Legislating Medieval Magic

Surviving fiscal reports from the fourteenth century bear witness to the fact that the secular courts tried and executed those, mostly women, accused of magical arts.⁴ Penal proceedings of sorcery predating Navarra’s surviving trial records emerge in accounting ledgers that documented annual expenditures from districts in Navarra submitted to the treasury of the kingdom.⁵ Though records from only thirty-seven years of the fourteenth century remain, significant evidence reveals that the court of Navarra was no stranger to the prosecution of magic.⁶

The medieval fiscal records mention a dozen women charged with maleficia by virtue of their herbal craft. A report from 1314 offers the first account of the punishment of maleficent magic by the secular court when two women from the village of Ziga (thirty miles north of Pamplona) were accused of “killing women with bad herbs,” imprisoned for two weeks, and burned for “the maleficia they had done.” The payments solicited for the “logs and chains and cut sticks” and the labor “of the men who burned them and with their expenses in the prison” are all that remain of their stories, haunting murmurs tucked away in archival receipts.⁷ Over a decade later, Joana la Christiana and several other “sorceresses and herbalists” were sent to the stake for “poisoning the people and being herbalists and doing much maleficia.”⁸ Their trial and execution cost the court thirty-four sueldos, the value of more than twenty lambs, or five weeks’ salary for a laborer.⁹ A record from the following year reports that “Jordana de Irissari, herbalist” was burned in San Juan Pie de Puerto, the capital of lower Navarra at that time.¹⁰ In 1336 another unnumbered group of “sortilegiis … [were] brought to justice,” while two years later Condesa de Urritzaga was “accused by her neighbors in Lasso that she had done sorceries,” for which she was burned publicly in the marketplace of San Juan Pie de Puerto.¹¹ The capital hosted another burning in 1342 when two women, Alamana de Sara and Montanya de Vasques, “were killed according to their confession for being ‘herbalists=hechiceras.’”¹² The fiscal demands from their execution offer some clues about their deaths, which generated expenditures for “the salary for the men who strangled them, the salary for the town crier who trumpeted their sentence, the cost of the rope to take them … the cost of the firewood to burn them.”¹³ It is noteworthy that this procedure of a public notification, and death by the garrote before public burning in the capital, mirrors the only surviving execution sentences of two witches in 1575.¹⁴ The same year of 1342, the “lady of Aroztegui and a woman from Gabat” were burned in the market of Garriz for being “herbalists and hechiceras.” The request for payment included the “costs of each one of their loads of firewood, and a beam on which they were tied and burned.”¹⁵ Unfortunately, the kingdom changed its accounting procedures in 1360, and these ledgers came to a halt.¹⁶

From these medieval records emerges a pattern: women, accused of using herbs for maleficia, were sentenced and burned in public spaces. Like most of medieval Europe, Navarra had not yet developed the full stereotype of the witch sect complete with cannibalism and the devil. But the cumulative concept of the diabolical witch emerging in the late fifteenth century led to a proliferation of legislation on how to deal with the threat these evildoers posed to early modern Christian society.¹⁷ Thus as the cohesive notion of witchcraft took shape, the courts were better prepared to identify, persecute, and prosecute this great evil.

Patterns of Witch Trials

Navarra’s trials of witchcraft and sorcery assumed multiple forms, and their patterns shaped the testimonies and foci of both witnesses and magistrates. Scholars have constructed helpful categorizations to describe witchcraft persecution patterns in early modern Europe. William Monter, for example, classified “small panics” as “groups of four, five, six, perhaps ten people arrested, tortured, and often killed … in one tiny jurisdiction over a span of eight to fourteen months.”¹⁸ Erik Midelfort defined large-scale witch-hunts as more than twenty executions in one year,¹⁹ while Wolfgang Behringer classified “witch trials with up to three executions, panic trials with 4–19 victims, large-scale witch-hunts with 20–99 executions, major persecutions with 100–249 executions, and … massive witch-hunts with more than 250 victims within less than five years” in a territory.²⁰ Brian Levack categorized witch-hunting quantitatively but included qualitative characteristics. “Small hunts” comprised of individual prosecutions and groups of one to three people; “medium-sized hunts” claimed between five and ten victims and included torture and often stopped there “because the supply of stereotypical witches had dried up”; and “large hunts” included ten to hundreds of victims and “were characterized by a high degree of panic.”²¹ Henningsen identified qualitive criteria (the connection with the devil, who became suspects, and the percentage of the local population accused) to define a witch craze as “an explosive amplification caused by a temporary syncretism of the witch beliefs of the common people with those of the more specialized or educated classes.”²² While this definition succinctly described a “witch craze” or “panic,” it did not address other, nonpanic patterns in Navarra’s trials of witchcraft and sorcery under any tribunal, including the Inquisition.

While useful, general categorizations, often predicated on executions, offer a limited application to Navarra’s secular witch trials. In fact, one of the largest witch panics in early modern Europe would fall short of being labeled a “large-scale witch-hunt” under Behringer’s classification. The scheme I propose for Navarra’s secular trials of witchcraft and sorcery draws from qualitative criteria to categorize the data. Informed by the run of surviving documents, from 1525 to 1675, three patterns of witch trials emerge defined not by the number of executions, but by the manner in which the prosecution unfolded (table 1). “Isolated trials” were instigated and treated in a single location with a single person, or single group of people. These included one—or more—accused witches but did not extend beyond that one moment in time and space. This pattern appeared in the various trials of solitary witches and sorceresses, a group of accused witches in 1595, and the few trials of the seventeenth century following the witch panic. These trials differed from instances of “chain trials,” cases that extended beyond one village and instigated a search for other witches. The number of accused varied among chain trials, and it is difficult to determine exactly how many people were ultimately tried, but generally they tended to encompass more than twenty villagers. Three examples of chain trials emerge from the records in 1525, 1539–40, and 1575–76. The third and least common pattern is that of a “witch panic” characterized by mass numbers of denunciations and confessions, a break in the “functional” role of witch belief, and the indictments of atypical people.²³ The magnitude of confessions and hundreds of accusations that occurred in Navarra in 1609–14 is a clear example of a witch panic. More importantly, these three patterns of prosecution enable us to see the regional trends of witch trials in early modern Navarra and attest to their great variability. These patterns also demonstrate that the method of a witch’s prosecution related directly to the profile of and accusations against her. That is, the manner in which the case unfolded (individual trial, chain trial, witch panic) influenced who was accused (usual suspects with notoriety or atypical ones, such as wealthy men), how they had come to the court’s notice (personal denunciation or judicial inquest), and how the accused was sentenced (absolution or execution).

Source: The numbers are drawn from Usunáriz, “La caza de brujas,” 342.

Isolated Trials

Isolated trials appear as singular people or a single group in one village that did not generate an increased pursuit within the village or elsewhere. Isolated trials of solitary individuals tended to focus on women, while those that featured a group of suspects included men. The first isolated trial, appearing in 1535, provides an example of the solitary sorcery and witchcraft trials peppered throughout Navarra’s records. María Sagardoy from the village of Aezcoa was denounced as a “bad Christian and poisoner.”²⁴ This accusation, coupled with the reputation that she kept a fat, dead toad on her porch, proved sufficient for her arrest and imprisonment in Pamplona’s royal jails. The sorceress belief here was established: she was female, performed her maleficia alone, and concocted poisons to harm neighbors and society at large. The devil, the witches’ gatherings, night flight, and preternatural powers made no appearance. Trials of solitary sorceresses and witches relied heavily on the accused’s reputation or fama in the village without dipping into diabolical ideologies.²⁵ At this time, in the autumn of 1535, the royal tribunals did not zealously pursue a conviction, nor did María’s denunciation generate a search for other witches, or a hunt for every other “bad Christian” in Aezcoa. This would not be the case, however, when this same valley would experience chain trials five years later.

Another isolated trial appeared in 1561 with the energetic prosecution of sixty-eight-year-old Graciana Belza from the Valley of Roncal. A robust list of accusations over three folios in length suggests that every ill experienced by the villagers of Vidángoz was attributed to this notorious neighbor. Her reputation as “a mala cristiana, a sorceress, a witch” was substantial, as multiple villagers reported that her threatening behaviors left the whole village “terrified.”²⁶ The village’s terror testifies to the crucial role of the perceived intent to harm that informed people’s fear and willingness to denounce their neighbors. This isolated trial featured a notorious town witch with established mala fama and numerous denunciations. Yet despite the multiple and diverse accusations against her, there was a complete absence of diabolism, fantastical elements (such as therianthropy), or accounts of witches’ gatherings. Diabolical tropes usually did not emerge in the isolated witch trials of Navarra. Similarly, in the summer of 1590, Milia de Otano was denounced by a dozen villagers as “a person of bad opinion, a sorceress, a charlatan, and full of superstitions.”²⁷ Witnesses both in support of and against Milia described the rituals she used to improve women’s fertility, help babies and livestock nurse, and unbind spells impeding procreation.²⁸ But Milia also suffered from “the reputation that if she was not content with her payment, she would hold back cures from her clients. And if she had already unbound them, she would undo it and make it even worse until she was satisfied with the payment.”²⁹ Even so, despite the ample reports of heterodox behaviors and illicit healing by a woman using rituals and countersorcery, no one used the term “witch.” These charges did not devolve into a quest for denunciations or accusations of diabolism. The devil seemed to materialize only when larger groups of individuals were accused of witchcraft.

