THE GREATESTWITCH-TRIALOF ALL:Navarre, 1609-14Gustav Henningsen

Auto-da-fe paintedby PietroBerruguete.

The inquisitors at Logroño in northernSpain were kept busy during the summerof 1613. They had no time to spare forbuU-fights or picnics, and hardly amoment to sample the fme local Riojawines: they were up to their eyes in workfrom dawn to dusk, and allowed them-selves no respite even on Sundays andholidays. They were engaged in the great-est witch-trial in history, both quantita-tively - it comprised almost 7,000 cases -and qualitatively, for, as one of theinquisitors smugly claimed: 'This subjecthas never been investigated and exploredso thoroughly before.' Nor was it ever tobe so treated again.

The inquisitorial tribunal at Logroño,south of Navarre, was in its ñf̂ h year ofwork on this mass trial. It had begunproceedings in January, 1609 and thefirst thirty-one witches were sent to theirauto-da-fe in 1610: eleven were burnedto death. But then a temporary halt wascalled, because the tribunal believed thatit had uncovered a witch-cult that wasactive over a wide area. A period of gracewas proclaimed, during which time allthose who voluntarily reported them-selves and denounced their accompliceswould escape punishment. The tribunal'smost junior inquisitor accordingly spentmost of the year 1611 travelling aboutthe Basque lands, taking the Edict ofGrace to the witches. Denunciationsflowed in: the inquisitor brought backwith him 1,802 witchcraft confessions(of which 1,384 came from children agedbetween seven and fourteen years) andaccusations against a further 5,000 per-sons who had failed to report themselves.The evidence covered 11,000 pages ofmanuscript; processing it gave the threejudges so much work that for eighteenmonths they had time for nothing else.

By the summer of 1613, with the periodof grace allotted to the witches long past,the tribunal had to decide what to doabout the 5,000 accused. The two seniorinquisitors favoured severity, but theirjunior colleague (who had actually col-lected the evidence) thought that all casesshould be suspended. He protested thatduring the whole of his journey throughthe Basque country he had not found asingle shred of proof of the existence ofany sect of witches. Indeed, he had comeback to Logroño filled with scepticismabout the entire trial, which had beeninstituted by his colleagues several monthsprior to his appointment to the tribunalin June, 1609. Because of this disagree-ment among the judges it was decided torefer the matter to the Inquisitor-Generaland his eight advisers who formed theSupreme Council of the Inquisition inMadrid, commonly known as the suprema.The junior inquisitor sent in his reportin 1611, but his two senior colleaguesprocrastinated and argued until the exas-

perated council demanded their opinionswithout delay. That was why the Logroñotribunal was obliged to work under suchpressure throughout the summer.

Who were these three divided judges?The president of the court and the seniorinquisitor was Doctor Alonso de Becerray Holquín, aged 53, a monk of the aristo-cratic Order of Alcántara. The secondinquisitor was the sixty-year-old licenciado^Juan de Valle Alvarado. He had originallybeen a parish priest, but had worked hisway up to the post of secretary to theprevious Inquisitor-General, who hadappointed him to the Logroño tribunalin 1608. The third judge was the licen-ciado, Alonso de Salazar Frías, who wasfifty years of age. When he entered the

proved as good as their word. Before longBecerra and Valle openly implied thattheir colleague was in league with theDevil; they claimed that the Devil wasresponsible for having Salazar sent toNavarre, and asserted that Salazar de-fended the witchcraft suspects becausehe had been 'blinded by the Devil'.

Passions ran high that summer while thethree inquisitors sat at their table in thetribunal's courtroom and read out theirconflicting interpretations of the evidence.Not infrequently the porter felt obligedto enter the hall and warn the judges thattheir heated voices could be heard outsidein the street. Let us join them for amoment as they battle over the 5,000 sus-pected witches. Salazar speaks:

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Map of northern Spain showing proportion of confessions by witches in relation to accusations.

service of the Holy Office in 1609 he hadbehind him a career in ecclesiastical lawand diplomacy and was exceptionally well-connected: for many years the CardinalArchbishop of Toledo, Don Bernardode Sandoval y Rojas, uncle of the King'sown Favourite (the Duke of Lerma), washis patron. When the Archbishop becameInquisitor-General in 1608, he bestowedthe first post to become vacant upon hisprotégé, and thus it was that Salazar wassent to serve at Logroño. Upon his arrivalhe found a major witch-trial in full swing.

