title: Third Punic War

text: Carthage paid off its indemnity in 151 BC and was prospering economically, but was no military threat to Rome. Nevertheless, there had long been a faction within the Roman Senate that had wished to take military action against Carthage. For example, the dislike of Carthage by the senior senator Cato was so well known that since the 18th century he has been credited with ending all of his speeches with ("Carthage must be destroyed"). The opposing faction included Scipio Nasica, who argued that fear of a strong enemy such as Carthage would keep the common people in check and avoid social division. Cato was a member of an embassy to Carthage, probably in 153 BC, and noted her growing economy and strength; Nasica was likely a member of the same embassy. Using the illicit Carthaginian military action as a pretext, Rome began preparing a punitive expedition.


title: Third Punic War

text: Modern scholars have advanced several theories as to why Rome was eager for war. These include: a Roman fear of Carthaginian commercial competition; a desire to forestall a wider war which might have broken out with the death of Masinissa, who was aged 89 at the time; the factional use of Carthage as a political "bogeyman", irrespective of her true power; a greed for glory and loot; and a desire to quash a political system which Rome considered anathema. No consensus has been reached regarding these and other hypotheses. Carthaginian embassies attempted to negotiate with Rome, which responded evasively. The large North African port city of Utica, some north of Carthage, went over to Rome in 149 BC. Aware that its harbour would greatly facilitate any assault on Carthage, the Senate and the People's Assembly of Rome declared war on Carthage.


title: Third Punic War

text: The Romans elected two men each year, known as consuls, as senior magistrates, who at time of war would each lead an army; on occasion their term was extended. A large Roman army landed at Utica in 149 BC under both consuls for the year, Manius Manilius commanding the army and Lucius Marcius Censorinus the fleet. The Carthaginians continued to attempt to appease Rome, and sent an embassy to Utica. The consuls demanded that they hand over all weaponry, and reluctantly the Carthaginians did so. Large convoys took enormous stocks of equipment from Carthage to Utica. Surviving records state that these included 200,000 sets of armour and 2,000 catapults. Their warships all sailed to Utica and were burnt in the harbour. Once Carthage was disarmed, Censorinus made the further demand that the Carthaginians abandon their city and relocate away from the sea; Carthage would then be destroyed. The Carthaginians abandoned negotiations and prepared to defend their city.


title: Third Punic War

text: The city of Carthage itself was unusually large for the time: modern scholars give population estimates ranging from 90,000 to 800,000. Any of these would make Carthage one of the most populous cities in the Mediterranean area at the time. It was strongly fortified with walls of more than circumference. Defending the main approach from the land were three lines of defences, of which the strongest was a brick-built wall wide and high with a ditch in front of it. Built into this wall was a barracks capable of holding over 24,000 soldiers. The city had few reliable sources of ground water, but possessed a complex system to catch and channel rainwater and many cisterns to store it.


title: Third Punic War

text: The Carthaginians raised a strong and enthusiastic force to garrison the city from their citizenry and by freeing all slaves willing to fight. They also formed a field army at least 20,000 strong, which was placed under Hasdrubal, freshly released from his condemned cell. This army was based at Nepheris, south of Carthage. Appian gives the strength of the Roman army which landed in Africa as 84,000 soldiers; modern historians estimate it at 40,000–50,000 men, of whom 4,000 were cavalry.


title: Third Punic War

text: The Roman army moved to Carthage, unsuccessfully attempted to scale the city walls, and settled down for a siege. They set up two camps under command of legates: Censorinus's had the primary role of protecting the beached Roman ships; and Manilius's housed the Roman legions. Hasdrubal moved up his army to harass the Roman supply lines and foraging parties. The Romans launched another assault on the city but were thrown back by the Carthaginians. Scipio Aemilianus, the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus, who was serving as a tribunea middle-ranking military positionheld back his men, and was able to deploy them to beat off the pursuing Carthaginians, preventing heavy losses.


title: Third Punic War

text: The camp established by Censorinus was badly situated and by early summer was so pestiferous that it was moved to a healthier location. This was not as defensible, and the Carthaginians inflicted losses on the Roman fleet with fireships. The Romans then made these attacks more difficult by building additional fortifications. Nevertheless, the Carthaginians repeatedly attacked the camps. In often confused fighting Scipio distinguished himself further by his role in thwarting these; the discipline which he imposed on his troops was in contrast with the behaviour of most of the rest of the Roman army.


title: Third Punic War

text: Manilius decided to strike against the Carthaginians' main camp near Nepheris, despite its strong position and fortifications. Arriving there, Manilius ordered an immediate assault, against Scipio's advice. This initially went well, but the Romans advanced into an untenable position. When they attempted to withdraw they were attacked by the Carthaginians, who inflicted heavy casualties. Scipio led 300 cavalry in a series of limited and well-disciplined charges and threats which caused the Carthaginians to pause for long enough for most of the infantry to complete their retreat. That night Scipio led his cavalry back to rescue a trapped group of Romans. The Roman column retreated to its camp near Carthage, where a committee from the Senate had arrived to investigate progress. Scipio's performance was prominent in their subsequent report.


title: Third Punic War

text: Scipio made contact with several of the leaders of Carthage's Numidian cavalry, then joined a second, better-planned expedition led by Manilius against Hasdrubal at Nepheris. Despite the greater forethought, the Romans made no progress, although one of the Numidians contacted by Scipio did defect to the Romans with 2,200 men. Manilius withdrew after the Romans ran out of food, and Scipio led the Romans' new allies on a successful foraging expedition.


title: Third Punic War

text: The Romans elected two new consuls in 148 BC, but only one of them was sent to Africa: Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus; Lucius Hostilius Mancinus commanded the navy as his subordinate. He pulled back the close siege of Carthage to a looser blockade and attempted to mop up the other Carthaginian-supporting cities in the area. He failed: Neapolis surrendered and was subsequently sacked, but Aspis withstood assaults from both the Roman army and navy, while Hippo was fruitlessly besieged. A Carthaginian sortie from Hippo destroyed the Roman siege engines causing them to break off the campaign and go into winter quarters. Hasdrubal, already in charge of the Carthaginian field army, overthrew the civilian leadership of Carthage and took command himself. Carthage allied with Andriscus, a pretender to the Macedonian throne. Andriscus had invaded Roman Macedonia, defeated a Roman army, had himself crowned King Philip VI, and sparked the Fourth Macedonian War.


title: Third Punic War

text: Scipio intended to stand in the 147 BC elections for the post of , which was a natural progression for him. Aged 36 or 37, he was too young to stand as consul, for which by the the minimum age was 41. There was considerable political manoeuvring behind the scenes. Scipio and his partisans played on his successes over the previous two years and the fact that it was his adoptive grandfather, Scipio Africanus, who had sealed Roman victory in Africa in the Second Punic War. Public demand to appoint him as consul, and so allow him to take charge of the African war, was so strong that the Senate put aside the age requirements for all posts for the year. Scipio was elected consul and appointed to sole command in Africa; usually theatres were allocated to the two consuls by lot. He was granted the usual right to conscript enough men to make up the numbers of the forces there and the unusual entitlement to enroll volunteers.


title: Third Punic War

text: Scipio moved the Romans' main camp back to near Carthage, closely observed by a Carthaginian detachment of 8,000. He made a speech demanding tighter discipline and dismissed those soldiers he considered ill-disciplined or poorly motivated. He then led a successful night attack and broke into the city with 4,000 men. Panicked in the dark, the Carthaginian defenders, after an initial fierce resistance, fled. Scipio decided that his position would be indefensible once the Carthaginians reorganised themselves in daylight, and so withdrew. Hasdrubal, horrified at the way the Carthaginian defences had collapsed, had Roman prisoners tortured to death on the walls, in sight of the Roman army. He was reinforcing the will to resist in the Carthaginian citizens; from this point there could be no possibility of negotiation or even surrender. Some members of the city council denounced his actions and Hasdrubal had them too put to death and took full control of the city.


title: Third Punic War

text: The renewed close siege cut off landward entry to the city, but a tight seaward interdiction was all but impossible with the naval technology of the time. Frustrated at the amount of food being shipped into the city, Scipio built an immense mole to cut off access to the harbour via blockade runners. The Carthaginians responded by cutting a new channel from their harbour to the sea. They had built a new fleet and once the channel was complete the Carthaginians sailed out, taking the Romans by surprise. In the ensuing Battle of the Port of Carthage the Carthaginians held their own, but when withdrawing at the end of the day many of their ships were trapped against the city's sea wall and sunk or captured. The Romans now attempted to advance against the Carthaginian defences in the harbour area, eventually gaining control of the quay. Here, over several months, they constructed a brick structure as high as the city wall which enabled up to 4,000 Romans to fire onto the Carthaginian ramparts from short range.


title: Third Punic War

text: Once this feature was complete Scipio detached a large force and led it against the Carthaginian field army at Nepheris. The Carthaginians, commanded by a Greek named Diogenes, had established a fortified camp for their winter quarters. Late in 147 BC Scipio directed an assault on the camp from several directions and overran it. Fleeing Carthaginians were pursued by Rome's mounted Numidian allies and few escaped. The town of Nepheris was then besieged and surrendered after three weeks. Most of the fortified positions still holding out in Carthage's hinterland now opened their gates.