This occurred in an isolated trial from 1595 when an extended family from the village of Inza was accused of witchcraft by the alcalde (municipal magistrate), Fermín Andueza. Under coercive interrogation by Andueza and his son, the imprisoned group supplied confessions diverging sharply from the more typical concerns of witchcraft in Navarra (such as destroyed crops or bad neighbors), reflecting instead diabolical anxieties. Confessing to renouncing God and engaging in unnatural sex with the devil and one another, this level of diabolism transcended that of any other isolated witch trial in the tribunals’ records. Within a month of their transfer to the royal jails, many of the accused villagers recanted their confessions, reporting tales of violent coercion by the Andueza clan. This unfortunate case came to its end when the court scribe traveled to Inza to receive testimony about the alleged perjuries and discovered that the original scribe deposing the accused witches had told many people, including his daughter, mother-in-law, and neighbors, that the accused “were not witches, nor were those they in turn denounced as witches.”³⁰ Instead of fama at the village level, these “witches” were crafted by the hands of a very select group of people (Andueza’s family and some unnamed clerics). Though this trial included seventeen villagers, comprising an extended family and children, it remained isolated in both scope (no other witches were sought) and time (no further arrests were made).

From 1595 until 1647, no crimes of sorcery or witchcraft fell to the royal tribunals. And following the Inquisition-led witch panic of 1609–14, the four trials of the secular court processed in the seventeenth century all reflected an isolated trial pattern.³¹ But this absence of trials does not indicate an absence of belief. The dozens of crimes that fell under the Inquisition’s label of Supersticiones between the witch panic and the royal tribunal’s sorcery trial of 1647, and the four trials of sorcery that fell to the royal tribunals, all testify to the continued belief in magic and sorcery throughout the seventeenth century.³²

In 1647, María Yrisarri and María de Ollo, two healers from Pamplona, were denounced to the royal court for witchcraft and sorcery and “diabolical arts” that brought about “much harm in the republic.”³³ As their procurador argued for their referral to the Inquisition, the court’s fiscal (prosecutor) fought to retain their case, highlighting the presence of maleficia and the lack of any solid proof of heresy. Ultimately, they were remitted to the Inquisition. About a decade later, the court charged fifty-three-year-old María Brigante with sorcery following the accusation of murdering a jurist, Bartolome Ximénez, by means of spells and a bewitched doll. Two dozen villagers from her native town of Lumbier reported María’s mala fama and notorious reputation for sorcery, while her procurador’s defense argued that the testimony was brought forth with bad intentions and could “not be proven by the witnesses” being no more than “illusion and fantasy.”³⁴ The court nonetheless attributed Bartolome’s death to María’s spells. This late isolated trial featured medical, clerical, and legal arguments of bewitchment, demonstrating the continuity of belief despite the slimming number of judicial persecutions. A decade later, in 1672, another isolated trial appeared before the royal tribunals when Pedro de Badostain and María de Sarasa were charged with maleficia and sorcery. Their mala fama in the town of Burlada had reached its crescendo when a newborn died in his mother’s arms, distorted and black, following a visit from María. The court sentenced María harshly to four years of exile, testifying further to a continuity in strong belief of the magical universe despite the reduction of trials of magic.³⁵

The last isolated trial under the royal tribunals offers a paradoxical conclusion to Navarra’s history of sorcery and witchcraft prosecutions. The 1675 trial of María Esparza features sophisticated investigative techniques fused with faulty reasoning. Many villagers in Esquiroz attested to fifty-year-old María’s effective powers of healing, while ten witnesses spoke of her mala fama. But the most curious component—one that had not been used before in Navarra’s witchcraft and sorcery trials—was the presence of and reliance on medical experts. This investigative process transcended the bounds of the magistrates and enlisted four medicos to discern if the source of María’s healing “could possibly be natural” or if the various ills ascribed to her were the result of “supernatural effects.”³⁶ Based on a reading of the accusations, these four educated medical men concluded sorcery was the source of her healing powers. Despite the procedural change, the continuity in belief was palpable, and María received a harsh sentence of exile. Following this isolated trial, never again did the royal tribunals adjudicate a trial for sorcery or witchcraft. This final case provides an opportunity to observe how the court had changed over the 150 years as it phased out chain trials, while simultaneously challenging arguments that credit an era of “rational” thought with the end of early modernity’s witch trials.

Chain Trials

Chain trials—defined here as cases that extend beyond one village and instigate a search for other witches—occurred in 1525, 1539–40, and 1575–76. Various patterns in chain trials emerge: in situ investigations were often begun by officials, neighboring villages generated accusations, interrogations and accusations centered on diabolical tropes, “new” suspects cropped up among the accused, and larger numbers of villagers—including males—were accused. The record of witch trials under the royal tribunals began with a series of chain trials in 1525 involving a zealous judge, his traveling entourage of assistants, and a young witchfinder.³⁷

In January 1525 the royal council dispatched the magistrate Pedro Balanza to “inquire, learn, correct, punish, and sentence the diabolical sect and the crimes committed by these witches who are said to be in this Kingdom of Navarra.”³⁸ Balanza began an energetic campaign against the witches in the Valleys of Roncal and Salazar, working diligently alongside a dozen various assistants (see map 2). The results were swift and dramatic, and within a few months the first mass execution was held.³⁹ But these anomalous, decentralized executions did not occur in Pamplona; instead, a traveling judiciary toured villages, and “the executions were made in the same villages where they had committed their crimes.”⁴⁰ This diverged from the tribunals’ customary judicial procedures that typically saw the justices dispatch the accused to Pamplona. These chain trials occurred in multiple valleys and lasted over six months, involving one to two hundred witchcraft accusations (not all were further processed by the court) and yielding approximately fifty executions.⁴¹ The judicial power concentrated in a single magistrate’s hand, and the search for witches (based on young Graciana de Ezcároz’s examination of villagers’ pupils), lent itself to a careless execution of justice. The chain trials under Balanza heightened tensions between the royal tribunals and the Inquisition and would serve as a cautionary tale against overzealous persecutions of witchcraft.

Fifteen years later in 1540, the same valleys experienced another episode of chain trials (see map 3). The tribunals charged a large group of villagers with being “witches [and] poisoners” who met at night to gather “filth and powders and burnt toads and other poisons” with which to kill their neighbors.⁴² The accused villagers included the town’s alcalde, Lope Esparza, a denunciation triggered perhaps by suspicion of negligence as the authorities claimed witches remained in the valley following the trials of 1525.⁴³ The indictments against the accused detailed diabolical, antisocial, and heretical activities at witches’ gatherings, but interestingly lacked specificity (for example, no one was specifically charged with drying up the milk of their neighbor’s best cow). This mirrors the general and diabolical accusations generated in other chain trials, revealing that the more people who were accused, the more generalized—and diabolical—accusations became. In total, the royal tribunals arrested nearly thirty people in these chain trials but acquitted most, handing out only four sentences, while transferring dozens of the remaining accused witches to the inquisitorial tribunal.⁴⁴ These chain trials ended at that point, and Navarra remained relatively free from witchcraft prosecutions until the latter quarter of the century when the bulk of the secular court’s witch trials would occur in less than one year’s time.

The final momentous chain of trials began in 1575 in the tiny village of Anocíbar with a priest, the unfortunate María Johan afflicted by unexplained fits, and two young boys. The vigilant priest Pedro de Anocíbar reported that two brothers, ten-year-old Miguel and eight-year-old Martín, had been taken to the witches’ gatherings by their aunt, sixty-year-old María Johan.⁴⁵ The priest himself had prepared the questions and interrogated the boys, presenting this material to the royal court in late August 1575. After being summoned by the fiscal and denying her guilt, María Johan was subjected to three sessions of interrogative torture, convicted, and sentenced to be “burned in the Plaza de la Taconera” in Pamplona on October 25, 1575. The two boys also accused Miguel Zubiri of witchcraft, and he received the same sentence, his execution held at the same site the following month.⁴⁶

The first executions for witchcraft in five decades instigated a chain reaction of witch fears and a search for witches throughout Navarra.⁴⁷ As village authorities launched investigations into their regions’ witches, more were crafted and found.⁴⁸ In only seven months, the royal tribunals processed more than half of its total documented witch trials!⁴⁹ A detailed treatment of all the trials and accused witches lies outside the scope of this section, but an overview of the chain trials will serve to highlight their features and commonalities.⁵⁰ These trials began to unfold immediately following the discovery of the witches of Anocíbar, as commissaries from the tribunals toured throughout the valleys of northern Navarra, collecting information.⁵¹ A blend of established town witches, fresh suspects, and the ease of using a witchcraft denunciation to settle old scores supplied witches in every town where they were sought (see map 4). And within ten days of the aforementioned María Johan’s execution, a new group of witches had been discovered.

