How the Church turned Europe's beloved mousers into symbols of evil — and how that decision may have doomed millions to plague
When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 CE, it left behind a Europe that inherited Roman infrastructure, Roman law — and Roman cats. For centuries, cats had served legions as practical pest controllers, keeping grain stores and barracks free from rodents. Early medieval monasteries continued this tradition without question. Monks valued their cats, allowed them into scriptoriums, and recorded their hunting exploits in marginal illustrations. A ninth-century Irish monk wrote a famous poem about his white cat Pangur Ban, comparing their shared love of focused work — the monk hunting words, the cat hunting mice. It is one of the most tender animal portraits in early literature.
This peaceful coexistence would not last.
The turning point arrived not gradually but in a document. In 1233 CE, Pope Gregory IX issued a papal bull titled Vox in Rama — (Voice in Rama) — addressed to the King of Germany. The document described a supposed heretical sect in the Rhineland whose initiation rituals allegedly involved a large black cat. Gregory's text described this cat as a manifestation of Lucifer, arriving among worshippers in a ceremony of obscene veneration.
Historians debate how literally medieval people took this specific text, but its effect on cat symbolism was corrosive and lasting. Vox in Rama embedded the black cat into the official Church vocabulary of devil worship. Inquisitors, already hunting for signs of heresy across Europe, now had a convenient symbol to work with. Suspected witches were frequently accused of keeping cats as (familiars) — supernatural servants connecting them to demonic power.
By the 13th and 14th centuries, cat massacres had become documented events in parts of France, Germany, and the Low Countries. On feast days — particularly Midsummer and the feast of Saint John the Baptist — crowds in some towns would gather cats into sacks or baskets and burn them publicly. These events were not secret or shameful; they were civic occasions. Authorities participated. Contemporary accounts describe them with the matter-of-fact tone of any other seasonal festival activity.
While European cats suffered persecution, the story unfolded entirely differently in Islamic lands. The Prophet Muhammad was recorded as having deep affection for cats. One famous hadith tells how Muhammad cut off the sleeve of his robe rather than disturb his cat Muezza, who had fallen asleep on it while he prepared for prayer. Islamic law declared cats ritually clean animals, permitted inside mosques and homes without restriction.
Throughout the medieval period, cats thrived in Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, and across the Islamic world. Traders, scholars, and travelers moving between the Islamic Mediterranean and Christian Europe sometimes noted this contrast with surprise. While a cat in a French village might be viewed with suspicion, the same animal in Cairo was a welcome guest at any market stall.
This divergence had lasting consequences. Islamic cat populations remained stable and healthy through the centuries that saw European cat populations decimated by fear and violence.
Even within Catholic Europe, the persecution was uneven. Many monasteries never abandoned their cats. Practical necessity overrode theological anxiety: without cats, rats and mice destroyed grain stores, consumed candles needed for worship, and gnawed through the leather bindings of irreplaceable manuscript books. Abbots who understood the value of their libraries maintained cats regardless of broader cultural currents.
Archaeological excavations at medieval monastery sites across Britain and Ireland frequently uncover cat bones — evidence of animals that lived long, well-fed lives alongside the monks. Some monastic rules explicitly mentioned cats as permitted animals when other livestock were restricted. The cat's usefulness purchased it a degree of institutional protection that ordinary village cats did not enjoy.
The consequences of cat persecution reached their most catastrophic expression during the Black Death of 1347 to 1351, which killed between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's population. The plague was spread primarily by fleas carried by rats — the very animals that cats existed to control.
The causal chain is not simple. Historians are careful to note that the plague would have spread regardless of cat populations, given the speed and scale of medieval trade routes and the density of urban living conditions. Rats were not the only vector. But the systematic reduction of cat populations across parts of Europe — through killing campaigns, abandonment during panics, and sustained cultural hostility — almost certainly reduced one natural brake on rat population growth.
The irony was invisible to contemporaries. When plague arrived in a town, the instinct was often to kill animals suspected of spreading disease, which sometimes included cats. The persecution and the plague reinforced each other in a cycle of misunderstanding.
Joan of Arc's trial in 1431 offers a revealing window into how thoroughly cats had become entangled with accusations of witchcraft. Though no cats were central to her specific charges, the broader framework of her prosecution — heresy, consorting with supernatural forces, deviation from Church authority — was the same framework that had made cat ownership suspicious for two centuries.
The rehabilitation of the cat began slowly in the 1400s and accelerated through the 1500s. Several forces drove this shift. The Renaissance recovery of classical texts restored the Roman and Greek tradition of cat appreciation. Printing presses spread natural history books that described cats' practical virtues without demonic overlay. As trade and urban life grew more complex, the economic case for cats — protecting warehouses, ships, and granaries — became harder to ignore.
By the 1600s, educated Europeans increasingly viewed cat persecution as a feature of an embarrassing superstitious past. The Dutch and English began incorporating cats into domestic paintings as symbols of hearth and home rather than evil. The Persian and other long-haired breeds arrived in Europe from Ottoman trade routes, bringing with them a novelty that repositioned cats as objects of curiosity and luxury rather than fear.
The journey from persecuted to beloved would take centuries to complete — but by 1700, the worst was over. The cat had survived Europe's long hostility and was finding its way back into the affection it had enjoyed in Roman times.
Did Pope Gregory IX really cause cat persecution? The papal bull Vox in Rama (1233) contributed to associating black cats with devil worship in official Church rhetoric, but cat persecution drew on many sources including folk superstition and witchcraft trials. Gregory IX's document gave theological authority to existing anxieties rather than inventing them from nothing.
Did cat persecution actually worsen the Black Death? Historians debate this. Reduced cat populations likely contributed to higher rat numbers in some regions, which would have increased flea-carrying hosts. However, the plague spread through multiple vectors and would have been catastrophic regardless. The connection is real but not a simple cause-and-effect.
Were all cats persecuted, or mainly black cats? Black cats bore the strongest symbolic association with evil following Vox in Rama, but persecution was often indiscriminate during panics and mob actions. Any cat could become a target in the wrong circumstances.
How did Islamic cat culture survive into the modern era? Islamic law's designation of cats as ritually clean, combined with the hadith traditions about the Prophet's affection for cats, created a cultural and religious foundation that protected cats across the Islamic world continuously. Today, cats are welcomed in mosques across the Middle East and North Africa.