What was the inquisition and how did this movement help foster witch-hunts during the Middle Ages?

Answer 1

An inquisition is an investigation into people or organizations that are thought to be heretical by the Roman Catholic Church. Inquisitions began in the late 12th century, and have continued since. The medieval inquisitions were aimed at such heretical movements as the Cathars and Waldensians. When we speak of the inquisition, without saying specifically saying which, we are usually speaking of the Spanish Inquisition, which started in 1478 and lasted until 1834. There were also Portuguese and Roman Inquisitions, both of which began in the 16th century. These later inquisitions were aimed at rooting out all heretics rather than being confined to investigating specific heresies.

Witch trials began in ancient times, but were not in much of the medieval world until they started happening in Southern France and Switzerland in the 14th and 15th centuries, about the time the Renaissance began. In the early years, they were trials of individuals and small groups. Later, they became organized and state sanctioned efforts to find, try, and execute witches, rather than to try people who were accused of witchcraft, and these were the witch hunts. They originated in the early Renaissance and became widespread in the 16th century, and continued for something over a hundred years. They were a money making operation for people who got bounties for each witch executed.

The estimates I have seen on executions of witches put the numbers for the entire Middle Ages in the hundreds, or less than one per year for the continent of Europe on average. The estimates I have seen for the period of the 16th and 17th centuries, after the Middle Ages ended, possibly as many as 100,000 executions, or 500 per year. The witch hunts began in Switzerland and southern France, but were primarily in focused in Germany, Denmark, England, and Scotland, all Protestant countries, where the inquisitions were not operating.

Based on these facts, I would say that the inquisitions and the witch hunts were things that were coincidental, and possibly not related on a basis of cause and effect. The strong connection between them was that both the later inquisitions and the witch hunts were proactive attempts to find evil, as opposed to attempts to deal with evils that had been exposed. But in any case, they had little to do with the Middle Ages.

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