title: Third Punic War

text: Scipio's position as the Roman commander in Africa was extended for a year in 146 BC. In the spring he launched a full-scale assault from the harbour area, which successfully breached the walls. Over six days, the Romans systematically worked their way through the residential part of the city, killing everyone they encountered and setting the buildings behind them on fire. On the last day Scipio agreed to accept prisoners, except for 900 Roman deserters in Carthaginian service, who fought on from the Temple of Eshmoun and burnt it down around themselves when all hope was gone. At this point, Hasdrubal surrendered to Scipio on the promise of his life and freedom. Hasdrubal's wife, watching from a rampart, then blessed Scipio, cursed her husband, and walked into the temple with her children to burn to death.


title: Third Punic War

text: There were 50,000 Carthaginian prisoners who were sold into slavery. The notion that Roman forces then sowed the city with salt is likely a 19th-century invention. Many of the religious items and cult-statues which Carthage had pillaged from Sicilian cities and temples over the centuries were returned with great ceremony.


title: Third Punic War

text: Rome was determined that the city of Carthage remain in ruins. A ten-man commission was despatched by the Senate and Scipio was ordered to carry out further demolitions. A curse was placed on anyone who might attempt to resettle the site in the future. The former site of the city was confiscated as , public land. Scipio celebrated a triumph and took the "agnomen" "Africanus", as had his adoptive grandfather. Hasdrubal's fate is not known, although he had surrendered on the promise of a retirement to an Italian estate. The formerly Carthaginian territories were annexed by Rome and reconstituted to become the Roman province of Africa, with Utica as its capital. The province became a major source of grain and other food.


title: Third Punic War

text: The Punic cities which had stood by Carthage to the end were forfeit to Rome as , or, as in the case of Bizerte, were destroyed. Surviving cities were permitted to retain at least elements of their traditional system of government and culture. The Romans did not interfere in the locals' private lives, and Punic culture, language and religion survived, and is known to modern scholars as "Neo-Punic civilization". The Punic language continued to be spoken in north Africa until the 7th century AD.


title: Third Punic War

text: In 123 BC a reformist faction in Rome led by Gaius Gracchus was eager to redistribute land, including publicly held land. This included the site of Carthage and a controversial law was passed ordering the establishment of a new settlement there, called Junonia. Conservatives argued against the law, and after its passage spread rumours that markers delimitating the new settlement had been dug up by wolvesa very poor omen. These rumours, and other political machinations, caused the plan to be scrapped. In 111 BC legislation repeated the injunction against any resettlement. A century after the war, Julius Caesar planned to rebuild Carthage as a Roman city, but little work was done. Augustus revived the concept in 29 BC and brought the plan to completion. Roman Carthage had become one of the main cities of Roman Africa by the time of the Empire.


title: Third Punic War

text: Rome still exists as the capital of Italy; the ruins of Carthage lie east of modern Tunis on the North African coast. A symbolic peace treaty was signed by Ugo Vetere and Chedli Klibi, the mayors of Rome and modern Carthage, respectively, on 5 February 1985; 2,131 years after the war ended. As of 2020 the modern settlement of Carthage was a district of the city of Tunis.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ (), , was one of the most trusted and loyal "Sahabah" (companions) of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He was born in Mecca and is considered to have been the first mu'azzin in history, chosen by Muhammad himself. He was a former Abyssinian slave and was known for his voice with which he called people to their prayers. He died in 640, about the age of 60 (or just over 60 in Hijri years).


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Bilal ibn Rabah was born in Mecca in the Hejaz in the year 580. His father Rabah was an Arab slave for the clan of Banu Jumah while his mother, Hamamah, was allegedly a former princess of Abyssinia who was captured after the event of the Year of the Elephant, and put into slavery. Being born into slavery, Bilal had no other option but to work for his master, Umayyah ibn Khalaf. Through hard work, Bilal became recognised as a good slave and was entrusted with the keys to the Idols of Arabia. However, racism and sociopolitical statutes of Arabia prevented Bilal from achieving a lofty position in society.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: In his book, "Bilal ibn Rabah", Muhammad Abdul-Rauf states that Bilal "was of a handsome and impressive stature, dark brown complexion with sparkling eyes, a fine nose and bright skin. He was also gifted with a deep, melodious, resonant voice. He wore a beard which was thin on both cheeks. He was endowed with great wisdom and a sense of dignity and self esteem."


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Similarly, in his book "The Life of Muhammad", William Muir states that Bilal "was tall, dark, and with African feature and bushy hair." Muir also states that noble members of the Quraysh despised Bilal and called him "Ibn Sawda" (son of the black woman).


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: When Muhammad announced his prophet-hood and started to preach the message of Islam, Bilal renounced idol worship, becoming one of the earliest converts to the faith.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: When Bilal's slave master, Umayyah ibn Khalaf, found out, he began to torture Bilal. At the instigation of Abu Jahl, Umayyah bound Bilal and had him dragged around Mecca as children mocked him. Bilal refused to renounce Islam, instead repeating "Ahad Ahad" (God is one). Incensed at Bilal's refusal, Umayyah ordered that Bilal be whipped and beaten while spread-eagled upon the Arabian sands under the desert sun, his limbs bound to stakes. When Bilal still refused to recant, Umayyah ordered that a hot boulder be placed on Bilal's chest. However, Bilal remained firm in belief and continued to say "Ahad Ahad".


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: News of the persecution of Bilal reached some of Muhammad's companions, who informed the prophet. Muhammad sent Abu Bakr to negotiate for the emancipation of Bilal, who manumitted him after either purchasing him or exchanging him for a non-Muslim slave.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Many years later, during the mobilization for one of the Islamic expeditions in the Levant under Abu Bakr's rule, Bilal asked him, being his previous manumitter, for permission to leave Medina and pursue Jihad.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: In the newly formed Islamic state of Madina, Bilal had become a prominent contributing member of the Muslim society taking on important roles.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: The majority of mosques around the world recite the Athan according to the Sunni tradition. A dream was seen by Abdullah ibn Zaid where an angel in the form of a man wearing a green garment taught the words of the adhan. The Prophet then instructed Abdullah to teach those words to Bilal because he had a louder voice than him. Umar ibn al-Khattab also saw the same dream. The detail of this story is mentioned below.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Shias, on the other hand, do not accept Abdullah ibn Ziyad's story. They state that the Adhan was revealed to Muhammad just as the Qur'an al-Majid was revealed to him. Shias believe that the Adhan could not be left to the dreams or reveries. Furthermore, Sayed Ali Asgher Razwy states, "If the Prophet could teach the Muslims how to perform prostrations, and how, when, and what to say in each prayer, he could also teach them how and when to alert others before the time for each prayer." According to the Shia traditions, the angel who taught Muhammad how to perform ablutions preparatory to prayers and how to perform prayers also taught him the Adhan.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Bilal rose to prominence in the Islamic community of Medina, as Muhammad appointed him minister of the Bayt al-Mal (treasury). In this capacity, Bilal distributed funds to widows, orphans, wayfarers, and others who could not support themselves.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: He participated in the Battle of Badr. Muhammad's forces included Ali ibn Abi Talib, Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, Ammar ibn Yasir, Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, Abu Bakr, Umar, Mus`ab ibn `Umair, and Az-Zubair bin Al-'Awwam. The Muslims also brought seventy camels and two horses, meaning that they either had to walk or fit three to four men per camel. However, many early Muslim sources indicate that no serious fighting was expected, and the future Caliph Uthman stayed behind to care for his sick wife Ruqayyah, the daughter of Muhammad. Salman the Persian also could not join the battle, as he was still not a free man.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Bilal was among the sahabah promised Paradise in this world, as mentioned in the story of his footsteps being heard in paradise.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: In the Sīrat Abī Bakr Al-Ṣiddīq that compiled many narrations and compiled historical circumstances regarding the rule of Caliph Abu Bakr, Bilal accompanied the Muslim armies, under the commands of Said ibn Aamir al-Jumahi, to Syria.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: After Muhammad died in 632 CE, Bilal was one of the people who did not give bay'ah (the oath of allegiance) to Abu Bakr. It is documented that when Bilal did not give bay'ah to Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab grabbed Bilal by his clothes and asked, "Is this the reward of Abu Bakr; he emancipated you and you are now refusing to pay allegiance to him?


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Bilal replied, "If Abu Bakr had emancipated me for the pleasure of Allah, then let him leave me alone for Allah; and if he had emancipated me for his service, then I am ready to render him the services required. But I am not going to pay allegiance to a person whom the Messenger of God had not appointed as his caliph." Similarly, al-Isti'ab, a Sunni source, states that Bilal told Abu Bakr: "If you have emancipated me for yourself, then make me a captive again; but if you had emancipated me for Allah, then let me go in the way of Allah."


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Abu Ja'far al-Tusi, a Shia scholar, has also stated in "lkhtiyar al-Rijal" that Bilal refused to pay allegiance to Abu Bakr.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Purnam Allahabadi, a Sufi poet whose works originated from the Mughal Empire, composed a Qawwali in which he mentioned how time had stopped when some companions blocked Bilal from delivering the Adhan (which he had seen in his dream), and appealed that it was incorrect. Because the companion Bilal was of an Abyssinian origin, he could not pronounce the letter "Sh" (Arabic: "Shin" ش ). A hadith of Muhammad reports that he said, "The 'seen' of Bilal is 'sheen' in the hearing of Allah," meaning God does not look at the external but appreciates the purity of heart.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: The Sunni scholar al-Suyuti in his "Tarikh al-khulafa" wrote: "He (Bilal) died in Damascus in 17 or 18 AH, but some say 20 AH, or even 21 AH when he was just over sixty years old. Some said he died in Medina, but that is wrong. That is how it is in al-Isabah and other works such as the Tahdhib of an-Nawawi."


