Basque History of the World (14 page)

They confessed to breaking every taboo of their society. Were they furiously inventing stories based on the gravest cultural prohibitions they could imagine? The confession rate was not high. In the 1610 trial, only nine out of twenty-one witches had confessed. By then, another thirteen had died in prison and six had already been burned. Those who did not confess were certain to be burned alive. The Inquisition handed out sentences at an elaborate public ritual known as an Auto de fe, an Act of Faith. Although the 1610 Auto de fe of Logroño is famous for its witches, eleven of whom were sentenced to burning, an additional twenty-five heretics were also sentenced, including six people found guilty of Judaism, one of Islam, one of Lutheranism, twelve of heretical utterances, and two of impersonating agents of the Inquisition.

Auto de fe only unleashed more accusations throughout northern Navarra and Guipúzcoa. Rural Basqueland seemed in the throes of a spreading witchcraft epidemic. In some towns, panicking villagers lynched women. By March 1611, the Inquisition had discovered that in little Zugarramurdi, the hill of elms, 158 people out of a total population of 390 were witches and another 124 were under suspicion. One-fifth of the population of the twin villages of Ituren and Zubieta were found to be witches. In all, 1,590 witches were discovered in Navarra, with another 1,300 under suspicion. In Guipúzcoa, 340 witches were found.

A
T THE SAME TIME
, Pierre De Lancre, the witch hunter of French Basqueland, suspected that the entire population of Labourd might be witches. A reign of terror, based in St.-Jean-de-Luz, began when an official in St. Pée complained to Henri IV of an increase in witches in the area. De Lancre, a fifty-six-year-old lawyer from Bordeaux, was asked to investigate. He said that he found “so many demons and evil spirits and so many witches within Labourd, that this little corner of France is the nursery.”

De Lancre had many theories on why the Basques were so afflicted. Part of their problem stemmed from Ignatius de Loyola and the traveling Jesuit missionaries. All that evangelizing in places like Japan and China had infected them with demons which they had carried back to Labourd.

Another source of difficulty unearthed by De Lancre was the side effects of tobacco. The Basques were the first Europeans to cultivate tobacco, and it seemed that this was rendering them a bit strange. “I feel, and it is certain, that it makes their breath and their bodies so foul smelling that the uninitiated cannot bear it and yet they use it three or four times a day,” De Lancre pointed out. This use of tobacco, he supposed, was affecting their reason.

He also expressed disdain for Basque women and said they produced undersized and cursed children who died. This last accusation may have had some truth, due to the Rh blood factor.

Who was this Basque hater from Bordeaux who wanted to execute Basques by the hundreds? Before his father had earned a title, the family name had been Rostéguy, a Basque name, probably originally Errotegui, meaning “the place with the mill.” His family had migrated to Bordeaux a century earlier and become aristocratic Frenchmen. De Lancre despised what he regarded as the backward superstitions of the Basques, their myths and folk remedies. But he seemed to truly believe in a physically manifest devil, who, he even claimed, visited his apartment one night.

Anyone found engaged in folk healing, divination, or other traditional practices, especially if it was a woman, was a candidate for burning. Like the Tribunal of Logroño, De Lancre believed that the devil marked the body of initiates. All he had to do was find the mark. A blood spot on the eye was the mark of the devil. But most marks were not this visible. Hundreds of men, women, and children were rounded up. The accused could confess and be spared the painful and humiliating inspection before being burned alive. Those who did not confess were completely shaved. The body was then pricked inch by inch until a spot was found that yielded no blood. To make sure, such a spot would be stuck deeper, but if no blood came forth, the mark had been found. Then, they too would be burned alive.

T
HE OFFICIALS OF
the Spanish Inquisition came to understand that they were creating hysteria, that the more witches they burned, the more witches would be denounced. So they became more secretive and eventually even banned the burning of witches. The inquisitors went about their business, flushing out Lutherans, Jews, and Muslims, and even found a witch or two around Spain into the nineteenth century.

On the French side, as often happens with witch hunts, De Lancre’s terror seemed unstoppable until someone had the courage to denounce it, and then it quickly disintegrated. Jesuits and tobacco merchants weren’t the only Basques traveling the world. There were also the fleets that hunted whale and fished cod in Newfoundland.

When the St-Jean-de-Luz cod fleet, one of the largest, heard rumors of their wives, mothers, and daughters stripped, stabbed, and many already executed, the 1609 cod campaign was ended two months early. The fishermen returned, clubs in hand, and liberated a convoy of witches being taken to the burning place.

This one popular resistance was all it took to stop the trials. Some French historians have estimated that 600 accused witches had been burned. A Spanish commission studying the De Lancre trials reported only 80 burned, which may be conservative, but the exact number will probably never be known.

De Lancre retreated to Bayonne, where he began condemning Basque priests. He was soon recalled by the French crown to Bordeaux, where he died of natural causes, his reputation intact, at the age of sixty-eight, in 1631. In 1672, a royal edict banned witch trials in France. But even into the twentieth century some rural Basques continued to believe that a blood spot on the eye is the mark of the devil and that prayer books left open in church will let witches into the community.

6: The Wealth of Non-Nations

To be a true Basque, three things are required: to have a name which bespeaks Basque origin, to speak the language of the descendants of Aïtor, and to have an uncle in America.

