Were Cats Really Killed En Masse During the Middle Ages?

The Middle Ages always seem to be the most misunderstood period in history. I wrote an article in May 2019 debunking a number of popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages, but now I think it is time for me to debunk another. There is something of a widespread notion these days that, in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church hated cats because they associated them with witches and that they instigated a massive pogrom to exterminate them. Supposedly, according to the major proponents of this story, this mass killing of cats either resulted in the Black Death or promoted the Black Death’s spread across Europe.

I will admit that my hands are not entirely clean here, since, when I was a freshman in high school, I gave a presentation in one of my classes about the Black Death in which I claimed that people during the time of the Black Death blamed cats for the disease and killed them, thus inadvertently allowing the disease to spread further. Since then, however, I have learned better. The idea people in the Middle Ages killed cats en masse is a misconception. Although some people in the Middle Ages may have killed cats occasionally, the idea of a massive pogrom instigated by the Catholic Church that resulted in the spread of the Black Death is 100% pure fantasy.

Vox in Rama

When supporters of the story that people in the Middle Ages killed cats en masse look for documentary evidence to support their narrative, they usually cite one particular document: a decretal letter issued by Pope Gregory IX (in office 1227 – 1241) titled Vox in Rama. Some supporters of the cat-killing story claim that, in this letter, Pope Gregory IX orders all Christians to kill cats, since they are creatures of the Devil. This claim is completely false and anyone claiming that Vox in Rama contains an explicit order for Christians to kill cats clearly has not read the letter.

Vox in Rama is a real decretal letter that was issued by Pope Gregory IX in mid-June in either 1232 or 1233. The letter is primarily addressed to King Henry (VII) of Germany (ruled 1220 – 1235) and Archbishop Siegfried III of Mainz (in office 1230 – 1249). Contrary to what many have claimed, however, the letter does not say anything at all about killing cats. Instead, it describes in great detail certain bizarre heretical rites that peasants in the town of Stedinger were allegedly engaging in.

Gregory IX received his information about these alleged rites from the German inquisitor Konrad von Marburg (lived 1180 – 1233), who was known for using torture as a method of obtaining information. Consequently, much of the information he received was nothing more than fabulous nonsense made up by people who just wanted the torture to stop.

ABOVE: Thirteenth-century stained glass window from Elizabeth Church, Marburg, depicting the inquisitor Karl von Marburg

One of the many bizarre rites that Gregory IX claims the members of this Luciferian sect were engaging in was a ritual in which a statue of a black cat would come to life and the members of the cult would kiss its anus. Here is a translation of the crucial part of the decretal letter, as translated by Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters in their book Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History:

“The following rites of this pestilence are carried out: when any novice is to be received among them and enters the sect of the damned for the first time, the shape of a certain frog appears to him, which some are accustomed to call a toad. Some kiss this creature on the hind-quarters and some on the mouth; they receive the tongue and the saliva of the beast inside their mouths; sometimes it appears unduly large, and sometimes equivalent to a goose or duck, and sometimes it even assumes the size of an oven.”

“At length, when the novice has come forward, he is met by a man of marvelous pallor, who has very black eyes and is so emaciated and thin that, since his flesh has been wasted, seems to have remaining only skin drawn over the bone. The novice kisses him and feels cold, like ice, and after the kiss the memory of the catholic faith totally disappears from his heart.”

“Afterwards they sit down to a meal and when they have arisen from it, from a certain statue, which is usual in a sect of this kind, a black cat about the size of an average dog, descends backwards, with its tail erect. First the novice, then the master, then each one of the order who are worthy and perfect, kiss the cat on its hindquarters; the imperfect, who do not estimate themselves worthy, receive grace from the master. Then each returns to his place and, speaking certain response, they incline their heads towards the cat. ‘Forgive us,’ says the master, and the one next to him repeats this, and a third responding and saying, ‘We know master’; a fourth says, ‘And we must obey.’”

This passage is immediately followed by a surprisingly detailed description of the cultists engaging in wild sex orgies in the dark involving incest, gay sex, and the appearance of a mysterious man with glowing genitals and hairy legs. I won’t quote that part here, though, because it is not immediately relevant to this discussion. If you want to read it, you can click on the link above to the Google Books edition of the book.

