Constitutio Criminalis Carolina

The Constitutio Criminalis Carolina is the foundational criminal code of the Holy Roman Empire, approved at the 1530 Diet of Augsburg and formally ratified at the 1532 Diet of Regensburg under Emperor Charles V. Built on Johann Freiherr von Schwarzenberg's 1507 Bambergensis, it is recognized as the first body of German criminal law and criminalized offenses including murder, manslaughter, robbery, arson, and witchcraft, mandating execution by fire for witchcraft convictions, a provision historians link to the surge of witch trials between 1580 and 1680. Beyond standardizing penal law across the fragmented Empire, it introduced the canonical Italian inquisitorial procedure into Germanic law, allowing courts to investigate cases on the evidence rather than only in response to a victim's accusation. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/