The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [40]
Anyone found engaged in folk healing, divination, or other traditional practices, especially if it was a woman, was a candidate for burning. Like the Tribunal of Logroño, De Lancre believed that the devil marked the body of initiates. All he had to do was find the mark. A blood spot on the eye was the mark of the devil. But most marks were not this visible. Hundreds of men, women, and children were rounded up. The accused could confess and be spared the painful and humiliating inspection before being burned alive. Those who did not confess were completely shaved. The body was then pricked inch by inch until a spot was found that yielded no blood. To make sure, such a spot would be stuck deeper, but if no blood came forth, the mark had been found. Then, they too would be burned alive.
THE OFFICIALS OF the Spanish Inquisition came to understand that they were creating hysteria, that the more witches they burned, the more witches would be denounced. So they became more secretive and eventually even banned the burning of witches. The inquisitors went about their business, flushing out Lutherans, Jews, and Muslims, and even found a witch or two around Spain into the nineteenth century.
On the French side, as often happens with witch hunts, De Lancre’s terror seemed unstoppable until someone had the courage to denounce it, and then it quickly disintegrated. Jesuits and tobacco merchants weren’t the only Basques traveling the world. There were also the fleets that hunted whale and fished cod in Newfoundland.
When the St-Jean-de-Luz cod fleet, one of the largest, heard rumors of their wives, mothers, and daughters stripped, stabbed, and many already executed, the 1609 cod campaign was ended two months early. The fishermen returned, clubs in hand, and liberated a convoy of witches being taken to the burning place.
This one popular resistance was all it took to stop the trials. Some French historians have estimated that 600 accused witches had been burned. A Spanish commission studying the De Lancre trials reported only 80 burned, which may be conservative, but the exact number will probably never be known.
De Lancre retreated to Bayonne, where he began condemning Basque priests. He was soon recalled by the French crown to Bordeaux, where he died of natural causes, his reputation intact, at the age of sixty-eight, in 1631. In 1672, a royal edict banned witch trials in France. But even into the twentieth century some rural Basques continued to believe that a blood spot on the eye is the mark of the devil and that prayer books left open in church will let witches into the community.
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6: The Wealth of Non-Nations
To be a true Basque, three things are required: to have a name which bespeaks Basque origin, to speak the language of the descendants of Aïtor, and to have an uncle in America.
—Pierre Lhande-Heguy, first secretary of the
Basque Academy of Language, BASQUE IMMIGRATION , 1910
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EVEN IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, the rural Basques, isolated in mountain villages such as Zugarramurdi and Ituren, were not the mainstream of the Basque population. While most Europeans were focused on their region, their country, their crown, the successful Basque was a man of the world. He was interested in Africa and Asia and especially passionate about the lands Basques called Amerika. Like the character in the Pío Baroja witchcraft novella, an ambitious man could improve his station in life by going to Amerika and returning with, if not wealth, at least experience. Amerikanuak, Basques who returned