“The seats destined for criminals in our courts of justice are blackened with persons accused of this guilt. There are not judges enough to try them. Our dungeons are gorged with them. No day passes that we do not render our tribunals bloody by the dooms which we pronounce, or in which we do not return to our homes, discountenanced and terrified at the horrible confessions we have heard.” But the _Witch Mania_ in Europe, may be said to properly date from about the year 1488, when Pope Innocent VIII., in a determined effort to rid the Church of Rome of the stigma and opposition of those supposed to be prompted by the devil, appointed inquisitors in every country, armed with the apostolic power to accuse and punish this class of criminals.[18] Following the appointment of this commission and those of successive Popes, a wholesale slaughter of innocent men and women, followed this crusade of bigotry and ignorance. Cumanus burned forty-one women in one province alone, in Italy; Sprenger burned more than five hundred in a year, in Germany; five hundred were burned in Geneva, in 1515 and 1516; in the district of Como, in the year 1524 about a thousand people suffered death for witchcraft and for several years thereafter the general average in this district was a hundred a year and one inquisitor alone, Remigius, took whatever credit he was entitled to, for having during a period of fifteen years convicted and burned nine hundred poor souls for this imaginary offense.[19] In 1520 witches were burned in fires that were ever kept burning to receive their tortured bodies, in France. In 1561 five poor women of Verneuil were convicted of turning themselves into cats and prowling around and performing satanic feats, as a result of which they were all burned alive.[20] In 1571 the celebrated sorcerer, Trais Echelles, after his confession, was burned at the Place de Greve, in Paris. In 1573 Giles Garnier, of Lyons, was indicted for being a loup-garou, or man wolf,[21] and prowling around at night and destroying children. Fifty witnesses testified against him and after being placed upon the rack, he confessed the crime he was charged with and was condemned by Dr. Camus to be: “tied to a stake and burned alive and that his ashes be then scattered to the winds.”[22] The conditions in England, during the sixteenth century, were about the same as in France, Germany and Italy, so far as the persecutions for witchcraft were concerned. While rooting out many errors of ignorance and superstition, the Reformation made no head-way at all against witchcraft and sorcery, the greatest evil of the period and strange to narrate, while their followers were persecuted for this crime, Luther and Calvin were as firm believers in witchcraft as were the Popes whom they opposed and their followers were even as zealous persecutors of the innocents accused of this crime as were the churchmen of the old religion.[23]