Villagers throughout Navarra immediately began to find and denounce witches to the tribunals, who reported: “We have been informed that in the village of Huarte and its jurisdiction there are many people who have done much harm with spells and other maleficent arts.”⁵² This report produced four witches accused of a diabolical definition of witchcraft used often in 1575–76 that featured the witches’ gatherings, night flight, relationships with toads, poisoning with deadly powders, and occasionally, sexual deviance and the presence of the devil.⁵³ By the end of 1575, an inquest spread to the village of Urdiain where five villagers denounced eighty-year-old Graciana Martínez for witchcraft, accusing her of raising a herd of toads to poison crops, animals, and children. But countering these accusations, seventeen villagers testified on her behalf, including the vicar, an abbot, and even one of the prosecution’s witnesses. The fiscal nonetheless sentenced the bedridden Graciana to “perpetual exile.”⁵⁴ This harsh punishment, despite the weakness of her case, demonstrates that in times of chain trials the procedures of an energetic court often broke from typical patterns of jurisprudence resulting in hyperaggressive sentencing. It also reveals the devastation an accusation could bring. Meanwhile, another village in the Valley of Araquil launched an inquest of those “suspected to be witches sorceresses” resulting in the arrest of seven women and three men, all charged with the stereotyped, diabolical notions of witchcraft so prevalent during this pattern of witch trial.⁵⁵ Along with many others from the chain of witch trials, all the accused ended up in the arms of the Spanish Inquisition, where most received penances or absolutions.

In January 1576, the village of Burguete hunted for its witches and five were found: one with established mala fama, along with two other women and two men. Villagers’ reports centered on the most notorious witch, Graciana Loizu and her toad familiars.⁵⁶ The magistrates sentenced Graciana to exile while freeing the appended accused witches demonstrating a trend found within chain trials: villagers free from long-standing witch reputations found themselves arrested alongside persons with established mala fama. In Navarra’s secular trials, these accompanying witches were usually released, and sentencing was reserved for the primary suspects.

January’s searches continued into February as the court dispatched a commissary to the villages of Ostiz, Burutain, and Esáin. The language found in the villagers’ reports makes strikingly clear the impact Pamplona’s executions had on these chain trials, as multiple witnesses alluded to the “accused witches from the village of Anocíbar.”⁵⁷ Sixty-six-year-old Peruzqui de Yráizoz was not alone when he admitted he did “not know who in the place of Burutain and its neighbors have the fama and reputation and are witches … because before those from Anocíbar were imprisoned and killed as witches, he never saw any [witches].”⁵⁸ Similarly, fifty-year-old Martín Joan Torena’s testimony reveals much about the crucial importance of Anocíbar and its repercussions, noting “it had never come to his notice that any person at all in his town had the fama of being a witch until the ones from Anocíbar were imprisoned and burned. And from that moment on, he heard … of those who are brujos and brujas in the said land.”⁵⁹ This villager reveals for us the importance of publicly created fama and elucidates that witch fears were sensitive to and dependent upon collective discussions. Witch crafting and designations did not reflect an occult label doled out in private. As news of the burnings in Pamplona reached villagers, they in turn became primed to find witches among their neighbors, leading to more searches and suspects.

In the same month of February, the villages of Legarda and Urtega also began inquiries into “who have been or are in the opinion of being witches or sorcerers.”⁶⁰ This yielded two very unlikely suspects in Navarra: Teresa de Ollo, a hidalga (noblewoman) with an impeccable reputation, and Juanes Isturiz, a man of great wealth. The familial connections among all the former’s accusers made clear that hers was the unmistakable case of a witchcraft accusation utilized for vengeance. The denunciation of this well-respected, wealthy woman illustrates how suspects in chain trials often broke with traditional witch stereotypes. While Juanes was released, which happened often for male witches, Teresa perished in prison within a month of her arrest.⁶¹ A similar situation occurred in March as the tribunals dispatched commissaries to the village of Muez “to inquire and discover who are male witches and female witches in the Valley of the Berrueca.”⁶² Though the village did not have any witches to report, one clever family of aristocrats seized this opportune time to avenge their father’s death and settle decades’ worth of animosities by denouncing another prominent family’s matriarch, the wealthy María Perez de Olalde, for witchcraft. María, a hidalga, died within a month of incarceration.⁶³

The chain trials of 1575–76 illuminate that when witches were actively sought in a legal context, they were found easily. Accusations were used to create a “roll” of suspects drawing from those with mala fama, as well as the newly accused villagers who appeared during chain trials. So tangible was this roll that several cases used the term rolde or the “roll of” witches. The curious use of the word rolde offers us some clues as to when broad searches for witches were occurring. Within the archives of Navarra, the use of rolde is reserved for accounting, fiscal, and administrative purposes. In inheritance cases, it sometimes appears as “rolde and memorial” of a list of belongings on the contents of coffers. Out of 150 procesos in the AGN from 1475 to 1675 that use the term rolde, none employed rolde to list people, only goods.⁶⁴ Yet, during the chain trials, the word rolde applied toward humans appeared multiple times as investigators inquired in villages for names on the rolde de brujas, the roll of witches.

Fortunately, the royal tribunals did not follow the pattern of witch-hunting in more volatile regions where a routine line of the interrogation process dedicated itself to seeking accomplices, multiplying the number of accused.⁶⁵ The vast majority of witches crafted in the chain trials of 1575–76 ultimately arrived at the Inquisition’s court where they either received absolution or were processed in the auto de fé (penitential ceremony) of 1577. While the Inquisition’s intervention broke the chain reaction of trials at this time, this same judiciary would fan the flames of Navarra’s witch panic three decades later.

Witch Panic

The infamous witch panic began with the confession of a young woman who had recently returned to her home in a northern village of Navarra from the French Pyrenees where she had been working. While living on the French side of the border, the now-reformed witch, María de Ximildegui, had attended witches’ gatherings called akelarres, which occurred also in Zugarramurdi on Spanish soil. María soon denounced several of her neighbors, and within a month, nearly a dozen villagers supplied witchcraft confessions to the parish church.⁶⁶ The confessions soon reached the tribunal’s ears in Logroño, and by late January of 1609, the inquisitors had summoned several suspects for questioning. Meanwhile, some of those who had confessed to witchcraft locally sought out the inquisitors to recant their confessions. At the same time, fearful parents and officials pleaded with the tribunal to prosecute these witches who reportedly continued to kidnap children, taking them to the akelarres. Within six months, the Inquisition had collected evidence of at least three hundred accused witches and an even greater number of bewitched children.⁶⁷ Through combined results of voluntary and involuntary confessions, the crucial roles of children, mass denunciations, procedural irregularities, and preaching to exhort clemency, hundreds of confessions and accusations poured in, morphing into the extraordinary witch panic of the early seventeenth century (see map 5). As much excellent scholarship has already treated this event, this study restricts itself to a brief overview.⁶⁸

Thirty-one accused witches received formal sentences meted out at the Inquisition’s auto de fé on November 7 and 8, 1610. These punishments, which included the burning of eleven unconfessed witches, served as both a public warning for transgressions and as entertainment for many people who traveled great lengths to witness this elaborate ritual of penance and punishment.⁶⁹ But instead of resolving the witch problem, this dramatic ceremony intensified witch concerns. As children continued to report kidnappings by witches, parents took matters into their own hands leading to “wide-spread, village-based torture.”⁷⁰ Following these continued reports of witches plaguing the region, the Suprema dispatched one of the Logroño tribunal’s inquisitors, Alonso Salazar y Frías, to the area in May 1611, where he began an eight-month-long visitation throughout the tribunal’s territory.⁷¹ Salazar noted judicial misdeeds and expressed his concerns and recommendations to the Suprema. Further, he noted the oversized role of children in the panic.⁷² He thus advocated complete silence and discretion with the shrewd observation that “In my experience I have seen that there were neither witches nor bewitched in a village until they were talked about and written about.”⁷³ While Salazar no doubt influenced the Suprema, Lu Ann Homza has recently shown that villagers, women, and families also shaped inquisitorial policy by bringing their accusers and torturers to the secular court for slander.⁷⁴ Notarial derelictions further influenced inquisitorial policy as the Suprema lost faith in the reliability of these witch trials.⁷⁵ This resulted in new instructions issued by the Suprema in August 1614 that drew from the 1526 witchcraft regulations while adding sixteen clauses taken from Salazar’s own recommendations.⁷⁶

The Inquisition’s dramatic public penitential ceremony had intensified the witch panic. While autos de fé sought to attract and captivate spectators, this one featuring the infamous witch sect would prove to be extraordinarily well attended. After preparing stages and stands for observers (including a wooden structure eighty-four feet long, eleven levels of stands to accommodate one thousand people, portable benches, and a stage), the auto began on November 7, 1610.⁷⁷ Among the thirty-one accused witches dressed in sanbenitos (penitential smocks) and caps covered with flames and devils, eleven were sentenced to execution. The public ritual—including processions, lengthy readings of accusations and confessions, ceremonies of penance and forgiveness, scenes of contrite tears, and burnings of neighbor-witches—affected immensely all those present, which was said to number thirty thousand. So impactful was this auto de fé with its accompanying capital punishments, the printer Juan Mongastón reported: “Having listened to so many ghastly monstrosities for the space of two whole days … we all returned to our several homes, crossing ourselves the while.”⁷⁸

The witch panic represented a pivotal event in the history of witchcraft in Navarra. It is clear this mutation in witch belief was caused by a constellation of influences, including rumors from France, sermons preached by local priests, the persistence of villagers in eliciting confessions from family members, the extreme reliance on children, the composition of Logroño’s tribunal, gross derelictions of duty, and the unintentional effects of preaching, visitations, and published edicts. The Inquisition’s eagerness to solve this problem had only made it worse. As this section has shown, it is crucial to situate how villagers came to be prosecuted and the legal processes shaping each trial.

