The Trial: A History from Socrates to O. J. Simpson. Sadakat Kadri

in search of casual sex perhaps, or cleaning up at a dice table before exiting with a sulphurous whoosh – but chroniclers knew of others far more benign. In the early thirteenth century, an English monk called Roger of Wendover told how Satan had once helped a nun fight off a rapist. Caesarius of Heisterbach reported that he had even lent support to the Church’s war on heresy. The Bishop of Besançon had invoked him in order to ask how two troublesome preachers were able to walk on water and pass through flames, and the Devil had confided that they had infernal charms sewn into their armpits. When the men declined to disclose what lay under their flesh they were flayed by force and burned at the stake. The powers of hell, used wisely, could be extremely helpful indeed.

      But at the very same time that both men were writing, the Church’s attitude to Satan was undergoing profound change. Catholicism had been at war since 1095, when Pope Urban II had blessed the first crusaders’ attempt to capture the Holy Land; and since 1208, when Innocent III launched his attack on the Cathar heretics, its struggle had become one of self-definition as much as survival. The very idea of Catholicism was being challenged – and in the name of combating a heresy that overestimated evil, the Church would itself promote Lucifer from an inferior demon to the Prince of Darkness. The Cathar belief that Satan was slugging it out with God and had the upper hand on earth was already being caricatured as a celebration of wickedness rather than an explanation of it. Church propagandists were asserting that heretics worshipped their savage deity in person, generally by kissing his anus, and the mischievous demons of picaresque tradition were giving ground to diabolical creatures of a far more sinister hue. The stranger at the tavern described by Thomas de Cantimpré in the mid thirteenth century was not a gambler with the luck of the Devil but someone who bought a man’s soul for a drink – and unsheathed his talons at closing time to call in his due. By the late 1300s, macabre stories were telling of men who begged from their deathbeds to have their right hand amputated, forced in extremis to reveal that the limb was pledged to Satan and anxious not to die with the debt unredeemed. Similar stories would one day attach themselves to the exploits of a sixteenth-century conman called Dr Johann Faust – but the pact attributed to his literary reincarnation was already being drafted.

      The changing superstitions were transformed into doctrine at the end of the thirteenth century when a Dominican monk called Thomas Aquinas subjected demons – along with the rest of creation – to detailed analysis. The scholar, concerned to establish a rational basis for God’s existence in an intellectual climate that demanded proof for every proposition, would establish an orthodoxy that would hold for three more centuries, and his examination of the spiritual world generated some especially alarming conclusions. While recognizing that some people thought demons were illusory, he scrutinized the evidence and showed that they were in fact ubiquitous – and dangerous. Incubi and succubi, for example, were not just cruising whores, but diabolical transsexuals who reaped sperm from men and sowed it into women, generating giants in the process. Although that specific hazard was something from which Aquinas claimed miraculous immunity,^* less sanctified individuals faced serious risks. Demons were so malicious that they sought pleasure not for its own sake but only to lead humans to perdition. Magicians were especially liable to be outsmarted by creatures of the netherworld. Indeed, the mere act of invoking a demon meant that a sorcerer was making a deal with death and a pact with hell.

      The stock of ritual magic, once the preserve of only the wisest Christians, was plummeting, and a series of events that occurred south of Paris in 1323 offered a vivid indication of how far it was to fall. They began when shepherds driving their flocks past a crossroads noticed two long straws sticking out of the ground and heard a distant miaow. Local inquisitors, summoned to the scene, began digging. It was not long before their spades hit a chest containing a coal-black cat and several vials of consecrated oil and holy water. Inquiries among local carpenters led to the arrest of one Jean Prévost, who explained that he had been trying to assist a group of Cistercian monks from the nearby abbey. They had hired him, along with a magician called Jean Persant, to help recover the abbot’s stolen treasury and the plan had been to disinter the cat after three days, skin it alive, make three thongs from its hide, and consume the contents of its stomach. Prévost and Persant anticipated that a demon called Berich would then point them in the direction of the thief. The scheme would have raised few eyebrows just a century earlier, but by the 1320s it was looking distinctly outré. The monks were collectively degraded and condemned to lifetime incarceration, while the defendants were burned to ashes. Persant suffered the additional discomfort of having the cat tied around his neck at the stake.

      Similar prosecutions proliferated throughout the fourteenth century, but it was reverberations from the longstanding campaigns against heresy in southern Europe and Germany that finally gave the fears the distinctive shape that is nowadays associated with the witch-hunts. The papal Inquisition, though successful in shattering Catharism, had merely scattered many of its most fervent adherents, and as refugees had poured into Germany and the Savoy, a domino topple of dissent had begun that would set off anti-Catholic movements for centuries. Officials increasingly responded by linking their concerns about magical pacts with the allegations of sexual diabolism that the Church had long been levelling against its enemies, and during the mid fifteenth century all the cross-pollination finally bore fruit. In a series of trials across Burgundy and the Savoy, tortured defendants began to confess to a form of mischief so distinctive as to amount to an entirely new offence. They had, they now admitted, flown on beasts and greased sticks to huge assemblies at which Satan had manifested himself in the form of a lascivious creature such as a goat, dog, or monkey. They had repeatedly kissed his rear end. They had also prostituted themselves to demons, raised storms, cast spells against their neighbours, and performed acts against nature until cockcrow. It was a crime whose time had come.