About 1515, 500 persons were executed at Geneva, under the character of “Protestant witches,” from which we may suppose many suffered for heresy.  Forty-eight witches were burnt at Ravensburgh within four years, as Hutchison reports, on the authority of Mengho, the author of the “Malleus Malleficarum.”  In Lorraine the learned inquisitor, Remigius, boasts that he put to death 900 people in fifteen years.  As many were banished from that country, so that whole towns were on the point of becoming desolate.  In 1524, 1,000 persons were put to death in one year at Como, in Italy, and about 100 every year after for several years.[51]

[Footnote 51:  Bart. de Spina, de Strigilibus.]

In the beginning of the next century the persecution of witches broke out in France with a fury which was hardly conceivable, and multitudes were burnt amid that gay and lively people.  Some notion of the extreme prejudice of their judges may be drawn from the words of one of the inquisitors themselves.  Pierre de Lancre, royal councillor in the Parliament of Bourdeaux, with whom the President Espaignel was joined in a commission to enquire into certain acts of sorcery, reported to have been committed in Labourt and its neighbourhood, at the foot of the Pyrenees, about the month of May, 1619.  A few extracts from the preface will best evince the state of mind in which he proceeded to the discharge of his commission.

His story assumes the form of a narrative of a direct war between Satan on the one side and the Royal Commissioners on the other, “because,” says Councillor de Lancre, with self-complaisance, “nothing is so calculated to strike terror into the fiend and his dominions as a commission with such plenary powers.”

At first, Satan endeavoured to supply his vassals who were brought before the judges with strength to support the examinations, so that if, by intermission of the torture, the wretches should fall into a doze, they declared, when they were recalled from it to the question, that the profound stupor “had something of Paradise in it, being gilded,” said the judge, “with the immediate presence of the devil;” though, in all probability, it rather derived its charms from the natural comparison between the insensibility of exhaustion and the previous agony of acute torture.  The judges took care that the fiend seldom obtained any advantage in the matter by refusing their victims, in most cases, any interval of rest or sleep.  Satan then proceeded, in the way of direct defiance, to stop the mouth of the accused openly, and by mere force, with something like a visible obstruction in their throat.  Notwithstanding this, to put the devil to shame, some of the accused found means, in spite of him, to confess and be hanged, or rather burnt.  The fiend lost much credit by his failure on this occasion.  Before the formidable Commissioners arrived, he had held his cour pleniere before the gates of Bourdeaux, and in the square of the palace of Galienne,