The Royal Tribunals of Pamplona

The roots of Navarra’s royal court and council reach back to 1329 when Queen Juana II instituted the judiciary to improve and streamline legal procedures.⁷⁹ The establishment of this legal arm concentrated power in the hands of a single court and weakened noble authority. After the Spanish conquest, the royal court and council was reorganized with the court serving as the lower tribunal and the council as the appellate court. This restructuring included the appointment of a regent and six judges but reserved for the king the right to appoint the regent and two of the councilors, thus ensuring a Castellano regent would preside over the council.⁸⁰ Councilors serving in these positions required a law degree and an “Old Christian” lineage, yielding a tribunal composed of nobles and relatives. Additionally, four secretaries took declarations from witnesses, drafted agreements, recorded the trials, and carried out sentencing, including corporal punishments.

The fiscal oversaw the royal tribunals, supervising the discipline of the officials in the lower court and appearing as the official accuser in all cases of serious matters, such as murder, sedition, and as the records reveal, trials of sorcery and witchcraft. As such, summaries and sentences in the trials often emerge from the fiscal. Opposing him, the procurador or “lawyer of the poor,” served as the defense attorney for the accused. This included both those too poor to afford legal representation as well as wealthy individuals. To obtain their positions, procuradores had to complete a minimum of five years of legal training, fulfill an internship, and pass the council’s aptitude test.⁸¹

The court and council functioned independently from the episcopal court (curia diocesana de Pamplona) and the Inquisition, and somewhat separately from the king and the viceroy. As noted by historian Jesús María Usunáriz, “it was the royal council, not the viceroy … who was charged with administering justice in the kingdom.”⁸² These special provisions no doubt strengthened the royal tribunals’ sense of entitlement to the prosecution of witches and sorceresses, and it is within this early modern context—just a few years after Navarra’s final revolt—that the royal court and council adjudicated its first witch trials in 1525.

As with other regions throughout early modern Europe, Navarra’s legal jurisdictions were messy and overlapping. Not only did witchcraft prosecution fall to three judicial courts—the secular royal court and council, the Spanish Inquisition’s tribunal in Navarra, and the episcopal curia diocesana de Pamplona—but Navarra’s legal codes contained no explicit legislation on how to treat cases of witchcraft and sorcery. Its laws, extending back to its medieval fueros (local, foundational charters), simply did not address the crimes of witchcraft and sorcery.⁸³ This ambiguity nurtured a battle between the royal tribunals and the Inquisition’s tribunal lasting over a century, and though the Inquisition oversaw the majority of trials of witchcraft and sorcery, the secular court approached approximately 150 accused witches and sorceresses from 1525 to 1675.⁸⁴ The curia diocesana de Pamplona did not stake high claims to witchcraft persecution, and only one significant witch trial came to its court.⁸⁵ And while local alcaldes wielded power in civil matters and often initiated inquiries into maleficia, the records suggest they usually surrendered suspected heretical evildoers to higher judiciaries. But in the absence of explicit legislation regulating sorcery and witchcraft, it is not possible to define with certainty the exact criteria the tribunals drew from in their initiation of trials.

Trials of witchcraft and sorcery in Navarra were produced under a local inquisitorial judicial process. Introduced into continental European jurisprudence by the sixteenth century, the inquisitorial system replaced the accusatorial one throughout most of Europe and significantly facilitated the conviction of accused witches. Inquisitorial elements relied on formal initiation and prosecution and were biased toward opinions informed by legal and theological doctrines featured in demonologies.⁸⁶ Courts operating under the inquisitorial system tended to be more likely to use severe punishments as a deterrence against the crime of witchcraft. Though not all of Europe adopted the inquisitorial process (England and Scandinavia, for example, persisted in accusatorial procedures), Spain and other major legal systems adopted a general form of inquisitorial processes that focused on official prosecution and the search for “objective truth.”⁸⁷ Inquisitorial procedures, though somewhat varying according to local contexts, established the initiation of prosecutions and the manner in which magistrates determined guilt. Navarra’s records reflect inquisitorial methods, but as the historian Rita Voltmer has shown in the case of the Holy Roman Empire, the courts combined inquisitorial and accusatorial procedures until the mid-seventeenth century—an observation reflected clearly in Navarra’s nuanced court records.⁸⁸

Navarra’s interrogation processes were not tightly scripted but rather encouraged villagers to share freely the social drama, the gossip, and the fama. Initial interrogations tended to be open-ended, many simply inquiring as to whether there were any witches in the area. Testimonial transcripts reveal, too, that commissioners and judges posed different questions to different witnesses. In several trials, for example, children were pressed about magical elements while adults’ interrogations centered on fama.⁸⁹ Most questions tended to be general and not focused on a particular act of maleficia or charge. The magistrates compiled these testimonies, while adding their own list of charges that sometimes did not emanate from the testimonies, most frequently during times of chain trials.

From Villager to Witch

Accusations of witchcraft and sorcery began often by villagers at the local level. While several trials suggest a cleric or alcalde instigated a denunciation himself, accused witches came to the authorities’ attention usually via the murmurs of mala fama supported by numerous neighbors. This occurred, for example, when villagers denounced a “bad Christian” to a parish priest, or a bad neighbor to the local alcalde. Other times witches came to be crafted by vengeful neighbors.⁹⁰ And some witches, especially during the chain trials and the witch panic, were simply “caught up” in the net of witch-hunting. Once an accusation came to the notice of the alcalde, it is probable that he would conduct his own preliminary inquest (called “the first instance”) before transferring the denunciation to Pamplona. When the magistrates of the royal court received the denunciation, a commissioner, scribe, and translator would conduct in situ their own interrogations of the accusers and, sometimes, of the accused. If the fiscal decided to move forward with the case, a functionary from the tribunals would escort the accused to the royal jails (cárceles reales) adjacent to the royal tribunal.⁹¹ While court records portray the walk from the outskirts of Navarra to Pamplona in barren terms of hours and receipts for the use of mules, men, and minutes required to bring the accused securely to the tribunals, it takes little imagination to envision the terror women and men experienced as they scaled the steep passage upward toward the imposing judicial complex, along the ramparts, and approaching the walled city of Pamplona. Plucked from their rural spaces and deposited within an inhospitable penal system, accused villagers faced the harsh conditions of imprisonment and intimidating interrogations produced in the Spanish language of legal text, a tongue few (if any) of the accused understood.

