Spanish Inquisition

The Spanish Inquisition appears in the novel as the authority behind the 1610 auto-da-fé at Logroño and as the setting for an inquiry into alleged witchcraft in the Baztán, the region of the core investigations and family search. Its remembered history is defined by a sharp contradiction: Salazar y Frías rejected the claim that satanism was present, yet his inquiry gathered thousands of denunciations and confessions from local residents.

Historical setting

The account places Salazar y Frías in the Baztán region after the 1610 auto-da-fé at Logroño, where many people had been killed. He then lived among the valley’s residents for more than a year. The novel recalls him as an unusually just inquisitor, but the violence that preceded his arrival forms the background to the fear surrounding his investigation.

Salazar y Frías’s inquiry

After living among the local population, Salazar y Frías returned to the tribunal and maintained that there was no satanic presence in the Baztán region. On that basis, he argued that no one should be condemned to death for satanism. His conclusion did not amount to a finding that nothing unusual had occurred: the account says he distinguished the reported practices from satanism, describing them instead as something else.

Denunciations and the limits of the record

The inquiry nevertheless produced more than three thousand denunciations and fifteen hundred confessions, described as voluntary, in which residents admitted participating in the practices in some way. The same recollection warns that denunciations and confessions were often generated by fear of reprisals during the witchcraft panic. It also insists that beneath this atmosphere of hysteria and paranoia lay some truth. The Inquisition’s remembered role is therefore neither a simple confirmation of satanic accusations nor a clean exoneration of the practices: the record holds fear, coercive historical circumstances, and admissions of participation in unresolved tension.