page_title: Pope Innocent VIII
section_title: Relations with witchcraft
hierarchical_section_title: Pope Innocent VIII / Papacy / Relations with witchcraft
caption_attribution_description: Malleus Maleficarum (title page) by Heinrich Kramer Cover of the seventh Cologne edition of the Malleus Maleficarum, 1520 (The University of Sydney). Bibliographic record at the University of Sydney Library. Transcript: Latina: MALLEVS MALEFICA- RVM, MALEFI= cas, &amp; earum hærism, vt phramea potentissima conterens. Translation: English: The Hammer of Witches which destroyeth Witches and their heresy like a most powerful spear[1] ↑ The English translation is from this note to Summers' 1928 introduction.
context_page_description: Pope Innocent VIII, born Giovanni Battista Cybo, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 29 August 1484 to his death. Son of the viceroy of Naples, Battista spent his early years at the Neapolitan court. He became a priest in the retinue of Cardinal Calandrini, half-brother to Pope Nicholas V, Bishop of Savona under Pope Paul II, and with the support of Cardinal Giuliano Della Rovere. After intense politicking by Della Rovere, Cibo was elected pope in 1484. King Ferdinand I of Naples had supported Cybo's competitor, Rodrigo Borgia. The following year, Pope Innocent supported the barons in their failed revolt.
  In March 1489, Cem, the captive brother of Bayezid II, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, came into Innocent's custody. Viewing his brother as a rival, the Sultan paid the pope not to set him free. Any time the Sultan threatened war against the Christian Balkans, Innocent threatened to release this brother, who later died in a military expedition, fighting for King Charles VIII of France against Naples.
context_section_description: On the request of German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, Innocent VIII issued the papal bull Summis desiderantes (5 December 1484), which supported Kramer's investigations against magicians and witches:
  "It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that in some parts of upper Germany, [...] Mainz, Köln, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth, the grapes of vines, and the fruits of trees, as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind, vineyards also and orchards, meadows, pastures, harvests, grains and other fruits of the earth; [...]"
  The bull was written in response to the request of Dominican Heinrich Kramer for explicit authority to prosecute witchcraft in Germany, after he was refused assistance by the local ecclesiastical authorities, who disputed his authority to work in their dioceses. Some scholars view the bull as "clearly political", motivated by jurisdictional disputes between the local German Catholic priests and clerics from the Office of the Inquisition who answered more directly to the pope.
  Nonetheless, the bull failed to ensure that Kramer obtained the support he had hoped for, causing him to retire and to compile his views on witchcraft into his book Malleus Maleficarum, which was published in 1487. Kramer would later claim that witchcraft was to blame for bad weather. Both the papal letter appended to the work and the supposed endorsement of Cologne University for it are problematic. The letter of Innocent VIII is not an approval of the book to which it was appended, but rather a charge to inquisitors to investigate diabolical sorcery and a warning to those who might impede them in their duty, that is, a papal letter in the by then conventional tradition established by John XXII and other popes through Eugenius IV and Nicholas V (1447–55).
caption: Malleus Maleficarum, 1520 edition
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