Upon imprisonment, a functionary inventoried the accused’s goods, as the sale of these possessions covered the debts incurred while in prison. This included the charges for arrest and transport, court costs, travel expenditures for scribes and interrogations, litigating fees, and room and board. Their material goods were usually minimal; a typical “list of goods” (lista de bienes) including only well-worn clothing, old bedding, pots and pans, and a meager supply of grains, hardly enough to occupy a single folio. And while several notable exceptions appear in the trials—surprising lists of multiple houses, vineyards, plots of land, livestock, furnishings, and other household goods—each of these emerged from revenge accusations in the chain trials of 1575–76.⁹² The poverty of most witches prompted their procuradores to petition for poor relief to fund their basic sustenance. While we cannot conclude with certainty that the court condemned its prisoners to endure hunger from meager rations, it is safe to assume that provisions lacked severely, and harsh conditions threatened the very lives of the accused. And while in 1567 an official public policy sought to provide rations for destitute inmates who could “prove” their poverty, reports of starvation and death among prisoners continued to appear throughout the witch trials.⁹³

With the accused in custody, the tribunals issued a summary complaint against the accused announcing the witch’s name, hometown, residence, and a generalized accusation. A typical pronouncement began: “The Supreme Court of this Kingdom of Navarra received notice that María de Arguello … of the town of Senosiain … bewitched a child… . She is securely imprisoned in the jail, accused of sorcery.”⁹⁴ María’s denunciation—prompted by a bad reputation (mala fama), in turn reported by the town alcalde, and then transferred to the royal court—reflects the common trajectory for average trials. The trial records, or procesos, began with the testimonies against the accused, as translated and recorded by one of the scribes. Commissioners of the court interviewed witnesses for the fiscal, encouraging them to share freely about the social drama. It is these lengthy interrogations and testimonies reported by a motley crew of villagers—clerics, town officials, men, women, and children alike—that occupy the bulk of the procesos. While procesos sometimes included the interrogations of the accused, this remained an inconsistent feature in the trials, obscuring a clear view of the accused’s agency. This does not imply, however, that accused witches did not navigate the interview process by choosing what to say and what to omit, thus shaping their narratives and defense. Formal declarations of innocence and arguments of defense, however, were conducted to the court through their procuradores. The defense sought to disprove accusations by establishing that their clients, as buenas cristianas, enjoyed buena fama. The striking contrast in the arguments set forth by procuradores and contemporary legal defenses lay bare the core differences in modern understandings of witchcraft and those of the villagers of Navarra. Defense attorneys did not dispute the reality of sorcery and witchcraft, the ability to fly, or the use of toads, listing instead articles, most of which addressed fama or reputation, that they would prove or counter as part of their defense through the interrogations of their own sets of witnesses.

Though the articles of defense varied throughout the trials, several themes emerge consistently. The first line of defense—in every single trial of witchcraft and sorcery—argued that the accused was a buena cristiana (a good Christian) and focused on their Catholic acts, Christian reputation, and/or legitimate marital status. The villagers’ reports on behalf of the accused likewise focused on the buena cristianidad of the witch and her good reputation. In cases involving accusations of murder by maleficia, procuradores argued that the deaths were by “natural means” and presented substantiating reports from villagers. For example, when in 1576 María de Aniz was accused of witchcraft and blamed for the murder of her husband and two other men, her procurador Martín de Aragon argued that the latter died from “natural causes” and her husband died due to a fall.⁹⁵ He then presented eleven testimonies from a range of witnesses testifying to her husband’s unfortunate accident and the well-known illnesses of the two men.⁹⁶ Another frequent line of defense centered on enmities that often drove witchcraft accusations. The importance of this defense is reflected in the 1576 trial of María de Olagüe in which her procurador countered accusations of therianthropy with arguments that her accuser harbored ill will to her family, and not by questioning the reality of her transformation into domesticated animals.⁹⁷ Defense statements varied throughout the trials, and each case brought its own matrix of circumstances, but generally speaking, a witch’s defense concentrated on proofs of proper religious behavior, refutations of specific acts of maleficia (especially those involving murder), and arguments pointing to feuds among accusers and the accused.

Sentencing the Witch

Sentences handed down to accused witches by the royal tribunals relied less on deliberate executions and more on banishments, though executions did occur in 1525 and again in 1575. The trial records do not reveal the decision-making processes of the magistrates, and sentences appeared without legal justifications or arguments. Presented as short, simple sentences from the fiscal, punishments ranged from public humiliation to banishment to absolution. And while orders for torture and execution are not absent from the trial record, records documenting these corporal punishments appeared sparingly.⁹⁸

Public Humiliation

Humiliation within the public sphere aimed to impact both the sentenced and the audience. Observable penal rituals helped define sanctioned and unsanctioned behaviors and, like fama, established norms. The exhibition of the sentence expanded its effect and warned the public against engaging in the crimes of the accused. As Michel Foucault analyzed: “The body of the condemned man was once again an essential element in the ceremonial of public punishment … it served as the public support of a procedure that had hitherto remained in the shade; in him, on him, the sentence had to be legible for all.”⁹⁹ These public rituals both reinforced the accepted social order and demonstrated the tangible power of the secular court. While the Inquisition’s tribunal held its elaborate penitential ceremony, the auto de fé, the royal tribunals used their public penal displays “to project an image of the council as a divinely sanctioned magistrate, with the God-given duty and power to punish.”¹⁰⁰

The public humiliation of the carpenter Juan de Jenda in 1576 offers a view of the royal tribunal’s public rituals. Accused of witchcraft and meeting with “a large number of men and women that made reverence to the devil,” Juan was sentenced by the fiscal “to be taken from the prison where he is, riding horseback on a beast of burden, nude from the waist up, with the sound of the trumpet and the voice of the town crier publishing his crimes … and one hundred lashings … [and] ten years’ of exile.”¹⁰¹ The court drew attention to this ritual through the theatrics of partial nudity and loud pronouncements of guilt, used to publicly warn against the taint of witchcraft. Four months later, Juan’s sentence was reduced “to the humiliation only.”¹⁰² Juan’s sentence—the only surviving one composed solely of public humiliation—calls into question whether the magistrates’ main concern was his guilt, or the opportunity to warn against the practice of, or accusations of, witchcraft. So crucial was public penitence, the tribunals relied on this punitive measure up until its final trial of witchcraft and sorcery. In the final sorcery trial in 1675, María Esparza was sentenced: “To be mounted on a beast of burden, nude from the waist up, with a penitential cone hat on her head, and brought through the public streets and announced with the sound of trumpets and the voice of the town crier publishing her crimes, to two hundred lashings, and to ten years of exile.”¹⁰³ Though the records suggest her humiliation was not carried out, it is noteworthy that public humiliation continued to hold legal weight and cultural significance.

Banishment

Banishment—from the village, the greater region or valley, or the entire kingdom of Navarra—served as the most frequent sentence for accused witches. The tribunals utilized banishment to cleanse the community by purging itself of unwanted people, a common practice serving a therapeutic and restorative purpose throughout the early modern period.¹⁰⁴ The official expulsion of Navarra’s convicted witches ranged from three months to perpetual exile, with some twenty sentences handed out. Bureaucratic records dispassionately note the process of transporting the sentenced witch on horseback, under “secure guard,” to the outskirts of Navarra. In the abovementioned trial of María Esparza, her warden reported it took six days to lead María by horseback out of Navarra. Taking her hand, Juan Saturtegui led her across the border and into Aragon, and warned her to never again return to her kingdom, her land, or her life.¹⁰⁵

While not as immediately final as physical death, exile resulted in a social death for the sentenced witch. And social death led frequently to physical death as stigmatized witches lost access to resources and their unsavory label deterred people from providing charity. With little or no possessions, the lack of support from kin or neighbors, and their fama commanded by a witchcraft conviction, few prospects existed for these sentenced witches and sorceresses, most of whom were older, widowed women. Their experience after exile is hard to ascertain, as the fiscal’s final sentence usually concluded the case and any information about the accused. But one banished witch did reemerge in the trial records of the royal tribunals when she reappeared in Pamplona, permitting a serendipitous glance at the gravitas of banishment.

Graciana Belza, harshly sentenced to five years’ exile in 1561, returned to Navarra in the dead of winter several months after her sentencing. The procurador pleaded for the magistrates’ mercy on her behalf, pointing out that she was an elderly woman and that it was the court’s torture that had left her crippled and unable to work. He elucidated the terribly real consequence of exile by adding that “she cannot vouch for herself, and with the fama she has that she is a witch, no one has wanted to take her in their house.” Graciana, “terribly lost, dying of hunger” and driven to desperation by “the extreme necessity that she was in,” had returned to her village, her children, and her home.¹⁰⁶ So perilous was banishment, Graciana had returned to petition the court for mercy, as she faced death by cold and starvation. But the court, understanding well the exile’s intended effect, denied her request and doubled her original sentence, condemning Graciana to two hundred whippings and ten years of exile.

Absolution

Unlike the Inquisition, which promoted penance and absolution, the royal tribunals did not absolve accused witches and sorceresses with frequency, though they did dismiss cases or transfer them to the Inquisition.¹⁰⁷ The fiscal pardoned only ten witches throughout the trial records: eight during the chain witch trials in 1575–76, one from the isolated trial of 1595 that left nine villagers from Inza dead, and an accused sorceress from 1675.¹⁰⁸ In most of these cases it is unclear why the accused witch was pardoned, as many of the trial reports’ contours appeared no different than those of convicted witches. For example, in the case of three accused witches from Piedramillera in 1575—all named María—two Marías were absolved while one María was sentenced. Several other trials featured absolutions for some of the accused but not others, despite their similarities, with no clear explanations or fruitful clues as to how the jurists reached their sentencing.

In contrast, the solid defense for María Arguello in 1675 offers a clue of what may have influenced her favorable absolution. Accused of using “evil sorcery” to kill a boy, her procurador insisted that the magistrates dispatch botanists and apothecaries from Pamplona to examine the bowls that reportedly contained illicit unguents. In a detailed procedural description narrating the transfer of the bowls from the alcalde to the court under official supervision, the records offer a glimpse of something resembling a modern-day dossier. The various phases of the investigation were controlled, annotated, and signed. And after much deliberation, the apothecaries declared that “there is no unguent at all,” rather, “some mixture of oil” in one of the bowls and “some little bit of grease or fat” in another.¹⁰⁹ They concluded with assurances that she could neither harm nor heal with these materials; they were completely innocuous. Still, we cannot entirely attribute her absolution to the investigative techniques, and doubtless there existed other nuances outside of our limited view.

