In its early stages the belief in witchcraft was artificially stimulated by the Church, and flourished in an atmosphere of ignorance and dread of the unseen. “Had the Church resolutely repressed the growing superstition in place of stimulating it with all the authority of the Holy See, infinite bloodshed and misery might have been spared to Christendom.”[40] Every Inquisitor was an agent for the spread of the belief, and the Church industriously taught it. An Italian Inquisitor in 1485 burnt forty-one people for witchcraft in one district in the Grisons--an exploit which gratified the historian Sprenger; and Innocent’s Bull of 1484 gave a perceptible impulse to the superstition, forty-eight persons being burnt in one small German town in five years by order of Sprenger and a fellow Inquisitor. To doubt the reality of the crime was to dispute the authority of the Church; to aid an accused person was to impede the Inquisition. A woman charged with witchcraft had little chance of escape, for if her defence made a favourable impression on the judges they also were considered to have been bewitched, and few of them cared to run that risk. Confessions made under severe torture were, of course, numerous, and were afterwards used as proving the reality of the crime. The small amount of incredulity which existed vanished before Sprenger’s _Malleus Malficarum_, which Lea terms “the most portentous monument of superstition which the world has produced.” With perfect good faith and absolute belief in the truth of demoniacal possession, Sprenger brought forward an overwhelming mass of evidence, which no one in those times was able to rebut or dared to dispute. This terrible book, which remained the recognized authority on the subject for more than a century, immensely stimulated a belief which, as Lea remarks, is “ a process of purely natural evolution from the principles which the Church had succeeded in establishing.”[41] For 200 years the Church had done all it could to promote this belief. Pope Calixtus, in 1457, ordered the repression of witchcraft, and towards the end of the century Alexander VI urged the Inquisitor of Lombardy to show greater zeal in his work. Early in the sixteenth century Julius II defined the powers of the Inquisitors, and issued to their helpers indulgences similar to those given to Crusaders. Thus persecution produced its natural effect in a great revival of superstition in Northern Italy. The Inquisitors burnt 140 persons at Brescia in 1510, and 300 at Como four years later.