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 in response to allegations of heresy in Germany associated with the inquisitor Konrad von Marburg. It should not be confused with the separate campaign against the Stedinger. FrantiĹĄek NovotnĂ˝âs study of the persecution and its surviving sources places the letter within that specific political and religious conflict.
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 black cat, roughly the size of a small dog, descends backwards from a statue with its tail erect, and the heretics kiss its hindquarters in order of rank. The scene is grotesque and written to make the accused 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
The letter circulated in several versions addressed to political and church authorities, including Frederick II, Henry (VII), the archbishop of Mainz, the bishop of Hildesheim, Konrad and bishops in the Mainz province. That is not the same as a general command to households to kill their cats. Nor does it mean that only five people could ever have heard its contents: medieval letters could be copied, relayed and preached about.
The stronger objection is what the document asks for and what evidence connects it to later events. A hostile description of alleged heretical rites does not establish a continent-wide extermination programme. The absence of printing presses is not the argument; medieval people were quite capable of spreading a story without a share button.
Where the Medieval Cat Massacre Myth Came From
One frequently mentioned modern book is Donald Engelsâ Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat, first published in 1999, with a paperback edition in 2001. The Association of Ancient Historiansâ 1999 book list confirms the earlier publication. But identifying a book that repeated a claim is not the same as tracing the origin of every later retelling. There is no sound basis here for saying that one author invented the entire myth.
There is also an easy chronological trap. 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. Whatever associations the title brings to mind, its central episode is not a medieval event. The episode Darnton interprets, from an apprenticeâs retrospective account, belongs to 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 familiar images from the early modern witch trials are often projected backwards. Medieval precedents exist, but that does not make every periodâs beliefs identical.
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 practice became associated with the town fair and with Kattenwoensdag, Cat Wednesday. The festival organisersâ account describes a superstitious custom intended to secure a prosperous fair. 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. The wool-store explanation is a familiar story, not a settled finding. Practical and religious motives could coexist; neither becomes true simply because it sounds suitably medieval.
The modern revival is much kinder. The organisersâ history records how, 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 edition is announced for 9 May 2027.
The Paris Midsummer Bonfire
Paris also had a cruel midsummer tradition involving cats burned at the Saint-Jean bonfire on the Place de Grève. Historical accounts associate the spectacle with civic festivities and royal participation. It is a separate tradition to investigate, not automatic evidence of obedience to a thirteenth-century papal letter.
The essential caution is chronological: early modern customs and Darntonâs eighteenth-century printing-shop episode cannot simply be moved back before the Black Death to supply its missing cause. That does not make medieval cruelty disappear. It means each example needs its own date and context. For another unsettling episode that requires careful handling, see the dancing plague of 1518.
Medieval Cats as Pets, Mousers, and Property
If cats were universally hated demons, the legal record would be awkward to explain. Welsh law assigns them value and specifies desirable qualities, including the ability to catch mice. The laws are associated with the tenth-century ruler Hywel Dda, but the National Library of Wales explains that the surviving lawbooks are thirteenth-century manuscripts containing material of different ages. A medieval legal tradition is not a price list preserved unchanged from one kingâs reign.
Religious texts are as revealing. The early thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, guidance for anchoresses, explicitly permits a cat. It also allows an exception for other animals when necessity and the directorâs advice justify it. The cat is the ordinary exception to the animal-keeping restriction, not the sole possession the women could own. Practical mousing and religious discipline could share a room.
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 Metzlerâs 2009 article Heretical Cats traces feline symbolism in accusations against heretics and idolaters. It also discusses medieval stories of women turning into cats, including a story repeated in the Malleus Maleficarum. So it would be wrong to say that medieval cat imagery had nothing to do with witches. Her argument is about changing associations, not a clean border at the year 1500.
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 these accusations, feline imagery helped demonise people. It does not give us a count of actual cats killed.
The Cruelty That Archaeology Actually Confirms
Here is the uncomfortable archaeological finding. A 2017 study of El Bordellet, at Vilafranca del Penedès in Catalonia, examined 899 cat bones from around the year 1000 and identified skinning marks. Those are bones, not 899 individual cats. The University of Barcelonaâs research account describes nine young animals, aged roughly nine to twenty months, and notes that associated finds also leave room for a possible ritual interpretation.
Cat fur had commercial uses, and the skinning evidence supports exploitation of pelts. It does not establish a Europe-wide killing programme, and the possible ritual context should not be dismissed just to make an âeconomics, not religionâ punchline. Medieval people could have more than one reason for doing something unpleasant. The important point is that these remains provide evidence about a particular place and practice, not a missing chapter in a papal extermination order.
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 needs evidence: the scale of any cat decline, its effect on rodents and the route by which infection spread. Cats are not a simple protective switch. The CDCâs explanation of plague transmission notes that cats can become infected, carry infected fleas and, when suffering pneumonic plague, transmit infectious droplets. That modern evidence does not settle a medieval epidemic, but it does show why âmore cats equals less plagueâ is not a sufficient explanation.
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. The models do not measure medieval cat populations or demonstrate what a cat cull would have changed. The missing-cat explanation still needs its own evidence, rather than borrowing certainty from a debate about transmission routes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Pope Gregory IX order cats to be killed?
No. The June 1233 letter describes an alleged heretical ritual involving a cat-shaped manifestation and calls for action against heresy. It does not order the extermination of domestic cats. Its recipients were church and political authorities in Germany, not simply five isolated readers.
Were cats ever thrown from a tower in Belgium?
Yes. Ypres had a tradition of throwing live cats from its belfry, conventionally dated as ending in 1817. The modern Kattenstoet uses toy cats. Explanations of the original custom differ, so the practice should not be presented as a proven result of a papal order.
Were medieval cats kept as pets?
Yes. Legal texts, household evidence and religious guidance show that cats could be valued as mousers and companions. The Ancrene Wisse permits a cat, while the Welsh legal tradition associated with Hywel Dda assigns cats practical value. Neither source requires us to imagine that every medieval household felt the same way.
So were medieval cats treated well?
Not uniformly. At El Bordellet, remains of nine cats show skinning for their pelts; the 899 figure counts bones. Other evidence shows affection and practical care. Medieval treatment of cats was varied, and neither a universal golden age nor a universal persecution describes it well.
Where did the cat massacre story come from?
Its exact genealogy is not established here. Modern retellings combine claims about papal letters, cruel local customs and plague. Donald Engelsâ Classical Cats is one modern work discussed in connection with the narrative; Darntonâs The Great Cat Massacre concerns a much later episode. A shared subject does not make the events contemporary.
What the Sources Add Up To
The history of medieval cats is less tidy and more human than the myth. Vox in Rama is not a cat-extermination order, and the continental cull proposed as a cause of the Black Death is not demonstrated. Cats could be valued in law, permitted in religious households, used in hostile symbolism and killed for fur or spectacle. These are different practices with different evidence. The cat has enough real history without being handed sole responsibility for Europeâs worst pandemic.
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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