A witch hunt in the Kingdom of Navarre in 1610 resulted in the convictions of thirty-one “witches.” Eleven were condemned to the most extreme form of auto-da-fé—burning at the stake—and the rest to do penance. The trials didn’t stop the frenzy: by May 1611, thousands had been accused of being servants of the devil by their neighbors.
Historian Lu Ann Homza calls the situation a “social inferno.” From its headquarters in Madrid, the Suprema of the Inquisition sent Alonso de Salazar Frias to reconcile the Church with those who had confessed to witchcraft. On the road for eight months listening to the victims, Salazar came back with a damning report. Confessions of witchcraft had been extracted by force by local authorities—or vigilantes. With confession, “the Spanish Inquisition’s favorite method of proof” undermined, the Inquisition ended up absolving those who had been executed or penanced. New guidelines for witchcraft investigations were instituted; as Homza writes, “for all intents and purposes, the Spanish Inquisition never prosecuted witches again.”
“It was most unusual for the Spanish Inquisition to admit error or exonerate the dead,” continues Homza. Historians have been “enthralled” by the way this played out, but they’ve also been stymied. The records of the tribunal in Logroño were destroyed during Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in 1808. The only known documents about the events to survive were communications between Logroño and the Suprema. Historians could only see through the eyes of the Inquisitors themselves.
It turns out, however, that there’s another source of information about the witch hunt. “People in early modern Navarre had a considerable tradition of pursuing legal charges for all sorts of crimes,” writes Homza, and some of those accused as witches took to the law, suing their accusers for defamation and other offenses. This was civil litigation, records of which exist to this day in Archive Real y General de Navarra in Pamplona.
“The trials that ensued did not contain the term ‘witch’ or ‘witchcraft’ in the first folio titles,” Homza writes. “Instead, the prosecutions were classified according to other criminal categories of injury, aggression, or attempted murder, even though witchcraft suspicions and denunciations undergirded the offenses in question.”
More to Explore
Is There a Witch Bottle in Your House?
The trial manuscripts “illuminate events and motives from the points of view of the men and women who suffered from, engaged in, and witnessed the miseries of the witch hunting on the village level.”
Homza examines two of the cases in detail. One “amounted to a class action prosecution,” with eight women charging seventeen individuals. The witch hunting seems to have been sparked by children who claimed they were being taken from their beds to meet the devil by neighborhood women.
Weekly Newsletter
“This feature of Navarrese witchcraft had a long history, where harm to children was almost always the provocation for witchcraft accusations,” Homza writes. Mothers demanded local authorities do something about it—regardless of the obvious evidence that the children were not disappearing at night. Local authorities arrested and tortured suspects until they confessed. Some of those who confessed retracted their confessions when they were released; then they would be tortured again into confessing.
“Fear of the devil—along with sexual, social, and financial conflicts—drove the witch hunt,” Homza concludes.
In the two case studies, the plaintiffs won their cases. Defendants in both trials were sentenced to two-to-six years of exile. Some of the convicted sneaked back into Navarre; ultimately, a sort of “peace contract” was arranged between the antagonists. Meanwhile, episcopal courts also worked to punish clerical figures involved in the upheaval. In all, three legal jurisdictions, Inquisitional, episcopal, and secular, helped bring the living nightmare to an end—except, of course, for those who were burned to death.
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
.jpg){kind=link}