Around the year 1507, in the countryside south of Basel, the courts took a woman’s family apart. Her sister Ursle was drowned on a witchcraft charge. Her husband Seckinger was broken on the wheel. She was left with six small children, too poor to bring in her own hay and grain, and she later said she had thought about killing herself. Then a young man appeared and asked her a question nobody else seems to have asked: Dilge, how is it that you fare so badly?
The record has him continue: “If you will turn to me and do what I bid you, I will give you and your children food and drink enough, and you need not work” [so wil ich dir und dinen kind essen und trincken gnug geben und darfft nit wercken].
That is the devil as he appears in the confession of Dilge Glaserin, interrogated at Pfeffingen in 1532: a devil whose whole offer is groceries and rest, made to a widow at the end of her strength. The interrogation protocol insists, at every single article, that she confessed all of this “without any bonds, pain, or torture, unforced and uncompelled” [ohn alle Band, Pin und Marter, unzwungen und undrungen].
Her file survives in the Basel state archive, four drafts of her interrogation in two clerks’ hands. What was done with her is not recorded.
A professor goes looking for sleepwalkers
The man who found Dilge’s file was not looking for her. Friedrich Fischer held the chair of philosophy at the University of Basel, and in 1839 he had published a three-volume work on somnambulism: sleepwalking, animal magnetism, visions, the whole nocturnal borderland that early nineteenth-century science was trying to claim from religion. He believed that somnambulism explained “many a strange appearance of the belief in magic and ghosts,” and so he went into the city’s archive to test the idea against the old sorcery and witch trials.
He reported the result with visible surprise. The yield in sleepwalkers was “extremely small: only one clear case of the kind was found.” What the archive gave him instead became a 23-page pamphlet, printed in 1840 as the university’s invitation to the rector’s address that September. Its findings, from the surviving files:
- From the sixteenth century, five trials, all between 1519 and 1550, handled “just as crassly and inhumanly as everywhere else.” Those are Fischer’s words, in a text written to celebrate his own university.
- From the seventeenth century, fourteen trials, and in a hundred years exactly one execution, in 1624.
- From 1643 onward, nobody in the surviving Basel files is tortured on a sorcery charge, “although very suspicious persons occur.”
For contrast he pointed north, to Würzburg, Bamberg and Trier, and to Salzburg, where witch burnings consumed a hundred people and more as late as 1678, all of it in the same seventeenth century. The comparison is his, and it serves a conclusion we will get to. The files come first.
Five files from the sixteenth century
The oldest surviving file, from 1519, is a small scrap headed “Vergicht einer Hexen,” a witch’s confession. Barbel Schienbeinen of Neuenburg confessed that around mid-Lent, caught by nightfall outside the Riehen gate, she met a man in black clothes. She asked who he was, and he answered that he was the devil. She renounced God Almighty and gave herself to him. She also confessed to laming a girl in Kleinbasel who had called her knoblouchin, garlic woman. The scrap does not say whether the confession was obtained “by kindness or by pain,” and it does not say what was done with her. Fischer thought her end hardly in doubt: death by fire, or, “by way of mercy,” death by water.
The second file reads differently. Around 1530 Anna Wehrlin, the innkeeper at the Red Jug, was accused by a dying rival innkeeper of taking his manhood with a soup, a diagnosis confirmed by a soothsayer in Freiburg to whom the man had sent his urine. Anna admitted the affair with the accuser and took her punishment for that. The bewitchment she flatly denied, and the court appears to have let it drop without torture. Fischer suspected a mundane reason: she was a Basel citizen, and her accusers were foreigners.
Then comes the Pfeffingen file of 1532, the one Fischer called “the strangest witch trial I have ever seen.” Three women of a village held by Basel in pawn from the bishop: Agnes Salathe, Ita Lichtermutt, and Dilge Glaserin. Each had her own devil, and the devils have names. Agnes’s devil, Oygly, came to her house in grey clothes. Ita’s devil, Ruby, begged to be let in while her husband Oetly was carting a load of wood to Basel. Dilge’s devil, Franck, was the young man with the offer of food.