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: When Bilal's wife realized that death was approaching Bilal, she became sorrowful. It is documented that she cried and said, "What a painful affliction!" However, Bilal objected to his wife's opinion by stating, "On the contrary, what a happy occasion! Tomorrow I will meet my beloved Muhammad and his faction (hizb)!"


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: He is believed to have been buried in the Bab al-Saghir cemetery, Damascus. However, there exists another shrine, believed to be the burial of Bilal, near a small village called al-Rabahiyya, in Amman, Jordan.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: The descendants of Bilal ibn Rabah al-Habashi are said to have migrated to the land of Ethiopia in East Africa. The Imperial family of Mali in West Africa also claims descent from him.


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: Though there are some disagreements concerning the hard facts of Bilal's life and death, his importance on a number of levels is incontestable. Mu'azzins, especially those in Turkey and Africa, have traditionally venerated the original practitioner of their profession. The story of Bilal is the most frequently cited demonstration of Islam's views of measure people not by their nationality nor social status nor race, but measuring people by their Taqwah (piety).


title: Bilal ibn Rabah

text: In 1874, Edward Wilmot Blyden, a former slave of African descent, wrote: "The eloquent Adzan or Call to Prayer, which to this day summons at the same hours millions of the human race to their devotions, was first uttered by a Negro, Bilal by name, whom Mohammed, in obedience to a dream, appointed the first Mu'azzin. And it has been remarked that even Alexander the Great is in Asia an unknown personage by the side of this honoured Negro."


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Witch trials in the early modern period saw that between 1400 to 1782, around 40,000 to 60,000 were killed due to suspicion that they were practicing witchcraft. Some sources estimate that a total of 100,000 trials occurred at its maximum for a similar period. Groundwork on the concept of witchcraft (a person's collaboration with the devil through the use of magic) was developed by Christian theologians as early as the 13th century. However, prosecutions for the practice of witchcraft would only reach a highpoint from 1560 to 1630 during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion, with some regions burning those who were convicted at the stake, of whom roughly 80% were women, mostly over the age of 40.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Throughout the medieval era, mainstream Christian doctrine had denied the belief in the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as a pagan superstition. Some have argued that the work of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century helped lay the groundwork for a shift in Christian doctrine, by which certain Christian theologians eventually began to accept the possibility of collaboration with devil(s), resulting in a person obtaining certain real supernatural powers.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In 1233, a papal bull by Gregory IX established a new branch of the inquisition in Toulouse, France, to be led by the Dominicans. It was intended to prosecute Christian groups considered heretical, such as the Cathars and the Waldensians. The Dominicans eventually evolved into the most zealous prosecutors of persons accused of witchcraft in the years leading up to the Reformation.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Records were usually kept by the French inquisitors but the majority of these records did not survive, and one historian who was working in 1880, Charles Molinier, refers to the surviving records as only scanty debris. Molinier notes that the inquisitors themselves describe their attempts to carefully safeguard their records, especially when they were moving from town to town. The inquisitors were widely hated and they would be ambushed on the road, but their records were more often the target than the inquisitors themselves ["plus désireux encore de ravir les papiers que porte le juge que de le faire périr lui-même"] ("better to take the papers the judge carries than to make the judge himself perish"). The records seem to have often been targeted by the accused or their friends and family, wishing to thereby sabotage the proceedings or failing that, to spare their reputations and the reputations of their descendants. This would be all the more true for those who were accused of practicing witchcraft. Difficulty in understanding the larger witchcraft trials which were to come in later centuries is deciding how much can be extrapolated from what remains.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In 1329, with the papacy in nearby Avignon, the inquisitor of Carcassonne sentenced a monk to the dungeon for life and the sentence refers to... "multas et diversas daemonum conjurationes et invocationes"... and it frequently uses the same Latin synonym as a word for witchcraft, "sortilegia"—found on the title page of Nicolas Rémy's work from 1595, where it is claimed that 900 persons were executed for "sortilegii crimen".


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Witch trials were still uncommon in the 15th century when the concept of diabolical witchcraft began to emerge. The study of four chronicles concerning events in Valais, the Bernese Alps and the nearby region of Dauphiné has supported the scholarly proposal that some ideas concerning witchcraft were taking hold in the region around western Switzerland during the 1430s, recasting the practice of witchcraft as an alliance between a person and the devil that would undermine and threaten the Christian foundation of society.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The Perrissona Gappit case tried in Switzerland in 1465 is noted for the thoroughness of the surviving record.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The skeptical Canon Episcopi retained many supporters, and still seems to have been supported by the theological faculty at the University of Paris in their decree from 1398, and was never officially repudiated by a majority of bishops within the papal lands, nor even by the Council of Trent, which immediately preceded the peak of the trials. But in 1428, the Valais witch trials, lasting six to eight years, started in the French-speaking lower Valais and eventually spread to German-speaking regions. This time period also coincided with the Council of Basel (1431–1437) and some scholars have suggested a new anti-witchcraft doctrinal view may have spread among certain theologians and inquisitors in attendance at this council, as the Valais trials were discussed. Not long after, a cluster of powerful opponents of the Canon Episcopi emerged: a Dominican inquisitor in Carcassonne named Jean Vinet, the Bishop of Avila Alfonso Tostado, and another Dominican Inquisitor named Nicholas Jacquier. It is unclear whether the three men were aware of each other's work. The coevolution of their shared view centres around "a common challenge: disbelief in the reality of demonic activity in the world."


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Nicholas Jacquier's lengthy and complex argument against the Canon Episcopi was written in Latin. It began as a tract in 1452 and was expanded into a fuller monograph in 1458. Many copies seem to have been made by hand (nine manuscript copies still exist), but it was not printed until 1561. Jacquier describes a number of trials he personally witnessed, including one of a man named Guillaume Edelin, against whom the main charge seems to have been that he had preached a sermon in support of the Canon Episcopi claiming that witchcraft was merely an illusion. Edeline eventually recanted this view, most likely under torture.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The most important and influential book which promoted the new heterodox view was the "Malleus Maleficarum" by Heinrich Kramer. Kramer begins his work in opposition to the Canon Episcopi, but oddly, he does not cite Jacquier, and he may not have been aware of his work. Like most witch-phobic writers, Kramer had met strong resistance by those who opposed his heterodox view; this inspired him to write his work as both propaganda and a manual for like-minded zealots. The Gutenberg printing press had only recently been invented along the Rhine River, and Kramer fully utilized it to shepherd his work into print and spread the ideas that had been developed by inquisitors and theologians in France into the Rhineland. The theological views espoused by Kramer were influential but remained contested, and an early edition of the book even appeared on a list of those banned by the Church in 1490. Nonetheless "Malleus Maleficarum" was printed 13 times between 1486 and 1520, and — following a 50-year pause that coincided with the height of the Protestant reformations — it was printed again another 16 times (1574–1669) in the decades following the important Council of Trent which had remained silent with regard to Kramer's theological views. It inspired many similar works, such as an influential work by Jean Bodin, and was cited as late as 1692 by Increase Mather, then president of Harvard College.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: It is unknown if a degree of alarm at the extreme superstition and witch-phobia expressed by Kramer in the "Malleus Maleficarum" may have been one of the numerous factors that helped prepare the ground for the Protestant Reformation.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The period of the European witch trials, with the most active phase and which saw the largest number of fatalities seems to have occurred between 1560 and 1630. The period between 1560 and 1670 saw more than 40,000 deaths.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Authors have debated whether witch trials were more intense in Catholic or Protestant regions. However, the intensity had not so much to do with Catholicism or Protestantism as both regions experienced a varied intensity of witchcraft persecutions. In Catholic Spain and Portugal for example, the numbers of witch trials were few because the Spanish and the Portuguese Inquisition preferred to focus on the crime of public heresy rather than the crime of witchcraft, whereas Protestant Scotland had a much larger number of witchcraft trials. In contrast, the witch trials in the Protestant Netherlands stopped earlier and they were among the least numerous in Europe, while the large-scale mass witch trials which took place in the autonomous territories of the Catholic prince-bishops in Southern Germany were infamous in all of the Western world, and the contemporary writer Herman Löher described how they affected the population within them:


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The Roman Catholic subjects, farmers, winegrowers, and artisans in the episcopal lands are the most terrified people on earth, since the false witch trials affect the German episcopal lands incomparably more than France, Spain, Italy or Protestants.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The mass witch trials which took place in Southern Catholic Germany in waves between the 1560s and the 1620s. Some trials went on to continue for years and would result in hundreds of executions of all sexes, ages and classes. These included the Trier witch trials (1581–1593), the Fulda witch trials (1603–1606), the Eichstätt witch trials (1613–1630), the Würzburg witch trials (1626–1631), and the Bamberg witch trials (1626–1631).


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In 1590, the North Berwick witch trials occurred in Scotland, and were of particular note as the king, James VI, became involved himself. James had developed a fear that witches planned to kill him after he suffered from storms while traveling to Denmark in order to claim his bride, Anne, earlier that year. Returning to Scotland, the king heard of trials that were occurring in North Berwick, and ordered the suspects to be brought to him—he subsequently believed that a nobleman, Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, was a witch, and after the latter fled in fear of his life, he was outlawed as a traitor. The king subsequently set up royal commissions to hunt down witches in his realm, recommending torture in dealing with suspects, and in 1597, he wrote a book about the menace that witches posed to society, entitled "Daemonologie".


