Beyond All Human Reason

Part of the broader witch hunts that swept across Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Basque witch trials unfolded much like their counterparts elsewhere. However, these witch trials were halted by an unlikely hero: a member of the Spanish Inquisition. In this episode, I bring you the story of the Basque witch trials and the inquisitor who put a stop to them. 

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben, with original music by Purple Planet. 

Episode sources  

Chapters

• 0:00 Pre-roll
• 0:09 Intro
• 3:21 Zugarramurdi
• 7:48 The Doubting Inquisitor
• 14:08 Skepticism Spreads
• 19:04 Conclusion
• 22:35 Outro

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
In December of 1608, twenty-year-old María de Ximildegui returned to the village of her birth. Although her family was French, she had grown up in the Basque village of Zugarramurdi in Navarre. However, in her late teens, her family moved to the French province of Labourd, where an enormous witch-hunt was underway, overseen by the magistrate of Bordeaux, the famed Pierre de Lancre. By the time María returned to Zugarramurdi, she had been deeply affected by what she had seen of the witch trials in France. She began to insist that, during her time in France, she herself had been a member of a witches’ coven but now wished to return to the Catholic faith and be reconciled to the Church. Coerced into confession under torture, she then insisted that she could identify other witches among her neighbors and began to name names.

She first pointed to 22-year-old María de Jureteguía. The family of the accused witch begged Ximildegui to recant and stop accusing others, but she merely insisted that if she could speak with the accused, she would surely convince her to confess. Jureteguía’s family brought the two women together, and Ximildegui began to relate a detailed account of the witches’ sabbath in which the two women had allegedly participated. As she spoke, Jureteguía’s family became more and more convinced of the truth of the accusation, and they began to pressure the accused witch to confess. Overwhelmed by terror, she fainted. When she had recovered, she confessed that everything Ximildegui said was the truth, that both had been witches, and that she wished to be reconciled to the Church. Asked to name what other witches she had seen at the sabbath, she named María Chipía de Barrenechea, her 52-year-old aunt, and accused the woman of teaching her the secrets of witchcraft as a little girl.

The witch hunt that resulted from these accusations would leave a legacy of fear, suspicion, and tragedy in Navarre. Part of the broader witch hunts that swept across Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Basque witch trials unfolded much like their European counterparts. However, these witch trials were halted by an unlikely hero: a member of the Spanish Inquisition. In this episode, I bring you the story of the Basque witch trials and the inquisitor who put a stop to them.

Zugarramurdi
In a matter of weeks, the rumors of witchcraft spread, and panic soon followed. Those suspected of witchcraft were threatened with torture unless they confessed. Still, with each confession, the people of Zugarramurdi grew surer that witches were among them, leaving a wake of destruction that included men, women, children, livestock, and crops. The confessions became more and more astonishing, and ten of the accused confessed to kidnapping children for over a decade in order to drink their blood. Despite these shocking confessions and growing fear, local Basque law allowed for reconciliation with the community. Those who had confessed and repented were pardoned and forgiven. However, word had already reached the Office of the Inquisition, and by then, it was too late.

In 1610, the tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition in nearby Logroño decided to launch a full-scale witch hunt in Zugarramurdi and the surrounding territories. Inquisitors were dispatched to the area and began arresting villagers. Some three hundred people were accused of the heresy of witchcraft, and those who did not immediately confess were put to torture. Of those three hundred, officials brought forty to be tried at Logroño and sentenced twelve of these to be burned at the stake. Five of those sentenced had to be burned in effigy. They had already died in prison.

As more and more accusations emerged, a complex and detailed image of the Basque witch emerged. According to the testimony offered, the witches gathered regularly, including on the eves of Christian festivals, leaving their homes by foot or flying to meadows or grottos to worship the Devil. They kissed the Devil's hand, heart, privates, and tail before dancing to music. The gathered witches were forbidden to cross themselves or mention the names of Jesus and Mary. Many of these rituals mirrored aspects of Catholic Mass. The witches reportedly offered the Devil money, consecrated bread, and wine. They even made confessions, followed by communion with a Host resembling the sole of a shoe.

The trials and folk beliefs about witches and witches’ sabbaths that the accused described in their confessions brought a new word into common usage in Basque and Spanish: akelarre. British historian Emma Wiley has argued that the Basque concept of the akelarre—a gathering where witches were said to cavort with the devil and commit various misdeeds together by night—arose from a variety of cultural ideas, including folk magic, healing traditions, confraternities, and popular rituals in early modern Catholic communities. In the Basque language, akerra is the word for a male goat, and popular images of the akelarre featured a gathering of witches presided over by the devil in the form of a black goat or the hybrid form of a man with a goat’s features, most famously depicted by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya in his 1798 painting, Akelarre.

