Neither De Lancre’s trials in St.-Jean-de-Luz nor the Tribunal of Logroño betray even a hint of cynicism. All evidence indicates that even some of the most fantastic tales told by witnesses and in confessions were believed at face value.
The Canon Episcopi had cautioned that women who claimed to be flying through the air on the backs of wild animals were in reality remaining on the ground and simply having hallucinations induced by the devil. Yet somehow, seven centuries later, men of the Church, of law, of learning, appeared to believe that women in the mountains of northern Navarra were rubbing an ointment on their bodies in order to fly through the sky to witches’ sabbaths.
Doubts lingered. Interrogators earnestly tried to make a distinction between true events and the sort of delusions referred to in the Canon. Among the questions prepared by the tribunal was whether rubbing ointment and then flying was the only way to get to the sabbath.
In spite of the improbability of many of the accusations, it is striking how widely accepted they were. Even in modern times, this history is often treated as incidents of witchcraft, rather than incidents of mass hysteria. It seems likely that a frightened peasantry, attacked for being different, was coerced into absurd confessions. But rather than asking why this persecution took place, the question frequently asked is why the practice of witchcraft occurred. Pío Baroja, son of a distinguished journalist and himself a doctor and prominent twentieth-century novelist, rather than try to explain seventeenth-century witch hunting, attempted to explain why there were so many witches. He suggested that perhaps pre-Christian Basque beliefs had combined with a movement rebelling against the Church.
Baroja’s nephew, Julio Caro Baroja, a leading ethnologist, set off a witch craze in Basqueland in the 1970s with the publication of scholarly studies. Despite Caro Baroja’s reasoned books exploring the nature of the hysteria, it became fashionable once again to talk about Basque witchcraft not as a persecution by the authorities but as an exotic folk practice.
Pío Baroja had reversed the old bigotries, and rather than blame the Arabs and Jews, argued proudly that witchcraft was a uniquely Christian phenomenon. “In Semitic religions,” he wrote, “the woman is always seen banished from the altars, always passive and inferior to men.” In primitive European religions, on the other hand, according to Pío Baroja, “the great and victorious woman appears. Those first Christians—the Jewish race—did not have, could not have a cult of the Virgin Mary.”
But if belief in witchcraft was about empowering women, as Pío Baroja asserted, the witch hunts themselves were clearly an attack on women. Although a few men were also accused of witchcraft, the essential belief was that a woman with power necessarily used it for evil. De Lancre made this clear in the 1600s in his embrace of an old Semitic myth about women. In explaining why the Basques were afflicted with so many witches, he said, “This is apple country: the women eat nothing but apples, they drink nothing but apple juice, and that is what leads them to so often offer a bite of the forbidden apple.” And it is true, though not necessarily suspicious, that the people in Labourd, Guipúzcoa, and Navarra eat a great deal of apples and drink a lot of cider in the winter.
The antiwoman aspect of witch hunting becomes clearer when examining the nature of some of the allegations. The emphasis was on sexual perversion. Pío Baroja even offered lust as one of the possible motivations for practicing witchcraft. Women flew to secret rendezvous, where orgies were conducted with the devil. These clandestine orgies were known in Euskera as akelarre. The word comes from akerr, meaning a “male goat,” and larre, meaning “meadow.” The witches allegedly flew to a secret meadow and had group sex with a billy goat.
The accusation is reminiscent of Aimeric de Picaud’s concern for mares and mules. What stronger denunciation of an agrarian society than the charge of bestiality? Even in modern times, when Basque peasants engage in the duel by insults known as xikito, the accusation of bestiality remains a classic attack. And though to most people, sex with a goat would seem sufficiently perverted, it was not even conceded that they had conventional goat sex. It was group sex, and the goat sometimes used an artificial phallus, with the intercourse sometimes vaginal and sometimes anal. According to some accounts, the goat would lift his tail so the women could kiss his posterior while he broke wind.