Their confessed crimes are village-sized. They annoyed the preacher of Pfeffingen by riding across his path in kneading troughs and sending a “bad air” at him, which was meant to blind him but only made his face swell and his hair fall out. They made a water that swept a bailiff’s timber into the Rhine. In spring they sat with Dilge’s old mother in the vineyard under a peach tree and debated what to eat: one chose the year’s cherries, one the year’s birds, one the year’s wine, and their devils brought all of it, and there was eating and dallying, and then everyone walked home. Once they plotted a flood that would drown every field and meadow in the land, and two of them set out for the meeting in kneading troughs, and Agnes met them below the village of Aesch and said: “Turn back, for nothing will come of this business” [wendend üch umb, denn es wirt nüt us dieser sach]. So they turned back.
The three told these stories in near-identical words, down to small details, and the protocol repeats at every article that all of it was volunteered freely. Fischer did not believe the assurance: “It needs no proof that such things could not be confessed so uniformly without suggestion and torture,” and the repeated insistence on voluntariness “awakens an ugly suspicion against the honesty of the inquisitors.” Only Dilge’s confession seemed to him possibly genuine, the melancholy delusion of a woman whom the same justice system had already bereaved, and he noted the one detail that marks her devil as a creature of hunger and dream: she admitted the devil never kept his promise.
The fate of all three women is missing from the file. Peter Ochs, Basel’s great historian, mentions the case and gives no outcome either. Fischer wrote that the outcome was “hardly doubtful.” He is probably right. But it is worth being precise about what the archive holds here: three named women, four drafts of Dilge’s interrogation, and nothing after.
The wolf-riding witch is a Basel-country tradition older than any surviving trial file. Around 1423, according to Peter Ochs’s history of Basel, a woman near the lower Hauenstein pass was notorious for riding about on a wolf, holding the wolf’s tail instead of a bridle, and frightening peasants on their way home from drinking. She was arrested and convicted on the sworn statement of a single farmer.
The fourth file, dated 1546, repeats the third. Elsy Stälin of Büsserach confessed to a devil bearing the same name as Ita Lichtermutt’s, fourteen years after Ita’s interrogation, along with the same weather magic at a spring and the same wolf-riding. Fischer noticed that the handwriting resembles that of the earlier protocols and suggested the same district official, the bailiff of Dorneck, conducted both inquisitions, pressing the older confessions, which had gone on living in local tradition, out of a new suspect.
The fifth file ends with the only sixteenth-century death sentence the archive preserves, and it repays close reading. Adelheit Jelin, properly Joly, a woman from Fribourg, sold folk services: herbs and a rag sewn with holy names to protect a herdsman’s cattle from wolves, help in recovering lost money, treasure-hunting on the side. Under interrogation she boasted and backpedaled in the same breath. She said she had once owned a living earth-manikin, then admitted her “earth folk” were nothing but mandrake roots. Asked whether she had been inside the Venusberg, she said yes, with her late husband, with Master Robert the scribe, with Sheriff Falckner and the Commander of Engelsberg. On the devil she never wavered: “She has no dealings with the devil. She uses a blessing and reads the Passion” [Si gange mitt dem Tüfell nitt umb. Si pruche einen Segen und lese den passion].
The verdict of 12 September 1550 nonetheless states that she used a devil, and names him: Latus. She had denied any such thing in every interrogation that survives. Fischer reasoned that this admission, which cost the woman her life, could only have been extracted in a further interrogation under torture, whose protocol is lost. The sentence itself survives verbatim: “This Adelheit is condemned to the fire, yet by mercy executed in the water and dispatched from life to death. Wednesday, 17 September 1550.”
In Basel that mercy was administered at the Käppelijoch, the little chapel joint on the Mittlere Brücke, from which the condemned were pushed into the Rhine.
1602: an old woman, eight hoistings, and two faculties
After 1550 the files fall silent for half a century. Fischer did not think this silence was an accident of the archive; the persecution machinery paused in many places while the Reformation’s church struggles consumed attention, and Basel’s records match that wider rhythm. The files resume in 1602 with the longest case in the pamphlet.
