Cats in the Middle Ages: The Truth About the Medieval Cat Massacres

Somewhere between the fall of Rome and the invention of the printing press, according to a story you have definitely read online, the Catholic Church declared war on cats, Europe obediently killed them all, the rats multiplied, and the Black Death arrived to collect the bill. It is a tidy story. Cause, effect, moral lesson about superstition. The problem with the popular history of medieval cats is that almost every link in that chain snaps the moment you check it against the actual sources.

This is not a defence of the Middle Ages. Europeans did kill cats, sometimes ritually, sometimes in numbers, sometimes for profit. The documented cruelty is real and specific. It just does not match the version recycled every October, and the gap between the two is where the interesting history lives.

What is in this article

• The Story Everyone Repeats About Medieval Cats
• What the Papal Bull Vox in Rama Actually Says
• Where the Medieval Cat Massacre Myth Came From
• The Cat Killings That Really Happened
• Medieval Cats as Pets, Mousers, and Property
• Did Dead Cats Cause the Black Death?
• Frequently Asked Questions
• What the Sources Add Up To

The Story Everyone Repeats About Medieval Cats

The standard version goes like this. In 1233 Pope Gregory IX issued a bull called Vox in Rama condemning black cats as agents of Satan. Terrified Europeans exterminated cats across the continent. A century later, with no predators left, the rats multiplied and the plague swept in. The Church, in this telling, accidentally killed millions of people because it was scared of a pet.

The claim spreads because it is structurally satisfying. Villains, irony, a body count. It also has almost no documentary support, which is why medievalists have spent two decades pushing back on it.

What the Papal Bull Vox in Rama Actually Says

The document exists. That part is true. Vox in Rama was issued by Gregory IX in June 1233 and concerns an alleged Luciferian heresy among the peasantry of the Stedinger region, in what is now northwestern Germany. The pope had been briefed by the inquisitor Konrad von Marburg, whose methods were extreme enough that he was murdered on a roadside within a year.

The Cat That Walks Backwards

The famous passage describes an initiation rite. A novice meets a toad, then a pale, emaciated man whose kiss drains all memory of the Catholic faith. Then a statue of a black cat, roughly the size of a dog, comes to life, walks backwards with its tail erect, and the heretics kiss its hindquarters in order of rank. The scene is grotesque and written to make one group of German peasants sound irredeemable.

Here is the part that never survives the retelling. The letter contains no instruction to kill cats. None. It does not condemn cats as a species, does not order their removal, and does not mention housecats at all. It describes a demonic apparition in the shape of a cat inside a heresy report. That is a very different document from an extermination order.

Who Actually Received It

Distribution matters more than content here. Vox in Rama went to a handful of recipients: King Henry VII of Germany, Archbishop Siegfried III of Mainz, Bishop Conrad II of Hildesheim, Konrad von Marburg, and the Emperor Frederick II. Five men. A regional communication about a regional problem, not an encyclical read from every pulpit in Christendom. There was no printing press and no mechanism by which a peasant in Aragon or Northumbria would ever have heard of it.

A letter that five people read cannot have triggered a continental pogrom. The logistics alone rule it out.

Where the Medieval Cat Massacre Myth Came From

The trail is short and modern. Most popular accounts of mass cat killing in the Middle Ages trace back to Donald Engels and his 2001 book Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat, which presented the extermination narrative and the plague connection as established fact. Nearly every article and video repeating the claim cites Engels, directly or through someone who cited Engels.

There is a second, older source of confusion. Robert Darnton’s 1984 classic The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History has a gruesome centrepiece: Paris printing shop apprentices rounding up and killing their master’s cats, including his wife’s pet, as class revenge. The title alone has done enormous work in the public imagination. The event happened in the 1730s. That is not the Middle Ages. That is the decade Bach was writing at Leipzig.

The same retro-fitting runs through the history of black cat superstitions, where the witch-and-familiar imagery everyone assumes is medieval turns out to be a product of the early modern witch trials.

The Cat Killings That Really Happened

Rejecting the extermination myth does not mean Europe was kind to cats. Two documented traditions are worth knowing, because both are stranger and better attested than the version people repeat.