Torture

In the Roman law, “full proof” appeared only in the form of the testimony of two eyewitnesses or confession by the accused.¹¹⁰ Navarra’s courts also considered the accused’s confession to be regina probationum: the “queen of proofs.”¹¹¹ No other form of proof—aside from the firsthand testimony of two unimpeachable witnesses—offered such close proximity to the “truth.” From the late medieval and throughout the early modern periods, torture served as a form of judicial investigation that sought to uncover the truth by yielding a confession. But torture was not free from criticism, and intellectuals and theologians raised frequent concerns about false confessions induced by physical pain. As with us, many early modern minds found judicial torture to be fraught with issues, but they would have disapproved equally of our burden—or lack thereof—of proof. They would struggle to understand how modern Western juries, lawyers, and judges rely comfortably on interpretations drawn from circumstantial evidence as “proof” beyond a reasonable doubt. Circumstantial evidence was often considered an inadequate standard of truth, and as such counted as a “half proof.” And so, the royal tribunals, operating within a legal system that thought it possible to attain the truth through regulated coercion, turned to judicial torture.¹¹²

Scholars have credited the laxity of Spanish witchcraft persecutions to restrictions placed on torture by its Inquisition, which used judicial torture in only 1 percent of its cases.¹¹³ Though it is impossible to state with certainty the number of torture sentences total (as missing data from the trials of 1525 may skew these results), surviving records document around 4 percent of accused witches’ interrogations under torture.¹¹⁴ This does not mean, however, that the fiscal did not call for defendants to be put to the question of torture with greater frequency.

The understandings informing judicial torture suggest that certain crimes—such as witchcraft and sorcery—required torture to uncover the truth. Passionate arguments made by the fiscal in the early witchcraft and poisoning trial of Fortuno Legaz in 1539 reveal that judges felt torture provided a crucial tool as witchcraft was “difficult to prove” and that conjectures and fama alone were insufficient proofs “within the ordinary law.” He drew explicitly from conventional legal precedent arguing: “Most importantly, according to the law, crimes committed with poison are often made in secret and seldom can you find and know the truth, without torment.”¹¹⁵ Since no known secular legislation for early modern witchcraft in Navarra survives, it is not possible to assert that it was considered a crimen exceptum in Navarra.¹¹⁶ But the fiscal certainly envisioned the use of torture in witchcraft cases as essential, as maleficia was usually committed clandestinely, prohibiting the court access to eyewitnesses and rendering confession the only viable option. No tool elicited confessions, “the truth,” as effectively as torture. And so the fiscal appealed to the court’s desire for effective judicial proceedings, promoting torture as the correct judicial tool to make it “quicker and easier to convict.”¹¹⁷ But despite this reasoning, the court denied Fortuno’s torture. Twenty years later, however, the same fiscal would have greater success in his request. The surviving transcripts present a haunting depiction of this order that illustrates the intimate relationship between torture and a search for the truth in early modern witch trials.

In the summer of 1561, in the “chamber of torment,” Graciana Belza received her first interrogation under torture. But before this she had been warned that “if she did not tell the truth, they would put her to the question of torture and they would administer it very sternly, until she declared the truth.”¹¹⁸ Keeping in mind the fiscal’s order for a “robust” search for “the truth,” the judicial torture was carried out as follows, recorded carefully by the scribe:

They ordered the sticks tightened, and having been tightened, the magistrates told her to tell the truth… . Asked if she knows the manner in which the spells and witchcraft is usually done, she said that she does not know. And so, the magistrates seeing her negativity, ordered to have the sticks tightened even more, and having been tightened, they told her to tell the truth in all she had been asked. She said she knows nothing… . And then, the magistrates ordered to give [her] a jug of water, and after giving the jug of water, they asked her to tell the truth in all she has been asked… . And she always responded that she did not know anything.¹¹⁹

By inflicting pain on her body, the court sought to coax her conscience to free itself of its guilty burden and admit her wrongdoing. Torture served as a tool to get at the truth, though a modern observer may question (as did many early moderners) whether that truth was “true” or merely pain’s by-product. But defining truth as a collective production situated in a specific cultural-historical context demonstrates how and why confession was accepted as truth and “full proof.”¹²⁰ Graciana’s refusal to confess, to give the truth, resulted in a second torture session that broke both arms and crippled her. Graciana remained steadfast in her innocence and refused to confess despite the unfathomable pain she no doubt endured. Despite their lack of a confession, the magistrates found her guilty and sentenced her to one hundred lashings and five years’ banishment (later extended to ten after she returned to her village, described above). This trial demonstrates that sometimes, even when torture failed to yield a confession, a generous number of witnesses implicating a witch and extensive mala fama, combined with an adamant fiscal, could override its absence. And it reminds us of the devastation of a witchcraft denunciation.

Graciana Belza was the only accused witch whose judicial torture was documented outside of the chain trials of 1525 and 1575–76. During the latter, the royal court ordered torture in almost 50 percent of the cases (seven of sixteen trials total) but followed through in only three cases.¹²¹ While acknowledging the egregious physical and psychological effects torture no doubt brought upon the accused, it can be argued that while the fiscal ordered it with frequency, the court of Navarra did not rely heavily on orders of interrogative torture.

Death

The royal tribunals of Pamplona rarely actively sentenced witches to death, though many died in their prison. While surviving records suggest approximately thirty to fifty accused witches were executed in 1525 under the magistrate Pedro Balanza, without extant records from these trials it is not possible to examine how the death sentences were discussed, decided upon, and executed.¹²² What is most important to note is that it was an anomalous event, and such in situ executions were not repeated in the history of Navarra’s secular witch trials. Only three sentences of execution survive in the tribunals’ records, and only two were carried out: those of María Johan on October 25, and Miguel Zubiri on November 28, 1575. María Johan and Miguel were to be “taken through the main streets of this city and to the Campo de la Taconera of this city” where an erected stake awaited. They were to be hanged first, and their bodies burned in open flames until they “returned to ash.”¹²³ These executions impacted Navarra profoundly and set off a chain reaction of witch concerns and trials not seen in half a century. But despite these executions in 1525 and again in 1575, most of Navarra’s deceased witches did not perish by means of burning, but rather by the deadly prison conditions.

Prison conditions in early modern Navarra mirrored those throughout Europe as cold, dark, dank, and generally unsanitary spaces. Prison deaths occurred with frequency, as reflected by the fact that the majority of deaths of accused witches (setting aside the first witch persecution of 1525 and the single panic) occurred within the royal prisons’ walls. The first recorded prison death of an accused witch was that of Teresa de Ollo, a hidalga detained in the royal prisons on a witchcraft charge. Within two months of her arrival to the prisons in February 1576, she was dead.¹²⁴ Her speedy death reflects poor prison conditions while suggesting her privileged lifestyle rendered her ill-prepared for the cold dampness public jails offered. This suspicion is strengthened by the similar fate met by another hidalga, María Perez de Olalde, shortly thereafter. Weeks before Teresa’s death, eighty-year-old María was brought to the royal prisons on ambiguous charges of witchcraft emanating from a rival family. Her wealth afforded her an aggressive defense and allowed her the uncommon luxury of a medical examination by a doctor who visited her in the prison, declaring her to be in “mortal danger” and recommending her immediate release if she were to survive.¹²⁵ The council denied her freedom, and within the month María was dead.

The most disturbing string of prison deaths took the lives of nine accused witches from Inza in 1595. Seventeen villagers—ranging in age from nine to sixty—were transferred to the royal prisons in Pamplona. Within two months of their imprisonment, the prisoners complained of deplorable conditions in which they were starving to death. They petitioned the court for their release, explaining they were poor with no goods to support themselves, and begged for mercy, claiming “they are suffering with dire need, so great that they have had to pawn their coats and other garments in order to eat.”¹²⁶ It is not unheard of to find petitions from prisoners proclaiming their poverty, invoking the expression “they are dying of hunger,” but the notable language used to describe their intense deprivation, their pawning of their coats off their backs (thus their source of warmth), and their claims that the food rations were insufficient to sustain their lives stand out among all the recorded claims of poverty. By mid-March at least four accused witches had died, as evidenced within this petition for release: “what the fiscal gives them for food is not enough to sustain them, especially for the diseases that are present, and from which four of them have died and now three are in danger of dying.”¹²⁷ Their procurador concluded by begging for their release lest they perish in that prison.

