Insecurity created by the religious wars contributed to persecution for witchcraft, which actually began before the Reformation in the 1480s but became especially common about 1560. Both Protestants and Catholics tried and executed those accused of being witches, with church officials and secular authorities acting together.

The heightened sense of God’s power and divine wrath in the Reformation era was an important factor in the witch-hunts, but other factors were also significant. In the later Middle Ages, many educated Christian theologians, canon lawyers, and officials added a demonological component to existing ideas about witches. For them, the essence of witchcraft was making a pact with the Devil that required the witch to do the Devil’s bidding. Witches were no longer simply people who used magical power to do harm and get what they wanted, but rather people used by the Devil to do what he wanted. Some demonological theorists also claimed that witches were organized in an international conspiracy to overthrow Christianity.

Trials involving this new notion of witchcraft as diabolical heresy began in Switzerland and southern Germany in the late fifteenth century; became less numerous in the early decades of the Reformation, when Protestants and Catholics were busy fighting each other; and then picked up again about 1560, spreading to much of western Europe and to European colonies in the Americas. Scholars estimate that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people were officially tried for witchcraft, and between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed. While the trials were secret, executions were not, and the list of charges was read out for all to hear.

Though the gender balance of the accused varied widely in different parts of Europe, between 75 and 85 percent of those tried and executed were women, whom some demonologists viewed as weaker and so more likely to give in to the Devil. Tensions within families, households, and neighborhoods also played a role in witchcraft accusations, as grievances and jealousies led to accusations. Suspects were questioned and tortured by legal authorities, and they often implicated others. The circle of the accused grew, sometimes into a much larger hunt that historians have called a “witch panic.” Panics were most common in the part of Europe that saw the most witch accusations in general — the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, and parts of France. Most of this area consisted of very small governmental units that were jealous of each other and, after the Reformation, were divided by religion. The rulers of these small territories often felt more threatened than did the monarchs of western Europe, and they saw persecuting witches as a way to demonstrate their piety and concern for order.

Even in the sixteenth century a few individuals questioned whether witches could ever do harm, make a pact with the Devil, or engage in the wild activities attributed to them. Furthermore, doubts about whether secret denunciations were valid or torture would ever yield a truthful confession gradually spread among the same type of religious and legal authorities who had so vigorously persecuted witches. By about 1660 prosecutions for witchcraft had become less common. The last official execution for witchcraft in England was in 1682, though the last one in the Holy Roman Empire was not until 1775.

European ideas about witchcraft traveled across the Atlantic. There were a few trials of European colonists for witchcraft — the most famous of which was at Salem in Massachusetts — but more often indigenous people were accused of being witches. For example, Jean de Léry, a French Protestant explorer in South America, used a description of a witches’ ritual from a book of European demonology to describe rituals of the Tupinambá people of Brazil. Another French official speculated in the early seventeenth century that the reason there were so many more witches in Europe than there had been earlier was the coming of European missionaries to the New World. Many of Satan’s demons had left Europe centuries earlier when it had become Christian, he commented, but now they had returned. Religious zeal, heightened by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, had many consequences that were not expected.