Innocent VIII issued Summis Desiderantes Affectibus on 5 December 1484 in answer to a petition from two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, who complained that they were being obstructed in the German lands. The bull does two things. It states, in the pope's own voice, that many people in the provinces of Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Salzburg and Bremen have given themselves to devils and by incantations have destroyed crops, killed livestock and made men and women barren. It then confirms the two inquisitors in their office, instructs the local clergy to assist them, and threatens ecclesiastical censure against anyone who impedes them.
It did not define witchcraft, did not create the inquisition, and did not order anyone burned. Its force was administrative. It removed a jurisdictional obstacle by putting the weight of the papacy behind two men whose authority local bishops had been questioning.
That distinction matters because of what happened to the text afterwards. From 1487 the bull was printed at the front of the Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer's handbook for finding and convicting witches, where a reader would naturally take it as papal approval of the book. It was not. The bull is three years older than the treatise and says nothing about it. The pairing gave a private work the appearance of official sanction, and it is the clearest case in this collection of an instrument acquiring an authority it never claimed for itself.