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The Pendle witch trials of 1612 are some of the most prominent in English history, resulting in the hanging of ten of the eleven who were tried.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The witch-panic phenomenon reached the more remote parts of Europe, as well as North America later in the 17th century, among them being the Salzburg witch trials, the Swedish Torsåker witch trials and, somewhat later, in 1692, the Salem witch trials in Colonial New England.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: There had never been a lack of skepticism regarding the trials. In 1635, the authorities of the Roman Inquisition acknowledged its own trials had "found scarcely one trial conducted legally". In the middle of the 17th century, the difficulty in proving witchcraft according to the legal process contributed Rothenburg (German) following advice to treat witchcraft cases with caution.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Although the witch trials had begun to fade out across much of Europe by the mid-17th century, they continued on the fringes of Europe and in the American Colonies. In the Nordic countries, the late 17th century saw the peak of the trials in a number of areas: the Torsåker witch trials of Sweden (1674), where 71 people were executed for witchcraft in a single day, the peak of witch hunting in Swedish Finland, and the Salzburg witch trials in Austria (where 139 people were executed from 1675 to 1690).


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The 1692 Salem witch trials were a brief outburst of witch-phobia which occurred in the New World when the practice was waning in Europe. In the 1690s, Winifred King Benham and her daughter Winifred were thrice tried for witchcraft in Wallingford, Connecticut, the last of such trials in New England. Even though they were found innocent, they were compelled to leave Wallingford and settle in Staten Island, New York. In 1706, Grace Sherwood of Virginia was tried by ducking and jailed for allegedly being a witch.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Rationalist historians in the 18th century came to the opinion that the use of torture had resulted in erroneous testimony.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In France, scholars have found that with increased fiscal capacity and a stronger central government, the witchcraft accusations began to decline. The witch trials that occurred there were symptomatic of a weak legal system and "witches were most likely to be tried and convicted in regions where magistrates departed from established legal statutes".


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: During the early 18th century, the practice subsided. Jane Wenham was among the last subjects of a typical witch trial in England in 1712, but was pardoned after her conviction and set free. The last execution for witchcraft in England took place in 1716, when Mary Hicks and her daughter Elizabeth were hanged. Janet Horne was executed for witchcraft in Scotland in 1727. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 put an end to the traditional form of witchcraft as a legal offense in Britain. Those accused under the new act were restricted to those that pretended to be able to conjure spirits (generally being the most dubious professional fortune tellers and mediums), and punishment was light.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In Austria, Maria Theresa outlawed witch-burning and torture in 1768. The last capital trial, that of Maria Pauer occurred in 1750 in Salzburg, which was then outside the Austrian domain.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In the late 18th century, the practice of witchcraft had ceased to be considered a criminal offense throughout Europe, but there are a number of cases which were technically not witch trials, but they are suspected to have involved a belief in witches, at least, they may have involved a belief in it behind the scenes. Thus, in 1782, Anna Göldi was executed in Glarus, Switzerland, officially, she was executed for "poisoning" (her employer, who believed that she had practiced witchcraft on his daughter)—a ruling at the time widely denounced throughout Switzerland and Germany as judicial murder. Like Anna Göldi, Barbara Zdunk was executed in 1811 in Prussia, not technically for witchcraft, but for arson. In Poland, the Doruchów witch trials occurred in 1783, and the execution of two additional women for sorcery in 1793, tried by a legal court, but with dubious legitimacy.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Despite the official ending of the trials for witchcraft, there would still be occasional and unofficial witch-hunts and killings of those who were accused of practicing witchcraft in parts of Europe, such as the killings of Anna Klemens in Denmark (1800), Krystyna Ceynowa in Poland (1836), and Dummy, the Witch of Sible Hedingham in England (1863). In France, there was sporadic violence and there was even murder in the 1830s, with one woman reportedly burnt in a village square in Nord.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In the 1830s, a prosecution for witchcraft was commenced against a man in Fentress County, Tennessee, either named Joseph or William Stout, based upon his alleged influence over the health of a young woman. The case against the supposed witch was dismissed upon the failure of the alleged victim, who had sworn out a warrant against him, to appear for the trial. However, some of his other accusers were convicted on criminal charges for their part in the matter, and various libel actions were brought.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In 1895, Bridget Cleary was beaten and burned to death by her husband in Ireland because he suspected that fairies had taken the real Bridget and replaced her with a witch.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The killing of people who were suspected of performing malevolent sorcery against their neighbors continued into the 20th and 21st centuries. In 1997, two Russian farmers killed a woman and injured five members of her family because they believed that the woman and her relatives had used folk magic against them. It has been reported that between 2005 and 2011, more than 3,000 people were killed for allegedly being witches by lynch mobs in Tanzania.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Peculiar standards applied to witchcraft allowing certain types of evidence "that are now ways relating Fact, and done many Years before". There was no possibility to offer alibi as a defense because witchcraft did not require the presence of the accused at the scene. Witnesses were called to testify to motives and effects because it was believed that witnessing the invisible force of witchcraft was impossible: "half proofes are to be allowed, and are good causes of suspicion".


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Various acts of torture were used against accused witches to coerce confessions and cause them to provide names of alleged co-conspirators. Most historians agree that the majority of those persecuted in these witch trials were innocent of any involvement in Devil worship. The torture of witches began to increase in frequency after 1468, when the Pope declared witchcraft to be and thereby removed all legal limits on the application of torture in cases where evidence was difficult to find.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In Italy, an accused witch was deprived of sleep for periods up to forty hours. This technique was also used in England, but without a limitation on time. Sexual humiliation was used, such as forced sitting on red-hot stools with the claim that the accused woman would not perform sexual acts with the devil. In most cases, those who endured the torture without confessing were released.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The use of torture has been identified as a key factor in converting the trial of one accused witch into a wider social panic, as those being tortured were more likely to accuse a wide array of other local individuals of also being witches.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: A variety of different punishments were employed for those found guilty of witchcraft, including imprisonment, flogging, fines, or exile. Non-capital punishment, especially for a first offence, was most common in England. Prior to 1542, Church courts dealt with most cases in England and most sanctions were directed more to penance and atonement than harsh punishments. Often the guilty party was ordered to attend the parish church, wearing a white sheet and carrying a wand, and swear to lead a reformed life. The Old Testament's book of states, "Thou shalt not permit a sorceress to live". Many faced capital punishment for witchcraft, either by burning at the stake, hanging, or beheading. Similarly, in New England, people convicted of witchcraft were hanged.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The scholarly consensus on the total number of executions for witchcraft ranges from 40,000 to 60,000 (not including unofficial lynchings of accused witches, which went unrecorded but are nevertheless believed to have been somewhat rare in the Early Modern period). It would also have been the case that various individuals would have died as a result of the unsanitary conditions of their imprisonment, but again this is not recorded within the number of executions.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Attempts at estimating the total number of executions for witchcraft have a history going back to the end of the period of witch-hunts in the 18th century. A scholarly consensus only emerges in the second half of the 20th century, and historical estimates vary wildly depending on the method used. Early estimates tend to be highly exaggerated, as they were still part of rhetorical arguments against the persecution of witches rather than purely historical scholarship.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Notably, a figure of nine million victims was given by Gottfried Christian Voigt in 1784 in an argument criticizing Voltaire's estimate of "several hundred thousand" as too low. Voigt's number has shown remarkably resilient as an influential popular myth, surviving well into the 20th century, especially in feminist and neo-pagan literature. In the 19th century, some scholars were agnostic, for instance, Jacob Grimm (1844) talked of "countless" victims and Charles Mackay (1841) named "thousands upon thousands". By contrast, a popular news report of 1832 cited a number of 3,192 victims "in Great Britain alone". In the early 20th century, some scholarly estimates on the number of executions still ranged in the hundreds of thousands. The estimate was only reliably placed below 100,000 in scholarship of the 1970s.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: There were many regional differences in the manner in which the witch trials occurred. The trials themselves emerged sporadically, flaring up in some areas but neighbouring areas remaining largely unaffected. In general, there seems to have been less witch-phobia in Spain and the papal lands of Italy in comparison to France and the Holy Roman Empire.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: There was much regional variation within the British Isles. In Ireland, for example, there were few trials.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: There are particularly important differences between the English and continental witch-hunting traditions. In England the use of torture was rare and the methods far more restrained. The country formally permitted it only when authorized by the monarch, and no more than 81 torture warrants were issued (for all offenses) throughout English history. The death toll in Scotland dwarfed that of England. It is also apparent from an episode of English history, that during the civil war in the early 1640s, witch-hunters emerged, the most notorious of whom was Matthew Hopkins from East Anglia and proclaimed himself the "Witchfinder General".


