by Henry Kamen
Medieval practice in secular courts had been that witches should be burnt, and the Inquisition at first followed suit. The Saragossa tribunal burnt one in 1498,76 another in 1499 and three in 1500. From this time on, cases of witches were regularly identified, the first at Toledo being in 1513 and at Cuenca in 1515. In Cuenca the popular fear was fed by stories of children being found bruised and murdered, “wherefore it is suspected they were wounded or killed by xorguinos and xorguinas (wizards and witches).”77 From 1520 edicts of faith in both Castile and Aragon began to add magic, sorcery and witchcraft to the list of offenses implying heresy. However, the belief in the sabbat was still far from being accepted by learned opinion. At Saragossa in 1521 a theologian declared that the sabbat “was a delusion and could not have occurred, so no heresy is involved.”
Meanwhile, learned opinion was taking stock of the phenomenon. In 1529 two friars, Martín de Castañega, with his Treatise of Superstitions (Logroño), and Pedro de Ciruelo, with his Treatise Reproving Superstitions (Alcalá), separately published commentaries on what Ciruelo termed “the vain superstitions and witchcraft which in these times are widespread in our Spain.” Both authors agreed that popular beliefs in magic were rooted in the ignorance of the rural population, and should be remedied through education rather than disciplinary measures. However, some secular courts continued with their harsh line. In Navarre for most of the sixteenth century, witchcraft was examined not by the Inquisition but by the state. In 1525 possibly thirty witches were burnt on the orders of the state prosecutor, Balanza, an official of the royal council of Navarre.78
The Holy Office desisted from interfering in such cases, not because inquisitors were liberal on the matter but because they tended to be skeptical of the powers attributed to the devil, and the tribunal in any case had no exclusive jurisdiction over the offense. Subsequent policy in the matter arose out of a historic meeting held at Granada in 1526.79 As a result of the persecution of witches by secular authorities in Navarre that year, Inquisitor General Manrique delegated a committee of ten, which included the lawyer Hernando de Guevara and the future inquisitor general Valdés, to decide whether witches really did go to the sabbat. The discussion paper offered to the meeting stated that “the majority of jurists in this realm agree that witches do not exist,” because of the impossibility of the acts they claimed to do. A vote was taken and a majority—six—of those present decided “that they really go” to the sabbat; a minority of four, including Valdés and Guevara, voted “that they go in their imagination.” The meeting also decided that since the homicides to which witches frequently confessed might well be illusory, they should be tried by the Inquisition and not handed over to the civil authorities. If, however, the authorities had proof of homicide, they should be free to act on their own account.
Many of those on the committee were during those same weeks in Granada discussing the conversion of the Moriscos. In general the committee was concerned more to educate the so-called witches than to chastise them. The bishop of Mondoñedo, for example, suggested the following remedies: “send preachers to those parts, to tell the people of the errors of the witches and how they have been deceived by the devil; the inquisitors and secular judges should proceed with caution; the monasteries of that region should be reformed.” One of the resolutions of the whole committee was that “great care be taken to preach to them in their language,” namely, in Basque. The urgent need for re-Christianization was noted subsequently by the theologian Alfonso de Castro in his Adversus haereses (1534), referring to “Navarre, Vizcaya, Asturias, Galicia and other parts, where the word of God has seldom been preached. Among these people there are many pagan superstitions and rites, solely because of the lack of preachers.”
The persecution and execution of witches continued but the Holy Office, guided by the 1526 resolutions, played very little part in it. The 1526 decisions were communicated in detail to local tribunals. In Navarre, for example, the inquisitors were given strict instructions not to proceed in such cases without consulting the Suprema and the local judges.80 Witch persecution is reported to have occurred in Navarre in 1527–28,81 with the participation of the local inquisitor Avellaneda, and the execution of at least fifty witches on the authority of the royal council of Navarre. Since no convincing documents for this appear to have surfaced, however, it has been suggested that the whole affair was spurious and based on a forgery.82 When further troubles occurred in Navarre in 1538 the then inquisitor, Valdeolivas, was instructed by the Suprema not to accept the confessions of witches literally, and to “speak to the principal people and explain to them that the loss of harvests and other ills are either sent by God for our sins or are a result of bad weather, and that witches should not be suspected.”
