On October 20th, 1675, the county of Vaduz got a new master.
His name was Ferdinand von Hohenems, and he was a sadist.
At least, that’s how he’s remembered.
In the folk memory of this country he is treated as though he was just simply born wrong.
He was violent from a young age, he lashed out out at his brother,
he lashed out at the peasants who worked his family land.
He just wasn’t a man who garnered a lot of love.
But it wasn’t just violence either.
He was also undisciplined, and in a Germanic society that honestly might be worse.
He was spoiled from birth and therefore had no concept of money.
And very quickly spent every penny that his family ever had.
By the time he was lord of this region, he was in such debt that he would never be able to pay it back.
But even with debts stacked up large enough to threaten his right to rule,
von Hohenems wasn’t going down quietly.
Spoiled brats rarely do.
And for all his moral failings, nobody ever said he wasn’t clever.
Before too long, he’d come up with a plan that would solve all of his problems.
In one act, he would be pay off his debts, give the church the power they demanded,
and allow the common people to feel that they were being protected from supernatural harm.
A triple win scenario.
He was gonna find some witches, and he was gonna kill them.
The thing is, though, von Hohenems couldn’t have cared less about witches.
I personally don’t even think he believed in them.
But in 1488 a sexual deviant wrote what would become the second highest selling book
for the next two hundred years.
It was called the Hammer of the Witches, and it led to an intercontinental orgy
of state persecution and murder.
Von Hohenems may not have believed in witchcraft, but the people did.
The church did.
And even after losing up to a tenth of their population in a similar purge a short generation before,
by the 1670’s, the people of this region were ready for another round.
After all, there was still misery.
There was still confusion and pain.
No matter how many witches they’d killed in the past, they’d never seemed to strike that final blow.
Because the reality is there are no witches, and the need for a scapegoat never truly goes away.
All it ever really needs is prompting.
In this case, the prompting came from the top down and was much more rooted in practicality than zeal.
To von Hohenems and his debtors, this was the answer they'd been looking for.
They even stopped threatening to write the emperor.
And not just because they were worried about being accused,
but also because this was going to get them paid.
Because every single witch that was brought to trial if convicted, and trust me,
they’re going to be convicted, a hundred percent were convicted.
If they were convicted, it meant that the state got everything they owned.
Their land, their house, their inheritance, their property, all of it.
And in turn, that would then go to his debtors.
Those on top absolutely loved the murder of witches.
Because every witch that got murdered paid those on top.
I think that for those of you watching this, you’ve probably imagined that when I say witch,
I mean a woman.
Which makes sense, because in world history
women were far more likely to be accused of witchcraft than men.
Even in the museums here when they talk about the purges of the past, they always dress it up as a woman.
Which even though it's untrue, kind of makes sense, because this country has always been
a difficult place to be a woman.
After all, they only got the vote here in, what, 1982?
But in Liechtenstein, at least during von Hohenems’ years, witches were more likely to be men.
Because women tended not to own property.
Women had less wealth.
And the entire point of the venture was to get the lord’s hands on the peoples’ things,
not just randomly kill poor people.
But, once he’d made the trials public, there was only so much control he could keep over the process.
Agendas abounded everywhere, and it didn’t take being a lord to want to harm others.
The common people also had plans.
The church had plans.
This wasn’t the first time that witch hunts had come to Vaduz, and the lessons learned from it
were far more entrenched on the bottom than they were at the top.
A generation before, the largest witch trials in the region’s history swept through,
killing hundreds of peasants.
And it's very clear that the lords didn't want us to remember that.
Every single reference to that time has been quite literally ripped from Liechtenstein’s history books.
Nobody in power wanted to remember what happened, and in turn, nobody in power did.
But the people remembered.
They were the ones being picked off.
They remembered what happens when you were accused.
They remembered the night when the state came to their home and ripped their father from his bed
and murdered him for a crime they knew he didn't commit.
And if that happens to you, how can you forget the hand that pointed that finger.
