From an early day, in France, people were punished for supposed crimes resulting from witchcraft and sorcery. Charlemagne frequently ordered all necromancers, sorcerers and witches to be driven from the realm and with the gradual increase of the crimes attributed to them, he published different edicts, preserved at length in the “Capitulaire de Baluse.”[12] By these edicts, death was decreed against all those who practiced feats of sorcery and witchcraft, and those who conspired with the devil to afflict either man or woman, with barrenness; who excited tempests, or windstorms; destroyed the fruits of the earth, hurt cows, or other animals, and afflicted human beings with sores or disease, were to be immediately executed, upon their conviction.[13] From the time of Charlemagne until the eighteenth century, in France, England, Scotland and other European countries, the trials for witchcraft and sorcery continuously multiplied and it became the common means to enable a wolfish monarch to rid himself of a disliked rival or subject, upon some trumped-up charge, based upon some trivial circumstance connected with an unexplained phenomenon. The destruction of the Stedinger, in 1234; the persecutions of the Templars, from 1307 to the year 1313; the trial and execution of poor Joan of Arc, in 1429, the tragedy of Arras, in 1459, and many other horrible casualties, during the middle ages illustrate the prevalency with which this delusion was used to bring about the death and destruction of a large portion of the human race, who were guilty only of living in an age of ignorance and cruelty.[14] At the instance of Pope Gregory IX., the Emperor of Germany, Frederic II., pronounced his banns against the valiant Stedinger, in 1233 and a crusade was inaugurated against them in all Germany. Eight thousand of them were slain upon the field of battle and the whole race extinguished and their houses and woods were burned, because they would not embrace the Catholic religion, but continued to adhere to their own ideals and ideas in religion and government. The Pope charged that they “insulted the holy sacrament, consulted witches to raise evil spirits, shed blood like water, took the lives of priests and concocted an infernal scheme to propagate the worship of the devil.”[15] The Templars had also offended the Church and in 1307 the charge was brought against them that they were in communion with evil spirits and had sold their souls to the devil. This charge effected its object and they were extirpated, even as the poor Stedinger had been, in the previous century.