For the first two years Salazar seemsto have respected the competence of histwo senior colleagues. However, when thejudgement of the cases for the auto-da-fewas being considered in 1610, he venturedto criticise certain points of evidence pro-duced, thus saving two of the accusedfrom the stake - but thereby putting anend to the tranquillity of the tribunal.Salazar was warned by his colleagues thathe would not get a moment's peace if hedid not adhere to their opinion, and they

My colleagues are wasting their time inmaintaining that the more theoretical andcomplex aspects of this can be properlyunderstood only by the witches, since in theevent witchcraft has to be dealt with byjudges who are not members of the sect . . .It is not very helpfiai to keep asserting thatthe Devil is capable of doing this or that;. . . nor is it useful to keep saying that thelearned doctors [of the churchl state thatthe existence of witchcraft is certain. No-body doubts this . . .

The real question is: are we to believethat witchcraft occurred in a given situationsimply because of what the witches claim?No. It is clear that the witches are not to bebelieved, and that the judges should notpass sentence on anyone, unless the case canbe proven by external and objective evi-dence sufficient to convince everyone whohears it. And who can accept the following:that a person can frequently fly through theair and travel a hundred leagues in an hour;that a women can get out through a spacenot big enough for a fly; that a person canmake himself invisible; that he can be in ariver or in the sea and not get wet; or that

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he can be in bed and at the sabbath at thesame time; . . . and that a witch can turnherself into the shape she fancies, be ithousefly or raven? Indeed, these claims gobeyond all human reason and many evenpass the limits permitted the Devil.

The two senior inquisitors were amazedand appalled by their colleague's cavaliercontempt for received opinion. 'It is im-possible to comprehend', they protested,'how anyone dares to assert that it is thescholars and the council of the Inquisitionwho have been in error and who havecommitted injustice for all this time.'Becerra and Valle were also aghast attheir colleague's refusal to accept the con-fessions of the witches themselves as firmevidence - especially since they had justspent eighteen months examining the1,802 depositions.

We marvel that he tries to insinuate that themajority of the witches' confessions andeverything else that emerges from the visita-tion are dreams and fantasies, for it is clearthat the tricks, intrigues, and contrivancesof the Devil have been powerful and strongenough to blind the understanding of manypeople. All of this, naturally, has allowedthe Devil better to protect his witches.

Becerra and Valle remained unshakablyconvinced by the statements of the witchesthemselves that they 'really go to thesabbath and participate corporally in themeetings, and that they believe absolutelythat their Devil is God'. In their reportsto the council in Madrid they provideddetails on the sabbaths (called aquelarresin Basque) and the rituals practised, sup-ported with almost interminable quota-tions from the original confessions.

The main argument of the two seniorjudges was that the witches' confessionswere in agreement each with another aswell as with the available books on demon-ology, and must therefore be true; but tothis Salazar objected that his colleagueshad taken a selective view of the materialand that their whole opinion rested ontheir subjective evaluation of the confes-sions:

In order to resolve the contradictions whichemerge from the confessions, my colleaguesdivide the defendants into three categories:those of good, bad, and indiflerent con-fessions. We have, however, no method orrule which allows us to evaluate each con-fession other than the arbitrary one that mycolleagues have used, and refer to in theirreport. Thus the note of 'bad' is given tosome confessions which another judge mightcall good, and vice versa.

Salazar further denied the connectiondrawn by his colleagues between an actof malice - such as a curse or a spell -and an actual misfortune. 'Until it hasbeen clearly and distinctly ascertainedthat certain events resulted from maleficia',he argued, 'my colleagues cannot callthem proofs.' He emphasised that therewas no evidence for the efficacy of spells

W) I

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HISTORY TODAY

Cardinal Ssndoval y Rojas. Archbishop ofToledo, who became Inquisitor-General in1608.

outside the confessions of the witchesthemselves, and reminded his superiorsin Madrid that 'We have no more groundfor believing the accomplices about thisthan for believing the other details aboutthe gatherings, dances and sabbaths,which pass beyond the limits of credulity*.Salazar concluded his submission to theInquisitor-General with a recommenda-tion that all the accused should be par-doned because they were innocent, andhe dubbed the entire trial 'the most re-grettable affair in the history of theInquisition'. The two other judges re-mained unmoved to the last, and com-plained that the delay in prosecuting the5,000 suspects had 'made the Devil andhis witches bolder' so that 'the sect' was'constantly acquiring more members'.

