The Inquisitor who wouldn’t burn witches

“… only ‘the wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition’ made the witch craze ‘comparatively harmless’ in Spain.” — William Monter, quoting Henry Charles Leaⁱ

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. And nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition to show wise restraint in dealing with witchcraft—unless somebody has heard of Alonso de Salazar Frías, ‘The Witches’ Advocate.” But before we meet this heroic Inquisitor who refused to let witches be burned, let us place him in his historical context.

Salazar’s employer, the Spanish Inquisition, founded at the request of “The Catholic Kings” Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, opened for business in 1480. Three years later, it formed one unified, government-controlled institution across both kingdoms. The initial purpose of the Spanish Inquisition was to ferret out converted Jews (conversos) who continued to practice Judaism in secret (Judaizers). It also came to prosecute unfaithful converts from Islam (Moriscos), Protestants, heretical mystics, heterodox Catholics, bigamists, blasphemers, the superstitious, and sexual sinners. The Inquisition also censored books that might foster such errors.

Contrary to the Black Legend, the Spanish Inquisition was notably less bloodthirsty than secular courts. Only about two per cent of its cases resulted in execution: possibly 3000 deaths inflicted in four centuries. Its judges were less likely to rely on evidence obtained by torture. But explanation is not absolution. The Inquisition was an expression of its own time, when differences in belief or behavior were judged worthy of death. The courts of the Inquisition did not operate by standards of justice governing Church or State today. For instance, its proceedings were so secret that prisoners were not told the charges against them nor allowed to confront their accusers. Instead, Inquisitors sought to probe the minds and souls of the accused to understand the intentions behind their supposed offenses. This quest for exactness, however, made trials excruciatingly slow, resulting in needlessly long imprisonment before cases were resolved. But even when the sentence was merely penance, public shame ruined convicted persons’ lives and tainted their families for generations.

Suppressing maleficent or diabolic witchcraft was a matter for secular courts in medieval Spain. The newly founded Spanish Inquisition initially was content with that arrangement, although it had five people burned in Saragossa at the very end of the fifteenth century. Twenty years later, it had added magic, sorcery, and witchcraft to its list of forbidden practices. But in 1526, a government-sponsored witch-hunt in Navarre prompted the Supreme Council of the Inquisition to order extreme caution when prosecuting witchcraft lest imaginary crimes be punished. An inquisitor who violated those instructions by burning seven women at Barcelona in 1549 was removed and his remaining victims freed. An investigator sent by headquarters called the cases “laughable.” Although secular authorities continued to try witches, the Inquisition demurred. It intervened from time to time, as when it saved 40 women’s lives during a panic at Navarre in 1575, but sporadically thereafter.

But in 1609, a witch-panic exploded in the Spanish Basque country. Hysteria—and terrified people—crossed the Pyrenees from France after King Henry IV sent a hyper-vigilant but credulous judge named Pierre de Lancre to hunt witches in the Basque region of Labourd. De Lancre was obsessed with the notion that a “sect” of diabolical witches—3000 strong—flourished among the backward Basques. He had at least eleven or perhaps as many as eighty witches executed but the court at Bordeaux released almost all his prisoners. Miffed by his colleagues’ skepticism, de Lancre wrote a treatise Description of the Inconstancy of Evil Angels and Demons (1612) defending the reality of devil-worship by witches. The book’s lurid illustration of a witches’ Sabbat may have had more impact than the text. (It may have even influenced Francesco Goya’s depictions of witches in his Caprichos two centuries later.)

So, what did de Lancre claim Basque witches (xorguimos and xorguinas) do beyond the usual evildoing and harming of man, beast, and crops attributed to their kind? He said that they really, physically travelled through the air to gather at secret assemblies (Akelarre) to worship Satan in the form of a He-goat (aker) in ceremonies parodying the Mass. The devilish court was strictly hierarchical and its subjects formed an “inverted Church.” Separated by grade, the witches feasted, danced, and fornicated. They enjoyed cannibal fare, brewed poisons, and initiated new members by marking them in the left eye with a shape like a frog’s foot. While the adults frolicked, the children herded toads—familiars or future potion ingredients—in a little pond off by themselves. (Stealing children to turn them into witches was a distinctive feature of Basque witchcraft and harm to children, including vampirism, was the most feared aspect.)

Anxiety about witches had filtered over the border a year before Pierre de Lancre had been sent to investigate in Labourd. A young Spanish Basque woman who had returned home after working on the French side mentioned that she had been a witch over there but had repented. She then identified several neighbors as witches. Although all of them reconciled with the Church, the spark had been lit for a new panic known as the Witches of Zugurramurdi.

