This chapter analyzes papal pronouncements in matters of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Popes intervened typically in response to demands coming from local religious authorities involved in the repression of the “demonic arts.” In the early phase – from the 1320s to the 1430s – some papal decrees emphasized that magic was heretical and its practitioners were involved in a demonic conspiracy, giving thus an impulse to the outbreak of the witch hunt. Subsequently, the papacy’s support of witch hunters came close to an approval of the doctrine of diabolical witchcraft. In the final decades (the 1580s to the 1640s), popes issued sweeping condemnations of the entire spectrum of magical practices. Such decrees settled the Church’s accounts with astrology, and at the same time tasked the Roman Inquisition with a campaign to stamp out popular “superstitions,” which remained one of the Holy Office’s main objectives in the early modern era.

The chapter examines recent historiography on the Papal States and considers the different stages of its territorial formation, from the fifteenth century to the Napoleonic era. Throughout the early modern period, the Papal States maintained their composite nature; characterized by territories with strong traditions of local government, extensive feudal powers, and by the inheritance of duchies that had belonged to dynasties that had become extinct, as happened in the cases of Ferrara and Urbino. These characteristics of the papal dominions strongly determined the nature of Roman government in the localities. Control of law and order and the financial administration, themselves synonyms of “good government,” and determining factors in maintaining the consent of those under papal authority, received expression in the adaptation of norms and practices to local conditions, as can be seen in the dense correspondence between the relevant Roman Congregations and the local officers, governors, and legates.