Tragically, nine villagers perished due to the royal prison conditions in Pamplona, including nine-year-old María Johan Chorro and her sixteen-year-old sister. They were all women and girls, and all died “Christian” deaths according to their cellmates. In total, more than half of the accused witches from Inza died within the walls of Pamplona’s royal prison. These deaths, though not caused by a direct execution, illustrate that the business of crafting, persecuting, and prosecuting suspected witches yielded much tragedy and many deaths, mostly of women.

Navarra’s independent spirit and its unified, established, and powerful tribunals shaped its witchcraft and sorcery trials of the early modern period. Unlike less centralized legal systems found in some parts of early modern Europe, Navarra’s strong and structured courts prevented local alcaldes and territorial lords from prosecuting accused witches and sorceresses. The legal systems that guided witch trials in Navarra leaned heavily toward the reports given by villagers, not learned ideas of diabolism, while the presence of the Inquisition also provided a means of checks and balances at times. But patterns varied, and during times of chain trials or the witch panic, diabolism emerged as a focal point and the Inquisition proved to be inconsistently restrained. Even so, Navarra’s judicial processes relied on testimony that was attentive to fama and other localized concerns. Further, when the royal tribunals did actually follow through with an order for judicial torture, seeking accomplices was not a central part of the interrogation, thus keeping the net from widening too far, too often. Together, these factors helped shape a relatively restrained approach to witchcraft prosecution under the remarkable royal court and council of Navarra (1484–1841).

1. Martín de Arles y Andosilla, El tratado “De Superstitionibus” de Martin de Andosilla, trans. José Goñi Gaztambide (Gobierno de Navarra: Institution Principe de Viana, 1971), 276.

2. Fernando Bujanda, “Documentos para la historia de la diócesis de Calahorra: Constituciones o casos del obispo don Miguel,” Berceo 1 (1946): 121.

3. Bujanda, “Documentos para la historia,” 121.

4. I extend my gratitude to Félix Segura Urra, chief archivist at the AGN, for his generous assistance in pointing me to these special sources.

5. Félix Segura Urra, “Hechicería y brujería en la Navarra medieval: De la superstición al castigo,” in Akelarre: La caza de brujas en el Pirineo (siglos XIII–XIX), ed. Jesús María Usunáriz Garayoa, RIEV Cuadernos 9 (Donostia: Sociedad de Estudios Vascos, 2012), 287.

6. Segura Urra, “Hechicería y brujería en la Navarra medieval,” 288. This is also made clear in Ander Berrojalbiz, Sources from the Dawn of the Great Witch Hunt in Lower Navarra, 1370 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

7. AGN, Comptos, Reg. 43 (1314), fol. 168v.

8. AGN, Comptos, Reg. 25 (1329), fol. 244r.

9. Florencio Idoate Iragui, La Brujería en Navarra y sus Documentos (Pamplona: Institución Príncipe de Viana, 1978), 11.

10. AGN, Comptos, Reg. 26 (1330), fol. 214v. San Juan Pie de Puerto (Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port) was the old capital until the conquest by Castilla in 1512.

11. AGN, Comptos, Reg. 36 (1336), fol. 104r; Reg. 40 (1338), fol. 222r.

12. This quote appears as it was written in the archival source. AGN, Comptos, Reg. 47 (1342), fol. 231.

13. AGN, Comptos, Reg. 47 (1342), fol. 231.

14. Though executions for witchcraft occurred in 1525, those records do not survive, leaving the death sentences of 1575 as the only extant records of an execution in Navarra by the secular court. See AGN, TR_699853 (1575).

15. AGN, Comptos, Reg. 47 (1342), fol. 251r.

16. This does not mean that sorcery trials came to an end, however. For example, the 1370 sorcery trials of Pes de Guoythie and Condesse de Beheythie in Lower Navarra reveal for us sophisticated, developed notions of witchcraft that would later be reflected in early modern Basque trials. See Berrojalbiz, Sources from the Dawn of the Great Witch Hunt in Lower Navarra, 1370.

17. For an understanding of this shift from its “prehistory” to the early modern concept of witchcraft through the writings of Johannes Nider, see Michael Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

18. E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 89.

19. H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1582–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 9.

20. Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 49.

21. Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 171–73.

22. He distinguished between witchcraft and witch panics in his table of “aspects” toward a “dynamic theory of witchcraft.” Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614, Basque Series (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980), 391–92, table 15.

23. Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 391–92.

24. AGN, TR_209502 (1535), fol. 3r.

25. This is not always the case as will be seen in 1595. Fama was one of the five main tropes emerging in Navarra’s cauldron of witch beliefs.

26. AGN, TR_211115 (1561), fol. 22r. While Graciana was tried alongside another accused witch, María Lopez, only Graciana was pursued so harshly while María was fined and exiled for one year.

27. AGN, TR_148294 (1590), fol. 15r.

28. As Guido Ruggiero has shown in Binding Passion: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), the magical powers of women to bind men both in their fidelity and their (im)potence threatened patriarchal and church control.

29. AGN, TR_148294 (1590), fol. 20r.

30. AGN, TR_71319 (1595), unnumbered.

31. None of these sources appear in Idoate’s book, while two of them are mentioned in Jesús María Usunáriz Garayoa, “La caza de brujas en la Navarra moderna (siglos XVI–XVII),” in Usunáriz, Akelarre, 337. Given this, this section dedicates some details to the untreated sources.

32. I draw this data from Henningsen’s unpublished Supersticiones log given to me in 2012 and 2016. Recall that the category of Supersticiones encompassed healing, superstitious prayers, and other superstitions, and that the Logroño tribunal oversaw the three Basque provinces in addition to Navarra.

33. AGN, TR_16058 (1647), fol. 6v.

34. AGN, TR_59308 (1661), fol. 99v.

35. AGN, TR_299756 (1672), fol. 123r.

36. AGN, TR_17176 (1675), fol. 26v.

37. Idoate, La Brujería, 34. Since the records from the judge, Pedro Balanza, and his activities are scant, it is impossible to categorize this event with certainty. Relying on numerical data alone, the witchcraft prosecutions of 1525 could fall into the category of a “witch panic.” But given the absence of complete documentation it is most appropriate to label it a chain trial.

38. AGN, TR_63825 (1533), fol. 6r.

39. Idoate, La Brujería, 24.

40. Idoate, La Brujería, doc. 7.

41. Usunáriz, “La caza de brujas,” 311. Idoate offers higher estimates of 80 and 110 executions, Idoate, La Brujería, 40–41.

42. AGN, TR_63994 (1540), fols. 59r–60r.

43. As suggested by Usunáriz in “La caza de brujas,” 312.

44. The names of the accused appear in the auto de fé of 1540. The Inquisition ended up processing forty-nine accused witches, thirty of whom were children.

45. AGN, TR_69853 (1575).

46. AGN, TR_69853 (1575), fol. 94r

47. E. William Monter briefly mentions this “outbreak of witch hunting” in Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 268–69.

48. This phenomenon would later be astutely characterized by Alonso Salazar y Frías, an inquisitor involved in the witch panic, who remarked: “There were neither witches nor bewitched in a village until they were talked about and written about.” Henningsen, The Salazar Documents, 342.

49. Of the existing known secular witch trial records, 54 percent occurred from November 1575 until March 1576, at which time the Inquisition assumed jurisdiction.

50. See Levack, The Witch-Hunt, 171–75 for some general trends in larger accusations.

51. These towns were Oricáin, Ostiz, Burutáin, Etuláin, and Esáin, in the Valleys of Ezcabarte, Olaibar, and Anué.

52. AGN, TR_327213 (1576), fol. 1r.

53. AGN, TR_327213 (1576), fols. 78r–80v. Diabolical dimensions emerged as one of the five main tropes in Navarra’s cauldron of witch beliefs.

54. AGN, TR_327215 (1576), fol. 63r.

55. AGN, TR_327295 (1576), fol. 1r.

56. AGN, TR_98192 (1576), fols. 17r, 19r.

57. AGN, TR_11219 (1576), fols. 9v–10v.

58. AGN, TR_11219 (1576), fol. 9v.

59. AGN, TR_11219 (1576), fol. 10r–v.

60. AGN, TR_327744 (1576), fol. 1r.

61. AGN, TR_327744 (1576), fols. 166r–168r.

62. AGN, TR_294640 (1576), fol. 1r.

63. AGN, TR_294640 (1576), fol. 67r.

64. For example, in an inheritance dispute in 1537, a woman petitioned the court to aid in restitution of her possessions and presented the “rolde of her mother’s goods” (AGN, TR_197088). Some examples include a payment for a “rolde of wheat sacks” removed from the house of Jeronimo de Sarasa who died of plague (AGN, TR, 329815, 1600); a request for a payment of 458 ducados owed for the “rolde of cargo” delivered by Sancho from Pamplona (AGN, TR, 202345, 1638); and an inheritance sought from the “rolde and memorial of his parents’ goods” sought by a son (AGN, TR, 227747, 1656).

65. For a useful explanation and map, see Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 105, and chap. 4 more broadly. Also Levack, The Witch-Hunt, 69–81, and chap. 6.