ABOVE: Illustration of Pope Gregory IX, author of the Vox in Rama, from a manuscript from c. 1482 containing a collection of his decretal letters

Obviously, everything Pope Gregory IX says in this letter sounds incredibly bizarre and salacious—at least to modern readers who are unaccustomed to hearing stories about the alleged debaucheries engaged in by heretics. In any case, though, the Vox in Rama never calls for the killing of cats in any way; it simply contains a description of a statue of a black cat coming to life and cultists kissing its anus. As anyone who has actually read the letter can tell, it is, in fact, a call to arms against the supposed Luciferian sect that Pope Gregory IX thought was flourishing in Stedinger—not a decree for Christians to kill all cats.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that anyone in the Middle Ages ever even interpreted this letter as a call to arms against cats, nor would it have made any sense for them to interpret the letter in such a way. In addition to the description of the cultists kissing the cat statue’s anus, the letter also contains descriptions of the cultists engaging in activities with demons in the forms of a giant frogs, a pale, skinny man, and a man with glowing genitals and hairy legs. Interpreting the letter as a call to arms against cats makes about as much sense as interpreting it as a call to arms against pale, skinny people.

Finally, even if the Vox in Rama did contain some kind of injunction to kill cats (which it manifestly does not), it is highly unlikely that this would have triggered any kind of widespread cat-killing phenomenon since, as far as we know, copies of the letter were only sent to five people: Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire, King Henry (VII) of Germany, Bishop Conrad II of Hildesheim, and Konrad von Marburg. The letter only concerned a particular region of Germany and was probably completely unknown outside of the region that it concerned.

In other words, if anyone was killing cats en masse during the Middle Ages, they were certainly not doing it because of the Vox in Rama.

ABOVE: Illustration of the Battle of Altenesch from the Stedinger Crusade. The Vox in Rama is really a call to arms against the alleged Luciferian cultists that Gregory IX thought were in Stedinger, not against cats.

Medieval artistic representations of people killing cats

There are a few surviving medieval depictions of people killing or hunting cats. These depictions have been taken by some authors as evidence that the killing of cats was widespread in medieval Europe. This is not, however, a reasonable conclusion to draw from the surviving depictions. For one thing, many of the cats shown being killed or hunted in the illustrations are probably wildcats—not domestic housecats.

Additionally, these illustrations do not show us how common it was for people to kill cats. We should not assume based on a handful of illustrations of people hunting or killing cats that people went around hunting or killing cats all the time. Certainly, a handful of artistic representations are not in any sense evidence of a widespread pogrom against cats.

ABOVE: Illustration from a manuscript produced in Brittany, dating to c. 1430 – c. 1440, depicting hunters with dogs shooting arrows at a wildcat in a tree

Modern cat-killing traditions

It is true that, at least in some areas of France and Belgium during the Early Modern Period (lasted c. 1500 – c. 1750), there were apparently some people who did indeed kill cats in large numbers. For instance, Jean Meslier (lived 1664 – 1729), a French Catholic priest who was discovered upon his death to have secretly written a memoir in which he expressed radical atheistic views, records that certain “brutal madman” of his own time took perverse joy in burning cats alive. Meslier strongly deplores this practice, seeing it as a moral abomination.

In the Belgian city of Ypres, ever since 1955, people have held an annual celebration in May in which a person dressed as a jester throws children’s plush toy cats from the belfry of the local Cloth Hall. The festival is known as “Kattenstoet,” which means “Cats-Festival.” Supposedly, this strange festival is based on an earlier festival in which people actually set cats on fire and hurled them from the bell tower.

Proponents of the idea that cats were killed en masse during the Middle Ages are perhaps on slightly firmer ground when citing these traditions as evidence. At least here we dealing with actual evidence of people killing cats in significant numbers, rather than, say, a papal letter that contains no mention of cat-killing whatsoever. Nonetheless, as far as I am aware, none of these regional cat-killing traditions can be definitively traced back to the Middle Ages.