The goat was a typical convergence of Basque and Christian imagery. It is horned and therefore associated with the devil. Martin Luther was sometimes depicted as a goat. But a black billy goat was also an important spirit in the pantheon of pre-Christian Basques. In the modern-day carnival of Ituren, which, like witchcraft, is a complex blend of pagan and Christian, a goat appears. Carnival, the last fling before lent, celebrates permitting the impermissible. While the joaldunak, grim-faced men in sheepskin with high cone-shaped hats who ring copper bells strapped to their backs, come and go from the mountains, clanging their huge bells, people appear dressed as monsters spraying hoses or as farmers throwing mud. The most frightening character of all, the one that always scatters the children, is a man dressed head to toe as a huge billy goat.
THOSE ACCUSED OF WITCHCRAFT, being held in secret cells, their whereabouts unknown to the world, torture chambers awaiting, were urged to confess. Confession was rewarded with leniency. Many who confessed to the Inquisition were simply condemned to a few years’ banishment from their native village. A convicted heretic was an outcast for life, forbidden to ride a horse, barred from owning weapons, silk, pearls, or precious metals. If a heretic was burned, the stigma was passed to her family.
The accused was not initially informed of the charges. She was simply told to confess what was in her heart. If the accused waited until being charged, it was too late to avoid torture. The Inquisition, contrary to popular belief, saw torture as a last resort and was suspicious of confessions coerced by violence, though all confessions were made at least under the threat of violence.
Accusations of witchcraft were usually initiated by Basque peasants settling a grudge or explaining a misfortune. In Pío Baroja’s novella La Dama de Urtubi, a young man runs off to America to earn wealth and stature so he can court an aristocratic woman. But when he returns, he finds that she is interested in another man and concludes that the two have been bonded by a witch’s spell.
This is typical. A crop fails, someone falls ill, the apple tree didn’t bear fruit. Someone had clearly cast a spell. And there was often agreement on who the witch was—a woman who seemed to hold a grudge for some perceived wrong.
At the edge of St Pée, a forest begins which crosses the border at Dancharia, near Urdax, and drops down into a deep valley where villages are built in the dark quiet mountain crevices and farmers work the rugged airy slopes. In 1608, a young woman named María de Ximildegui returned to her native village of Zugarramurdi in this self-contained little world. The village, whose name means “hill of elms,” would never be the same.
An illustration of the Basque billy goat by Jean Paul Tillac (1880-1969) for a book by Arthur Campión. Born in the French southwest, Tillac, whose drawings chronicled Basque life, had one Basque grandparent. (Collection of the Musée Basque, Bayonne)
Young María de Ximildegui had spent several years across the border in Ciboure. Her family had remained there, but she returned to her hometown, where she informed the local authorities that she had been a witch in Labourd, and during that time she had attended a sabbath in Zugarramurdi. She wanted to name names.
She said that while living in Ciboure, she had been an active witch for eighteen months before trying to break away, a struggle with the devil that resulted in weeks of illness. A priest in Hendaye had saved her through confession.
Ximildegui named twenty-two-year-old María de Jureteguía as one of the participants at the Zugarramurdi ceremony. Jureteguía, along with her husband, accused Ximildegui of lying. But in a public confrontation, Ximildegui was so convincing, offering meticulous details, that the townspeople began little by little to believe her and urged María de Jureteguía to co
nfess. Too late, Jureteguía realized that she was now in the position of being a suspected witch. Overtaken with fear and the exasperation of what had turned into a losing shouting match, she fainted.
Later, the panic-stricken Jureteguía realized that since she was believed to be a witch, she could only save herself by the mercy that comes after confession. So she confessed to having been led astray by her fifty-two-year-old aunt, María Chipía Barrenechea. So began a string of denunciations that unraveled the village.
After her confession, Jureteguía said that she was being pursued by witches, whom she would try to fend off with the sign of the cross. She would see them in the yard disguised as cats, dogs, and pigs. The townspeople reacted to this news without a hint of skepticism and began searching houses for toads. They all knew that toads were necessary companions to witches. The toad search lead to Barrenechea’s octogenarian sister Graciana, who would in time confess to being the queen witch of Zugarramurdi.
