There are histories and there are lies. The two are not mutually exclusive. The best lies are the on

There are histories and there are lies. The two are not mutually exclusive. The best lies are the ones which root themselves in history, no matter how apocryphal, and then proceed to repeat themselves over and over again until they become convincing truths. History is full of these lies, now taught as incontrovertible fact, when once upon a time some clever minds devised some lies to hide their own sordid parts in the telling of history.

There is a fact and that fact is the certain nature of human beings.

The history of the Statute of Secrecy is a history of lies and half-lies and apocryphal truths and a history of the certain nature of human beings. The story is always the same across Europe. Europe burned. The blood of witches and wizards turned their streams and rivers red. Old and young, weak and strong – the inquisitors and the confessors came for them all and with them, they brought the fires of hell and the wrath of a cruel and unfeeling god. Thou shalt not suffer the witch to live. To be tried for magic was to be condemned to death. Muggle villagers and muggle lords, they both looked on in cold disregard. This was the truth. This was history. This was a lie.

There is a better saying which governs the truths and half lies and apocrypha concerning the witch burnings. For the love of mammon is the root of all evil. The priests came and the priests went and in the middle, they changed their ragged cloths for trunks full of gold and silver. An alchemical miracle. The law, even the divine law, was a matter of business and Rome had had several centuries to perfect the art of peddling salvation and divine mercy. No other burgher  knew its intricacies half as well as the Pope. No other merchant knew better how to turn a profit from a war which threatened to unthrone him. No other banker knew better how to mint gold from the bodies of the dead.

If the person of the Pope had not been so inviolate, so high above suspicion, they might have even called them sorcerers. Magicians. Alchemists who had surpassed their god in their miraculous deeds by turning the blood of peasants into gold.

In Italy they stamped their sealing wax with their signet rings and helped the Pope on the way to fixing his name to a Bull which gave them free reign. Della Rovere, Medici, Sforza, d’Este, Zabini. They had their muggles and they had their wizards – but the magical and the mundane did not matter where gold was concerned. Theywere not the ones going to the stake. And once the flames settled, Rome got its cut and they, as representative of Rome, got their own cut. Blood-gold and blood-silver for the coffers of Italy’s oldest magic families, reaped from the blood soaking the fields of France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.

In Germany, they fell over themselves to fan the flames of their hysteria. Better, after all, that they burn muggles and their poor brothers and sisters than them, when famine and war wracked the land. In Trier and Bamberg and Würzburg it was always the same case: non-conformists went to the flames and pious Catholics, even if they had wands, prospered. The priests took their pay, a cut for themselves and a cut for Rome, and they – Welfs and Ammendorfs, Ludekas and Hexenheims – took their lands, homes and whatever was left behind.

In France, Louis Philippe de Malfoi and Artaud de L'Étrangé carelessly provided Charles IX with a list of ‘witches’ – some of them magical, some of them muggle; the only common denominator was the fact that their lands happened to fall justoutside the borders of their own land. Not content to stop just there, they accused them of lycanthropy and all of France fell on these people with relish. There were one hundred thousand witches and wizards, the rumours ran, and Louis Philippe de Malfoi and Artaud de L'Étrangé had delivered one hundred of them - oh, some were magic, some were mundane, it made no difference to a hysterical France - to Charles IX. In return for their service to their country, they were both made Comtes and given a tidy slice of land each, in Languedoc in the South of France.

In Russia, they followed the Tsar. Anna Glinskaya became a witch – and so too did the boyars, when the Oprichniki came for them. So too did the Romanovs, though the magic had not entered their blood yet. Godunov found his throne slipping away from him – and the Shuiskiis, though they carried wands, were only too happy to send the Romanovs on their way. Magic, after all, was only as good as the people accused of it. The truth was only as important as the effects it produced and the power it handed to its accusers.

In England and Scotland, the story was no different. Apollonius Malfoy I whispered in the ear of James II of England and Scotland and received free reign to conduct the trials of North Berwick as he pleased. For that, he received the sum of forty thousand galleons and an Earldom. The Scottish clans deny it now, but they were there when Apollonius Malfoy accused the Earl of Bothwell of high treason and conspiracy with witches. Which witches? Eighty poor muggles, a doctor and nineteen poor witches who insisted on interfering with the natural running of things. They had it coming, Dougal Macmillan would say much later, they had it coming to them. No wonder, that when the magical world chose to secede it was Dougal Macmillan who urged them to wait for the new king and Apollonius Malfoy who reminded Edmund Rosier of all he stood to lose if they chose to secede.

The numbers, at the end of that dark time, ran into the tens of thousands. In 1693, the Statute of Secrecy came into place and the magical world disappeared. Malfoys and Macmillans, Ammendorfs and von Hexes, Rostovs and Shuiskiis, Malfois and L'Étrangés, Miletianii and Zabini – they retreated with their wealth and their power and began the lie.

Apollonius Malfoy had never spoken to a muggle in his entire life.

Cosimo de Miletianii had never been a cardinal.

Alexei Popovich Rostov retreated into legend and became a hero, as though he had never lived at all and had never sent boyars to Ivan the Terrible for execution when they proved stiff necked. As though he did not live on long after the Statute was put in place.

Lothar von Ammendorf – well the Ammendorfs were extinct, weren’t they, even if their coffers rattled with muggle silver and gold?

Charles de Malfoi had never succeeded to a county.

Just like that, overnight, the muggles and the Jews and the gypsies who had been burnt at stake became ill-used witches. The witches who had been burnt remained only in name and the histories of their ‘crimes’ were hidden. Their crimes, after all, were very simple: they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and angered the wrong kind of wizard. They all disappeared, devoured by the power of martyrdom and were canonized as victims of ‘those bloodthirsty muggles’. These were real wizards, after all, and with a casual sleight of hand, the certainty of human nature was vanished by apocryphal half-truths and fanciful lies which captured the imagination of a vulnerable and terrified public who saw blood and flames when they saw muggles. In the end, it was not the perfumes of Araby, but lies and more lies which turned their hands lily white.

And their tables and their coffers, when the dust settled, overflowed with the spoils of the hunt.