Population and the Death Toll Jenny jennyg@compuserve.com Mon Jan 31 19:02:06 2000 Hi Everyone,*p*In a little bit, I'll try to pick up where I left off. However in the mean time I thought I'd post a letter that I wrote. Someone had asked me about the population of Europe at the time of the trials, and how the number of deaths compared to it. Also, how the number of witchcraft trials compared to other capital crimes.*p*So for any serious statistics fans, here's something to munch on.*p**************************************p*The population of Europe fluctuated greatly during the course of the Burning Times (1300-1800). Around 1300, Europe had a population of 36 million. When the Black Death hit in 1348, the population plummeted to around 18 to 24 million. It stayed that low for about 150 years. Then, in the end, of the 15th century, the population began to rise dramatically. By 1600, the height of the trials, Europe's population had quadrupled to a staggering 100 million people.*p*Interestingly, this roughly corresponds to the number of witchcraft trials. There was a sudden spate of political trials in the early 1300's, when the population was high but stable. When the Black Death hit, witch trials dropped. They picked up again at the end of the 15th century, when the population began to soar. And when population density was the highest, witch trials were the worst.*p*Here are some figures for smaller areas.*p*New England had a little less than 100,000 inhabitants in the 17th century (when all of its witch-hunting occurred) and killed 36 people. Iceland had a population of 50,000 when it killed 22 people. Finland had 300,000-400,000 people and 115 deaths. England's population was more uncertain, somewhere between 2 and a half and 5 and a half million. It killed between 800-1,000 witches. France, Switzerland, and Germany had a combined population of 50 million (sorry, my source doesn't break them down more than that...) and may have killed up to 37,000 witches.*p*A caveat about these figures: the deaths are spread out over many years, so we can't simply say that .036% of New Englanders were killed for witchcraft. In fact New England and Iceland's figures are actually worse than they look, because these areas hunted witches for far less time than, say, England and Germany did.*p*********************p*I don't have full information on how common witch trials were compared to other capital crimes. However Hans Eyvind Naess did a nice study of Norway's trials ("Norway: The Criminological Context", in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen's _Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries_)*p*Naess found that when witch-hunting was fiercest in Norway, witches made up 5% of the executions. There were 40 executions totaly, and they broke up like this:*p*Witchcraft = 2 Theft = 10 Homicide = 9 *br*Adultery = 3 Incest = 12 Infanticide = 4*p*This is when witchcraft trials were *most* common. Naess hastened to note that normally they were much lower.*p**********************p*These percentages may make witch hunting look almost inconsequential. The Burning Times certainly weren't a population devastating event like the Black Plague (30%-50% population loss in a three-year period). But the trials had a much greater impact than these numbers suggest. For every witch who died, there was another one who survived her trial. Probably one was lynched for every 2-5 who were legally executed (though lynching is notoriously hard to estimate). *p*Moreover a huge number of people were suspected of witchcraft, but never formally tried. For example Spain's one craze was the Basque Dream Epidemic, the largest craze of the Burning Times. Only 11 people died, yet more than 7,000 were reported to the Inquisition. That's one of the reasons why the death toll is a miserable way of determining how devastating the Burning Times were.*p*Let me give you some statistics from Spain (courtesy of Gustav Henningsen's wonderful book, _The Witches' Advocate_). These do a much better job of showing what a witch craze could do to a region.*p*At the height of Spain's greatest craze (1611) the towns at the center of the craze were devastated. In the town of Donamaria (pop. 215), 20 people confessed to being witches, and another 109 were under suspicion. That means 60% of the residents were believed to be witches -- and given the gender percentages in this trial (60% women, 40% men), that means that almost three quarters of the woman in town had been reported to the Inquisition. Zugarramurdi (pop. 390) was also hard hit. 34 of its residents confessed to witchcraft and 124 were suspected -- hence almost 40% of the people were suspected.*p*Other areas had less problems. But on average, 25% of the population of the region had either actively confessed to being witches, or were reported to the Inquisition. For this one year, there were 11 deaths, 31 full trials, and 1,527 accusations that never came to trial. This, in a population of 6,120.*p*It's dangerous to extrapolate from one area to another. But there are reasons to suspect that something similar held true in other parts of Europe: the vast majority of cases never came to trial. Trial records and confessions mention many suspected witches who were never tried. However in most places, there was no "official" way of permanently recording suspicions, so they've been lost to time. In Spain the Inquisition kept detailed notes, and we can see how much larger witch hunts really were.*p************br************p*This is one of the reasons why I think that fixating on the death toll is misleading. The number of deaths is only the tip of the iceburg -- it doesn't give us a good feel for how horrific the persecution was. Even looking at just the trials and "official" persecution can blind us.*p*In Spain, in 1611, eleven people died. For every one who died, there were three who were tortured, interrogated, and publicly humiliated. For every one who was officially tortured, however, there were 500 whose lives were forever changed by the fear and paranoia of their neighbors. To say, then, that 11 witches died is misleading, for it erases the 20 who survived their trials, and the fifteen hundred who suffered without one.*p*Jenny*br*