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Italy has had fewer witchcraft accusations, and even fewer cases where witch trials ended in execution. In 1542, the establishment of the Roman Catholic Inquisition effectively restrained secular courts under its influence from liberal application of torture and execution. The methodological Instructio, which served as an "appropriate" manual for witch hunting, cautioned against hasty convictions and careless executions of the accused. In contrast with other parts of Europe, trials by the Venetian Holy Office never saw conviction for the crime of malevolent witchcraft, or "maleficio". Because the notion of diabolical cults was not credible to either popular culture or Catholic inquisitorial theology, mass accusations and belief in Witches' Sabbath never took root in areas under such inquisitorial influence.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The number of people tried for witchcraft between the years of 1500–1700 (by region) include: Holy Roman Empire: 50,000 Poland: 15,000 Switzerland: 9,000 French Speaking Europe: 10,000 Spanish and Italian peninsulas: 10,000 Scandinavia: 4,000.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Various suggestions have been made that the witch trials emerged as a response to socio-political turmoil in the Early Modern world. One form of this is that the prosecution of witches was a reaction to a disaster that had befallen the community, such as crop failure, war, or disease. For instance, Midelfort suggested that in southwestern Germany, war and famine destabilised local communities, resulting in the witch prosecutions of the 1620s. Behringer also suggests an increase in witch prosecutions due to socio-political destabilization, stressing the Little Ice Age's effects on food shortages, and the subsequent use of witches as scapegoats for consequences of climatic changes.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The Little Ice Age, lasting from about 1300 to 1850, is characterized by temperatures and precipitation levels lower than the 1901–1960 average. Historians such as Wolfgang Behringer, Emily Oster, and Hartmut Lehmann argue that these cooling temperatures brought about crop failure, war, and disease, and that witches were subsequently blamed for this turmoil. Historical temperature indexes and witch trial data indicate that, generally, as temperature decreased during this period, witch trials increased. Additionally, the peaks of witchcraft persecutions overlap with hunger crises that occurred in 1570 and 1580, the latter lasting a decade. Problematically for these theories, it has been highlighted that, in that region, the witch hunts declined during the 1630s, at a time when the communities living there were facing increased disaster as a result of plague, famine, economic collapse, and the Thirty Years' War. Furthermore, this scenario would clearly not offer a universal explanation, for trials also took place in areas which were free from war, famine, or pestilence. Additionally, these theories—particularly Behringer's —have been labeled as oversimplified. Although there is evidence that the Little Ice Age and subsequent famine and disease was likely a contributing factor to increase in witch persecution, Durrant argues that one cannot make a direct link between these problems and witch persecutions in all contexts.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Moreover, the average age at first marriage had gradually risen by the late sixteenth century; the population had stabilized after a period of growth, and availability of jobs and land had lessened. In the last decades of the century, the age at marriage had climbed to averages of 25 for women and 27 for men in England and the Low Countries, as more people married later or remained unmarried due to lack of money or resources and a decline in living standards, and these averages remained high for nearly two centuries and averages across Northwestern Europe had done likewise. The convents were closed during the Protestant Reformation, which displaced many nuns. Many communities saw the proportion of unmarried women climb from less than 10% to 20% and in some cases as high as 30%, whom few communities knew how to accommodate economically. Miguel (2003) argues that witch killings may be a process of eliminating the financial burdens of a family or society, via elimination of the older women that need to be fed, and an increase in unmarried women would enhance this process.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper advocated the idea that the witch trials emerged as part of the conflicts between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Early Modern Europe. A 2017 study in the "Economic Journal", examining "more than 43,000 people tried for witchcraft across 21 European countries over a period of five-and-a-half centuries", found that "more intense religious-market contestation led to more intense witch-trial activity. And, compared to religious-market contestation, the factors that existing hypotheses claim were important for witch-trial activity—weather, income, and state capacity—were not."


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Until recently, this theory received limited support from other experts in the subject. This is because there is little evidence that either Roman Catholics were accusing Protestants of witchcraft, or that Protestants were accusing Roman Catholics. Furthermore, the witch trials regularly occurred in regions with little or no inter-denominational strife, and which were largely religiously homogenous, such as Essex, Lowland Scotland, Geneva, Venice, and the Spanish Basque Country. There is also some evidence, particularly from the Holy Roman Empire, in which adjacent Roman Catholic and Protestant territories were exchanging information on alleged local witches, viewing them as a common threat to both. Additionally, many prosecutions were instigated not by the religious or secular authorities, but by popular demands from within the population, thus making it less likely that there were specific inter-denominational reasons behind the accusations.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: The more recent research from the 2017 study in the "Economic Journal" argues that both Catholics and Protestants used the hunt for witches, regardless of the witch's denomination, in competitive efforts to expand power and influence.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In south-western Germany, between 1561 and 1670, there were 480 witch trials. Of the 480 trials that took place in southwestern Germany, 317 occurred in Catholic areas and 163 in Protestant territories. During the period from 1561 to 1670, at least 3,229 persons were executed for witchcraft in the German Southwest. Of this number, 702 were tried and executed in Protestant territories and 2,527 in Catholic territories.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: It has been argued that a translation choice in the King James Bible justified "horrific human rights violations and fuel[ed] the epidemic of witchcraft accusations and persecution across the globe". The translation issue concerned Exodus 22:18, "do not suffer a ...[either 1) poisoner "or" 2) witch] ...to live." Both the King James and the Geneva Bible, which precedes the King James version by 51 years, chose the word "witch" for this verse. The proper translation and definition of the Hebrew word in Exodus 22:18 was much debated during the time of the trials and witch-phobia.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: From the 1970s onward, there was a "massive explosion of scholarly enthusiasm" for the study of the Early Modern witch trials. This was partly because scholars from a variety of different disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, philosophy, philosophy of science, criminology, literary theory, and feminist theory, all began to investigate the phenomenon and brought different insights to the subject. This was accompanied by analysis of the trial records and the socio-cultural contexts on which they emerged, allowing for varied understanding of the trials.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Inspired by ethnographically recorded witch trials that anthropologists observed happening in non-European parts of the world, various historians have sought a functional explanation for the Early Modern witch trials, thereby suggesting the social functions that the trials played within their communities. These studies have illustrated how accusations of witchcraft have played a role in releasing social tensions or in facilitating the termination of personal relationships that have become undesirable to one party.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, various feminist interpretations of the witch trials have been offered and published. One of the earliest individuals to do so was the American Matilda Joslyn Gage, a writer who was deeply involved in the first-wave feminist movement for women's suffrage. In 1893, she published the book "Woman, Church and State", which was criticized as "written in a tearing hurry and in time snatched from a political activism which left no space for original research". Likely influenced by the works of Jules Michelet about the Witch-Cult, she claimed that the witches persecuted in the Early Modern period were pagan priestesses adhering to an ancient religion venerating a Great Goddess. She also repeated the erroneous statement, taken from the works of several German authors, that nine million people had been killed in the witch hunt. The United States has become the centre of development for these feminist interpretations.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In 1973, two American second-wave feminists, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, published an extended pamphlet in which they put forward the idea that the women persecuted had been the traditional healers and midwives of the community, who were being deliberately eliminated by the male medical establishment. This theory disregarded the fact that the majority of those persecuted were neither healers nor midwives, and that in various parts of Europe these individuals were commonly among those encouraging the persecutions. In 1994, Anne Llewellyn Barstow published her book "Witchcraze", which was later described by Scarre and Callow as "perhaps the most successful" attempt to portray the trials as a systematic male attack on women.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Other feminist historians have rejected this interpretation of events; historian Diane Purkiss described it as "not politically helpful" because it constantly portrays women as "helpless victims of patriarchy" and thus does not aid them in contemporary feminist struggles. She also condemned it for factual inaccuracy by highlighting that radical feminists adhering to it ignore the historicity of their claims, instead promoting it because it is perceived as authorising the continued struggle against patriarchal society. She asserted that many radical feminists nonetheless clung to it because of its "mythic significance" and firmly delineated structure between the oppressor and the oppressed.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: An estimated 75% to 85% of those accused in the early modern witch trials were women, and there is certainly evidence of misogyny on the part of those persecuting witches, evident from quotes such as "[It is] not unreasonable that this scum of humanity, [witches], should be drawn chiefly from the feminine sex" (Nicholas Rémy, c. 1595) or "The Devil uses them so, because he knows that women love carnal pleasures, and he means to bind them to his allegiance by such agreeable provocations." Scholar Kurt Baschwitz, in his first monography on the subject (in Dutch, 1948), mentions this aspect of the witch trials even as ""a war against old women"".


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Nevertheless, it has been argued that the supposedly misogynistic agenda of works on witchcraft has been greatly exaggerated, based on the selective repetition of a few relevant passages of the "Malleus maleficarum". There are various reasons as to why this was the case. In Early Modern Europe, it was widely believed that women were less intelligent than men and more susceptible to sin.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Many modern scholars argue that the witch hunts cannot be explained simplistically as an expression of male misogyny, as indeed women were frequently accused by other women, to the point that witch-hunts, at least at the local level of villages, have been described as having been driven primarily by "women's quarrels". Especially at the margins of Europe, in Iceland, Finland, Estonia, and Russia, the majority of those accused were male.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Barstow (1994) claimed that a combination of factors, including the greater value placed on men as workers in the increasingly wage-oriented economy, and a greater fear of women as inherently evil, loaded the scales against women, even when the charges against them were identical to those against men.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Thurston (2001) saw this as a part of the general misogyny of the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods, which had increased during what he described as "the persecuting culture" from which it had been in the Early Medieval. Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, in a 1982 publication, speculated that witch-hunts targeted women skilled in midwifery specifically in an attempt to extinguish knowledge about birth control and "repopulate Europe" after the population catastrophe of the Black Death; this view has been rejected by mainstream historians. The historian of medicine David Harley criticised the notion of the midwife-witch as a prevalent type of victim of witch hunts and commented on Heinsohn and Steiger as belonging to a set of polemicists who misportrayed the history of midwifery.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the common belief among the educated sectors of the European populace was that there had never been any genuine cult of witches and all of those people who were persecuted and executed as such were innocent of the crime of witchcraft. However, at this time, various scholars suggested that there had been a real cult that had been persecuted by the Christian authorities, and it had pre-Christian origins. The first person to advance this theory was the German Professor of Criminal Law Karl Ernst Jarcke of the University of Berlin, who put forward the idea in 1828; he suggested that witchcraft had been a pre-Christian German religion that had degenerated into Satanism. Jarcke's ideas were picked up by the German historian Franz Josef Mone in 1839, although he argued that the cult's origins were Greek rather than Germanic.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In 1862, the Frenchman Jules Michelet published "La Sorciere", in which he put forth the idea that the witches had been following a pagan religion. The theory achieved greater attention when it was taken up by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who published both "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe" (1921) and "The God of the Witches" (1931) in which she claimed that the witches had been following a pre-Christian religion which she termed "the Witch-Cult" and "Ritual Witchcraft".