How can you forget the hand that cut off his head.
You don't.
So when those witch trials came back to Vaduz, people were ready for some vengeance.
They were here to settle some scores.
It wasn't just lords and pastors.
It was peasants.
Von Hohenems may have opened the door, but it was the people who rushed through.
Accusation beget accusation, and death beget death.
Nobody in society walked away untouched.
In towns such as Triesen, where the trials were at their worst,
perhaps up to a tenth of all citizens were killed.
It got so bad that regions thousands of kilometers away, who had witch trials all their own,
would speak of Vaduz in hushed tones.
This was witch country.
Because of one man’s greed, the entire region would become synonymous with witches
right up to the modern day.
But all terrible things must come to an end, and eventually von Hohenems made a mistake.
He let a witch get away.
A young woman escaped from his castle dungeon and ran directly to her local pastor,
hoping to convince him of her innocence.
And her luck, her timing, whatever you want to call it, couldn’t have been better.
Had she chosen any other clergymen, they would have probably sent her back to jail.
But she chose Valentin von Kriss.
And he was different.
Because he'd recently had a major change of heart when he was accused of witchcraft.
If they could accuse him and he knew he was innocent, then what about those hundred other people?
How many of them had been innocent too?
So despite the fact that he'd been a vocal supporter of the trials for years up until this point,
as soon as he realized it was all just a game, he no longer wanted to play by their rules.
So he wrote to his superiors.
Using the church as his sword, he asked them to speak to the Emperor on his behalf.
To find justice for all the innocent people who were so clearly falsely accused.
And although it took a long time for the message to make it, years in fact, Vienna eventually heard his cry.
Von Hohenems was imprisoned and his lands stripped away.
The county was handed to his younger brother, who put an end to the purge.
But with the witch trials over, society here had to somehow find themselves again.
They just spent the better part of a decade at each other's throats.
Accusing each other of the worst possible things and watching as their neighbours went off to die.
By their own hand.
It's not an easy thing to forget.
So for the people here who were accused, who were killed, who were looking for that revenge,
and not finding it, they had to do something.
You couldn't get back at them physically.
You could sue them, maybe get a little money, but you were never going to get your family member back.
And in a religious society that wasn't really enough.
These people had to be punished metaphysically.
And so instead of just letting the church decide, the people of Liechtenstein,
they got together in a sense.
And they all decided that the mountain over there, just across this hill here, in the town of Triesen
was going to be purgatory or hell.
Or however you want to define it.
For the rest of time, everyone who took part in those witch trials,
would have their soul wait on that mountain sitting on rocks awaiting a day that will never come.
And not just them but nine generations of their family after them.
But the people coming to terms with what had happened didn’t mean the problems were magically over.
In declaring the trials illegal, the emperor had set precedent for the people
who’d been accused to sue for restitutions.
Already having to deal with his brother’s unpaid debts, the new lord of Vaduz had
no money to pay for the compensations required.
He was quickly made insolvent and forced to sell his land to the highest bidder.
And that bidder happened to be a very wealthy Austrian family, looking to buy a chunk of imperial land
that would give them access to the diet.
Within a decade, the family Liechtenstein would be the new masters of Vaduz.
And as time progressed, it would be their family connections that would keep this country independent.
Their relations with Napoleon and the Emperor in Vienna meant that while all other regions
were conglomerating into Austrian, Germanic and Swiss states,
Liechtenstein was allowed to remain free.
Eventually, with virtually all of their other holdings lost to war, the descendants of those imperial powerbrokers
would move into the small castle overlooking Vaduz.
It’s where they live today.
Liechtenstein is tiny.
It's a maybe twenty minute drive with about thirty thousand people.
But don’t let that fool you.
There's more here than just a headline.
These are a people and this is a nation.
And anytime you find people conglomerated together, you're going to find stories.
Sometimes, you’ll even find a witch.
This is Rare Earth.
Oh boy!
Talking. I'm doing the arm motions like...
Shut up, crickets!