The Basque Witch Trials

The Basque panic crossed a border. It began in French Labourd, where the magistrate Pierre de Lancre conducted an intense campaign in 1609, and moved into northern Navarre, where the Spanish Inquisition's tribunal at Logroño took it up. The accusations followed the usual pattern with one aggravating feature: much of the testimony came from children, who were asked whether neighbours had carried them by night to a gathering, and who supplied names.

At the auto de fe held at Logroño in November 1610, eleven of those condemned as witches were burned, five of them in effigy because they had already died in prison. Alonso de Salazar Frías, the junior of the three inquisitors, had dissented over the handling of the cases.

What followed is almost unique in the history of the subject. The Suprema sent Salazar out through the affected districts with an edict of grace, allowing people to speak without penalty. He gathered an enormous quantity of testimony, and then, instead of counting it, he tested it. He went to the places named. He examined the powders and ointments handed over as evidence. He set statements against each other where they should have agreed, and questioned people separately. Almost everyone who had confessed retracted. Nothing produced as evidence turned out to be anything at all.

Salazar's report to the Suprema concluded that there had been neither witches nor bewitched in the region until people began talking and writing about it, and that the talking had made the rest. He argued this from inside the Inquisition, against colleagues who did not accept it, and he largely won. In 1614 the Suprema issued revised instructions: confessions were not to be taken at face value, testimony from children was to be treated with great care, and cases were to be reviewed centrally. After that the Spanish Inquisition is not a significant executor of witches, and Spain and Portugal show low totals for the period when parts of Germany were at their worst.

That is uncomfortable for a widely held picture in which the Inquisition is the engine of the witch hunts. It was not. Most executions in Europe were the work of ordinary secular courts, and the presence of a strong central reviewing authority, whatever else it did, tended to suppress local witch panics rather than feed them.

Across the border the story ran the other way. Pierre de Lancre's campaign in Labourd produced executions and a book in which he explained the Basque country to itself, drawing on its coastal poverty, its language and its women in terms that say a great deal about him and nothing reliable about anyone he tried.

The atlas records both, because the contrast is the finding.