The first four witches in Zugarramurdi were accused of using an assortment of spells and powders to kill a total of eighteen children and eleven adults, and cause various harm to people, livestock, and crops. Eventually, ten witches confessed to a several-decade crime spree that included killing children and sucking their blood.
Incredibly, in a tribute to local Basque law, the village was able to resolve the entire affair bloodlessly, and the confessed witches were pardoned. The matter would have ended had not someone, the source remains anonymous, gone to the Inquisition.
In 1609, four accused witches and an Euskera translator were taken from the village by the Inquisition. More and more villagers were arrested, and the confessions were spectacular. Jureteguía admitted to a childhood of witchcraft. She had guarded a flock of toads and was punished if she did not treat them with the utmost respect. Her aunt would sometimes reduce her to a minuscule size, enabling her to pass through tiny chinks in walls. Many admitted to passing through small holes. They described elaborate initiations in which they were presented with a well-dressed toad. They had sexual intercourse in a variety of ways with the devil and with each other, both heterosexually and homosexually, including with members of their own family, all supervised by the elderly Graciana Barrenechea. They also confessed to infanticide and vampirism, cannibalism, defiling of tombs, eating of corpses. One admitted poisoning her own grandchild.
They confessed to breaking every taboo of their society. Were they furiously inventing stories based on the gravest cultural prohibitions they could imagine? The confession rate was not high. In the 1610 trial, only nine out of twenty-one witches had confessed. By then, another thirteen had died in prison and six had already been burned. Those who did not confess were certain to be burned alive. The Inquisition handed out sentences at an elaborate public ritual known as an Auto de fe, an Act of Faith. Although the 1610 Auto de fe of Logroño is famous for its witches, eleven of whom were sentenced to burning, an additional twenty-five heretics were also sentenced, including six people found guilty of Judaism, one of Islam, one of Lutheranism, twelve of heretical utterances, and two of impersonating agents of the Inquisition.
Auto de fe only unleashed more accusations throughout northern Navarra and Guipúzcoa. Rural Basqueland seemed in the throes of a spreading witchcraft epidemic. In some towns, panicking villagers lynched women. By March 1611, the Inquisition had discovered that in little Zugarramurdi, the hill of elms, 158 people out of a total population of 390 were witches and another 124 were under suspicion. One-fifth of the population of the twin villages of Ituren and Zubieta were found to be witches. In all, 1,590 witches were discovered in Navarra, with another 1,300 under suspicion. In Guipúzcoa, 340 witches were found.
AT THE SAME TIME, Pierre De Lancre, the witch hunter of French Basqueland, suspected that the entire population of Labourd might be witches. A reign of terror, based in St.-Jean-de-Luz, began when an official in St. Pée complained to Henri IV of an increase in witches in the area. De Lancre, a fifty-six-year-old lawyer from Bordeaux, was asked to investigate. He said that he found “so many demons and evil spirits and so many witches within Labourd, that this little corner of France is the nursery.”
De Lancre had many theories on why the Basques were so afflicted. Part of their problem stemmed from Ignatius de Loyola and the traveling Jesuit missionaries. All that evangelizing in places like Japan and China had infected them with demons which they had carried back to Labourd.
Another source of difficulty unearthed by De Lancre was the side effects of tobacco. The Basques were the first Europeans to cultivate tobacco, and it seemed that this was rendering them a bit strange. “I feel, and it is certain, that it makes their breath and their bodies so foul smelling that the uninitiated cannot bear it and yet they use it three or four times a day,” De Lancre pointed out. This use of tobacco, he supposed, was affecting their reason.
He also expressed disdain for Basque women and said they produced undersized and cursed children who died. This last accusation may have had some truth, due to the Rh blood factor.
Who was this Basque hater from Bordeaux who wanted to execute Basques by the hundreds? Before his father had earned a title, the family name had been Rostéguy, a Basque name, probably originally Errotegui, meaning “the place with the mill.” His family had migrated to Bordeaux a century earlier and become aristocratic Frenchmen. De Lancre despised what he regarded as the backward superstitions of the Basques, their myths and folk remedies. But he seemed to truly believe in a physically manifest devil, who, he even claimed, visited his apartment one night.