The Inquisition became involved and went searching for more malefactors. After zealous special preachers fanned out into the mountain parishes to denounce the horrors of the “witch sect,” numerous children and youths suffered an epidemic of dreams about being taken to the Sabbat in their dreams. Accusations and confessions followed. Eventually, thirty-one people came under scrutiny. Twelve died in prison. Six who refused to confess were burnt at the stake in a spectacular auto de fe ceremony before a crowd of 30,000 people at the Inquisition’s regional base in Logroño in 1610.

The youngest of the three Inquisitors who judged these cases expressed misgivings about the outcome. This man was Alonso de Salazar Frías (1564-1536). Salazar, a lawyer’s son from a prosperous family of civil servants and merchants, had had a distinguished career as a canon lawyer serving two bishops before his appointment to the tribunal at Logroño. He was noted for his diplomatic skills, astute mind, tenacity, and formidable powers of concentration. In short: he never gave up.

But the Basque panic kept spreading despite the executions at Logroño. Almost 2,000 people—mostly children and young adolescents—had confessed or had attracted suspicion. Villagers had turned into vigilantes, torturing suspects on their own by methods crueler than the Inquisition ever used, trying to find the adults who had corrupted their children. There was even a fourteen-year-old French witch-finder in the mix who admitted later he had been bribed to make accusations.

Salazar was assigned investigate at the local level and offer amnesty to those who surrendered voluntarily. After eight months on the road, Salazar reported back to the Inquisitor General in Madrid: “I have not found a single proof, not even the slightest indication, from which to infer that an act of witchcraft has actually taken place.”ⁱⁱ The campaign against witches was the very thing that bred them.

Salazar attacked the question as no other witch-hunter ever did, before or after. By cross-checked individual confessions, he uncovered fatal contradictions. He had nine sets of witches taken individually to their alleged meeting places and questioned about details of their activities. Answers were inconsistent. Twenty-two jars of magic powders and ointments were examined by doctors and apothecaries as well as tested on animals. All were harmless. Through logic, Salazar thoroughly debunked testimony originating in dreams: if witnesses could not distinguish what they dreamt from what they did, how could judges? There was no objective test to assess their credibility nor external evidence to support charges against them. “It is not very helpful to keep asserting that the Devil is capable of doing this or that,” Salazar concluded. “The real question is: are we to believe that witchcraft occurred in a given situation simply because of what witches claim?”ⁱⁱⁱ

Salazar distilled 11,200 pages of notes from his investigations into six reports for the Supreme Council of the Inquisition. Despite bitter and mendacious opposition from the other two Logroño inquisitors, the Council sided with Salazar. In 1614, it issued new instructions that henceforth forbad the execution of witches. Historian Charles Henry Lea described Salazar’s work as “the turning point in history of Spanish witchcraft.”^iv

Salazar served as a tribunal judge three more times. His intervention prevented mass burnings by secular authorities at Vizcaya in 1618 by getting 289 witchcraft cases transferred to the Inquisition which suspended them all. He became prosecutor of the Supreme Council in 1628 and a full member three years later before dying in 1636.

Alas, the Inquisition’s decision not to burn witches did not mean that witches ceased to be killed. Governments executed; neighbors lynched; individuals murdered. For example, more than 300 witches were hanged in Catalonia between 1616 and 1619 before the Inquisition wrested control from the secular authorities. Deeply seated popular beliefs about witchcraft persisted, especially in northern Spain. The Inquisitors turned passive and stopped interfering in witch persecutions.

Salazar’s reports were forgotten, buried in the Inquisition’s archives until discovered by Lea almost three centuries later. Had they been published and circulated across Europe the way de Lancre’s demonology and similar books did, they would have been another voice for reason to argue against the blood-drenched madness of the Early Modern Witch-Hunt.

Nevertheless, the lifesaving wisdom and courage of Alonso de Salazar Frías are still worthy of honor. To paraphrase Sigrid Undset, “A good deed shall stand, though all the mountains crash in ruin.”

Endnotes:

Sources:

Julio Carlo Baroja, The World of the Witches. Trans. O.N.V Glendinning. (Chicago, 1965)

The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition. Ed. Richard M. Golden. (Santa Barbara CA, 2006)

Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition. (Reno, 1980)

Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. (London, 1997)

William Monter, Ritual, Myth & Magic in Early Modern Europe. (Athens, OH, 1983)

______, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily. (Cambridge, 1990)