Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain

Abracadabra Omnipotens

M. Tausiet

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137355874
• eBook ISBN: 9781137355881
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Drawing on the graphic and revealing evidence recorded by the different courts in early modern Saragossa, this book captures the spirit of an age when religious faith vied for people's hearts and minds with centuries-old beliefs in witchcraft and superstition.

1

The Judicial Backdrop: Saragossa and the Three Justice Systems

A number of citizens were recently appointed to see and ordain the statute which it appeared was necessary in order to deal with witches.¹

The city of Caesar Augusta was founded in around 14 BC by the emperor Augustus on the ruins of the ancient Iberian city of Salduie. Later dubbed ‘the most noble, most loyal, most heroic, ever heroic, most beneficent and immortal city of Saragossa’², it is today the very embodiment of uninterrupted historical continuity, having survived sieges, warfare and many another misadventure over the centuries. From its very foundation it was designed to be a special enclave, with an unmistakably colonizing mission. Its geographical position at the heart of the Ebro basin, where the Ebro itself meets the Gállego and the Huerva, with a fourth river (the Jalón) not far distant, made it the obvious local ‘capital’ of an extensive territory: the place to which all roads led. As a centre of, initially, Romanization, and then Christianization, it also became an innovative and pioneering cultural hub.³

Yet if one thing characterizes Saragossa’s cultural evolution, it is the city’s apparent capacity to absorb all incomers. The process of Romanization was still under way when the Christianizing of the capital and its outlying areas began; similarly, the Moors started to arrive there before the latter was complete. In neither case did the introduction of new beliefs result in the eradication of earlier ones: instead, new and old settled into a coexistence that may at first sight seem surprising, bearing in mind that Islam had been officially adopted throughout the greater part of Spain towards the end of the eighth century. Although Islamic control over the population of the Ebro basin did not become fully effective until the second half of the eleventh century – in other words, only shortly before the Christian reconquest of the area – four centuries of Muslim rule were to leave an indelible trace not only on the urban structure of Saragossa itself but also on its citizens’ mentality.⁴

After Saragossa had been reconquered in 1118 by Alfonso I (‘the Battler’), its Christian, Jewish and Muslim populations were obliged to share the space available. The city was therefore divided into three clearly differentiated areas: the Christian nucleus, which was essentially concentrated within the city walls; the Jewish quarter, which continued to occupy the same land it probably always had – the south-east quadrant of the original Roman settlement; and the Moorish quarter, which, in line with the conditions imposed by Alfonso, had to be located on the outskirts, beyond the city walls. This residential layout did not, however, mean an end to contact between the different religious groups: in fact Jews, Muslims and Christians were all free to move around the city at will, and their lives remained closely intertwined.⁵

It was the expulsion in 1492 of the Jews from the entire Iberian Peninsula by the Catholic monarchs Fernando of Aragon and Isabel of Castile that brought this situation to an end. Thereafter, however, not only were the Jews no longer tolerated (being obliged either to go into exile or to rapidly convert to Christianity, a course of events that soon led to the persecution of the judaizantes, those who continued to practise their former religion), but neither were the mudéjares – those Muslims who had carried on living peacefully in Saragossa, without converting, since the city’s Christian reconquest. Unlike the Jews, they were not officially expelled from Spain until 1610, but the pressure on the mudéjar population to abandon its beliefs and customs increased day by day once Granada had been reconquered in 1492. In November 1525, Charles V ordered the mudéjars of Aragon to embrace Christianity within the space of a month. From that date onwards, the new converts, known as moriscos, began to be watched and persecuted in Saragossa since, just as the Valencian moriscos were suspected of maintaining close relationships with Algeria and Constantinople, there was growing concern that the Aragonese moriscos might be in league with the Protestants of the French region of the Béarn, just the other side of the Pyrenees.⁶

The fifteenth century marked a turning point in Saragossa’s history as the ancient medieval city moved into the early modern age. Confrontations between the different socio-religious communities were on the rise and the sense of mutual suspicion was intensifying (fomented by the activities of the Inquisition, which will be discussed later in this chapter), at a time when the city was also experiencing major economic and demographic growth (the population is reckoned to have reached around 20,000 by 1495). Moreover, the new political concept of the State – increasingly understood as an authority moving beyond localism and tending instead towards centralization – proved attractive to what had hitherto been a predominantly rural nobility. From the late fifteenth century onwards, that nobility became urban, as families started to set up home in the Aragonese capital. With their arrival, the face of the city began to change: whereas at the end of the Middle Ages its streets had been narrow and twisting – the legacy of its Islamic past – by the turn of the sixteenth century they had become straighter, wider and more open, in order to accommodate the nobles’ grand new mansions and palaces, not to mention their fine four-wheeled carriages.⁷