Even if some of these local traditions do go back to the Middle Ages, a few local traditions of cat-killing in a handful of towns in France and Belgium still would not be evidence of any widespread pogrom against cats spreading across all of Europe, least of all one instigated by the Catholic Church itself.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Kattenstoet in Ypres, Belgium in the late 1950s

The origins of the misconception

It is unclear where exactly this whole idea of people in the Middle Ages killing cats en masse originates from, but I personally suspect it probably ultimately originates from a misremembering of a chapter in the influential 1984 popular history book The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History by the American cultural historian Robert Darnton.

In a chapter in the book, Darnton describes an incident in the late 1730s in which apprentice printers on the street Rue Saint-Séverin in Paris rounded up the cats owned by their master printer, put them on mock trial for witchcraft, and killed them all. The apprentices did this because they were angry that their master treated the cats better than them, so they sought revenge against him by killing all the cats.

This incident described in the book, however, happened in the 1730s, which means it happened towards the very end of the Early Modern Period, not during the Middle Ages. Furthermore, it was only one incident and it had nothing to do with the Black Death or the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, it is easy to see how someone could have read about the incident described in the book, misremembered when it happened, and concluded it must have happened during the Middle Ages.

ABOVE: Front cover of the book The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History by Robert Darnton, published in 1984. I suspect that a misremembering of this book is the ultimate source of the misconception discussed in this article.

However it originated, the misconception of medieval cat pogroms was certainly popularized by the book Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat, written by American classical historian Donald Engels and published in 2001. In the epilogue of the book, Engels asserts that Christians in the Middle Ages hated cats and regarded them as creatures of the Devil.

Citing the Vox in Rama, a handful of medieval depictions of people killing cats, and modern folk traditions as his only evidence, Engels claims that cats were brutally slaughtered in large numbers throughout the Middle Ages, that the cat population was “probably decimated,” that there was an underground cult of people who worshipped a goddess to whom cats were sacred, that members of this cult were ruthlessly persecuted and killed alongside their cats, and that this widespread slaughter of cats probably resulted in the spread of the Black Death.

Nearly every source that talks about cats being killed en masse during the Middle Ages cites Engels’s book as a source, so it is clear that, however the misconception arose, Engels is the one who popularized it. Unfortunately, nearly everything Engels writes about people in the Middle Ages slaughtering cats in massive numbers is based purely on speculation and fantasy.

At the very best, the evidence cited by Engels shows that a few people during the Middle Ages probably killed a few cats. The evidence he cites does not by any means support his conclusion that there was a massive pogrom against cats instigated by the Catholic Church. His further conclusions beyond this one, which have become part of the myth as well, are even more unsubstantiated.

ABOVE: Front cover of the 2001 book Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat, the book that helped promote the idea that cats were slaughtered in large numbers during the Middle Ages

“Probably decimated”?

There is no evidence to support Engels’s conclusion that the cat population was “probably decimated.” There just isn’t.

An underground cat-cult?

Donald Engels claims that there was a pagan cult that survived well into the Late Middle Ages that worshipped a goddess to whom cats were sacred and that Christians brutally persecuted members of this cult. Engels claims the following on page 160:

“Hundreds of thousands of women were killed during the witchcraft hysterias from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, and many more risked death simply for possessing a cat and honoring the goddess to whom the cat had been sacred. They would rather be brutally killed, tortured, imprisoned, and falsely accused of performing barbarous acts than abandon the religion that had been so central to their lives for over a millennium. Despite the false accusations and ‘confessions’ elicited under savage torture, they never worshipped evil, as their accusers claimed, nor was their beloved animal a minion of Satan. Unfortunately, yet more centuries had to pass before these facts were understood. It is indeed difficult to learn about the women’s beliefs directly, since they were burnt alive along with their beloved cats—only their dying screams still echo across the years.”

Engels makes it sound almost as though he somehow legitimately thinks that the witch trials of the Early Modern Period were really all about cat-haters persecuting cat-lovers. This is, I hope, a very obviously false interpretation to nearly everyone reading this. (Engels also appears to possibly fall into the popular misconceptions that the people accused of witchcraft during the Early Modern Period were all women and that all accused witches were burned at the stake, both of which I debunk in this article I wrote in October 2018.)