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Murray claimed that this faith was devoted to a pagan Horned God and involved the celebration of four Witches' Sabbaths each year: Halloween, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh. However, the majority of scholarly reviews of Murray's work produced at the time were largely critical, and her books never received support from experts in the Early Modern witch trials. Instead, from her early publications onward many of her ideas were challenged by those who highlighted her "factual errors and methodological failings".


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: However, the publication of the Murray thesis in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" made it accessible to "journalists, film-makers popular novelists and thriller writers", who adopted it "enthusiastically". Influencing works of literature, it inspired writings by Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Subsequently, in 1939, an English occultist named Gerald Gardner claimed to have been initiated into a surviving group of the pagan Witch-Cult known as the New Forest Coven, although modern historical investigation has led scholars to believe that this coven was not ancient as Gardner believed, but was instead founded in the 1920s or 1930s by occultists wishing to fashion a revived Witch-Cult based upon Murray's theories. Taking this New Forest Coven's beliefs and practices as a basis, Gardner went on to found Gardnerian Wicca, one of the most prominent traditions in the contemporary pagan religion now known as Wicca, which revolves around the worship of a Horned God and Goddess, the celebration of festivals known as "Sabbats", and the practice of ritual magic. He also went on to write several books about the historical Witch-Cult, "Witchcraft Today" (1954) and "The Meaning of Witchcraft" (1959), and in these books, Gardner used the phrase "the burning times" in reference to the European and North American witch trials.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: In the early 20th century, a number of individuals and groups emerged in Europe, primarily Britain, and subsequently the United States as well, claiming to be the surviving remnants of the pagan Witch-Cult described in the works of Margaret Murray. The first of these actually appeared in the last few years of the 19th century, being a manuscript that American folklorist Charles Leland claimed he had been given by a woman who was a member of a group of witches worshipping the god Lucifer and goddess Diana in Tuscany, Italy. He published the work in 1899 as "Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches". Whilst historians and folklorists have accepted that there are folkloric elements to the gospel, none have accepted it as being the text of a genuine Tuscan religious group, and believe it to be of late-nineteenth-century composition.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: Wiccans extended claims regarding the witch-cult in various ways, for instance by utilising the British folklore associating witches with prehistoric sites to assert that the witch-cult used to use such locations for religious rites, in doing so legitimising contemporary Wiccan use of them.


title: Witch trials in the early modern period

text: By the 1990s, many Wiccans had come to recognise the inaccuracy of the witch-cult theory and had accepted it as a mythological origin story.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, southeast Turkey, southwest Iran and northeastern Syria), ancient Egypt, ancient Iran (Elam, Media, Parthia and Persis), Anatolia/Asia Minor and the Armenian highlands (Turkey's Eastern Anatolia Region, Armenia, northwestern Iran, southern Georgia, and western Azerbaijan), the Levant (modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan), Cyprus and the Arabian Peninsula. The ancient Near East is studied in the fields of Ancient Near East studies, Near Eastern archaeology and ancient history.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The history of the ancient Near East begins with the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC, though the date it ends varies. The term covers the Bronze Age and the Iron Age in the region, until either the conquest by the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC, that by the Macedonian Empire in the 4th century BC, or the Muslim conquests in the 7th century AD.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The ancient Near East is considered one of the cradles of civilization. It was here that intensive year-round agriculture was first practiced, leading to the rise of the first dense urban settlements and the development of many familiar institutions of civilization, such as social stratification, centralized government and empires, organized religion and organized warfare. It also saw the creation of the first writing system, the first alphabet (abjad), the first currency in history, and law codes, early advances that laid the foundations of astronomy and mathematics, and the invention of the wheel.


title: Ancient Near East

text: During the period, states became increasingly large, until the region became controlled by militaristic empires that had conquered a number of different cultures.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The phrase "ancient Near East" denotes the 19th-century distinction between Near East and Far East as global regions of interest to the British Empire. The distinction began during the Crimean War. The last major exclusive partition of the east between these two terms was current in diplomacy in the late 19th century, with the Hamidian Massacres of the Armenians and Assyrians by the Ottoman Empire in 1894–1896 and the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. The two theatres were described by the statesmen and advisors of the British Empire as "the Near East" and "the Far East". Shortly after, they were to share the stage with <nowiki>"</nowiki>Middle East<nowiki>"</nowiki>, which came to prevail in the 20th century and continues in modern times.


title: Ancient Near East

text: As "Near East" had meant the lands of the Ottoman Empire at roughly its maximum extent, on the fall of that empire, the use of Near East in diplomacy was reduced significantly in favor of the Middle East. Meanwhile, the ancient Near East had become distinct. The Ottoman rule over the Near East ranged from Vienna (to the north) to the tip of the Arabian Peninsula (to the south), from Egypt (in the west) to the borders of Iraq (in the east). The 19th-century archaeologists added Iran to their definition, which was never under the Ottomans, but they excluded all of Europe and, generally, Egypt, which had parts in the empire.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Ancient Near East periodization is the attempt to categorize or divide time into discrete named blocks, or eras, of the Near East. The result is a descriptive abstraction that provides a useful handle on Near East periods of time with relatively stable characteristics.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The Uruk period ( to 3100 BC) existed from the protohistoric Chalcolithic to the Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia, following the Ubaid period. Named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia. It was followed by the Sumerian civilization. The late Uruk period (34–32 centuries) saw the gradual emergence of the cuneiform script and corresponds to the Early Bronze Age.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Sumer, located in southern Mesopotamia, is the earliest known civilization in the world. The oldest excavated archaeological site in Sumer, Tell el-'Oueili, dates to the 7th millennium BC, although it is likely that the area was occupied even earlier. The oldest layers at 'Oueili mark the beginning of the Ubaid period, which was followed by the Uruk period (4th millennium BC) and the Early Dynastic periods (3rd millennium BC). The Akkadian Empire, founded by Sargon the Great, lasted from the 24th to the 21st century BC, and was regarded by many as the world's first empire. The Akkadians eventually fragmented into Assyria and Babylonia.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Ancient Elam lay to the east of Sumer and Akkad, in the far west and southwest of modern-day Iran, stretching from the lowlands of Khuzestan and Ilam Province. In the Old Elamite period, c. 3200 BC, it consisted of kingdoms on the Iranian plateau, centered on Anshan, and from the mid-2nd millennium BC, it was centered on Susa in the Khuzestan lowlands. Elam was absorbed into the Assyrian Empire in the 9th to 7th centuries BC; however, the civilization endured up until 539 BC when it was finally overrun by the Iranian Persians. The Proto-Elamite civilization existed from c. 3200 BC to 2700 BC, when Susa, the later capital of the Elamites, began to receive influence from the cultures of the Iranian plateau. In archaeological terms, this corresponds to the late Banesh period. This civilization is recognized as the oldest in Iran and was largely contemporary with its neighbour, the Sumerian civilization. The Proto-Elamite script is an Early Bronze Age writing system briefly in use for the ancient Elamite language (which was a Language isolate) before the introduction of Elamite Cuneiform.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The Amorites were a nomadic Semitic people who occupied the country west of the Euphrates from the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. In the earliest Sumerian sources, beginning about 2400 BC, the land of the Amorites ("the "Mar.tu" land") is associated with the West, including Syria and Canaan, although their ultimate origin may have been Arabia. They ultimately settled in Mesopotamia, ruling Isin, Larsa, and later Babylon.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The Hurrians lived in northern Mesopotamia and areas to the immediate east and west, beginning approximately 2500 BC. They probably originated in the Caucasus and entered from the north, but this is not certain. Their known homeland was centred on Subartu, the Khabur River valley, and later they established themselves as rulers of small kingdoms throughout northern Mesopotamia and Syria. The largest and most influential Hurrian nation was the kingdom of Mitanni. The Hurrians played a substantial part in the history of the Hittites.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Ishuwa was an ancient kingdom in Anatolia. The name is first attested in the second millennium BC, and is also spelled Išuwa. In the classical period, the land was a part of Armenia. Ishuwa was one of the places where agriculture developed very early on in the Neolithic. Urban centres emerged in the upper Euphrates river valley around 3500 BC. The first states followed in the third millennium BC. The name Ishuwa is not known until the literate period of the second millennium BC. Few literate sources from within Ishuwa have been discovered and the primary source material comes from Hittite texts. To the west of Ishuwa lay the kingdom of the Hittites, and this nation was an untrustworthy neighbour. The Hittite king Hattusili I () is reported to have marched his army across the Euphrates river and destroyed the cities there. This corresponds well with burnt destruction layers discovered by archaeologists at town sites in Ishuwa of roughly the same date. After the end of the Hittite empire in the early 12th century BC a new state emerged in Ishuwa. The city of Malatya became the centre of one of the so-called Neo-Hittite kingdom. The movement of nomadic people may have weakened the kingdom of Malatya before the final Assyrian invasion. The decline of the settlements and culture in Ishuwa from the 7th century BC until the Roman period was probably caused by this movement of people. The Armenians later settled in the area since they were natives of the Armenian Plateau and related to the earlier inhabitants of Ishuwa.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Kizzuwatna was a kingdom of the second millennium BC, situated in the highlands of southeastern Anatolia, near the Gulf of İskenderun in modern-day Turkey, encircling the Taurus Mountains and the Ceyhan river. The centre of the kingdom was the city of Kummanni, situated in the highlands. In a later era, the same region was known as Cilicia.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Luwian is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Luwian speakers gradually spread through Anatolia and became a contributing factor to the downfall, after c. 1180 BC, of the Hittite Empire, where it was already widely spoken. Luwian was also the language spoken in the Neo-Hittite states of Syria, such as Melid and Carchemish, as well as in the central Anatolian kingdom of Tabal that flourished around 900 BC. Luwian has been preserved in two forms, named after the writing systems used to represent them: Cuneiform Luwian, and Hieroglyphic Luwian.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Mari was an ancient Sumerian and Amorite city, located 11 kilometres north-west of the modern town of Abu Kamal on the western bank of Euphrates river, some 120 km southeast of Deir ez-Zor, Syria. It is thought to have been inhabited since the 5th millennium BC, although it flourished from 2900 BC until 1759 BC, when it was sacked by Hammurabi.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Mitanni was a Hurrian kingdom in northern Mesopotamia from , at the height of its power, during the 14th century BC, encompassing what is today southeastern Turkey, northern Syria and northern Iraq (roughly corresponding to Kurdistan), centred on the capital Washukanni whose precise location has not yet been determined by archaeologists. The Mitanni language showed Indo-Aryan influences, especially in the names of gods. The spread to Syria of a distinct pottery type associated with the Kura-Araxes culture has been connected with this movement, although its date is somewhat too early.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Yamhad was an ancient Amorite kingdom. A substantial Hurrian population also settled in the kingdom, and the Hurrian culture influenced the area. The kingdom was powerful during the Middle Bronze Age, c. 1800–1600 BC. Its biggest rival was Qatna further south. Yamhad was finally destroyed by the Hittites in the 16th century BC.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The Aramaeans were a Semitic (West Semitic language group), semi-nomadic and pastoralist people who had lived in upper Mesopotamia and Syria. Aramaeans have never had a unified empire; they were divided into independent kingdoms all across the Near East. Yet to these Aramaeans befell the privilege of imposing their language and culture upon the entire Near East and beyond, fostered in part by the mass relocations enacted by successive empires, including the Assyrians and Babylonians. Scholars even have used the term 'Aramaization' for the Assyro-Babylonian peoples' languages and cultures, that have become Aramaic-speaking.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The Sea peoples is the term used for a confederacy of seafaring raiders of the second millennium BC who sailed into the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, caused political unrest, and attempted to enter or control Egyptian territory during the late 19th dynasty, and especially during Year 8 of Ramesses III of the 20th Dynasty. The Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah explicitly refers to them by the term "the foreign-countries (or 'peoples') of the sea" in his Great Karnak Inscription. Although some scholars believe that they "invaded" Cyprus, Hatti and the Levant, this hypothesis is disputed.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The "Bronze Age collapse" is the name given by those historians who see the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age as violent, sudden and culturally disruptive, expressed by the collapse of palace economies of the Aegean and Anatolia, which were replaced after a hiatus by the isolated village cultures of the Dark Age period in history of the ancient Middle East. Some have gone so far as to call the catalyst that ended the Bronze Age a "catastrophe". The Bronze Age collapse may be seen in the context of a technological history that saw the slow, comparatively continuous spread of iron-working technology in the region, beginning with precocious iron-working in what is now Romania in the 13th and 12th centuries. The cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Syria, and the Egyptian Empire in Syria and Palestine, the scission of long-distance trade contacts and sudden eclipse of literacy occurred between 1206 and 1150 BC. In the first phase of this period, almost every city between Troy and Gaza was violently destroyed, and often left unoccupied thereafter (for example, Hattusas, Mycenae, Ugarit). The gradual end of the Dark Age that ensued saw the rise of settled Neo-Hittite and Aramaean kingdoms of the mid-10th century BC, and the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.