Cat Wednesday in Ypres

In the Flemish cloth town of Ypres, live cats were thrown from the belfry of the Cloth Hall to the market square below. The earliest descriptions appear in the city chronicles for the years 1410 to 1420. After the town fair was moved to the second week of Lent in 1476, the throwing settled onto a fixed date known as Kattenwoensdag, Cat Wednesday. The last recorded throwing of live cats took place in 1817.

Why they did it is genuinely unresolved. One line of interpretation reads it as symbolic destruction of evil spirits, cats standing in for witchcraft. The other is brutally practical: Ypres stored unsold wool on the upper floors of the Cloth Hall through the winter, cats were kept up there to deal with mice, and once the wool was sold in spring the surplus cats were disposed of the fastest way available. A ritual with an inventory-management origin is a more medieval explanation than a theological one.

The tradition never died, it just got softer. On 13 March 1938 a small procession carried plush cats to the belfry and threw those instead. The parade resumed on 17 March 1946 after the war, and in 1955 the first full-scale Kattenstoet ran with 1,500 costumed participants. It now happens every three years on the second Sunday of May, with a jester tossing toy cats to a crowd with outstretched arms and a staged mock witch burning. The 2024 edition ran on 12 May. The next is 9 May 2027.

The Paris Midsummer Bonfire

The Saint-Jean bonfire on the Place de Grève in Paris burned every year at midsummer, and for a long stretch of its history a sack or basket of live cats was lowered into the flames as part of the spectacle. In 1648 the fire was lit by Louis XIV, then ten years old, crowned with a wreath of roses, who danced at the bonfire and went on to the banquet at the town hall afterwards. It was the last occasion on which a French monarch presided over the Paris midsummer fire.

Note the date. 1648 is not medieval. Neither is Darnton’s 1730s. The best documented cat cruelty in European history clusters in the early modern period, centuries after the plague years, the opposite of what the myth requires. For collective early modern behaviour that makes no sense until you read the archive, the dancing plague of 1518 is the other great example.

Medieval Cats as Pets, Mousers, and Property

If cats were universally hated demons, the legal record should show it. It shows the reverse. The tenth-century Welsh Laws of Hywel Dda price cats with a precision that only applies to things people want. A cat is worth fourpence. A kitten is worth one legal penny from birth until it opens its eyes, two pence until it kills its first mouse, and four pence once it kills mice. That last figure puts a working cat level with a full-grown sheep or an untrained house dog.

Religious texts are as revealing. The Ancrene Wisse, an early thirteenth-century rule for English anchoresses, is severe about worldly attachment and permits almost no possessions. Its one exception is explicit: the sisters shall not possess any beast except only a cat. Written within a generation of Vox in Rama, it treats a cat as the single acceptable companion for a woman walled into a cell for life.

Kathleen Walker-Meikle, whose doctoral work at University College London covered late medieval pet keeping and who wrote Medieval Pets and Medieval Cats, has documented how ordinary cats were in monasteries and households. The relationship was ambivalent, not hostile, and the ambivalence is the point.

The scholarship on the darker side is equally specific. Irina Metzler’s article Heretical Cats: Animal Symbolism in Religious Discourse, published in Medium Aevum Quotidianum volume 59 in 2009, argues that medieval cats were tied to heretics and idolaters rather than to witches, and that the witch-with-cat pairing belongs mostly to the period after 1500. She notes that the Malleus Maleficarum, printed by Heinrich Kramer at Speyer in 1486 and running to more than 120 folio pages of witch-hunting instruction, mentions cats essentially once, and links them to the faithless rather than to witchcraft. For the text supposedly at the centre of the cat panic, that is thin.

The demonisation was real, but it was aimed at heretics. Walter Map wrote in the twelfth century that the Devil appears to his followers as a black cat. Cathars and Waldensians were accused of cat worship, and the Templars faced the same charge at their trials in the early fourteenth century. In every case the cat is a rhetorical weapon pointed at people, not an animal on trial.