It’s possible that the black goat also plays an important symbolic role because it is associated with the pre-Christian Basque goddess Mari. The central deity of the pre-Christian Basque pantheon, Mari is often described as a woman dressed in red, a fire or tree shaped like a woman, or a thunderbolt. Her powers are associated with the weather and often with thunder, wind, and storms. Most Basques had syncretized Mari with the Virgin Mary by the Christian era. Still, some scholars argue that the cultural memory of Mari remained and fueled fears about witches.

The Doubting Inquisitor
The Basque witch trials transpired in a tumultuous early modern Europe marked by political, religious, and social upheaval. The Basque region possessed a distinct culture, language, and tradition that threatened the hegemonic power of the surrounding kingdoms. In 1511, Pope Julius II declared a Holy League against France, but the Basque region of Navarre remained neutral. Ferdinand II, king of Aragon and regent of Castile, used this as an excuse to invade Navarre in 1512. By 1529, the Treaty of Cambrai permanently divided Navarre along the Pyrenees. The kingdom of Castile annexed the southern portion, while the area north of the Pyrenees remained independent until its ruler became king of France in 1589.

At the height of the Basque witch trials, all regions were affected, and nearly two thousand accused witches had confessed. Of those, over a thousand were children aged seven to fourteen, who named thousands of others. 31 were taken to Logroño to endure the Spanish Inquisition’s infamous auto de fe in 1610, while 71 were reconciled or absolved, to say nothing of those who died in jail or at the hands of their frightened neighbors. The three inquisitors in Longroño agreed unanimously that the confessed witch who claimed to be a proselytizer for the witches should be burned, but that the eighteen who confessed should be punished with either imprisonment or exile but spared from burning at the stake. However, there was the matter of the twelve who denied the accusations against them. On these, the inquisitors were divided. Two decided that they should be sent to the stake, but the third was dissatisfied with the evidence against them and suggested that the accused should at least be put to the question—that is, interrogated under torture—to determine their guilt or innocence. This third inquisitor was Alonso de Salazar Frías, the man who would eventually put a stop to the Basque witch hunt.

Salazar was born in Spain to a prosperous and influential family. He attended the University of Salamanca and the University of Sigüenza, where he studied canon law. After graduating, he took holy orders and served as vicar-general of the episcopal court of Jaén. Working his way up through the ranks thanks to an influential patron, Salazar was appointed to fulfill the third inquisitor post at Logroño in 1609. Salazar’s appointment came amid growing skepticism among church authorities, including local priests and the Bishop of Pamplona, who cautioned the Inquisitor General that this witch craze originated from rumors spread from France by children and peasants. When Salazar refused to join the other inquisitors in their vote to condemn those who refused to confess, his superiors took note.

In March of 1611, the Inquisitor General ordered Salazar to conduct a new inquest in Navarre. This time, he was to go alone. As an experiment, his orders were to interrogate accused witches without the threat of torture to force confessions and without asking for the names of their accomplices. Instead, he was to hear their testimony and determine whether it corresponded with the testimony of others accused of attending the same gathering. Salazar’s official visitation began on May 22. He would not return until January 10 of the following year.

During his visitation, Salazar noted that the stories the accused told were often inconsistent and that, without the threat of torture, many retracted the statements they had made accusing others. He critiqued and ultimately rejected the accusations against some 1,384 children, absolved 41 adults, and reconciled some 290 others. Instead, he focused on finding material proof of an actual coven of witches. When he brought the accused to the place they were said to have gathered and asked where the devil sat, their statements contradicted one another and even their own earlier testimony. When he asked the accused about the many powders and ointments said to be poisons or elixirs of flight that turned out to be common, harmless substances, they said they had created them to please the inquisitors and spare themselves further torture and punishment. In fact, he could find no one who could reliably say they had ever seen a witch. As a result, Salazar decided that witchcraft was imaginary, insisting instead that the devil uses the fear of witchcraft to create chaos and cause the innocent to be unjustly persecuted. 

Upon returning to Logroño, Salazar ignored protocol, which required that he share his findings with his fellow inquisitors. Instead, he locked himself away and refused to see them. In his report to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, Salazar wrote, “I have not found one single proof nor even the slightest indication from which to infer that one act of witchcraft has actually taken place…the testimony of accomplices alone without further support from external facts substantiated by persons who are not witches is insufficient to warrant even one arrest.”