In other Inquisitions of the peninsula a similar skepticism was the rule. The tribunal of Saragossa executed a witch in 1535,83 but after protests by the Suprema it executed no further witches throughout its history. In 1550 the inquisitor of Barcelona, Diego Sarmiento, was dismissed for having executed witches without referring the cases to the Suprema. The case began in 1548, when a Valencian called Juan Mallet was called in by various towns to identify witches in the Tarragona area. “They took him through the villages,” says a report of the Inquisition, “and made the people come out of their houses so he could look at them and say which were witches, and those he pointed out were arrested without any other proof or information whatever.” The prosecutions were conducted by local justices. On this occasion inquisitor Sarmiento obtained custody of some of the arrested women, on the excuse that the Inquisition had jurisdiction. He was then faced with the problem of what to do with them. In June 1548 he organized a special conference in the palace of the Inquisition in Barcelona. Those attending were the bishop, the seven judges of the royal Audiencia, and nine leading prelates including the abbot of Montserrat. Sarmiento put to them exactly the question that had been debated in Granada in 1526. He asked whether “the witches were able to go to the sabbat bodily and assume the form of animals, as some of them claim and confess.” The unanimous conclusion of the learned men was: “they were of the opinion that these witches can travel bodily because the devil takes them, and can do the ills and murders they confess and they should be firmly punished.” It was as a result of this decision that Sarmiento allowed seven of the women to be burnt early in 1549.
The Suprema in Valladolid was appalled. In May 1549 it sent inquisitor Francisco Vaca to make a report. Vaca ordered the immediate release of two witches still in the cells. He then sent to Valladolid one of the most damning denunciations of witchcraft persecution ever recorded. In a report that identifies him as the first person in Spanish history to apply the rules of evidence to the phenomenon, Vaca condemned the witch craze on the basis that no credible proofs had been produced. He sent one of the documents in the case to the Suprema with the comment: “I believe that most of the other cases are as laughable as this one indicates.” He recommended freeing all those detained in the villages, and the return of all goods confiscated. Inquisitor Sarmiento was dismissed in 1550 for his part in the events. For the rest of its career the Inquisition in Catalonia punished no witches.84 The pioneering work of Francisco Vaca was of historic and enduring importance.
For the rest of the sixteenth century the Inquisition continued to maintain its hostility to persecution. As late as 1568 the Suprema ordered the tribunal of Barcelona to hand back to the episcopal court a case of “incantations”; and in Navarre in 1596 (the case of the witches of Araiz) the local inquisitor ordered that “it is agreed not to deal with these matters in the Holy Office,” and the prosecution reverted to the royal council of Navarre. Juana Izquierda, tried before the Toledo tribunal in 1591, confessed to taking part in the ritual murder of a number of children. Sixteen witnesses testified that the children had in fact died suddenly, and that Izquierda was reputed to be a witch. What would in any other European country have earned Izquierda the death sentence, in Spain earned her nothing more than abjura
tion de levi and two hundred lashes.85
The only significant relapse from this good record occurred a few years later in Navarre, where the tribunal had for many years resisted pressure by the royal council to use the death penalty against witches.86 The explanation for the relapse must be sought not in Spain but in France. Just across the frontier, in the Pays de Labourd, the Bordeaux judge Pierre de Lancre had conducted a horrendous witch hunt in the autumn of 1609, during which he executed eighty witches. The campaign supplied most of the material for his famous book on witchcraft, Tableau de l’inconstance (1612). The Labourd executions sent a shiver of terror through the Navarrese valleys and created a witch scare in Spanish territory that swept along with it the inquisitors of Logroño, one of whom was Alonso de Salazar Frias.87 A great auto de fe was held in the city on Sunday, 7 November 1610. So lengthy were the proceedings that the ceremony had to be continued the following day. Of the fifty-three prisoners who took part in the auto, twenty-nine were accused of witchcraft and, of these, five were burnt in effigy and six in person.88 This extreme measure produced a reaction in the Suprema, which in March the next year ordered the same Alonso de Salazar Frias to visit the relevant districts of Navarre, carrying with him an edict of grace to invite the inhabitants to repudiate their errors.