These bitter disagreements betweenthe inquisitors, on which the fate of 5,000and more persons depended, were morethan mere differences of temperament:they reflected the clash of two cultures.All three judges were ordained priests,and all three were university graduates;but where Valle and Becerra had readtheology, Salazar had studied canon law.Where the senior inquisitors constantlyassessed evidence in the light of theopinions and recommendations of theauthorities (that is to say of the demon-ologists), their junior colleague was inter-ested only in the case in hand. Valle andBecerra took the theories of the demon-ologists as their point of departure andonly accepted the witches' confessionswhen they accorded with this material;but Salazar was interested solely in whatcould be proved empirically in particularcases, and he could therefore not acceptthe witches* confessions until they hadbeen substantiated by tangible proof orby evidence from persons who were notthemselves witches.

The Inquisitor-General evidently sharedthe inductive philosophy of his protégé,and so did his council. They had onlysanctioned the burnings of 1610, influ-enced by the alarmist reports from

Logroño, with great reluctance. Normallythe suprema was sceptical about magicand witchcraft: the last burnings for thatoffence had taken place in 1526, and in1538 the council had warned the tribunalof Navarre not to believe everything thatthey read in the Malleus maleficarum^since it contained many mistakes. Thecouncil was therefore merely resuming itstraditional posture when, on August 29th,1614, it ruled that all the trials pendingat Logroño should be dismissed. At thesame time new instructions were issued,based on a draft prepared by Salazar,which made the rules for accepting evi-dence so rigorous that in fact they broughtwitch burnings in Spain to an end longbefore this happened in the rest of Europe(apart from a few cases where local auth-orities managed to put a witch to deathbefore the Inquisition could intervene).

But if the Devil was not at work in thegreen and pleasant Basque country, whathad caused the panic about witches thereduring the 1600s? The detailed reportsfiled by Salazar during his visitation of1611 make it possible to reconstruct withexactitude the genesis and progress of awitchcraze - something that historianshave been unable to do for other areas.In the northern part of Navarre, wherePart of Salazar's record of his investigation of the

Stand this sudden panic - for sudden itcertainly was - and one of the mostastonishing results of his investigationswas that, before the spread of the persecu-tions, the witch sect was completely un-known among the Basques.

There had been local notions aboutisolated village witches who were able toharm their neighbours by cursing them,but no one had heard anything about thewitches having a secret organisation andnocturnal gatherings; indeed, old peoplesaid bluntly that they had not even knownwhat a witches' sabbath was. They onlyfound out the truth in 1609, when JudgePierre de Lancre, from the parlement ofBordeaux, condemned to death about 100witches from the Pays de Labourd, onthe French side of the Pyrenees. Thewitchcraze had already been in existencethere for a couple of years, but it was notuntil 1609 that it spread into Spain, andthen to only five or six small towns nearthe border. Knowledge of the witch sectcame to these towns through variouschannels: through rumours from France,through people who had travelled up toBayonne to see the burning of the Frenchwitches, and finally through sermonspreached by the local priests who hadactually been encouraged by the Inquisi-witchcraze in Navarre.

the witch panic spread during the winterof 1610-11, Salazar noted that all thoseunder suspicion were in danger of beinglynched: stones were thrown at them,bonfires were lit around their houses, andsome had their houses pulled down aroundtheir ears. The village people resorted toevery possible form of torture in order toforce a confession: some were tied to treesand made to stand out through the coldwinter nights; others were made to standwith their feet in water until it frozearound them; others again were let downnaked on ropes from bridges and duckedseveral times to the bottom of icy coldrivers. In some places people dragged the'witches' out of their houses and tied themone after another with their legs betweenthe rungs of a long ladder and made themwalk around with the ladder all night tothe accompaniment of shouts and criesand lights in the streets while a thousandinsults were hurled at them. The popularviolence in the mountains of Navarreclaimed several lives that winter.

But Salazar did not only record; he alsosought to explain. He wished to under-

tion to expose the supposed witches intheir congregations. In all other districtsof the Logroño tribunal peace reignedright up to the autumn of 1610, whenpreachers were sent up into the moun-tains to convert all those who might beinfluenced by the evil sea; but when theauio-da-ß was held in Logroño with thefirst witches, 30,000 people came pouringin to hear the sentences read out and seethe witches burned. The preaching cru-sade, and the auto-da-Jé^ caused an explo-sive spread of the witchcraze.