66. Lu Ann Homza, Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 1–2.

67. Homza, Village Infernos, 40.

68. For English speakers, I suggest Lu Ann Homza’s Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates, which addresses the roles of parents, children, derelict notaries, and external influences in the witch panic and its resolution. See Henningsen’s The Witches Advocate for full accounts and detailed ethnographic data, and The Salazar Documents: Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías and Others on the Basque Witch Persecution (Leiden: Brill, 2004) for complete inquisitorial transcriptions. And for a provocative (though slimly cited) analysis, see the classic by Julio Caro Baroja, The World of the Witches, trans. O. N. V. Glendinning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). In Spanish, see Usunáriz’s edited volume, Akelarre. For an anthropological treatment of the panic, see Mikel Azurmendi’s Las brujas de Zugarramurdi: La historia del aquelarre y la Inquisición (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2013). Idoate offers useful analyses and transcriptions in La Brujería, 175–216, 372–420.

69. Canonist Francisco Peña said of the nature of the auto de fé: “the main purpose of the trial and the execution is not to save the soul of the accused but to achieve the public good and put fear into others.” From his Manual de los Inquisidores (1578), as cited in Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 174.

70. Homza, Village Infernos, 47.

71. AHN, Inq., Leg. 1679, Exp. 2.1, No. 2[a], fol. 16r.

72. Homza centers the roles of children, referring to the witch panic as “fundamentally a children’s event,” Village Infernos, 29–35, 120, 185–87. While Henningsen highlighted children as the central aspect of what he called the second “stage to the witch craze,” Homza has shown that children played central roles before the auto de fé of 1610. See Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 210–11, and Homza, Village Infernos, 30.

73. Henningsen, The Salazar Documents, 342.

74. Homza, Village Infernos, 21–23.

75. Homza, Village Infernos, 165–79.

76. For the new list of instructions, see Homza, Village Infernos, 175–80; Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 370–77.

77. Homza, Village Infernos, 40–41. See Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 181–93 for a full description of this event.

78. Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 193.

79. María Puy Huici Goñi, Las cortes de Navarra durante la edad moderna (Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 1963).

80. Jesús María Usunáriz Garayoa, “Las instituciones del reino de Navarra durante la Edad Moderna (1512–1808),” Revista Internacional Estudios Vascos 46, no. 2 (2001): 691.

81. Usunáriz, “Las instituciones del reino de Navarra,” 691–92.

82. Usunáriz, “Las instituciones del reino de Navarra,” 694.

83. This stands in contrast to the secular court in neighboring Aragon, who promulgated witchcraft laws in 1584 and 1586. In Saragossa, most trials of sorcery and witchcraft fell to the Inquisition. María Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain: Abracadabra Omnipotens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17.

84. These accused are distributed among the thirty-five procesos of witchcraft in the AGN on which this study focuses.

85. This stands in contrast to the noninquisitorial witch trials in Aragon that were treated by the episcopal court instead of the secular court. See Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain, 23.

86. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, “The Rise of Government and the Judicial Revolution,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials (London: Athlone Press, 2002), 68; John Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 131.

87. Ankarloo and Clark, “The Rise of Government,” 66.

88. Rita Voltmer, “The Witch in the Courtroom: Torture and the Representations of Emotion,” in Emotions in the History of Witchcraft, ed. Laura Kounine and Michael Ostling (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 99.

89. Children did participate as witnesses and, sometimes, as witchfinders (1525, 1595). However, from my research examining the testimonies from all the witnesses taken together, seldom did children hold a stand-alone role. For example, while it can be disconcerting to identify three child witnesses (aged eleven, twelve, and fourteen) who testified in the early trial of Fortuno and the deceased bulls in 1539, recall “that in all the town of Ochagavía it is published publicly among the neighbors that Fortuno Legaz is a witch” (AGN, TR_36180 (1539), 9r, 13r). It was not children’s testimonies alone, nor even mostly, that convicted Fortuno. The data shifts significantly, however, if we include the witch panic during which 1,384 children under the age of fourteen confessed to witchcraft. For an analysis of children and parental fear, see Homza, Village Infernos, 74–75, 102–4, 185–86.

90.Mala fama and vengeance are two of the main tropes that bubble forth in the cauldron of witch beliefs.

91. The prison began in 1308 as a tower-prison housed within the royal castle, though the judicial-penal space of the trials treated here was not constructed until 1541 where it remained in Pamplona’s center throughout the early modern period. This is the present-day Casco viejo or “old town” where the Archivo General de Navarra is situated on the original foundations of the royal castle. Pedro Oliver Olmo, Cárcel y Sociedad Represora: La criminalización del desorden en Navarra (siglos XVI–XIX) (Gipuzkoa: Universidad del País Vasco, 2001), 93.

92. AGN, TR_327744 (1576), fols. 21r–24v.

93. Oliver Olmo, Cárcel y Sociedad Represora, 123–24.

94. AGN, TR_333121 (1576), fol. 1r.

95. AGN, TR_69260 (1576), fol. 43r–v.

96. In response to this solid defense, the fiscal oddly introduced child witnesses and the vicar of Olagüe who introduced the witches’ gatherings to the accusations, including reverence to the devil. AGN, TR_69260 (1576), fols. 66–68r.

97. AGN, TR_69260 (1576), fol. 22r.

98. Torture was always recommended by the fiscal, even if it did not come to fruition. Thanks to a generous peer reviewer for clarifying this and to Jesús María Usunáriz Garayoa for clarifying this for me in a personal correspondence, September 26, 2023.

99. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 43.

100. Jason P. Coy, Strangers and Misfits: Banishment, Social Control, and Authority in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 126.

101. AGN, TR_11219 (1576), fols. 24r, 79r.

102. AGN, TR_11219 (1576), fol. 80r.

103. AGN, TR_17176 (1675), fol. 31r.

104. In his study of banishment in early modern Germany, Coy has shown the crucial role of expulsion rituals in establishing communal roles as well as the power (and limitations) of central authority. See Coy, Strangers and Misfits, 1–10.

105. AGN, TR_17176 (1675), unnumbered.

106. AGN, TR_211115 (1561), fol. 83r.

107. Penance was the most common sentence handed out by the Spanish Inquisition throughout its jurisdictions. Homza, Village Infernos, 17.

108. María Arguello is accused of sorcery in 1675, but unlike María Esparza accused along with her, she is absolved. AGN, TR_333121 (1675), fol. 79v.

109. AGN, TR_333121 (1675), fol. 75r+v.

110. Richard M. Frather, “Conviction According to Conscience: The Medieval Jurists’ Debate Concerning Judicial Discretion and the Law of Proof,” Law and History Review 7, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 23–88.

111. For more on confession in witchcraft trials, see Thomas Robisheaux, “‘The Queen of Evidence’: The Witchcraft Confession in the Age of Confessionalism,” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, ed. John M. Headley, Hans S. Hildebrand, and Anthony J. Papalas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

112. For a helpful discussion of torture, alongside other facets of Navarra’s criminal processes, see Daniel Sánchez Aguirreola, Salteadores y Picotas: Aproximación histórica al estudio de la justicia penal en la Navarra de la Edad Moderna el caso del bandolerismo (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2008), 125–35. For example, of the 269 highway assaults he examined, the fiscal asked for torture in forty of those cases, and followed through with seventeen (134).

113. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), 188. Monter, however, claims the Inquisition used torture in “slightly over one fourth of all prisoners charged with major heresies” while suggesting the rate of torture was lower for those charged with sorcery, Frontiers of Heresy, 74.

114. Within the surviving royal tribunals’ witch trial records, six documented judicial interrogations under torture survive, those for five women and one man.

115. AGN, TR_36180 (1539), fol. 67r. Italics mine.

116. Witchcraft’s status as a crimen exceptum not only relaxed laws regulating torture techniques, it simultaneously encouraged and intensified them. Levack, The Witch-Hunt, 78–80.

117. AGN, TR_36180 (1539), fol. 67r.

118. AGN, TR_211115 (1561), fol. 65r.

119. AGN, TR_211115 (1561), fols. 65r–66r.

120. And at the heart of the “truth” lies systems of belief. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4.

121. AGN, TR_69853 (1575); AGN, TR_327295 (1576). There is always the possibility, however, that records of judicial torture no longer exist, especially since the fiscal was always expected to advocate for the strictest approach, including torture. This may have been due to his duty to balance leniency with rigor, or perhaps, to play the Devil’s advocate. I extended my gratitude to one of the book’s peer reviewers for sharing these thoughts with me.

122. Idoate offers a full discussion of Balanza and these events in La Brujería, 23–67.AGN, 1525-Caja 113512, AP_Rena, Caja 94, N. 13.

123. AGN, TR_69853 (1575), fol. 117r.

124. AGN, TR_327744 (1576), fol. 166r.

125. AGN, TR_294640 (1576), fol. 65r.

126. AGN, TR_71319 (1595), fol. 108v.

127. AGN, TR_71319 (1595), fol. 111r.