Salazar had ample precedents to guide him, and the pioneering report by Francisco Vaca, drawn up over half a century before in Barcelona, would in all probability have been available to him. His own conclusions were therefore almost foreseeable. He began work in May 1611 and ended his labors in January 1612, but only on 24 March did he eventually present his report to the Suprema. During the time of his mission, Salazar declared, he reconciled 1,802 persons. Of these, 1,384 were children between the ages of nine and twelve in the case of girls, and between nine and fourteen in the case of boys. Of the others, “several were old and even senile, over the age of seventy and eighty.” After close examination of all the confessions and evidence about murders, witch sabbats and sexual intercourse with devils, Salazar came to his conclusion:
I have not found the slightest evidence from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred. Indeed, my previous suspicions have been strengthened by new evidence from the visitation: that the evidence of the accused alone, without external proof, is insufficient to justify arrest; and that three-quarters and more have accused themselves and their accomplices falsely.
I also feel certain that under present conditions there is no need of fresh edicts or the prolongation of those existing, but rather that in the diseased state of the public mind every agitation of the matter is harmful and increases the evil. I deduce the importance of silence and reserve from the experience that there were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about.
His long memorial89 was, as we have seen, by no means the first with such recommendations, and there is no reason to pick him out either as a pioneer or as a rationalist before the age of rationalism. Like Vaca before him, he laid great store by the laws of evidence. As a trained lawyer, he was interested less in the theological debate over the reality of witchcraft than in the material problem of having to arrest people on the basis of unsupported hearsay. “There is no use in saying that the evidence for witchcraft is certain. Nobody doubts this. . . . The real question is: are we to believe that witchcraft has occurred in a case simply because the witches say so?”
Salazar’s report was contested by his colleagues but finally accepted by the Suprema. He was helped powerfully by the fact that, as he himself pointed out, the Inquisition since 1526 had turned its face against the traditional death sentence for witches; that more and more lawyers, rather than theologians, were becoming inquisitors; and that the best-informed opinion in Spain was in favor of skepticism over the reality of witchcraft.
Even before the mission to Navarre, the inquisitor general had commissioned a report from the prominent scholar Pedro de Valencia. In his report, dated April 1611,90 Valencia was careful not to deny the reality of witchcraft, but his conclusions suggested that there was a strong element of mental sickness in the Navarre events, and that exceptional care must be taken to prove offenses. “The accused must be examined first to see if they are in their right mind or possessed or melancholic.” Their conduct “is more that of madmen than of heretics, and should be cured with whips and sticks rather than with sanbenitos.” Finally Valencia advised that “one must look for evidence, according to law, of an offense having been committed.”
On 29 August 1614 the Suprema issued authoritative instructions that reaffirmed the policy of 1526 and the conclusions of Vaca and Salazar. They were to remain the principal guide to the future policy of the Inquisition. Drawn up in thirty-two articles, the instructions adopted skepticism towards the claims of witches, and advised caution and leniency in all investigations. Belated justice was done to the victims of the Logroño auto of 1610: their sanbenitos were not to be exposed, and no stigma was to attach to them or to their descendants. Although the Inquisition was still obliged to follow European opinion and regard witchcraft as a crime, in practice all testimony to such a crime was rejected as delusion, so that Spain was saved from the ravages of popular witch hysteria and witch burnings at a time when it was prevalent all over Europe.
The decision of 1614 benefited those accused but placed the Inquisition in an ambiguous position in theory and in practice: in theory, because it admitted that diabolism was possible but denied any single instance of it; in practice, because it became reluctant to intervene in witchcraft cases and often conceded jurisdiction to the civil authorities. The Inquisition reverted to its practice of not burning, but continued to prosecute all types of superstition with vigor. In many tribunals in the seventeenth century “superstition” was the largest category of cases after “statements.”
