William V, Witch-Hunter of Bavaria

William V was the abdicated Duke of Bavaria. Father of Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria, William V was a very devout man who hated witches and heretics. When his son Maximilian was still childless after five years of marriage, he came to believe the the childlessness was due to some spell cast on Maximilian's wife.

The duchess was bewitched. . . . He had persecuted the heretics in his realm too zealously, shown too little mercy in burning witches, served the cause of Christ too plainly not to incur the bitter hatred of the Devil on himself and his family. William V had faith, nevertheless, that the Cross would prove more powerful in the end than the pentagram. If the spell could not be broken by prayers and devotional exercises, the general of the Barnabite friars, Michael Marrano, might be brought to Munich. He...was a celebrated expert in removing spells from princely personages.

William V knew all about witches. In fact, the bewitching of his daughter-in-law was almost trivial in comparison with the many evil works performed by witches. They ruined harvests, destroyed cattle and crops, brought pestilence, plague, and sickness into Bavaria, and wrought death and destruction. The most horrible thing about witches, however, was that they were an affront to God, and if nothing was done, God might bring down His wrath on Bavaria.

It was for this reason that

William had very early on exhorted his prefects and their officials to root out such vermin. Under his rule there had been epidemic persecution of witches in Schongau and the Werdenfels area, with one hundred and fourteen convicted witches dragged to the stake. He had given the most rigorous order that only those that repented might be strangled before they were burned, while the unrepentant were to be roasted alive in the Spanish manner. The screams of his victims did not rouse him from his sleep; he was better off than France's Catharine de Medici, who had been haunted by the ghosts of murdered Huguenots. He had taken precautions to ward off that sort of fiendish commotion: his palace was linked by connecting passages with churches and monasteries and packed with instuments of salvation--relics, crucifixes, and stoups of holy water. The whole devilish clan might rage before his gates, the holy man's abode was impregnably fortified against Satan.

By the time the pious monarch had abdicated, he had made it clear to his son that he should continue the extermination of witches. It was obvious to William for it was obvious "that his drastic measures would provoke Lucifer, and that the fiendish brood would go on trying to harm his flourishing principality. One reason why he had chosen Dr. Fickler as his son's tutor was that Fickler had written a book about witch trials."

William was also an anti-Semitic who continued a policy of active persecution (Kunze 124, 159).

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William V, Witch-Hunter of Bavaria copyrighted 1996-1998 to Shantell Powell.