The Copenhagen Witch Trials

What started it

Princess Anne of Denmark sailed to marry James VI of Scotland and the voyage met storms. The explanation the courts settled on was sorcery. Between the winter of 1589 and July 1590 seventeen people were burned in Copenhagen, and the same reasoning crossed the North Sea into the North Berwick trials in Scotland. Ane Koldings, held from May 1590, confessed under torture that she had sent small devils up the keels of the royal ships, and was burned in July.

The law that followed

Christian IV's Trolddomsforordningen of October 1617 split sorcery into two: magic without the Devil, punished by exile, and a pact with the Devil, punished by burning. It stood until 1686. The peak of Danish persecution was the great witch hunt of 1617 to 1625. In Jutland alone, 494 people were executed between 1609 and 1687, and 297 of those fell inside those eight years. There is no reliable national total, because the records outside Jutland are incomplete, and anyone quoting one should be asked where it comes from.

How it ended

Anne Palles was executed on 4 April 1693, the last woman legally executed for sorcery in Denmark; the king's mercy let her be beheaded before her body was burned. The last person executed for it at all was a man, the grenadier Johan Pistorius, in 1722. The Danish-language folk legends walk covers this world of belief, including a widow buried alive and the origins of Danish phrases — see the folk legends walk, or Danish folklore creatures for what people thought was out there.

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