—Pierre Lhande-Heguy, first secretary of the
Basque Academy of Language,
B
ASQUE
I
MMIGRATION
, 1910

E
VEN IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
, the rural Basques, isolated in mountain villages such as Zugarramurdi and Ituren, were not the mainstream of the Basque population. While most Europeans were focused on their region, their country, their crown, the successful Basque was a man of the world. He was interested in Africa and Asia and especially passionate about the lands Basques called Amerika. Like the character in the Pío Baroja witchcraft novella, an ambitious man could improve his station in life by going to Amerika and returning with, if not wealth, at least experience.
Amerikanuak
, Basques who returned from the Americas, were people worthy of respect in the community. This is a recurring theme in Basque literature, especially among the early twentieth-century Basque writers, who tried to reassess Spain after it lost its empire. In Miguel de Unamuno’s short story, “Every Inch a Man,” a special masculinity is ascribed to the lead character because he had made a fortune in America.

Amerikanuak bezain
, good, like an American, is an Euskera expression meaning “generous.”
Ez gira Amerikanuak
, you’re no American, is a way of calling someone cheap. In both expressions, the Americans referred to are
Amerikanuak
.

A people are shaped by their land, and the mountains of Basqueland, the green slopes that no one else would fight as hard for, could not support a population. Despite a lush appearance, the land is not fertile, and Basques always needed to look beyond Basqueland for food. It had been this special need for imports that had induced Castilian kings to exclude the Basques from the Spanish customs zone. Goods that landed in Basque ports paid no Spanish customs. If the goods were bound for Spain, they were taken through Alava to Miranda de Ebro, a river town, to enter the Spanish zone and pay duties. But goods could also be landed in a Basque port and reshipped to Europe without entering the Spanish customs zone.

Both the need for food and the customs arrangement were incentives to trade. The Basques bought Castilian wool and sold it to the rest of Europe, where it was a highly prized commodity. By the fifteenth century, Basques were producing and supplying one-third of Europe’s iron from Vizcaya’s huge deposits. They also produced swords, musket barrels, and ship’s anchors. Using the Euskera name for Bilbao, Shakespeare referred to “Bilbo swords.”

Long accustomed to looking abroad, the Basques were among the first Europeans to realize that the unique products of the new American lands could become as valuable as the silk and spices of Asia. Not only did Basques trade new American products, but they were also open to using them. From rubber balls to tobacco, the Basques pioneered American products in Europe.

T
HE CHILI PEPPER
was easy for Europeans to understand. In a sense, it was what Columbus had gone looking for, a spice. Exotic spices were already one of the most lucrative trades in the world. Columbus must have immediately recognized that hot peppers were valuable because he named them after the already high priced black pepper,
pimienta
. The new spice was called
pimiento
—masculine pepper, like black pepper but stronger. “
Mejor que pimienta nuestra
,” Better than our pepper, he reported.

The chili pepper was sold by Basques, Spaniards, and Portuguese to Africa, the Middle East, the Asian subcontinent, and the Far East. Its trading value soon declined because the plant was easily cultivated in these climates. Most Europeans ate only the mild sweet peppers. Basques were the only Europeans to have adopted a taste for hot peppers directly from America.

Guindilla peppers, grown in the Spanish Basque provinces, are pickled green or chopped into food when dried and red. Espelette, a whitewashed town next to St. Pée, is famous for its peppers. The small thin ones and the slightly hotter larger ones grow green but turn bright red in September, when they are harvested. The peppers are then strung through their stems and hung from the southern side of houses to dry, the lines of peppers echoing the traditional red trim of the white buildings. These peppers are used in the local sausage and many other dishes to give a subtle heat, nothing comparable to the fire of Caribbean or Mexican food, but the hottest burn of any cuisine in France. On the last Sunday in October, worshipers in Espelette are given a blessing and a string of dried peppers at Mass.

The following recipe is from Itxassou, the town next to Espelette that is famous for its cherries. The sauce is served by Jean Paul Bonnet at the Hotel du Fronton over skewers of grilled duck hearts.

ESPELETTE PEPPERS AND DUCK HEARTS

Brown shallots in duck fat, add 2 powdered Espelette peppers, and reduce to a sauce with créme fraîche for 8 minutes. I cannot say how much pepper powder. In Epelette every bunch of peppers is different depending on where it is grown and the weather. You have to taste it and decide. If the peppers are too strong, add a pinch of sugar.

The European distaste for burning-hot pepper is in perfect balance with nature because hot American peppers when grown in Europe give off little heat. The burning taste comes from a substance called capsaicin, whose burn increases when the pepper is grown in strong sunlight. Capsaicin is a failed chemical defense for plants. Most animals won’t eat plants that contain capsaicin, but many non-European humans are not deterred. The large red choricero, so called because it is used in chorizo sausage, has little heat when grown in Vizcaya on the wet fields near Guernica. When picked young and green, it is called a Guernica pepper. The same Guernica or choricero peppers, grown in the much sunnier Rioja, will begin to take on the sting of a chili. If Basqueland were sunnier, the Basques wouldn’t like their peppers. The great mid-twentieth-century Guipúzcoan chef and food writer José María Busca Isusi wrote of hot peppers, “This sting, if it is strong is bad, but when mild is very digestible and even aids digestion.”

In 1930 the Azcaray y Eguileor family published a book that promised to reveal the secrets of their Bilbao restaurant, El Amparo. It offered two suggestions for pimientos de Guernica, which have long been the popular ways of serving these peppers in Vizcaya.