The panic began with an outbreak ofdreams. Large numbers of people, for themost part children and young people,dreamed that they were taken to thewitches' sabbath at night while they layasleep in bed. This epidemic of whatpsychologists today would term 'stereo-typed' dreams spread from village to vil-lage; night after night the people affecteddreamed that they were fetched to thesabbaths. Once the 'bewitched' people,or the child witches, publicly recountedtheir nocturnal adventures, the witchpanic got under way. 'I have observed',

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Witches at a sabbath or a<7ua/iir/'e as it was called in the Basque regions: engraving of 1612.

noted Salazar in a famous phrase, 'thatthere were neither witches nor bewitchedin a village until they were talked andwritten about.'

But the dreams were not turned intoaccusations immediately; it was sometime before the children chose to revealwho it was that came to fetch them atnight. In Aranaz, in northern Navarre,the witchcraze did not get started untilafter a father had wormed the informationout of his son that it was the cowherdYricia who took him to the witches' sab-bath. The irate father went straight toYricia, and pointing a dagger at his chest,asked him why he had bewitched hisson. After Yricia had confessed to witch-craft he was taken to the local agent ofthe Inquisition who received his confes-sion and sent him to Logroño as a pris-oner. During the following day thirtyother child witches at Aranaz confessedthat the cowherd had taken them to thesabbath too, and after his removal thechildren agreed among themselves thatthey were also taken there by a sixty-year-old widow. And when she too wasarrested, the children accused anotherwoman . . .

Everywhere in the Basque witchcrazethere were the same three components:indoctrination, stereotyped dreams, forcedconfessions. The panic reached its cres-cendo during the summer and autumn of1611 when Salazar and his assistants

went travelling about the countrysidewith their Edict of Grace. Each time theedict was proclaimed, sermons werepreached against the witches with somuch explicit and suggestive detail thatSalazar became alarmed. 'In the presentunhealthy climate', he wrote in January,1612, 'it is harmful to air these mattersin public at all, since this could cause thepeople greater and more widespreaddamage than they have suffered already.'As the proper remedy for witchcraftSalazar recommended instead 'silence anddiscretion'. From then on the witch hys-teria began to decline and by 1613 it hadcompletely disappeared, apart from a fewvalleys in the Pyrenees which had beenaffected late. Nowhere did the panic lastfor more than two or three years.

The principal reason for the brief exist-ence of this dangerous phenomenon wasits monstrous form. In some villages itcould result in more than half the inhabi-tants being denounced as witches: chil-dren, women and men; young and old;rich and poor; clerics and laity - no socialgroup escaped. Everyone began to accuseeveryone else: children even denouncedtheir own parents and vice versa. Aspeople gradually realised that the witch-hunt was leading to the complete break-down of society, they became more will-ing to settle their differences amicably,out of court. At the local level the epi-demic could thus regulate itself. But con-

ciliation might be refused if the centralauthorities became involved, for theymight insist that the legal purge be car-ried on until all those accused and con-victed had been punished. That was whatBecerra and Valle wanted in the summerof 1613; but, thanks to Salazar, the Basquewitchcraze was no more than a brief̂ ifunpleasant interlude. After the cases fromLogroño were dismissed, the council ofthe Inquisition resumed its former prac-tice; and while various European courtscontinued to send witches to the stake,the 2,000 or so persons accused of witch-craft before the tribunals of the SpanishInquisition received only mild sentencesor were acquitted.

Yet it was only in the suspension ofexecutions that Spain took the lead, forwitch-trials continued to be held longafter that type of case had been abandonedby all other European courts. As late as1791 the Inquisition in Barcelona prose-cuted a woman who confessed to havingpledged her soul to the Devil and takenpart in a witches' sabbath. The scepticismof Alonso de Salazar Frías, the 'witches'advocate', was apparently still not ac-cepted by all his colleagues.

NOTES ON FURTHER READINGG. Henningsen, The Witches ' Advocare: BasqueWitchcraft and the Spanish Inquisiiion, 1609-1614,University of Nevada Press (San Reno, 1980); JulioCaro Baroia, The World of the Witches, Universiiyof Chicago Press (London and Chicago, 1964).

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