Between 1560 and 1660, Europe executed an estimated 50,000 people for witchcraft—more than in all previous centuries combined. The timing wasn't coincidental. These same decades marked the coldest period of the Little Ice Age, when Alpine glaciers swallowed entire villages and late spring frosts destroyed harvests across the continent.

The connection between falling temperatures and rising accusations reveals something unsettling about human nature. When communities faced unexplained suffering, they didn't simply endure it. They searched for someone to blame—and found their neighbors.

In 1626, the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg executed 900 people in a single year after devastating frosts destroyed the wine harvest. The connection seemed obvious to his contemporaries: someone must have made this happen. Medieval Europeans didn't distinguish between natural and supernatural weather the way we do. They lived in an enchanted world where storms could be summoned, hail directed at specific fields, and frost called down on enemies.

This wasn't ignorant superstition—it was a logical framework for understanding causation. If a hailstorm destroyed your crops but spared your neighbor's field fifty meters away, random chance seemed inadequate as an explanation. The targeted nature of many climate disasters demanded a targeted explanation. Weather magic provided one.

Court records from this period reveal the specificity of these beliefs. Accused witches were said to have thrown powder into rivers to cause floods, danced backward to summon frost, or buried eggs in fields to wither crops. These weren't vague accusations—they were precise theories about how someone had weaponized the weather against the community.

Takeaway

When suffering feels targeted rather than random, humans instinctively search for an agent responsible—a pattern that persists today in how we assign blame for complex systemic problems.

The Little Ice Age didn't just bring bad weather—it brought cascading economic collapse. Growing seasons shortened by several weeks. Wine production collapsed in regions that had produced grapes for centuries. The price of grain sometimes doubled or tripled within a single year. Communities that had survived for generations suddenly faced starvation.

Under this pressure, social bonds frayed in predictable ways. People who might have tolerated an eccentric neighbor during prosperous times began watching her more carefully. That old woman who muttered to herself—hadn't she been seen near the field before the frost? The widow who kept cats and rarely attended church—didn't the hailstorm start from her direction?

Witch accusations during the Little Ice Age followed a disturbing pattern: they clustered geographically in regions hardest hit by climate disasters and temporally in the years immediately following crop failures. The correlation is too strong to be coincidental. Bavaria saw its worst witch hunts after the coldest summers. Switzerland's trials peaked during the most devastating Alpine floods. Economic desperation created the psychological conditions for communities to turn on their own members.

Takeaway

Scapegoating intensifies not with the severity of problems but with the social stress those problems create—communities under economic pressure will find targets for their fear.

The witch trials required more than fearful communities—they required a legal apparatus capable of producing the confessions that communities demanded. During the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical and secular courts developed increasingly sophisticated methods for extracting the right answers from accused witches.

The innovation wasn't just physical torture, though that was terrible enough. Courts developed leading questions that embedded the expected answers. Interrogators asked not whether the accused had caused the frost but how—forcing suspects to choose between methods of weather magic rather than maintaining innocence. Under torture, people will say almost anything to make the pain stop. The questions ensured that what they said confirmed community beliefs about weather witchcraft.

These confessions then became evidence that witches really could control weather. Each extracted admission reinforced the framework that produced the next accusation. The legal system created a feedback loop: climate disasters prompted accusations, torture produced confessions, confessions validated beliefs about weather magic, and those validated beliefs made the next accusation more credible. The system was self-sustaining once it began.

Takeaway

When legal systems are designed to confirm existing beliefs rather than discover truth, they will reliably produce the evidence that confirms those beliefs—a warning about any justice system that measures success by conviction rates.

The Little Ice Age witch hunts ended not because Europeans became more enlightened but because the intellectual framework shifted. By the late seventeenth century, educated elites increasingly saw weather as governed by natural laws rather than supernatural intervention. The accusations continued from below, but courts stopped taking them seriously.

We'd like to believe we've moved beyond such thinking. But the pattern—unexplained suffering, search for human culprits, legal systems that confirm our anxieties—remains recognizable. The targets change; the mechanism persists.