’s work is rather biased against it, although here and there he too is forced to admit some truths. In my opinion, a good author on the subject is Jean Guiraud, but I’m not sure his books have been translated into English (the volume about the medieval Inquisition is available in Franch and Italian).

CONCLUSION

You have probably heard, especially in the field of so-called alternative information, that “history needs to be rewritten”, but I’ve noticed that often those who say this thing refer to aliens, UFOs, ancient astronauts, etc. On the contrary, truth is that in order to rewrite history we only need to read the sources in an honest and unbiased way.

Today, for example, even in the academic world there is a tendency to judging the past using modern standards, but this doesn’t make sense, because in the past people were different from us and the more we go back in time, the more they are different. They had a different frame of mind, different values, a different relation with themselves, the others, authority, religion, family relations and the world in general. Their inner world was completely different from ours. Had we the opportunity to talk with someone from 500 or 1000 years ago, we wouldn’t understand him. Basically, judging the past using modern standards is as stupid as judging a 5-year-old using the standards for a 40-year-old. No-one would say a 5-year-old is wrong or evil because he doesn’t act and think as a 40-year-old.

If we want to understand a phenomenon, a population or a single person from the past, we have to compare it with contemporary phenomena, populations and people. We are all children of our time, and if we had lived 500 or 1000 years ago, we would have behaved exactly like all the other people of 500 or 1000 years ago.

In any case, should I make a comparison between the past and the present, I don’t see a lot of differences. The only differences are in appearance. Today too there is an inquisition, centered not on religion, but on politics. If you say or do something “politically incorrect” you can be fined, fired from your job, inprisoned without a fair trial or you can have you bank accounts (and those of your relatives) closed. Some books are so politically incorrect they cannot be sold in either physical or online bookstores and you have to buy them from the publisher. Certain publishers are banned from book fairs (or some would like to do so).

So, where’s the difference with the past? The difference is that in the past the concept of freedom of expression didn’t exist, so if the Church would issue the Index of forbidden books, or if the Inquisition would take you to trial for denying a dogma, it was its right to do so and only few people would object. On the contrary, today we have our Constitutions stating that freedom of expression is one of our fundamental rights, but, apparently, only if you say the right things. At least, people in the past were not fooled, making them believe they had rights that actually didn’t have.

Actually, I should highlight that modern standards are used only in judging western populations. So, if, for example, a non-western population used to practise human sacrifices or cannibalism, people shrug and say “That was their culture and we have to respect it”. But if, in the same period of time, the Inquisition tried a person and sentenced him to recite certain preyers every day… well, that was sheer barbarity!



PS: The Middle Ages

Just like the Inquisition, the Middle Ages too has been the object of negative propaganda. Today, no historian believes anymore in the “Dark Ages”, but for most people the Middle Ages is still “Dark Ages”.

Here are some debunking books.

The first historian who debunked the myth of the Dark Ages is certainly French historian Régine Pernoud. All her books are extremely interesting and I especially recommend Women in the Days of the Cathedrals, which shows that in the Middle Ages women had already attained “gender equality” (whataver this means).

As for science in the Middle Ages, in 2020 a book has been published with the fitting title The Light Ages (free download here).


Another book about Medieval science and technology is Medieval Technology and Social Change (1964) (free download here).