title: Ancient Near East

text: During the Early Iron Age, from 911 BC, the Neo-Assyrian Empire arose, vying with Babylonia and other lesser powers for dominance of the region, though not until the reforms of Tiglath-Pileser III in the 8th century BC, did it become a powerful and vast empire. In the Middle Assyrian period of the Late Bronze Age, Ancient Assyria had been a kingdom of northern Mesopotamia (modern-day northern Iraq), competing for dominance with its southern Mesopotamian rival Babylonia. From 1365 to 1076, it had been a major imperial power, rivaling Egypt and the Hittite Empire. Beginning with the campaign of Adad-nirari II, it became a vast empire, overthrowing 25th Dynasty Egypt and conquering Egypt, the Middle East, and large swaths of Asia Minor, ancient Iran, the Caucasus and east Mediterranean. The Neo-Assyrian Empire succeeded the Middle Assyrian period (14th to 10th century BC). Some scholars, such as Richard Nelson Frye, regard the Neo-Assyrian Empire to be the first real empire in human history. During this period, Aramaic was also made an official language of the empire, alongside the Akkadian language.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The states of the Neo-Hittite kingdoms were Luwian, Aramaic and Phoenician-speaking political entities of Iron Age northern Syria and southern Anatolia that arose following the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1180 BC and lasted until roughly 700 BC. The term "Neo-Hittite" is sometimes reserved specifically for the Luwian-speaking principalities like Melid (Malatya) and Karkamish (Carchemish), although in a wider sense the broader cultural term "Syro-Hittite" is now applied to all the entities that arose in south-central Anatolia following the Hittite collapse – such as Tabal and Quwê – as well as those of northern and coastal Syria.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Urartu was an ancient kingdom of Armenia and North Mesopotamia which existed from c. 860 BC, emerging from the Late Bronze Age until 585 BC. The Kingdom of Urartu was located in the mountainous plateau between Asia Minor, the Iranian Plateau, Mesopotamia, and the Caucasus mountains, later known as the Armenian Highland, and it centered on Lake Van (present-day eastern Turkey). The name corresponds to the Biblical "Ararat".


title: Ancient Near East

text: Two related Israelite kingdoms known as Israel and Judah emerged in the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. The northern Kingdom of Israel, with its most prominent capital at Samaria, was the more prosperous of the two kingdoms and soon developed into a regional power; during the days of the Omride dynasty, it controlled Samaria, Galilee, the upper Jordan Valley, the Sharon and large parts of the Transjordan. It was destroyed around 720 BCE, when it was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The southern Kingdom of Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem, survived longer. In the 7th century BCE, the kingdom's population increased greatly, prospering under Assyrian vassalage. After the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 605 BCE, the ensuing competition between the Twenty-sixth Dynasty of Egypt and the Neo-Babylonian Empire for control of the Levant resulted with the rapid decline of the kingdom. In the early-6th century BCE, Judah was weakened by a series of Babylonian invasions, and in 587/6 BCE, Jerusalem was besieged and destroyed by the second Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, who subsequently exiled the Judeans to Babylon.


title: Ancient Near East

text: The term Neo-Babylonian Empire refers to Babylonia under the rule of the 11th ("Chaldean") dynasty, from the revolt of Nabopolassar in 623 BC until the invasion of Cyrus the Great in 539 BC (Although the last ruler of Babylonia (Nabonidus) was in fact from the Assyrian city of Harran and not Chaldean), notably including the reign of Nebuchadrezzar II. Through the centuries of Assyrian domination, Babylonia enjoyed a prominent status, and revolted at the slightest indication that it did not. However, the Assyrians always managed to restore Babylonian loyalty, whether through the granting of increased privileges, or militarily. That finally changed in 627 BC with the death of the last strong Assyrian ruler, Ashurbanipal, and Babylonia rebelled under Nabopolassar the Chaldean a few years later. In alliance with the Medes and Scythians, Nineveh was sacked in 612 and Harran in 608 BC, and the seat of empire was again transferred to Babylonia. Subsequently, the Medes controlled much of the ancient Near East from their base in Ecbatana (modern-day Hamadan, Iran), most notably most of what is now Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and the South Caucasus.


title: Ancient Near East

text: Following the fall of the Medes, the Achaemenid Empire was the first of the Persian Empires to rule over most of the Near East and far beyond, and the second great Iranian empire (after the Median Empire). At the height of its power, encompassing approximately 7.5 million square kilometers, the Achaemenid Empire was territorially the largest empire of classical antiquity, and the first world empire. It spanned three continents (Europe, Asia, and Africa), including apart from its core in modern-day Iran, the territories of modern Iraq, the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Abkhazia), Asia Minor (Turkey), Thrace (parts of Eastern Bulgaria), Macedonia (roughly corresponding to present-day Macedonia in Northern Greece), many of the Black Sea coastal regions, northern Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Central Asia, parts of Pakistan, and all significant population centers of ancient Egypt as far west as Libya. It is noted in western history as the foe of the Greek city states in the Greco-Persian Wars, for freeing the Israelites from their Babylonian captivity, and for instituting Aramaic as the empire's official language.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: The anonymous text that is usually called the Prayer of Saint Francis (or Peace Prayer, or Simple Prayer for Peace, or Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace) is a widely known Christian prayer for peace. Often associated with the Italian Saint Francis of Assisi ( – 1226), but entirely absent from his writings, the prayer in its present form has not been traced back further than 1912. Its first known occurrence was in French, in a small spiritual magazine called "La Clochette" (The Little Bell), published by a Catholic organization in Paris named "La Ligue de la Sainte-Messe" (The League of the Holy Mass). The author's name was not given, although it may have been the founder of "La Ligue," Father Esther Bouquerel. The prayer was heavily publicized during both World War I and World War II. It has been frequently set to music by notable songwriters and quoted by prominent leaders, and its broadly inclusive language has found appeal with diverse faiths encouraging service to others.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: In most of the published versions of the prayer, the text is abridged, paraphrased or copyrighted. Below is the complete original text from its earliest known publication (1912, in French, copyright expired), alongside a line-by-line English translation.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: The Franciscan Order does not include the prayer in its official "Prayers of St. Francis", and a church historian has noted that the phrasing of the first half of the text ("let me...") is atypically self-oriented for Francis: However, the prayer has been recommended by members of the Order, while not attributing it to Saint Francis.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: It has been noted that the second half of the prayer has similarities to this saying of Giles of Assisi (c. 1190 – 1262), one of the saint's close companions:


