The following list gives a few--and only a few--of the direful results to which this widespread superstition led. The instances are chiefly taken from Dr. Réville's _History of the Devil_, and Haydn's well-known _Dictionary of Dates_:--
At Toulouse a noble lady, fifty-six years of age, named Angela de Labarète, was the first who was burnt as a sorceress, in which special quality she formed part of the great _auto-da-fé_ which took place in that city in the year 1275; at Carcasonne, from 1320 to 1350, more than four hundred executions for witchcraft are on record; in 1309 many Templars were burnt at Paris for witchcraft; Joan of Arc was burnt as a witch at Rouen, May 30th, 1431; in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII. issued a bull against witchcraft, causing persecutions to break out in all parts of Christendom; during three months of the year 1515, about five hundred witches were burnt at Geneva; in 1524 many persons were burnt for the same crime in the Diocese of Como; about the year 1520 a great number suffered in France, and one sorcercer confessed to having 1,200 associates; from 1580 to 1595--a period of fifteen years--about nine hundred witches were burnt in Lorraine; between 1627 and 1629, no fewer than one hundred and fifty-seven persons, old and young, and of all ranks, were burnt at Wurtzburg, in Bavaria; in 1634 a clerk named Urbain Grandier, who was parish priest at Loudon, was burnt on a charge of having bewitched a whole convent of Ursuline nuns; in 1654 twenty poor women were put to death as witches in Brittany; in 1648-9 serious disturbances on account of witchcraft took place in Massachusetts; and in 1683 dreadful persecutions raged in Pennsylvania from the same cause; in 1692, at Salem, in New England, nineteen persons were hanged by the Puritans for witchcraft, and eight more were condemned, while fifty others confessed themselves to be witches, and were pardoned; in 1657 the witch-judge Nicholas Remy boasted of having burnt nine hundred persons in fifteen years; in one German principality alone, at least two hundred and forty-two persons were burnt between 1646 and 1651, including many children from one to six years of age; in 1749 Maria Renata was burnt at Wurtzburg for witchcraft; on January 17th, 1775, nine old women were burnt at Kalish, in Poland, on a charge of having bewitched and rendered unfruitful the lands belonging to the palatinate; at Landshut, in Bavaria, in 1756, a young girl of thirteen years was convicted of impure intercourse with the Devil and put to death. There were also executions for sorcery at Seville, in Spain, in 1781, and at Glarus, in Switzerland, in 1783; while even as late as December 15th, 1802, five women were condemned to death for sorcery at Patna, in the Bengal Presidency, by the Brahmins, and were all executed.