To begin with, these new residences looked more like rural fortresses, reflecting a feudal mentality still based on ideas of self-sufficiency, localism and military strength. Over the course of the sixteenth century, however, Saragossa’s aristocracy built magnificent urban mansions in full Renaissance style. These, in conjunction with the sumptuous grandeur of the city’s new churches and monasteries, created a sense of monumentalism much admired by visitors,⁸ although a concentrated architectural heart – something that would have proved easier to conserve in years to come – was never really established, because the members of the wealthy elite with money to spend on mansions and palaces were dispersed across such a wide area. These agents of architectural change were in fact no more than a tiny but privileged social minority whose fortunes continued to be based on their ownership of vast rural estates, when land was still seen as the most precious of commodities. Even though some of Saragossa’s artisans and merchants were enjoying growing levels of prosperity, their wealth was not reflected in the construction of grand urban residences, because their chief aspiration remained that of acquiring land, and with it the social status that would put them on some kind of par with the nobility.⁹

This, then, was in some ways a modern city, but one that remained socially and economically anchored in the feudal past. Not only did merchants and artisans see the capital they accumulated from commerce end up being controlled by the nobility while they themselves were deprived of the security and prestige conferred by land ownership, they were also barred from all positions of municipal authority. Although this exclusion did not lead to popular uprisings in Saragossa as it did in Barcelona and Valencia at around the same time, there were constant calls for change via institutional routes.¹⁰

It is worth noting here that while Saragossa’s population included members of the two most privileged groups in Spanish society (the nobility and high clergy) and a number of merchants, artisans and liberal professionals, many of its inhabitants were still employed in agriculture. The boundaries between city and countryside were by no means clearly defined at this time and there existed a substantial mass of agricultural workers, most of them day labourers who had absolutely no chance of ever owning the land they worked. Therefore, even during times of greater economic prosperity there were high levels of structural poverty, leading to sporadic outbreaks of violent disorder which were soon suppressed by the authorities.¹¹

The city also had a considerable marginal and floating population of poor people – vagrants, gypsies, prostitutes, pimps, slaves, prisoners, beggars, patients housed in charitable institutions and so on.¹² Moreover, as the only major political and economic centre for miles around, Saragossa attracted a high number of immigrants, drawn to the city for many different reasons, some simply hoping to find work there, others on the run from the law elsewhere and seeking refuge in an atmosphere of urban anonymity which inspired many to change not only their place of residence but also their job, spouse, name and even personality.¹³ As we shall see, the vast majority of those brought to trial for magic-related activities in early modern Saragossa were members of this floating population and many were immigrants from two areas in particular: the Mediterranean coast and the region of southern France that adjoined the Kingdom of Aragon.

Magic as a means of resorting to the imaginary rather than to a reality filled with hardship and material want, its manifold enchantments, the wonders and marvels its practitioners hoped to work by carrying out prescribed rituals to the letter – all of this has to be placed within the broader context of the cult of the miraculous, a phenomenon given a new lease of life in the late sixteenth century by the Counter-Reformation Church.¹⁴ As far as many of the people of Saragossa were concerned, spells and prayers, saints and demons, ungodly sacrilege and fervent devotion were caught up in a tangle of beliefs that even the most experienced theologians found hard to unravel.

That sense of the miraculous as a part of everyday life was enhanced in this period by the mythologization of the city itself, as reflected in the publication of a growing number of treatises inspired in the main by two particular tales from Saragossa’s past. To its champions, this was not just an earthly paradise of boundless fertility, situated – like the Garden of Eden itself – at the confluence of four rivers, but also, and most importantly, a divinely favoured and indestructible city, ‘a most solid pillar of Spain’s faith’, ready to do battle with the ‘infernal dragon’ and its many wiles. Firstly, the Virgin Mary was said to have come there in person from Jerusalem in 40 AD, leaving as gifts a pillar and a statue of herself for a church to be constructed in her honour, the first in the world to be consecrated to the Marian cult. Secondly, the blood shed by the so-called ‘Innumerable martyrs’ (more numerous even than those of Rome, so legend had it), namely the Saragossa Christians killed by the Romans in 303 AD, had sanctified the underground city that housed their remains and was linked by a passageway to the chapel of Our Lady of the Pillar.¹⁵

