Like all authorized establishments, the Spanish Inquisition recognised that justice wanted not solely to be finished but additionally to be seen to be finished. Its public judgments have been solemn events, as befitted a non secular physique involved with the salvation of souls. An auto de fe, or ‘act of religion’, was, partially, a non secular procession, presumably designed to imitate the Final Judgement. Autos emphasised penance and reconciliation; many first offenders escaped dying by publicly confessing their crimes. This present of mercy was deliberately humiliating. Penitents have been compelled to put on sambenitos, particular clothes, which, upon completion of their sentences, can be hung within the parish church to remind them, their offspring and their communities of their crimes.
The current discovery of a misplaced ballad describing an auto de fe – a type of leisure that seems to be at odds with its solemnity – can be sufficient to make any auto de fe distinctive. However the two-day auto held within the small northern city of Logroño in November 1610 has at all times been thought-about exceptional. The 53 accused included the Inquisition’s standard targets: blasphemers, fornicators and a contingent of ‘Judaising Jews’, New Christians accused of returning to their ancestral religion. However the huge crowds, presumably as many as 30,000 individuals, weren’t all for them and the ballad pays them no consideration. Everybody was there for the 29 Basque witches who, it was mentioned, had dedicated unspeakable acts with the satan at their sabbats. Historians have lengthy recognized that the occasion resulted in two pamphlets; the existence of a ballad had been reported, but it surely had by no means been discovered.
The primary day of the auto – Sunday 7 November – was dedicated to the so-called negativos, those that had refused to admit their crimes, all six of them witches. Their sambenitos foreshadowed their grim destiny: particular caps coated with figures of devils and flames. They have been launched to the secular authorities and executed. 5 others who had died in jail have been represented by wax statues, accompanied by coffins of their bones – these would be a part of the dwelling on the pyre. Studying the sentences that detailed their horrifying crimes took till dusk.
The second day – Monday the eighth – deliberately ended on a extra uplifting notice. With the negativos actually out of the best way, the scene was set for a show of mercy for many who had confessed. The sentences of the ‘confessing’ witches have been as soon as extra so lengthy–stuffed, as one pamphlet put it, with ‘issues so horrendous and dreadful that had by no means been seen earlier than’ – that daylight was once more operating out and the inquisitors ordered that the final ones be shortened. With ears nonetheless ringing from two days’ value of depraved deeds and spiritual exhortation, the viewers returned residence, ‘crossing ourselves all of the whereas’.
For Logroño’s printer, Juan de Mongastón Fox, the auto de fe offered a useful industrial alternative. In early January 1611 he printed a pamphlet which described ‘the nice evils’ the witches had dedicated, warning ‘each Christian of the care with which they need to watch over their residence and household’. When this pamphlet fell into the palms of certainly one of Spain’s main humanist students, Pedro de Valencia, he was so outraged that he wrote to the nation’s inquisitor normal in protest. He predicted that the pamphlet would solely encourage ‘depraved little girls’ to fornicate and commit adultery as a result of each different sin would appear mere little one’s play in comparison with the crime of witchcraft.
Mongastón Fox, nonetheless, additionally noticed one other alternative, publishing a second account in ballad format. By March 1611 the Inquisition’s supreme council had obtained phrase of those ‘printed verses’ and ordered the Logroño tribunal to suppress them – not even the Inquisition anticipated a ballad. This official hostility could clarify why solely a single copy survives, held in the present day in Cambridge College Library, and maybe additionally why there have been apparently by no means another auto de fe ballads written. The thing’s fragility presents an additional motive. The pamphlet is simply 4 folios lengthy – like ballads throughout Europe, it was printed on a single sheet of low cost paper after which folded.
In some methods, this ballad is typical of the European tune of dying. A gap notice, as an illustration, indicated the favored tune to be adopted, however how this went, we sadly have no idea. Its 430 strains are octosyllabic, which was Spain’s nationwide meter. In different respects, it’s uncommon, notably for its stage of element. The writer was clearly paying consideration when the (now largely misplaced) sentences have been learn out. Some particulars underscore the distinctive nature of the Basque witch-hunt itself. The ballad versified concerning the satan having intercourse with feminine witches from the entrance and male ones from behind:
After the choices, the satan is aware of them effectively,
every witch from the entrance, as fact will inform
and each warlock by his again.
It additionally described the digging up of the our bodies of useless grownup witches, which the dwelling then cannibalised on the sabbat:
As for the witches who die
their flesh is devoured by their friends
their bones floor into ointments
powders, and sinister brews.
Whereas the prolonged information pamphlets have been geared toward a narrower, educated viewers, the ballad exhibits that even probably the most solemn of public occasions couldn’t keep away from being entertaining. Certainly, by the 18th century autos have been likened to bullfighting.
Nonetheless, the truth that individuals have been executed for these crimes additionally made them appear extra actual. These verdicts and the ballad’s sensational descriptions mixed to generate concern and horror. Historians Gustav Henningsen and Lu Ann Homza have each proven how quickly the witchcraft panic unfold in Logroño’s wake; the ballad’s suppression was the Inquisition’s try and reassert management in response to this.
The ballad, then, underscores the sensational, multimedia nature of the Logroño auto de fe, which laid naked a nightmarish netherworld of witchcraft to a large viewers. As a musical efficiency and as an simply memorised textual content, it could have contributed to spreading the phrase, and the panic, greater than another report of the occasion.
Jan Machielsen is the writer, most lately, of The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret Historical past (Bloomsbury Educational, 2024).