Anyone found engaged in folk healing, divination, or other traditional practices, especially if it was a woman, was a candidate for burning. Like the Tribunal of Logroño, De Lancre believed that the devil marked the body of initiates. All he had to do was find the mark. A blood spot on the eye was the mark of the devil. But most marks were not this visible. Hundreds of men, women, and children were rounded up. The accused could confess and be spared the painful and humiliating inspection before being burned alive. Those who did not confess were completely shaved. The body was then pricked inch by inch until a spot was found that yielded no blood. To make sure, such a spot would be stuck deeper, but if no blood came forth, the mark had been found. Then, they too would be burned alive.
THE OFFICIALS OF the Spanish Inquisition came to understand that they were creating hysteria, that the more witches they burned, the more witches would be denounced. So they became more secretive and eventually even banned the burning of witches. The inquisitors went about their business, flushing out Lutherans, Jews, and Muslims, and even found a witch or two around Spain into the nineteenth century.
On the French side, as often happens with witch hunts, De Lancre’s terror seemed unstoppable until someone had the courage to denounce it, and then it quickly disintegrated. Jesuits and tobacco merchants weren’t the only Basques traveling the world. There were also the fleets that hunted whale and fished cod in Newfoundland.
When the St-Jean-de-Luz cod fleet, one of the largest, heard rumors of their wives, mothers, and daughters stripped, stabbed, and many already executed, the 1609 cod campaign was ended two months early. The fishermen returned, clubs in hand, and liberated a convoy of witches being taken to the burning place.
This one popular resistance was all it took to stop the trials. Some French historians have estimated that 600 accused witches had been burned. A Spanish commission studying the De Lancre trials reported only 80 burned, which may be conservative, but the exact number will probably never be known.
De Lancre retreated to Bayonne, where he began condemning Basque priests. He was soon recalled by the French crown to Bordeaux, where he died of natural causes, his reputation intact, at the age of sixty-eight, in 1631. In 1672, a royal edict banned witch trials in France. But even into the twentieth century some rural Basques continued to believe that a blood spot on the eye is the mark of the devil and that prayer books left open in church will let witches into the community.
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6: The Wealth of Non-Nations
To be a true Basque, three things are required: to have a name which bespeaks Basque origin, to speak the language of the descendants of Aïtor, and to have an uncle in America.
—Pierre Lhande-Heguy, first secretary of the
Basque Academy of Language, BASQUE IMMIGRATION , 1910
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EVEN IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, the rural Basques, isolated in mountain villages such as Zugarramurdi and Ituren, were not the mainstream of the Basque population. While most Europeans were focused on their region, their country, their crown, the successful Basque was a man of the world. He was interested in Africa and Asia and especially passionate about the lands Basques called Amerika. Like the character in the Pío Baroja witchcraft novella, an ambitious man could improve his station in life by going to Amerika and returning with, if not wealth, at least experience. Amerikanuak, Basques who returned from the Americas, were people worthy of respect in the community. This is a recurring theme in Basque literature, especially among the early twentieth-century Basque writers, who tried to reassess Spain after it lost its empire. In Miguel de Unamuno’s short story, “Every Inch a Man,” a special masculinity is ascribed to the lead character because he had made a fortune in America.
Amerikanuak bezain, good, like an American, is an Euskera expression meaning “generous.” Ez gira Amerikanuak, you’re no American, is a way of calling someone cheap. In both expressions, the Americans referred to are Amerikanuak.
A people are shaped by their land, and the mountains of Basqueland, the green slopes that no one else would fight as hard for, could not support a population. Despite a lush appearance, the land is not fertile, and Basques always needed to look beyond Basqueland for food. It had been this special need for imports that had induced Castilian kings to exclude the Basques from the Spanish customs zone. Goods that landed in Basque ports paid no Spanish customs. If the goods were bound for Spain, they were taken through Alava to Miranda de Ebro, a river town, to enter the Spanish zone and pay duties. But goods could also be landed in a Basque port and reshipped to Europe without entering the Spanish customs zone.
Basque History of the World Page 9