Spanish Inquisition

The Spanish Inquisition is the historical religious tribunal against which the novel sets the Baztán Valley’s memories of persecution, exclusion, and suspected witchcraft. Its significance is double: the institution appears as an agent of religious pressure, yet an inquisitor’s investigation also produces a striking refusal to confirm the supernatural accusations gathered around the valley.

Persecution and the Agotes

The novel recounts several competing theories about the Agotes’ medieval origins. They may have arrived in Navarra across the Pyrenees while fleeing war, famine, plague, and religious persecution; one widely supported theory identifies them as Cathars pursued by the Spanish Inquisition. Other accounts describe them as deserters who contracted leprosy in southern French lazarets, or as a mixture of outcasts brought to serve a local feudal lord. The accounts remain possibilities rather than a settled origin story.

Whatever their beginnings, the Agotes lived for centuries in Bozate without being permitted to join wider society. They were restricted from living elsewhere, running businesses, or marrying outside their group, and were directed toward woodworking and leatherworking, trades regarded as unhealthy. Their clothing had to bear an identifying mark, and they could be required to ring a bell to announce their presence. The novel connects this social exclusion to religious discrimination: although the Agotes were Christians who observed Catholic rites, they were treated as outsiders by the Church.

Religious Exclusion and Its Legacy

The restrictions extended into church practice. The Agotes had a separate baptismal font, and holy water used for them was discarded. They could be kept from the altar, confined to the rear of the nave, and directed through a smaller, separate entrance. In Arizkun, a grille divided them from other worshippers. Its later removal is described as a rejection of treatment that still caused deep shame among local residents. The novel thus presents religious exclusion not only as a medieval policy but as a legacy that remained painful in the present.

This history supplies context for contemporary desecrations at the church in Arizkun, but the evidence does not establish that the Spanish Inquisition directly caused those acts. Instead, Amaia considers the old religious divisions alongside the valley’s history of hardship, witchcraft accusations, and inquisitorial investigations. The distinction matters: historical persecution helps explain the charged meanings attached to local religious spaces without, by itself, identifying the modern perpetrators or their motives.

Witchcraft Investigations in the Valley

The novel recalls an inquisitor who spent a year traveling through the Baztán Valley and living among its people to investigate whether anything demonic was present there. More than a thousand people gave voluntary confessions of witchcraft, and neighbors made another three thousand accusations of harmful practices. The number and circumstances of these statements reveal how extensively fear and suspicion had entered local life; the account specifically emphasizes that the confessions were obtained without pressure or torture.

After returning to report to the Spanish Inquisition, the inquisitor concluded that he had found no evidence that there were witches in the valley. He did not dismiss the strange reports as ordinary, however: he described what occurred there as having a different nature. Amaia interprets this conclusion in light of the region’s history, while the novel leaves the boundary between supernatural possibility and human belief unsettled. The inquisitor’s account therefore complicates the institution’s role: the Spanish Inquisition is associated with persecution, yet this particular investigation also records a judgment that resists a simple accusation of witchcraft.