The main papal bull about witchcraft, Summis desiderantes affectibus (1484) by Pope Innocent VIII, declared that witchcraft was real, deadly, and a threat to Christian society, and it formally empowered inquisitors to investigate and punish alleged witches, especially in parts of Germany.

Core message of the papal bull

The bull frames witchcraft as a concrete alliance with the devil that harms both souls and bodies. It insists that such activity is not superstition or illusion but a genuine danger to the faithful and to Christendom.

It then grants specific inquisitors broad authority to pursue, arrest, imprison, and punish people accused of these crimes, even if local church leaders had previously blocked or limited them.

What it said witches were doing

The text lists a series of alleged acts to show how serious witchcraft supposedly was:

  • Making pacts with the devil and abandoning the Christian faith
  • Killing fetuses of humans and animals
  • Destroying crops and harvests
  • Making people and animals sick
  • Causing impotence in men and infertility in women

By cataloguing these harms, the bull portrays witches as enemies of both religion and everyday life, justifying harsh measures against them.

Legal and religious effects

The bull removes “impediments” that had limited inquisitors, warning that anyone who obstructs them could face excommunication. This effectively elevates witch-hunting work to a divinely backed mission, with resistance framed as defiance of the Church and of God.

It also ties witchcraft closely to heresy, placing alleged witches in the same category as other heretics and enemies of Christendom, which made severe punishments, including execution, easier to justify within existing Church law.

Link to later witch hunts

The bull was later printed at the front of Heinrich Kramer’s witch-hunting manual, the Malleus Maleficarum , to give his work extra authority. While the bull itself did not instantly trigger continent-wide witch crazes, it became one of the key documents that theologians and authorities cited to legitimize large-scale prosecutions in the decades that followed.

In short, the papal bull did not just say “witchcraft is bad”; it officially declared witchcraft real, detailed its supposed crimes, and empowered Church agents to hunt and punish alleged witches across key regions of Europe.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.