Skepticism Spreads
Part of the strangeness of this outbreak of witchcraft accusations was that anxieties about witchcraft had never run that high in Spain. While medieval law insisted that belief in witchcraft and magic was heresy, folk magic practices appear to have survived in the mountains of Galicia and Navarre. Even after the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, inquisitors focused mainly on Protestants and recent Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity and their descendants. Many elite Spaniards not only viewed witchcraft with skepticism but thought of it as a particularly northern—and Protestant—superstition. In questioning the existence of witchcraft during the Basque witch trials, Salazar gave voice to popular sentiment outside Navarre. In one of his reports, he writes:

The real question is: are we to believe that witchcraft occurred in a given situation simply because of what the witches claim? No: it is clear that the witches are not to be believed, and the judges should not pass a sentence on anyone unless the case can be proven with external and objective evidence sufficient to convince everyone who hears it. And who can accept the following: that a person can frequently fly through the air and travel a hundred leagues in an hour; that a woman can get through a space not big enough for a fly; that a person can make himself invisible; that he can be in a river or the open sea and not get wet; or that he can be in bed and at the sabbath at the same time…and that a witch can turn herself into any shape she fancies, be it housefly or raven? Indeed, these claims go beyond all human reason and may even pass the limits permitted by the Devil.

In a report in 1613, Salazar complained that the procedures in place during the outbreak were insufficient to determine the truth of the charges. He accused his fellow inquisitors of suppressing inconsistencies and omitting retractions from the official record. He claimed the inquisitors also failed to protect the accused against local authorities, whose violence and threats of violence often led to false confessions. Given the pressures applied to the accused, Salazar argued, an accused witch’s confession could not be considered sufficient evidence for a conviction, especially given the severity of the punishments for witchcraft.

Of course, Salazar’s insistence that witchcraft was a fraud angered his fellow inquisitors. The Supreme Council was inundated with letters from both sides, and after a year and a half of unresolved conflict, they summoned Salazar to Madrid. However, instead of reprimanding him, the Supreme Council allowed him to construct new procedures for detecting and prosecuting witches. These new regulations were designed to allow inquisitors to determine the difference between reality and imagination. These required that inquisitors avoid coercion, attempt to find material explanations for misfortunes or calamities, and allow those who had confessed under threat of torture to recant their testimony without fear of punishment. These new guidelines also allowed those previously convicted in the 1610 auto de fe to prison or exile be released from the terms of their sentences, retain their property, avoid the label of infamy for their descendants, and be allowed to return to Navarre. Perhaps most importantly, Salazar’s new regulations forbade discussing witchcraft in public. The Supreme Council endorsed these new regulations in August of 1614, establishing new, more rigorous requirements for the Spanish Inquisition that all but ended executions for witchcraft in Spain. 

When secular authorities in North Vizcaya attempted to pursue accusations of witchcraft in 1616, Salazar intervened, insisting that authorities follow the rules around the burden of proof adopted by the Inquisition. The authorities then referred the accused to the Inquisition, where inquisitors suspended the cases for lack of evidence, and the accused were absolved and spared. When secular authorities in Catalonia likewise began a witch hunt that resulted in over three hundred hangings between 1616 and 1619, the Inquisition intervened and halted the trials. Similar interventions halted the execution of accused witches in Burgos in 1621 and Cangas a few years later. By 1617, Salazar was able to report that peace had returned to Navarre.

Conclusion
While the origins of witchcraft trials are often obscure, several factors appear to have worsened anxieties about witches in Navarre in 1609. Externally, the persecution of accused witches in southern France was beginning to spark fear across the border. Internally, the Basque region faced severe economic challenges, including crop failures and deepening economic inequality. The increasing desperation of the poorest residents of Zugarramurdi may have increased social tensions and provided fertile ground for rationalizing misfortune through accusations of witchcraft. The region was also extremely isolated. Many Basque villages were remote and maintained unique cultural practices, leaving these communities exposed to external distrust and paranoia. 

Whatever the causes, the Basque witch trials left a profound impact on the region and its inhabitants. The trials resulted in half a dozen executions by burning at the stake of accused witches, mostly women, on November 1, 1610. This is in addition to the number of accused who died in prison or due to local violence. Even those who survived their ordeal endured long-lasting physical and psychological trauma. Eventually, the trials themselves were enough to spark new accusations, leaving a legacy of fear and suspicion, eroding trust and social cohesion within the Basque communities. Over time, however, skepticism regarding witch hunts began to grow across Europe. The Basque witch trials eventually came to symbolize the irrationality and cruelty of witch persecutions beyond the borders of Spain and Navarre.

In the end, it was the intervention of an inquisitor that slowed, then halted, the destruction. Historian Gustav Henningsen has claimed that Salazar’s reports reveal that many pre-modern people were far from victims of superstition and ignorance. They were, in fact, as capable of viewing witchcraft with as critical and analytical an eye as modern scholars. Thanks to Salazar’s extensive reports and tireless efforts, his influence spread to the rest of Europe, where, in the 1620s, the Roman Inquisition adopted new guidelines on witch trials based on Salazar’s revisions. Like those adopted by the Spanish Inquisition in 1614, these regulations established strict rules around the interrogation of accused witches, restricted the use of torture, emphasized the need for empirical evidence, and reduced the severity of punishments.

For his efforts, Alonso de Salazar Frías was appointed to the Spanish Inquisition’s Supreme Council in 1631.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more about the Basque witch trials, be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.