In any case, Engels seems to base his idea of a cat cult in the Middle Ages on an extremely naïve, selective reading of documents like the Vox in Rama and a few modern western European folk traditions about cats being good luck. I do not know why I have to say this, but the Vox in Rama and documents like it are not valid evidence to support this conclusion. First of all, we are talking about testimony that was extracted under torture, which is never reliable. We have no good reason, for instance, to think that the bizarre Luciferian sect described by Pope Gregory IX in the Vox in Rama existed at all or, if it did exist, that it was anything at all like the way he describes it.

Second of all, Engels’s reading of these texts is unfairly selective. Engels takes the references to cats and claims them as evidence for a cult of a cat goddess, but yet does not assume the existence of a god that looks like a giant frog, a god that looks like an extraordinarily pale, emaciated man, or a god that looks like a man with shaggy legs and a magical glowing penis.

In other words, Engels is willing to accept unreliable evidence as reliable only when it suits his preconceived idea that there was a cult of a cat goddess in western Europe during the Middle Ages. The later European folk traditions are equally poor evidence, since cats being regarded as “good luck” in some sense does not mean people worshipped a cat goddess.

Engels’s apparent belief in the existence of an underground cult of a cat goddess in western Europe during the Middle Ages strongly reminds me of the claims in the book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Murray, published in 1921, which have been debunked countless times. Murray and Engels both base their conclusions primarily on naïve, selective readings of testimonies that were extracted via torture from people accused of witchcraft or heresy.

ABOVE: Photograph of Margaret Murray, whose 1922 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe contains a number of debunked claims that bear a resemblance to the claims made by Engels about a cult of a cat goddess in the Middle Ages

And this supposedly helped spread the Black Death?

An integral part of the misconception about medieval people killing cats is the notion that people killing cats either directly led to the Black Death or at least made it easier for the Black Death to advance. Engels gives a succinct summary of the myth that is believed by countless people on page 160 of his book:

“For many years, historians of medicine have understood that the virtual elimination of cats in medieval towns, beginning in the thirteenth century, led to an explosion in the black rat population. This in turn increased the virulence of the disease [i.e. the Black Death].”

This part of the misconception, however, is the most preposterous. Even if people in the Middle Ages really were killing cats en masse (which we have no good evidence that they were), it is extraordinarily implausible that this could have realistically led to any increase in the virulence of the Black Death.

First of all, cats are not the only animals that hunt rats. Dogs, weasels, snakes, and birds of prey all hunt and kill rats as well. In fact, as I discuss in this article I originally published in January 2017 but have since revised, the ancient Greeks and Romans seem to have more often kept weasels as pets to hunt rodents than cats.

Second of all, cats that eat rats infected with the plague normally catch the plague themselves. Their fleas can then spread the plague to humans. Third of all, there is no way that people could have killed enough cats to even make a difference because cats are notoriously difficult to exterminate even from a small region.

ABOVE: Manuscript illustration by Pierart dou Tielt from c. 1353 depicting the citizens of Tournai burying victims of the Black Death

Even many articles that repeat the unsubstantiated story about people in the Middle Ages killing cats en masse manage to see that the notion that this could have led the spread of the Black Death is untenable. For instance, this article, written by Abigail Tucker and published in The Washington Post in October 2016, accepts the story about cats being killed en masse during the Middle Ages without question, based solely on the word of Donald Engel.

Nonetheless, Tucker easily spots the flaws in Engel’s speculation that this killing of cats might have resulted in the further spread of the Black Death. She gives the idea a very sound debunking:

“Sadly, this idea doesn’t hold much water. Research has shown that cats are reluctant rat-killers at best, and cats that do kill plague-infected rodents often catch the plague themselves — and readily spread it to humans through fleas. It’s also highly unlikely that the ecclesiastical cat assassins, however hellbent, could have killed anywhere near enough cats to alter the Black Death’s trajectory. Cats are almost supernaturally good at surviving: Modern-day governments find it practically impossible to rid even small islands of invasive cat populations, let alone to purge a land mass the size of Europe. (It recently took several years and $3 million to rid one small California island of cats, which were dining on a threatened species of lizard.)”