Margaretha Vögtlin of Riehen, called “the Countess” after her dead husband, was an old begging woman whom the village had feared for years. The heaviest accusations came from one Riehen widow, Anna Stürm. She testified that the Gräfin had pushed her in a quarrel over alms and she had lain twelve weeks lame in the hospital; and that once, while the Gräfin was helping her carry one of her children on the road to Basel, a magpie struck her on the head and bit through her hat, whereupon the child could move neither hand nor foot, a healer pronounced its heart “pressed in,” and it died on her arm in the Rheingasse. The Basel witnesses tell a different story. Sara Diermann, who had gone briefly out of her mind after taking the old woman’s look, was talked through her suspicion by a Dr. Grynaeus and another townsman, and testified that fright alone had made her ill; a second Basel woman gave similar evidence. Nobody managed the same with the witnesses from Riehen.
The investigating magistrates, the Seven, put the old woman to torture. The file counts it out: hoisted five times, three of them with threefold torture, and days later, after she had again sworn her innocence and said that as an old sick woman she would rather they killed her at once, hoisted another three or four times with stones hung on her. She endured it, the record notes, without particular screaming, and confessed nothing.
At that point the council asked both university faculties for opinions, and the two documents that came back are the heart of Fischer’s find. Neither doubts that witchcraft exists; both quote Exodus 22:18. And both, in 1602, tell the court it has no case. The legal opinion, written by the dean Ludwig Iselin, sorts the witnesses: the Basel ones speak for the prisoner, the Riehen ones from hearsay, “common outcry, suspicion and conjecture,” several of them testifying in their own cause. Conviction, it says, requires proof “clearer than the midday light,” and it reaches for a formula that still sounds startling in a witch file: it is “better and more advisable, in doubtful matters, to let a guilty person go free than to condemn an innocent one to death.” The theological opinion, signed by Johann Jakob Grynaeus, the head of Basel’s church, goes further. It is openly angry about the procedure, and it aims one sentence directly at the accusers: if the witnesses were questioned as sharply as the prisoner was questioned to make her confess, “those who testify in their own cause would perhaps speak otherwise.”
The court did not release her. She sat in the hospital prison for over a year, forbidden even to attend church, complaining that mice and rats ran over her at night. Then Grynaeus wrote again, this time in his own name, to the mayor and council. He opened by acknowledging what it cost to write it: whoever takes up the cause of this woman “loads slander and disfavor upon himself.” He asked that she be released to her people and, more than that, be provided with some maintenance for the short remainder of her life. He listed what had been done to her, including an episode the official record had not volunteered: after the magistrates left one day, a city guard brought in a vagrant witch-finder who stripped the old woman’s shirt, smeared a cloth, claimed he had seen her at gatherings on the Pratteln meadows, and threatened her at length. No court had ordered any of it. Grynaeus gave his reason at the close: he was asking “so that God the Lord be not angered by our mercilessness” [das Gott der Herr nit durch unser unbarmherzigkeit erzürnet werde].
There the file ends. The pamphlet does not record what the council decided, and the modern official account states only that, having confessed nothing, she could not be convicted. Whether Margaretha Vögtlin walked out of the hospital is not in the surviving papers either.
One beheading, and a century of banishments
Fischer’s fourteen seventeenth-century files contain exactly one death. In 1624 Reinhard Ruggraff confessed, after repeated “kind and painful” examination, that he had carried a little book on his body for some thirty years and used it to bend two respectable women to his will. On the emphatic motion of Dr. J. J. Fäsch, the court’s strict legal adviser, he was beheaded on 29 May 1624 and his body burned together with the book.
Around that single execution, the files show the court’s advisers backing away, case by case. A love-magician stood firm through repeated torture in 1627 and was banished instead of burned; under the rack he had named his secret, a burnt sparrow’s tongue, and his in-laws, who convulsed at the sight of him, withdrew their accusation after a bloodletting calmed the sister-in-law. In 1642 the same Dr. Fäsch, grown cautious, advised releasing two accused women because every testimony against them rested “on the mere suspicion of the injured.” A woman who boiled three skulls from an ossuary into goiter medicine was let go in 1643 when she denied any magical intent. A Riehen carpenter who drunkenly toasted the devil in an open tavern saved himself with the explanation that he had meant his old corporal, Johannes Teufel, under whom he had served in the Pappenheim regiment; the court banished the unlucky joker anyway.