Two cases from Barcelona show how the new attitude worked.91 In 1665 the tribunal uncovered a group of middle-class diabolists who recited black masses, conjured up devils and beheaded a goat at one of their ceremonies. A priest in the group was suspended from holy orders for five years, and a surgeon was flogged and banished for the same length of time. In the same year Isabel Amada, a widow of Mataró, was denounced by shepherds who had refused to give her alms. Within three days, they said, “two of their mules and thirty sheep died, and the accused claimed that she had done it with the help of the devil.” She was set free by the inquisitors. Such lenient verdicts would have been unthinkable in most European countries.
The approach adopted by the Inquisition by no means signified that witches escaped, nor was Spain any more enlightened in this matter than other countries. Jurisdiction over witchcraft in Spain was also exercised by the civil authorities, which meant that—contrary to what is frequently affirmed—witches continued to be executed regularly. In the kingdom of Aragon, for example, the civil authorities continued in full possession of their jurisdiction over witchcraft and the Inquisition seems to have made no more than token efforts to assert its claims. At least as many witches were tried before noninquisitorial courts in Upper Aragon in the early seventeenth century as before the Inquisition.92 Witches in Aragon were hanged, not burnt, by the civil courts, but the number of those executed is not known. In Catalonia, likewise, executions continued. In the jurisdiction of Vic, forty-five witches were sentenced by the civil authorities in 1618–22. Dozens of witches were hanged in several towns throughout Catalonia, including some in the Pyrenees. The royal courts tried in vain to intervene: their efforts were blocked by the local and baronial jurisdictions in which the executions took place. In 1621, a bishop reported, “the barons and lords of the villages, on seeing the loss of crops and the clamoring of the people, have supplied a cure for the ills by punishing these women.”93 The rector of the Jesuits in Barcelona, Pere Gil, penned a powerful plea to the viceroy to intervene, but with little result. The incidents declined in number after 1627.94
In classical narratives of witch persecution the blame for savage verdicts u
sed to be laid firmly by historians on the judges, and several personages in France, Germany and England were duly cast in the role of monsters attempting to impose their beliefs on ignorant rural populations. The immense extent of the phenomenon, however, has obliged scholars to revise their verdicts and look more deeply for explanations. In particular, the evidence points constantly to pressure from villagers rather than from official tribunals.95 In small communities, denunciations for witchcraft often arose simply out of family and communal tensions.96 The inquisitors in Spain were quite aware of the part played by a persecuting community in cases of alleged witchcraft, and of the vulnerability of women in the community. When Pascuala Gil, aged twenty-eight and wife of a shepherd, came before the inquisitors of Saragossa in 1679 on a charge of witchcraft brought by her neighbors, they “recognized her great truth and innocence.” When María Pérez, aged forty-five, came before them on the same charge, they agreed unanimously that all twenty-one of her accusers (including the parish priest) were motivated by malice, and “recognized her innocence.”97
Popular enthusiasm today for the theme of witchcraft has inevitably dragged the Spanish Holy Office into the arena of errors, exaggerations and attempts to produce impressive statistics. As it happens, the tribunal fits into none of the patterns to be found in other countries in Europe: there were no mass arrests or executions, no bloodthirsty judges, and no fading out of superstition before the inexorable advance of reason. Even the pioneering achievement of Francisco Vaca, the first inquisitor to really bring about an end to persecution in a peninsular community, was based not on enlightened rationalism but simply on a lawyer’s application of the rules of evidence. Set against a European background, Spain’s role in the prosecution of witchcraft was relatively small; and though its secular and episcopal tribunals were occasionally active the Inquisition played almost no part in the process. “The apex of prosecutions from 1560 to 1630”98 in northern and central Europe had no parallel in Spain, and the tens of thousands who died in other countries in that period were a grim contrast to the tranquility of life in the Mediterranean.