The Cruelty That Archaeology Actually Confirms

Here is the genuinely uncomfortable finding, and it has nothing to do with theology. At El Bordellet in Vilafranca del Penedès, Catalonia, excavators recovered an assemblage of 899 cat bones dated between the end of the tenth century and the start of the eleventh, carrying cut marks consistent with skinning. A separate medieval site in Portugal produced more than 200 cat bones with shallow incisions pointing to the same process. Age at death clusters between nine and twenty months, the window in which a cat is large enough for a useful pelt but its coat is not yet damaged.

Cat fur was a low-grade material used across northern Europe for linings, collars and sleeves, traded from around 1150. So medieval Europeans did kill cats in quantity. Not because a pope told them to, but because a cat skin was worth money and cats were abundant. Economics, not demonology. It is the same unglamorous logic archaeology keeps finding in daily life, from an undeciphered Anglo-Saxon runic ring to the oldest known gambling dice.

Did Dead Cats Cause the Black Death?

This is the load-bearing wall of the myth, and it is the weakest part. The claim requires that cats were the main brake on rat populations, that removing them released the rats, and that the rats then delivered the plague of 1346 to 1353.

Every step has problems. Cats are not the only rat predator in medieval Europe, which also had dogs, weasels, stoats, foxes, snakes and raptors. Yersinia pestis is carried by fleas on multiple rodent species, not on one species cats happened to hunt. Cats infected by plague fleas become vectors themselves, so more cats in a plague zone is not automatically fewer human cases. As the journalist Abigail Tucker has pointed out, modern governments with helicopters and budgets struggle to eradicate cats from small islands. Thirteenth-century Europe was not clearing them from a continent.

The rat premise itself has been under pressure. In a 2018 study in PNAS, Katharine Dean and colleagues modelled transmission routes against mortality records from nine European outbreaks and found that a human ectoparasite model, meaning body lice and human fleas moving between people, fitted the observed patterns better than the rat-flea model in seven of the nine cities. The finding was contested in the same journal, and Dean’s team replied that they were proposing a plausible alternative rather than ruling rats out. The debate is unfinished. What it establishes is that the ecology of the Black Death is complicated enough that a single-cause story about missing cats has nowhere to stand.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Pope Gregory IX order cats to be killed?

No. Vox in Rama, issued in June 1233, describes a black cat statue coming to life during an alleged heretical rite in the Stedinger region of Germany. It contains no order to kill cats, went to roughly five recipients, and concerned one regional heresy investigation.

Were cats ever thrown from a tower in Belgium?

Yes. Live cats were thrown from the Cloth Hall belfry in Ypres, with chronicle descriptions from 1410 to 1420 and a fixed date, Cat Wednesday, set after 1476. The last live throwing was in 1817. The modern Kattenstoet uses plush toys.

Were medieval cats kept as pets?

Routinely. The tenth-century Welsh Laws of Hywel Dda set a legal price for cats and kittens by age and mousing ability. The early thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse allowed English anchoresses one animal and one only: a cat. Monastic houses kept them, and manuscript margins are full of them.

So were medieval cats treated well?

Not uniformly. The 899 cat bones from El Bordellet in Catalonia, dated around the year 1000, and a medieval Portuguese assemblage both show skinning cut marks, with most animals killed between nine and twenty months old for their pelts.

Where did the cat massacre story come from?

Mostly from Donald Engels’ 2001 book Classical Cats, which most later retellings cite. The title of Robert Darnton’s 1984 The Great Cat Massacre reinforced it, though the killing Darnton documents happened in a Paris printing shop in the 1730s.

What the Sources Add Up To

The true history of medieval cats is less dramatic and more human than the myth. No pope ordered an extermination. No continent-wide cull happened. The plague did not arrive because a species went missing. What did happen is that cats were priced in law, permitted to anchoresses, dragged into heresy accusations aimed at people, thrown off a Flemish belfry for reasons nobody has settled, burned at a Paris bonfire in the seventeenth century, and skinned in the hundreds for cheap fur. All documented. None of it needs a conspiracy, which is exactly why the invented version keeps winning.

For the long view of how cats got from divine status to demonic accessory and back to the internet’s favourite animal, start with cats in ancient Egypt, then read about what a Roman well in Frankfurt gave up and the Arctic town where cats are banned outright. Nine centuries later, the arguments about what a cat is for have not really stopped.

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