Compendium of Witches (Compendium Maleficarum)

was said to have been torn and suddenly restored in the eyes of all. She had restored, in a moment, a certain glass thrown by her against a wall and shattered, and similar things; she escaped the Inquisitor's hand while excommunicated.

The above-cited person narrates that in France, Triscalinus a legendary charlatan or magician the charlatan, in the presence of Charles IX King of France, a King otherwise praised, attracted rings from a certain nobleman standing far from him, in the sight of all, and received them flying into his hand as it appeared; nevertheless, the chain was soon found intact and unhurt. Convicted of many things which could be done neither by art, nor by human artifice, nor by nature, he confessed that he had performed all these things by diabolical works, which he had previously stubbornly denied.

Johannes Trithemius 15th-century German abbot and polymath reports from older sources that in the year 876, in the time of Emperor Louis Louis the German, a certain Sedechias a Jewish magician in legends, a Jew by religion and a physician by profession, did certain stupendous things before princes; for it appeared to men that he devoured a cart loaded with hay, along with the horses and the driver. Moreover, he seemed to cut off heads, hands, and feet, which he placed in a basin before them, dripping with blood, offering them for all to see, and immediately restored them to the unhurt men in their proper places. In the middle of winter, he suddenly produced a most pleasant garden in the Emperor's palace, with trees, herbs, flowers, and the song of birds, born and heard suddenly.

a Decade 2, Sicilian affairs, book 5, ch. 2; the same, ch. 1, book 3, decade 1.

Thomas Fazello Dominican friar and historian of Sicily relates wonders regarding a certain Diodorus a magician figure, whom the common people call Liodorus, who, imbued with magic art, flourished in Cattana Catania, Sicily through a wonderful machinery of deceptions. By the potent force of his chants, he seemed to turn men into brute animals, to change the forms of almost all things into new metamorphoses, and to draw to himself those who were separated from him by very long distances. Furthermore, he harassed the citizens of Cattana with such frequent injuries and disgraced them with insults that they, circumvented by the vainest credulity, were incited to worship him. When he was about to be handed over to punishment as a capital criminal, by the most excellent art of his spells he escaped from the hands of the lictors from Cattana to Byzantium Constantinople, whose rule Sicily acknowledged at that time, and again from Byzantium to Cattana, and he ordered himself to be carried through the air in a small interval of time. By these benefits, he became so admirable to the people that, thinking a certain divine power was in him, they offered him with sacrilegious error the worship owed to sacred things. Finally, being caught suddenly by the divine power of Leo, the Bishop of Cattana, he was thrown into a fiery furnace in the middle of the city before all the people and was consumed by the burning of the fire. Thus, Divine Justice prevailed, so that he who had snatched himself from judges moved perhaps by less than just zeal could not slip from the hands of the Holy Man.

In our times, they reported that Caesarius Maltesius a historical figure accused of sorcery had been captured in Paris, but had escaped from prisons by cunning. The Inquisitor Bazzi likely a local ecclesiastical official objected to this among other things in his trial; but when he was urged and feared condemnation, he was snatched away by the Governor who was in power at that time, who ordered the Ecclesiastical Judges to desist. He crept into the court and there began to perform many things anew. He would change playing cards in the hand of another who held them while he himself was at a distance, so that a different figure appeared on them twice or three times. He attracted vessels placed on the other side of the table by moving only a small fragment of glass. He sometimes divined the thoughts of others, as when, with a great multitude of scattered grains of sugar on the table, he would indicate which grain someone had chosen in his mind, and even if someone hesitated in choosing the proposed thing, he would add the hesitation and the resolution. He boasted that he had long foreseen what another was about to choose, and many other things. For these reasons, he was summoned to court for the third time by the Most Illustrious Archbishop of Mechlin, Lord Honius D. Honius, in the year 1600. When he had promised to appear, he fled to the asylum of all the forerunners of the Antichrist. That prince, who had snatched the charlatan from judgment by authority and not by law, barely survived two years and died in the prime of life; nor did anything thereafter result happily in his government after he had undertaken the defense of an evil cause. From this, it is clear that God never leaves princes unpunished who are defenders of his enemies, since he had specifically a Exod. 22. v. 18. forbidden that anyone should let a witch live.