Did the Spanish Inquisition Burn Witches? Three Courts Compared

Yes, but not often. The Spanish Inquisition burned six people for witchcraft at Logroño in November 1610, and five more were burned in effigy after dying in prison. Then its governing council reviewed its own tribunal and, in 1614, issued rules that made further burnings practically impossible. Much of the killing around the Pyrenees was done by secular courts.

That answer surprises people because the Inquisition is the first institution most of us name when we hear "witch trial." The better test is to put three courts side by side, working within about a decade of each other around the same mountain range: a royal commission in France, an Inquisition tribunal in Spain, and the local courts of Catalonia.

The Labourd, 1609: a royal commission

In the summer of 1609, two judges from the Parlement of Bordeaux, Pierre de Lancre and Jean d'Espaignet, rode into the Labourd, a Basque-speaking territory on the French side of the border. They carried a royal commission, issued after a petition from inside the Labourd itself. According to Thibaut Maus de Rolley and Jan Machielsen, it was perhaps the only witch hunt in France to end in mass executions, and certainly the only one the central authorities sanctioned, at least at the outset.

How many people died is still uncertain. For centuries the standard figure was 600. Maus de Rolley and Machielsen trace it to a misreading of de Lancre's own preface, which mentions sixty or eighty witches and five hundred witnesses. Add the two numbers and the old total appears. The witnesses, mostly children and teenagers, apparently were not punished. The current estimate runs as high as eighty executions, possibly more if we look beyond the 1609 commission.

The fear had already crossed the border. In December 1608, a young woman named María de Ximildegui came home to Zugarramurdi, in Navarre, after working in the Labourd, and told her neighbors she had belonged to a coven there. Within weeks the case reached the Inquisition tribunal at Logroño. Spanish inquisitors later blamed de Lancre's commission for the panic on their side of the line.

Logroño, 1610 to 1614: the Inquisition burns, then audits itself

At an auto de fe in November 1610, the Logroño tribunal sentenced thirty-one people. Eleven were condemned to the stake for refusing to confess and repent, though five of them had died in prison and were burned in effigy. The other twenty confessed and received penances, as historian Lu Ann Homza reconstructs it. So the Inquisition did burn witches. That autumn, it burned six.

What happened next is the part the legend skips. The Suprema, the Inquisition's governing council in Madrid, sent the tribunal's most junior inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías, back into the countryside. He left on May 22, 1611, and did not return until January 10, 1612. By Homza's count he resolved 1,802 cases, absolving 1,384 children as a precaution and reconciling 290 people. In a report dated March 24, 1612, he argued that the tribunal lacked enough proof to try current or future suspects. The statements contradicted one another, physical evidence was nearly absent, and he had learned how bribery, coercion, and even torture had produced confessions. The two senior inquisitors in Logroño were outraged, and the quarrel ran for a year and a half.

In 1614 the Suprema issued new instructions. They stressed the difference between reality and illusion, discouraged forced confessions, and allowed witchcraft admissions to be revoked. They also lifted the sentences from the 1610 auto de fe and went to every tribunal in Spain's territories. Scholars have long concluded that the Spanish Inquisition basically never prosecuted witches again.

The restraint was not one man's achievement, and it was not entirely new. Homza, working in Navarrese archives that earlier researchers had not used, found that Salazar was not the only advocate for the accused. Inquisitorial, secular, and church officials collaborated to correct abuses, and the Logroño tribunal itself was fractious and badly managed. The Suprema had also been cautious before. In 1609 it sent Logroño a questionnaire meant to test whether witches' gatherings were real or imagined. According to the historian Doris Moreno Martínez, citing Gustav Henningsen, that questionnaire dated from Barcelona in 1548, after an episode far less flattering to the Inquisition. The Suprema had ordered that no sentence be carried out without consulting Madrid. The Barcelona tribunal went ahead anyway and, in January 1549, burned five women and one in effigy. The inspector sent to review the case, Francisco Vaca, concluded that six innocent women had been condemned on little more than their own confessions.

Catalonia: courts that few people checked

The third court comes a few years later and farther east. In February 1620, in the Catalan village of Castellterçol, a fifty-year-old widow named Elisabet Cerdà was asked why she had been arrested. Because some people call her a witch, she answered, and that was a lie. A few days later, under threat of torture, she admitted every charge. She was sentenced to the gallows, according to the trial minutes reported by Catalan News.

Pau Castell's 2013 doctoral thesis at the University of Barcelona points to the structure around cases like hers. Catalan local authorities enjoyed strong autonomy, and neither the Inquisition nor royal justice supervised them closely. In his reading the persecution rose from below, as communities pressed local courts to act on accusations of harm. His thesis covers mainly the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the later cases reported from the 1610s and 1620s are consistent with it. In the village of Sant Feliu Sasserra, Smithsonian Magazine reports, 23 women were prosecuted between 1618 and 1648, and six were hanged. The same article says the Inquisition and the Spanish crown extended their power into the countryside and largely ended the Catalan persecutions in 1622, though trials continued sporadically in remote areas.

The totals depend on what is counted. Smithsonian gives more than 700 people condemned over three centuries starting in 1424. Catalan News reports more than a thousand prosecuted and sentenced between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. These are long-run figures, not a count for any single hunt.

What separated the three courts

If we line up the three, the pattern has less to do with belief than with procedure. The Labourd commission leaned on the testimony of children and teenagers and finished in a matter of months. At Logroño, a council in Madrid eventually demanded proof that did not come from the accused and rewrote the rules for every tribunal beneath it. In Catalonia, local judges answered to few people above them until the Inquisition and the crown stepped in.

Oversight alone did not guarantee restraint. The Labourd commission carried the king's authority, and the Barcelona tribunal ignored an order to consult Madrid in 1549. What seems to have mattered is whether someone with power was willing to ask for evidence that did not come from the accused's own mouth.

That leaves both popular pictures short of the record. The Inquisition as a witch-burning machine does not fit Logroño, where the institution audited itself. The Inquisition as the witches' protector fits no better: it burned six people there and women in Barcelona sixty years earlier, and its reforms came after the fire, not before. The same test applies to other familiar stories, and our World History shelf runs it across subjects from Rome's arena to Franco's Spain.

The Labourd, Logroño, and Catalonia are one small slice of a pattern that stretches across Europe. In Witch Hunts: 15 Myths Debunked, we follow it court by court, from the Labourd commission and Salazar's investigation to the secular courts of a Catholic bishop in Würzburg and the assize courts of Essex, and ask why the same belief produced a massacre in one town and an acquittal in the next.