The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [39]
In 1609, four accused witches and an Euskera translator were taken from the village by the Inquisition. More and more villagers were arrested, and the confessions were spectacular. Jureteguía admitted to a childhood of witchcraft. She had guarded a flock of toads and was punished if she did not treat them with the utmost respect. Her aunt would sometimes reduce her to a minuscule size, enabling her to pass through tiny chinks in walls. Many admitted to passing through small holes. They described elaborate initiations in which they were presented with a well-dressed toad. They had sexual intercourse in a variety of ways with the devil and with each other, both heterosexually and homosexually, including with members of their own family, all supervised by the elderly Graciana Barrenechea. They also confessed to infanticide and vampirism, cannibalism, defiling of tombs, eating of corpses. One admitted poisoning her own grandchild.
They confessed to breaking every taboo of their society. Were they furiously inventing stories based on the gravest cultural prohibitions they could imagine? The confession rate was not high. In the 1610 trial, only nine out of twenty-one witches had confessed. By then, another thirteen had died in prison and six had already been burned. Those who did not confess were certain to be burned alive. The Inquisition handed out sentences at an elaborate public ritual known as an Auto de fe, an Act of Faith. Although the 1610 Auto de fe of Logroño is famous for its witches, eleven of whom were sentenced to burning, an additional twenty-five heretics were also sentenced, including six people found guilty of Judaism, one of Islam, one of Lutheranism, twelve of heretical utterances, and two of impersonating agents of the Inquisition.
Auto de fe only unleashed more accusations throughout northern Navarra and Guipúzcoa. Rural Basqueland seemed in the throes of a spreading witchcraft epidemic. In some towns, panicking villagers lynched women. By March 1611, the Inquisition had discovered that in little Zugarramurdi, the hill of elms, 158 people out of a total population of 390 were witches and another 124 were under suspicion. One-fifth of the population of the twin villages of Ituren and Zubieta were found to be witches. In all, 1,590 witches were discovered in Navarra, with another 1,300 under suspicion. In Guipúzcoa, 340 witches were found.
AT THE SAME TIME, Pierre De Lancre, the witch hunter of French Basqueland, suspected that the entire population of Labourd might be witches. A reign of terror, based in St.-Jean-de-Luz, began when an official in St. Pée complained to Henri IV of an increase in witches in the area. De Lancre, a fifty-six-year-old lawyer from Bordeaux, was asked to investigate. He said that he found “so many demons and evil spirits and so many witches within Labourd, that this little corner of France is the nursery.”
De Lancre had many theories on why the Basques were so afflicted. Part of their problem stemmed from Ignatius de Loyola and the traveling Jesuit missionaries. All that evangelizing in places like Japan and China had infected them with demons which they had carried back to Labourd.
Another source of difficulty unearthed by De Lancre was the side effects of tobacco. The Basques were the first Europeans to cultivate tobacco, and it seemed that this was rendering them a bit strange. “I feel, and it is certain, that it makes their breath and their bodies so foul smelling that the uninitiated cannot bear it and yet they use it three or four times a day,” De Lancre pointed out. This use of tobacco, he supposed, was affecting their reason.
He also expressed disdain for Basque women and said they produced undersized and cursed children who died. This last accusation may have had some truth, due to the Rh blood factor.
Who was this Basque hater from