Alonso de Salazar Frías

The Basque panic that ran through Navarre and the surrounding country from 1609 is one of the largest witch scares in European history, and it ended in a way almost no other did: an official of the prosecuting body investigated it properly and reported that there was nothing there.

Salazar was the junior of three inquisitors at the tribunal of Logroño. At the auto de fe of November 1610 he dissented from his colleagues over the handling of the cases. Afterwards the Suprema, the governing council of the Spanish Inquisition, sent him out through the affected districts with an edict of grace, under which people could confess without penalty. He took an enormous quantity of testimony, most of it from children.

Then he did what nobody else had done. He checked. He went to the places named, looked for the physical traces the confessions described, examined the powders and ointments handed over, and set the statements against one another. Almost everyone who confessed to him later retracted when questioned separately. Where two accounts should have matched they did not. Nothing produced as evidence turned out to be anything.

His conclusion, in his report to the Suprema, was that there had been neither witches nor bewitched in the region until people began to talk and write about them. In 1611 that is an extraordinary sentence, and it was written by an inquisitor.

Salazar's reports were argued over inside the Inquisition, against colleagues who did not accept them, and they largely won. In 1614 the Suprema issued revised instructions for witchcraft cases which reflected his findings: confessions were not to be taken at face value, accusations by children were to be treated with great care, cases were to be reviewed centrally, and the tribunals were in effect discouraged from proceeding. The Spanish Inquisition, whatever else it did afterwards, is not a significant executor of witches from that point on, and Spain and Portugal have strikingly low totals for the period when much of northern Europe was at its worst.

Two things follow, and both cut against the popular picture. First, a strong central reviewing authority reduced witch executions where it existed, because it took the decision away from local courts responding to local panic. The regions with the heaviest prosecution are generally the ones where small jurisdictions could try and burn without review. The Inquisition's reputation makes this uncomfortable, and it is nonetheless what the records show.

Second, argument from inside worked, at least once. Salazar was not a sceptic in the modern sense and did not deny that the Devil acts. He simply insisted on evidence, and on testing what he was told against what he could find. Gustav Henningsen's study of the episode gave him his English name, the witches' advocate, and reconstructed the visitation in detail from the tribunal's own papers.