Just as the demonic spirits invoked by the cast of characters we shall meet in the following pages as we journey through magical Saragossa were present in nocturnal conjurations, so it was supposed that the martyrs’ spirits continued to rise from their tombs at midnight to visit the miraculous sanctuary of the Basilica, as they had done in life. Confusion and ambiguity reigned as far as anything to do with the supernatural world was concerned. This being the case, and with a view to drawing a clear distinction between the licit and the reprehensible, a doctrine concerning those who followed the devil gradually took shape and became manifest not only in a series of theoretical treatises, but in a process of judicial persecution fought on various fronts.

From the late fifteenth century onwards, in Aragon, as in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula, there were three judicial institutions responsible for initiating legal proceedings against any kind of behaviour considered to be superstitious in nature: the secular, episcopal and inquisitorial courts.¹⁶ All three systems operated within Saragossa, and documentary evidence from each has survived. By far the greater part of the information we have relating to alleged witches, wizards and sorcerers in the city, however, comes from inquisitional sources. Why should this be? The reasons are manifold, and all have to do with the nature and objectives of the courts in question.

The secular courts, in theory controlled by the monarch, who was acknowledged to be the supreme authority throughout the Spanish territory, in practice constituted an utterly fragmented system. In the Kingdom of Aragon, the decision-makers were town councils (municipios) and local lordships (señoríos, administered by the nobility or the Church). To varying degrees, both formed independent, autonomous entities within the limits of their jurisdiction. While there was a supreme royal court (the Real Audiencia) directly subordinate to the monarchy, as well as the Justicia, the highest judicial figure in Aragon itself,¹⁷ most conflicts and cases were dealt with outside the auspices of these higher institutions. Landowners wielded what was essentially absolute power over their holdings, despotically governing and acting as judge and jury over their vassals. As for the local councils, although their decision-making capacity was more limited by the fueros (general laws of the kingdom), they controlled local matters in line with their own needs and interests and with almost complete freedom of manoeuvre.¹⁸ Proof of this can be seen in the various Estatutos de Desaforamiento (statutes suspending the fueros) that were approved in many Aragonese towns and villages over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so as to allow their councils to combat those crimes considered particularly serious.

The aim of these statutes was to free those who subscribed to the fueros from any obligation to respect them when it came to trying the most dangerous criminals, so that the latter could be sentenced quickly and effectively. Once desaforados (in other words, no longer bound by the fueros), judges could institute criminal prosecutions on their own initiative, without any other requirements, ‘[be] the party present or absent, [be it] a feast day or not, standing or seated, in the accustomed place or in an unaccustomed place, by day or by night, by any means’.¹⁹ Defendants might be subjected to brutal torture and have no recourse to any kind of defence lawyer. The freedom of action enjoyed by municipal judges went as far as allowing them to condemn to death criminals cited in the statutes without even bringing judicial proceedings against them (‘that summarily and without observing the usual solemnities […] they may proceed […] against those who have committed […] the said crimes […] even without calling a trial if they do not wish to do so’).²⁰

Only two very specific offences were considered grave enough to warrant such cruel and extreme measures: banditry and witchcraft, two crimes involving violence and destruction – one of which was real, the other imaginary – and which were perceived as in some way comparable to one another. Certainly both were a genuine source of affliction to those who were – or believed themselves to be – on their receiving end, and the threat of both was primarily felt in small and isolated pockets of population, often in remote, mountainous regions. Here, where brigands and highwaymen could most successfully ply their trade, was also where the most impassioned accusations of witchcraft were concentrated. Bearing in mind the kind of personal relationships typical of rural communities, whose members (often par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Note to the English Edition
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Abracadabra Omnipotens
• 1. The Judicial Backdrop: Saragossa and the Three Justice Systems
• 2. Magic Circles and Enchanted Treasures
• 3. Magic for Love or Subjugation
• 4. Saludadores and Witch-Finders
• 5. The City as Refuge
• 6. Rural versus Urban Magic
• Epilogue: In Times of Plague
• Notes
• Saragossa in the Early Modern Period: Locations of the Places Mentioned in the Text
• Tables
• Select Bibliography
• Index