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The government did little to promote the prosecutions edicts promulgated in 15 did more to restrain witch-hunting than encourage it. The great majority of witch trials and executions in the southern Netherlands took place south of the ‘linguistic frontier’, where French or German rather than Flemish was spoken. The largest concentration of these executions occurred in the duchy of Luxembourg, where at least 2,000 witches were burned, and in Artois, the Cambrésis, and the county of Namur. In contrast with the northern Netherlands, which became the Dutch Republic in the late sixteenth century, the ten southern provinces of the Netherlands, which remained under Spanish Habsburg control until 1714, held a large number of witch trials, resulting in at least 2,500 and possibly as many as 3,500 executions between 14. The witch trials that took place in this region were all conducted by secular authorities, although local pastors often played an important part in the process. Most of the Transylvanian trials about which we have information occurred in Siebenburgen, an area originally settled by Germans in the twelfth century. This system was in large part responsible for keeping the number of convictions in Transylvania at a minimum. It was also used on one occasion to secure the names of accomplices. Torture was used only if there was strong suspicion of witchcraft and if the water ordeal failed. Until 1725 all accusations in Transylvania were made publicly and under the threat of the talion witnesses were presented on behalf of both parties and the main method of probation was the water ordeal, the purpose of which was to produce a confession. In the province of Transylvania, which had a separate legal system, inquisitorial procedure arrived even later. The slow reception of learned witch beliefs in Hungary was matched by a belated adoption of inquisitorial procedure, which was not introduced into the kingdom of Hungary until the 1650s. Only when Benedict Carpzov’s Practica rerum criminalium was codified for Austria in 1656 and incorporated into the body of Hungarian law in 1696 were western demonological ideas made readily available to Hungarian judges. Western demonological ideas took a long time to penetrate the country and they were never fully developed. There were also a number of prosecutions in the south-eastern province of Transylvania, which remained an autonomous province within the Ottoman Empire between 15 and did not become fully reintegrated into the kingdom of Hungary until 1711. Most of the trials took place in the kingdom of Hungary, which became part of the Austrian Hapsburg monarchy in 1526. Between 15, just under 1,500 individuals were tried for witchcraft in Hungary, of whom some 450 are known to have been executed (most by burning), while at least 225 suffered non-capital punishments. Witch-hunting in Hungary was less intense and took a lower toll than in Poland, although the total number of trials and executions was by no means insignificant. The absence of any large-scale prosecutions can be attributed in large part to a division between the zealots on the council, who were eager to try witches as part of a program of Catholic reform, such as inspired the severe witch-hunts in Bamberg and Würzburg, and the so-called politicians, who were concerned mainly with maintaining the stability of the state. This relatively moderate record of witch-hunting had much to do with the reluctance of the central government in Munich to support the trials, and especially not to allow any witch-hunts from getting out of control. Even more significantly, not more than 1,000 of those tried were executed. Although about 3,000 individuals were tried for witchcraft in the duchy over the course of about 100 years, the accused witches represented a relatively small percentage of the population, which hovered around 1.4 million people in 1600. The duchy of Bavaria, which became an electorate in 1623, experienced a number of witch-hunts in the early modern period, but they were not as intense as those in the ecclesiastical territories in Franconia.
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