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: The most-prominent hymn version of the prayer is "Make Me a Channel of Your Peace", or simply "Prayer of St. Francis", adapted and set to a chant-like melody in 1967 by South African songwriter Sebastian Temple (born Johann Sebastian von Tempelhoff, 1928–1997), who had become a Third Order Franciscan. The hymn is an anthem of the Royal British Legion and is usually sung at its annual Festival of Remembrance. In 1997, it was part of the Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was performed by the Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor on the . The hymn was also sung for the religious wedding ceremony of Prince Albert II of Monaco to South African Charlene Wittstock in 2011.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: Christian Renoux, a history professor at the University of Orléans, published in French in 2001 a book-length study of the prayer and its origins, clearing up much of the confusion that had accumulated previously. The Franciscan journal "Frate Francesco" and the Vatican newspaper "L'Osservatore Romano" published articles in Italian summarizing the book's findings, and Renoux published an online abstract in English at The Franciscan Archive.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: The earliest known record of the prayer is its appearance, as a "beautiful prayer to say during Mass", in the December 1912 issue of the small devotional French Catholic publication "La Clochette", "the bulletin of the League of the Holy Mass". Although the prayer was published anonymously, Renoux concluded that, with few exceptions, the texts in "La Clochette" were generally written by its founding editor, Father Esther Bouquerel (1855–1923).


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: In 1915, Marquis Stanislas de La Rochethulon (1862–1945), founding president of the Anglo-French association "Souvenir Normand" (Norman Remembrance), which called itself "a work of peace and justice inspired by the testament of William the Conqueror, who is considered to be the ancestor of all the royal families of Europe", sent this prayer to Pope Benedict XV in the midst of World War I. The Pope had an Italian translation published on the front page of "L'Osservatore Romano" on 20 January 1916. It appeared under the heading, "The prayers of 'Souvenir Normand' for peace", with a jumbled explanation: "'Souvenir Normand' has sent the Holy Father the text of some prayers for peace. We have pleasure in presenting in particular the prayer addressed to the Sacred Heart, inspired by the testament of William the Conqueror." On 28 January 1916, the newspaper "La Croix" reprinted, in French, the article from "L'Osservatore Romano", with exactly the same heading and explanation. La Rochethulon wrote to "La Croix" to clarify that it was not a prayer of "Souvenir Normand"; but he failed to mention "La Clochette", the first publication in which it had appeared. Because of its appearance in "L'Osservatore Romano" and "La Croix" as a simple prayer for peace during World War I, the prayer became widely known.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: Around 1918, Franciscan Father Étienne Benoît reprinted the "Prayer for Peace" in French, without attribution, on the back of a mass-produced holy card depicting his Order's founder, the inspirational peacemaker from the Crusades era, Saint Francis of Assisi. The prayer was circulating in the United States by January 1927, when its first known English version (slightly abridged from the 1912 French original) appeared in the Quaker magazine "Friends' Intelligencer", under the misattributed and misspelled title "A prayer of St. Francis of Assissi". The saint's namesake American archbishop and military vicar Francis Spellman distributed millions of copies of the "Prayer of St. Francis" during World War II, and the next year it was read into the "Congressional Record" by Senator Albert W. Hawkes. As a friar later summarized the relationship between the prayer and St. Francis: "One can safely say that although he is not the author, it resembles him and would not have displeased him."


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: The Prayer of St. Francis has often been cited with national or international significance, in the spirit of service to others.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: In 1986, Pope John Paul II recited the prayer in bidding farewell to the global religious leaders he hosted for the first "World Day of Prayer for Peace", in Assisi at the Basilica of St. Francis. Indeed, the prayer "over the years has gained a worldwide popularity with people of all faiths"; and in 2013, Pope Francis chose his papal name as a tribute to St. Francis, "the man who gives us this spirit of peace".


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: Mother Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata, India) made it part of the morning prayers of the Roman Catholic religious institute she founded, the Missionaries of Charity. She attributed importance to the prayer when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1979 and asked that it be recited. It became the anthem of many Christian schools in Kolkata. South Africa's Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent leadership against apartheid, declared that the prayer was "an integral part" of his devotions.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: Margaret Thatcher, after winning the 1979 United Kingdom general election, paraphrased the prayer on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street, surrounded by a throng of reporters, having "kissed hands" with Queen Elizabeth II and become Prime Minister.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: In 1995, US President Bill Clinton quoted it in his welcoming remarks to John Paul II, starting the papal visit to address the United Nations in New York City. Nancy Pelosi quoted the prayer when she became Speaker of the US House of Representatives in 2007, as did her successor John Boehner when he resigned in 2015. Pelosi invoked it again at the opening of the evening House session following the January 6, 2021, insurrection and storming of the Capitol. At the 2012 Democratic Convention, Jena Nardella invoked the prayer during the closing Benediction. President-elect Joe Biden quoted the prayer during his speech following his victory in the Electoral College on December 14, 2020.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: The prayer is referenced in the Alcoholics Anonymous book "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions" (1953), and is often known to AA members as the "Step Eleven Prayer". An abbreviated version of the prayer was sung in Franco Zeffirelli's 1972 film about St. Francis, "Brother Sun, Sister Moon". In Band Of Brothers (2001), episode six “Bastogne”, Eugene ‘Doc’ Roe recites “Lord, grant that I shall never seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, or to be loved as to love with all my heart. With all my heart.” while praying in a foxhole in the Bois Jacques. A modified segment of the prayer is recited in one of the early trailers for the Sylvester Stallone 2008 film Rambo. A modified version of the prayer appears in the song Prayer in the musical Come From Away. Beanie Feldstein sings the prayer in the 2017 movie "Lady Bird", set at a Catholic girls' school. A shortened version appears in the HBO show Deadwood, episode 11, season one. And also appears in the CBC TV Series Anne with an E, episode 3, season three.


title: Prayer of Saint Francis

text: According to singer and guitarist Trey Anastasio from the American rock band Phish, recital of the Saint Francis prayer is an integral part of his pre-concert ritual.


title: Mötley Crüe discography

text: The discography of Mötley Crüe, an American rock band, consists of nine studio albums, three live albums, three EPs, six compilation albums, two box sets, nine DVD, 30 singles, and 32 music videos.


title: Mötley Crüe discography

text: Mötley Crüe was formed in 1981 by bass guitarist Nikki Sixx and drummer Tommy Lee, who were later joined by lead guitarist Mick Mars and lead singer Vince Neil. Mötley Crüe has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, including 25 million in the US.


title: Mötley Crüe discography

text: The band members have often been noted for their hard-living lifestyles; all members have had numerous brushes with the law, have spent time in jail and have suffered long addictions to alcohol and drugs. Their ninth studio album entitled "Saints of Los Angeles" was released on June 24, 2008. The band announced their retirement in 2013 and played what was planned to be their final concert on December 31, 2015. In 2019, the band officially reunited.


title: Honda Integra (fourth generation)

text: The fourth-generation Honda Integra (chassis code DC5), produced by Honda, was introduced in Japan on 13 April 2001, and produced from July 2001 until August 2006. It was introduced in North America on 2 July 2001 as the Acura RSX, the name a part of Acura's naming scheme changing the names of its models from recognizable names like "Integra" or "Legend" to alphabetical designations in order for buyers to build more recognition to the marque, and not the individual cars.


title: Honda Integra (fourth generation)

text: In concordance with the introduction of the Integra's platform mate, the seventh-generation Civic being introduced in 2000, the Integra joined the Civic in abandoning Honda's traditional double wishbone suspension at both ends and adopted MacPherson struts in the front and trailing arm type suspension in the rear along with the new K-series engine supplanting the B-series.


title: Honda Integra (fourth generation)

text: The K-series engine features intelligent VTEC (or i-VTEC), which electronically adjusts valve lift, valve duration and valve timing, giving the 2.0 L engine a flatter torque curve relative to previous VTEC implementations which only adjusted valve lift and valve duration.


title: Honda Integra (fourth generation)

text: The Integra received a facelift in 2004 (MY2005). The headlight and taillight assemblies lost the "half circle" on the bottom. This made the assemblies flush with the bumpers. The interior received new trim and gauge clusters, an immobilizer and alarm became standard, the body became stiffer, the suspension springs were redesigned, and the car's tendency to bump steer was reduced.


title: Honda Integra (fourth generation)

text: In Japan, the Integra was introduced in two versions, the iS (later renamed Type S in the 2004 refresh) and the Type R.