This was the moment which changed the fate for this tiny, unknown, ‘village of elm trees’. He decided to send the so-called ‘witches’ of Zugarramurdi off on the over 100km trek to Logrono to ask for a formal pardon from the Spanish Inquisition itself. This may have been so had the Abbot from the Monastery of Urdax, intent on recognition, not had other ideas. The village priest, seeing that matters were getting out of hand, quickly and sensibly tried to put an end to it all by saying that, if people were prepared to come to church and confess to being witches, they would be pardoned and the case would lie to rest. Slowly people started to accuse each other of witchcraft: it was the witches who sent the storms, killed people, ruined harvests and had sexual relationships with the devil, who appeared to them in the form of a ram. Not only did she tell everyone that she had participated in Akelarres (witches’ Sabbaths) but she managed to convince the villagers that another woman from Zugarramurdi, Maria de Jureteguia, had participated in them as well. It came in the form of a young 20-year old girl returning to Zugarramurdi after several years away in France. The Witch Trials of the Spanish Inquisition The Spanish Inquisition, hungry to locate and expel infidels from Spain, needed very little encouragement!Īnd it came. This would frequently lead them to being considered cursed! For some it was but a small step to imagine that the place was filled with witches and pagan worshippers. Thirdly, and perhaps more tenuously, the Basques have a very high percentage of Rhesus Negative blood which caused many children to be stillborn. Secondly, in the 16 th century, villages such as Zugarramurdi were predominantly female with many of the men away for months at a time working on the whaling boats along the Basque coast. Firstly, it was common practice among the locals to make remedies, creams and brews from the wide variety of plants and mushrooms found in these mountains. Other elements can be added to the scene. However erroneous this may have been the image was one which would linger on throughout the centuries. This sudden contrast would only serve to reinforce Picaud’s image of the Basque people.
#Tiny witch figurines full#
They would have found misty, heavily-wooded terrain, dotted with isolated villages full of strange, rugged, distinctive-looking people of an alien cultural background and speaking with an odd, harsh-sounding language. Nevertheless it is easy to understand how pilgrims, crossing the Pyrenees for the first time from the southern French border in Labourd, would have been filled with fear.
#Tiny witch figurines code#
Please look at an article I wrote on the Basque Code of Honour for a more balanced view! (He even went on to say that the food was awful!).
In it Aymeric describes them as “fierce-faced men who terrorize people with their barbarian tongues”, going on to describe the Basque people as “full of evil, dark in complexion, of aberrant appearance, wicked, treacherous, disloyal and false”. However, there is a more interesting question: ‘why’ did this fate fall upon Zugarramurdi: a seemingly peaceful, Basque village of a few hundred people, tucked away in the misty borderlands of the Spanish/French Pyrenees?Īs early as 1140, Aymeric Picaud wrote the Codex Calixtinus, the first ‘tourist’ guide to the Camino de Santiago, and this gave the Basques of Navarra a pretty bad press.
#Tiny witch figurines series#
The series of events which led up to the witch trials of the Inquisition are well-cited (and explained below).
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