In 1692 a Liestal ribbon-weaver named Jacob Fauslin stole a head from the gallows to use in casting magic bullets. The university opinion on his case, written by Dr. Sebastian Fäsch, declined to treat it as sorcery at all and proposed a few months of penal labor for robbing the gallows. The magic bullet, cast with the help of the dead, would get its own opera a hundred and thirty years later: Weber’s Freischütz turns on exactly this craft.
Two cases show where the line had moved by mid-century. In 1647 a lame girl named Elsbeth Hertnerin confessed to nightly visits from a tailor and a bagpiper nobody in her village had ever seen, to a marriage promise from the dead, to a pregnancy that produced “something, which however was no child,” and to an engineered ghost-racket that got her cousin’s wife into her bed. Her interrogation protocols are lost; what survives is the joint expert opinion, which concluded the devil was at play and the churchyard spirits she prayed for were devil-masks. Fischer’s dry comment: a confessed witch of the first degree, who in most of Europe at that date would have gone to the fire. In Basel she was locked in a blockhouse at the hospital.
And in 1664 the jurists Peter Megerlin and Nicolaus Passavant, asked whether an accused woman could be tortured, refused it, in a sentence that reads like a direct answer to the Malleus: torture must not be applied “especially because this concerns the grave vice of sorcery, which is hard to prove, while an irretrievable error is easily committed, and an innocent person may be condemned to fire or sword: wherefore the trial should be conducted in all its parts with the greater diligence and caution.”
The strangest file of the century is the one that had drawn Fischer into the archive in the first place, his single somnambulist. In January 1667 a 32-year-old servant, Christoph Fanz of Höllstein, was handed over to Basel after trying twice in one night to hang himself from the same oak, saved twice by the same man who climbed up after him. What Fanz told the magistrates and the deacon of St. Peter was a vision: something like a black dog on the night road, then the fiend upon him bodily, demanding his body, then his soul, then, haggling downward, whether he would at least give him a leg. The pressing lasted about an hour, with a promised horse decked in silver and gold, a shining lady laid at his side whom he never touched, and twenty plumed riders circling him. The devil, he said, lifted him up the tree himself and tied the knot. The Seven wrote in their report that they could not tell “whether he fabled from confusion of the head or spoke from sound reason.” The church’s opinion, drafted by Dr. Lucas Gernler, worked through the criteria for possession, found them absent, found no harm done to anyone, traced the whole calamity to the young man’s habit of wishing the devil would take him after his comrades teased him about a widow who had jilted him, and recommended custody strictly for his own protection, with daily pastoral visits. A few weeks later the deacon moved for his release and recommended him for a job. The man who had promised the devil his body was hired as a hospital servant.
By the century’s end the two learned parties had traded places, and Fischer, no friend of the clergy’s later severity, set the reversal down plainly: the jurists, who began the century as the hard party, ended it as the mild one, and the theologians the reverse. In 1696 it was the theologians who wanted a ghost-banisher named Samuel Kestenholz put to death for driving two spirits out of village stables with a root and ceremonies; the sentence could only be demanded in absentia, because Kestenholz had fled. After 1700 the courts stopped asking the university at all and prosecuted such cases as fraud.
The city that shipped the sabbat
One thing the pamphlet never mentions: two hundred years before the faculties saved Margaretha Vögtlin, Basel had helped build the idea her accusers used against her. Between 1437 and 1438, during the great Church council held in the city, the Dominican Johannes Nider, prior of Basel’s own convent, completed the Formicarius, whose fifth book carried the new Alpine picture of the diabolical witch to an audience of churchmen from all over Europe. The council fathers copied it and took it home. When the Malleus Maleficarum was assembled fifty years later, it drew on Nider’s book more than on any other source. We traced that transmission in detail in How the Church Invented the Witch: the sabbat was put together in the western Alps in the 1420s and 1430s, and Basel was one of the places it was copied from most.
