1589: Dietrich Flade, for leniency towards evildoers

ExecutedToday.com ^ | September 18, 2008 | Dogboy

[CheshireTheCat]

On Sept 18, 1589, a magistrate and deputy governor in Trier, a city embroiled in a witch-burning campaign, was himself delivered that fate.

The winds of the Reformation swirled mercilessly at that time, and Dietrich Flade sat on the bench charged with maintaining order in Trier. Flade held a Doctorate of Civil and of the Canon Law, and he was well-connected in the magisterial Germany of the day. He just happened to be alive at the wrong time. George Lincoln Burr provides an extensive account of Flade’s ill-fated time on the bench, including this foreboding look:

But the storm that was to rob him of fortune, fame, and life was already brewing all along the horizon. The witch-trials, which, during the earlier part of the century, had appeared only sporadically, were settling here and there into organized persecutions. In the neighboring Lorraine, the terrible Nicolas Remy was already exercising that judgeship, as the fruit of whose activity he could boast a decade later of the condemnation of nine hundred witches within fifteen years; and just across the nearer frontier of Luxemburg, now in Spanish hands, the fires were also blazing. Nay, the persection had already, in 1572, invaded the Electorate itself.

In six years, the diocese of Trier oversaw the execution of 368 witches, many of whom confessed only under torture. The anti-witchcraft campaign was so expansive that some towns were left with few if any women. The hysteria was widely reviled by the academics of the time, including both Flade and Cornelius Loos....

[keat]

Thanks for sharing this, I have found this website fascinating.

[the OlLine Rebel]

Gee, I thought only Catholics engaged in religious punishment.

We sure get that impression via Spanish Inquisition.

Never mind it turns out there was a reason it was called the SPANISH Inq, and not the Roman or Vatican or Catholic Inq.

[pierrem15]

It was called the Spanish Inquisition because the Papacy, during the long period of turbulence featuring Popes and Anti-Popes, to gain the assistance of the state had ceded much authority over the Church in Spain to the Crown.

The Spanish Inquisition was largely a political shakedown operation controlled by the Spanish monarchy.

This is the same pattern you see almost everywhere in Western Europe at the time, where the weakening of the Church led to various princes asserting the independent authority of the Crown, which (of course) included seizure of Church property (England), misuse of Church authority to extort cash (Spain), open embezzlement of Church funds (France), or a mixture of all three (Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, including the Protestant states).