Cats were killed across medieval Europe primarily because they became associated with devil worship, witchcraft, and heresy. This persecution began in earnest in the 13th century, after the Catholic Church formally linked black cats to satanic rituals, and it continued for roughly 500 years until the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. The killing took many forms, from organized culling to public spectacles where cats were thrown from towers or burned alive.
The Papal Bull That Started It All
The formal persecution traces back to 1233, when Pope Gregory IX issued a papal bull called Vox in Rama. The document was a response to reports of heresy in Germany, where an inquisitor named Konrad von Marburg had been sent to root out heretical sects. Konrad reported back that a group of supposed Luciferians in a specific German region worshiped a statue of a black cat during their rituals. According to his account, the statue came to life, and the cultists kissed the cat on its backside as part of an initiation that culminated in the appearance of a devil figure whose lower body was cat-like and covered in black fur.
Gregory IX responded by issuing the bull, which denounced cats, especially black ones, as evil and in league with Satan. Here’s the twist, though: the original document actually referred to a single sect’s use of a cat statue. It did not declare all cats to be incarnations of Satan, nor did it explicitly call for their killing. But the practical effect was enormous. The papal seal of disapproval gave religious cover to a wave of anti-cat sentiment that spread across Europe and lasted centuries.
Cats as Witches’ Companions
The Church’s condemnation fed into a growing body of folklore that made cats, particularly black ones, objects of genuine fear. European folk belief evolved the idea that cats were “familiars,” supernatural beings that assisted witches in carrying out dark magic. People believed witches could shapeshift into their black cat companions, which is where the superstition about a black cat crossing your path originated. The worry was that the cat might be carrying out a task for its witch, or worse, that it might be the devil in disguise.
This wasn’t a passing fad. The association between cats and witchcraft deepened over centuries. As late as 1658, the English naturalist Edward Topsell wrote in what was considered a serious scientific work that “the familiars of Witches do most ordinarily appear in the shape of Cats, which is an argument that this beast is dangerous to soul and body.” By the Renaissance, it was also widely believed that a black cat crossing your path had been deliberately sent by a witch to bring you harm. In Western Europe, black cats became shorthand for evil, disease, death, and misfortune.
Public Killings and Ritual Burnings
The fear of cats wasn’t just private superstition. It played out in public rituals that communities treated as entertainment or spiritual cleansing. One of the most well-documented examples comes from Ypres, Belgium, where cats were thrown from the belfry tower of the Cloth Hall into the town square below. There are competing explanations for this tradition. One holds that the act symbolized the killing of evil spirits connected to witchcraft. Another, more practical account suggests that cats had been brought into the Cloth Hall to control the mice and rats that gnawed at stored wool, and once the wool was sold in spring, the cats were simply discarded by throwing them from the tower.
The city of Ypres still commemorates this history with the Kattenstoet, a parade held every three years in which a jester tosses plush toy cats from the belfry to crowds below. The event is followed by a mock witch burning, a nod to how tightly the fates of cats and accused witches were intertwined. Similar cat-burning festivals took place in France and elsewhere, often on feast days or holidays, where live cats were placed in baskets or sacks and burned in bonfires.
The Connection to the Black Death
One of the most discussed consequences of medieval cat killing is its possible role in worsening the Black Death, the plague pandemic that devastated Europe in the mid-1300s. Bubonic plague is caused by a bacterium that infects fleas. Those fleas live on rats, which carry the disease without being harmed by it and spread it to human populations. Cats are natural predators of rats, so the logic is straightforward: fewer cats meant more rats, and more rats meant more opportunities for plague-carrying fleas to reach people.
It’s worth noting that this connection, while plausible, is difficult to prove definitively. The cat population decline would have reduced natural pest control, and more cats could have meant fewer rats in the century or two before the Black Death arrived. But plague transmission is complex, involving trade routes, sanitation, and population density alongside rat populations. Still, the irony is hard to ignore. The very animal that could have helped control the rodents spreading plague was the one Europeans had spent a century persecuting.
Not Everyone Hated Cats
Despite the widespread persecution, cats were never universally despised in medieval Europe. Monasteries, in particular, valued cats for exactly the reason they should have been valued everywhere: pest control. With parchment scrolls, grain stores, and food supplies constantly under threat from mice and rats, monks welcomed cats as working animals. Some monasteries kept records of their cats, naming them and noting their behavior. At places like the 12th-century St. Peter’s Church in Wormleighton, England, cat paw prints are still preserved in floor tiles, a small, accidental record of their daily presence.
Monks sometimes wrote about their cats with open affection. A famous 9th-century Irish poem called Pangur Bán was written by a monk comparing his white cat’s hunting to his own scholarly work. Medieval manuscripts occasionally feature playful illustrations of cats, suggesting that even during periods of intense superstition, individual people recognized cats as companions rather than agents of evil.
There was also a folk practice called ailuromancy, in which people tried to predict the future by watching a cat’s movements. Most of the time this was harmless, involving observations about weather or whether an unexpected guest might arrive. It gave cats a degree of value in everyday life, even as the broader culture treated them with suspicion. In Scotland, however, ailuromancy took a darker turn in a ritual called the taghairm, which was practiced through the 16th century and involved cruelty toward cats as part of divination.
How Long the Persecution Lasted
The killing and abuse of cats in Europe was not a brief episode. It stretched from the 13th century, when Vox in Rama was issued, well into the Renaissance and beyond. The superstitions that fueled it traveled across the Atlantic with the Pilgrims, arriving in the American colonies where black cats continued to be viewed with suspicion. The association between cats and witchcraft only began to fade during the Enlightenment in the 18th century, when rational inquiry started to replace supernatural explanations for misfortune. Even then, echoes of medieval fear persisted. Black cats remain symbols of bad luck in many Western cultures, and they are still statistically harder to adopt from shelters than cats of other colors.