Nor was the city’s own record clean before the files begin. The persecution’s documented Basel cases start in 1407, and the city burned and drowned before 1519: the best-remembered victim, Gret Fröhlicher, was accused in Basel, acquitted, and successfully sued her accuser for slander, only to be executed in 1458 at Pratteln, where she had moved to work as a midwife. Regional research counts close to thirty documented executions in Basel between 1433 and 1680, most of them women, and the drownings happened at the Käppelijoch in the middle of the Rhine bridge. Fischer’s mild seventeenth century is a statement about nineteen surviving files; the city’s four documented centuries of persecution reach beyond them on both ends. What the university opinions do show, over and over, is learned men using the era’s own theology and law to shrink the crime until almost nobody could be convicted of it. That is the same instrument we watched from the other side in What Demons Can and Cannot Do, where a Jesuit examination of 1632 fenced the devil in with categories; and it is what failed to happen at the convent of Aix-en-Provence in 1611, when a possession case ran to the stake with no faculty standing in the road.
The reformer Johann Jakob Grynaeus, who intervened twice for the tortured beggar woman of Riehen, was Basel’s Antistes, the presiding minister of the city’s church. His 1602 letter to the council asked for the woman’s release and for a small pension for her old age, and apologized in advance for the resentment the request would cause.
2019: the archive closes the circle
In October 2012, the Basel parliamentarian Brigitta Gerber and co-signatories asked the cantonal government to examine whether three women could be publicly declared innocent: Gret Fröhlicher, executed 1458; Barbel Schinbeinin, whose 1519 confession, the one extracted at the Riehen gate, can still be read in the state archive; and Margreth Vögtlin, tortured in 1602. Switzerland had a precedent, since Glarus had exonerated Anna Göldi, executed in 1782, in 2008.
The government’s answer, delivered over several reports between 2014 and 2019, turned on two points. The first was legal: the Code of Criminal Procedure has no path for revising verdicts of courts that no longer exist under laws that no longer exist. The second was the archive. A legal revision reopens an individual case on its records, and the records are not there. Too many files are lost; the ones that survive are the handful this article has been quoting. The same thinness that let Fischer present a flattering century for his university in 1840 made it impossible in 2019 to reopen a single named woman’s case.
So the rehabilitation became a plaque. The sculptor Markus Böhmer cast fourteen bronze heads for it, and it was unveiled on 22 March 2019 on the Mittlere Brücke, facing the Käppelijoch, above the water where the drownings were carried out. The inscription reads: “Basel remembers the people who in earlier centuries were accused of witchcraft, persecuted, tortured and killed. Today this is a place that admonishes us to meet other people without prejudice and not to exclude them.”
It stands a few minutes’ walk from the archive, where the scrap headed “a witch’s confession” sits under its 1519 date, a man in black at the Riehen gate and no last page.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Friedrich Fischer, Die Basler Hexenprozesse in dem 16ten und 17ten Jahrhundert. Einladungsschrift zu der Rede des zeit. Rector magn., Hrn. Prof. Dr. K. R. Hagenbach. Basel: Schweighauser’sche Universitätsbuchdruckerei, 1840. Digitized by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, bsb10976511.
- Regierungsrat des Kantons Basel-Stadt, Anzug Brigitta Gerber und Konsorten betreffend ‘Rehabilitierung der Opfer von Hexenverfolgung in Basel’, Bericht 12.5314.04, Basel, 8 May 2019.
- Kanton Basel-Stadt, Präsidialdepartement, media release on the unveiling of the memorial plaque for the victims of the witch persecutions, Mittlere Rheinbrücke, 22 March 2019.
- Peter Ochs, Geschichte der Stadt und Landschaft Basel, vols. III and VI, Basel 1786–1822 (cited by Fischer for the 1423 wolf-rider, the 1532 Pfeffingen case, and the 1619 sentence).
- Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, entry ‘Fischer, Friedrich’ (the Basel professor of philosophy, author of Der Somnambulismus, Basel 1839); via Wikisource.
- Martine Ostorero, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Kathrin Utz Tremp, Catherine Chène (eds.), L’imaginaire du sabbat. Edition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c.–1440 c.), Lausanne 1999 (for Johannes Nider’s Formicarius and the Council of Basel).