“Finally, even at the height of cat-quisition, most medieval Christians probably still liked cats as much as anybody else and safeguarded their favorites from the fanatics. Indeed, Exeter Cathedral in southwest England even had its own cat door. Note that cats are not exactly rare in Europe today – and as the animal behaviorist John Bradshaw writes, black cats, generally thought to be the wickedest ones, are especially numerous in many places, with more than 80 percent of the population carrying black-coat mutations.”

In other words, the whole notion that the mass extermination of cats during the Middle Ages even could have realistically led to the spread of the Black Death is pure baloney.

Those lovable medieval cats

This brings me to my final point, which has already been touched on in the passage I quoted. It is certainly true that some medieval texts do portray cats in association with Satan, the Vox in Rama being only one of them, but cats were far from universally hated during the Middle Ages. Even Donald Engels himself admits in his epilogue that cats were seen in a positive light by many country-dwellers during the Middle Ages for their ability to catch mice.

Cats appear frequently in medieval illustrations and marginal drawings, where they are often shown engaging in human activities, such as playing instruments, churning butter, walking on two legs, etc. These illustrations were, I suppose, in a sense, the “cat memes” of their age (although only the wealthy elites who could afford illustrated manuscripts got to see them).

ABOVE: High Medieval illustration of cats working

ABOVE: High Medieval illustration of a cat licking its butt

ABOVE: High Medieval illustration of a cat playing an organ

ABOVE: Late Medieval manuscript illustration of a cat as bishop

ABOVE: Late Medieval illustration of a cat churning butter

ABOVE: Late Medieval manuscript illustration of a black cat and mice

ABOVE: Late Medieval manuscript illustration of a cat smiling

Cats were also apparently often kept by Catholic nuns and anchoresses. While members of religious orders were usually forbidden from keeping pets, cats were often an exception to this rule because they were believed to keep pests at bay and were therefore perceived as useful.

The Ancrene Wisse, an early thirteenth-century monastic guide for anchoresses, states that they should keep no pets, except for a cat. A folio page from an early fourteenth-century illustrated Book of Hours, originally from the Netherlands but now kept in the British Library, contains an illustration of a nun spinning with her distaff while her pet, a white cat, plays with her spool.

ABOVE: Illustration from an early fourteenth-century Book of Hours from the Netherlands depicting a nun with her pet cat

The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (lived c. 1343 – 1400) spoke highly of cats for their mousing abilities in his book The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400. In “The Manciple’s Tale,” lines 175-182, Chaucer says the following:

“Lat take a cat, and fostre hym wel with milk,
And tendre flessh, and make his couche of silk,
And lat hym seen a mous go by the wal,
Anon he weyveth milk and flessh and al,
And every deyntee that is in that hous,
Swich appetit he hath to ete a mous.
Lo, heere hath lust his dominacioun,
And appetit fleemeth discrecioun.”

Translated into Modern English, this means something like the following:

“Take a cat and foster him well with milk,
and tender meat, and make his couch of silk,
and let him see a mouse go by the wall,
at once he leaves milk and meat and all,
and every dainty that is in the house,
such appetite he has to eat a mouse!
Lo, here desire shows his domination,
and appetite drives out discretion.”

It seems that not everybody hated cats during the Middle Ages and they were not universally seen as creatures of the Devil. Some people thought cats were good because they were useful for pest control.

Conclusion

The idea of a massive pogrom against cats instigated by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages is a fantasy. Did some people kill cats in the Middle Ages? Almost certainly, but people have been killing cats since the beginning of time and there are still people doing it today. Just because some people were doing it does not mean there was a massive pogrom against cats and it certainly does not mean that there was a “virtual elimination” of cats from western Europe during the Middle Ages, as Donald Engels claims.

Furthermore, the ideas of an underground cat cult in western European during the Middle Ages and of the massacre of cats leading to an increase in the virulence of the Black Death are both completely contrary to the available evidence. Finally, although cats are often associated with the Devil in medieval texts, they were not universally reviled; some people regarded them highly for their mousing abilities and they were one of the few pets allowed for members of some religious orders.