zeal of the enemies of Satan should cool, successive popes
appointed new commissions. One was appointed by Alexander VI. in 1494,
another by Leo X. in 1521, and a third by Adrian VI. in 1522. They were
all armed with the same powers to hunt out and destroy, and executed their
fearful functions but too rigidly. In Geneva alone five hundred persons
were burned in the years 1515 and 1516, under the title of Protestant
witches. It would appear that their chief crime was heresy, and their
witchcraft merely an aggravation. Bartolomeo de Spina has a list still
more fearful. He informs us that in the year 1524 no less than a thousand
persons suffered death for witchcraft in the district of Como, and that
for several years afterwards the average number of victims exceeded a
hundred annually. One inquisitor, Remigius, took great credit to himself
for having, during fifteen years, convicted and burned nine hundred.

In France, about the year 1520, fires for the execution of witches blazed
in almost every town. Danaeus, in his _Dialogues of Witches_, says they
were so numerous that it would be next to impossible to tell the number of
them. So deep was the thraldom of the human mind, that the friends and
relatives of the accused parties looked on and approved. The wife or
sister of a murderer might sympathise in his fate, but the wives and
husbands of sorcerers and witches had no pity. The truth is that pity was
dangerous, for it was thought no one could have compassion on the
sufferings of a witch who was not a dabbler in sorcery: to have wept for a
witch would have insured the stake. In some districts, however, the
exasperation of the people broke out, in spite of superstition. The
inquisitor of a rural township in Piedmont burned the victims so
plentifully and so fast, that there was not a family in the place which
did not lose a member. The people at last arose, and the inquisitor was
but too happy to escape from the country with whole limbs. The archbishop
of the diocese proceeded afterwards to the trial of such as the inquisitor
had left in prison.

Some of the charges were so utterly preposterous that the poor wretches
were at once liberated; others met a harder, but the usual fate. Some of
them were accused of having joined the witches' dance at midnight under a
blasted oak, where they had been seen by creditable people. The husbands
of several of these women (two of whom were young and beautiful) swore
positively that at t