Occult lore
Witch Trials
Direct answer
Witch Trials: The witch trials were the prosecutions for witchcraft held in Europe and its colonies between about 1450 and 1750, in which some forty to sixty thousand people were executed.
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At a glance
- Also called
- witch hunts, witch craze, witch persecution
- Found in
- Spells & Occult Terms
- Related
- Malleus Maleficarum, Maleficium, Witchcraft, Witch
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How many people were killed in the witch trials?
The witch trials were a legal process, not a mob. People were formally accused, usually by neighbours after a quarrel followed by a misfortune, examined by a court, and in much of continental Europe tortured until they confessed and named others. Historians estimate about ninety thousand prosecutions and forty to sixty thousand executions over three centuries. Roughly three quarters of the dead were women.
The hunts were very uneven. The small states of the Holy Roman Empire, Scotland, Lorraine and parts of Switzerland put thousands to death. Spain, Italy, Ireland and the Dutch Republic executed few. Where a strong central court reviewed the evidence, convictions fell.
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What sets Witch Trials apart
The trials followed a chain that historians can trace case by case: a quarrel, a misfortune, a rumour, a formal complaint, and then the step that decided everything, whether the court allowed torture. Where it did, one accused person named others and a single case became dozens. Where judges required ordinary proof, as in most of England and under the Spanish Inquisition after 1614, executions were few. The hunts ended less because belief in witches died than because lawyers stopped trusting the evidence.
- Period: about 1450 to 1750, with a peak from 1560 to 1630
- Prosecutions: about ninety thousand, by historians' estimates
- Executions: forty to sixty thousand
- Share of women: about three quarters overall
- Salem, 1692: nineteen hanged and one pressed to death
- Last in Europe: Anna Göldi, Glarus, Switzerland, 1782
Often mistaken for something else: A witch hunt in the loose modern sense is any campaign against a suspected group; the witch trials were actual court cases, with records, in which people were tried and killed.
The story behind Witch Trials
Trials for harmful magic are found throughout the Middle Ages, but the idea of a devil-worshipping sect of witches took shape in the Alps in the 1430s. The Malleus Maleficarum followed about 1486. The great panics came between 1560 and 1630. England hanged its last witches in the 1680s, the trials at Salem were in 1692, and Anna Göldi, executed at Glarus in Switzerland in 1782, is usually counted the last in Europe.
Why Witch Trials matters
Witch Trials are the best documented case of how fear, rumour and legal procedure can combine against innocent people, and they are widely misremembered.
How to read Witch Trials
Readers come to the subject for family history, for Salem, or to test claims about nine million dead or a hidden pagan religion, neither of which holds.
Witch Trials in practice: an example
A village record in which a woman is charged after a neighbour's cow dies, and then names three others under torture, shows the usual course of a trial.
Where readings of Witch Trials go wrong
The accused were not witches in any organised sense. The house names nobody as the cause of another person's misfortune.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
Recorded here as history and lore. No rite is taught on this page.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Spells & Occult Terms
- Aliases
- witch hunts, european witch trials, witch craze, witch persecution, salem witch trials
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
How many people were killed in the witch trials?
Historians estimate forty to sixty thousand executions in Europe and its colonies between about 1450 and 1750. The figure of nine million has no basis.
Were all the accused women?
No. About three quarters were women, but in some regions, among them Iceland, Normandy, Estonia and Russia, most of the accused were men.
When did the witch trials end?
Prosecutions declined in the later seventeenth century as courts grew doubtful of the evidence. The last execution by law in Europe is usually dated to Switzerland in 1782.
