Lore 243: Surprise

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Competition, as they often say, is good for business.

It can inspire a company to improve its products or lower their prices or even break into new product categories.

Competition helps both sides grow.

At least, that's what the experts say.

All I know is that it can often give us some very entertaining battle of the brands.

And at the risk of dating myself, I have to tip my hat to my personal favorite product showdown, the Cola Wars.

The first shots were fired in 1975 when Pepsi started their Pepsi challenge involving blind taste tests that showed that a lot of people actually preferred their soda over Coca-Cola's classic recipe.

And the results frightened Coke into some pretty bold decisions.

First, it was Diet Coke, then caffeine-free Coke.

But nothing beats the mess they made in 1985 when they ditched a classic and introduced new Coke.

How bad did it go over?

In a massive game of chicken with their loyal customers, it took Coca-Cola less than three months to flinch and bring the old recipe back.

Thankfully, the only real thing at stake in the whole situation was money.

But looking back at history, there have been moments when the competition was literally a matter of life or death.

If not in this world, then at least in the next.

How far were people willing to go to win over as many people as possible?

Well, if one tale from Europe is any indication, they were willing to kill for it.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Conflict is a breeding ground for folklore.

It always has been.

In the same way that a dry woodland is a forest fire waiting to happen, when people take sides and fear and hatred grow, folklore is just around the corner.

Take witchcraft as an example, since just about everyone has heard of it.

In most places in Europe, witchcraft was ignored for centuries.

The Catholic Church even refused to acknowledge that it even existed.

But then, people started taking sides during the Reformation in the early 1500s.

And like the Cola Wars of the 1980s, all of a sudden there were two competing brands in town, not one.

The witch trials that came out of that change could be seen as a sort of marketing war.

Witches are totally real, they would tell people.

They're dangerous and evil, and only my side can save you.

Belief in and fear of witchcraft became a tool in the hands of religious leaders to leverage public opinion in their own favor.

But not always, because there are always exceptions, right?

And one big exception can be found in Spain.

That part of Europe had originally been conquered by the Romans.

And if you remember your ancient history, it was right at the tail end of their empire that Rome converted to Christianity.

So when their rule of Europe collapsed, they left a patchwork of Christian and pagan communities scattered all over.

Then in the year 711, the Muslim Moors invaded from North Africa, disrupting the status quo.

11 years later, the people of Spain began to take back their land in a period known to historians as the Reconquista.

But it wasn't a quick victory.

Instead, it took almost 800 years thanks to the complications of having so many competing religious groups in one place.

Muslims, Christians, and even Jews all battling for a place to live.

In 1492, the Reconquista was considered over, and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella set about unifying their kingdom.

And since their common enemy, the Muslims, had been defeated, they needed a new boogeyman.

Because remember, fear and infighting keeps people focused on each other rather than challenging the leaders at the top.

So they aimed the spotlight on non-Christian communities.

Over the coming years, more and more restrictions would be implemented, forcing Jews and the remaining Muslims to either convert to Christianity or be forcibly expelled from the country.

But the fear was that these new converts were really still practicing their true faith in private.

So Ferdinand and Isabella kicked off something that would sound familiar to any fan of Monty Python, the Spanish Inquisition.

But if you weren't expecting that, don't worry, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Their chief weapon, after all, was surprise.

Well, and fear.

Fear of God, fear of the church, fear of the powers of the crown that guided the hand of the Inquisitors.

So naturally, people became very, very afraid, especially when the list of crimes they were looking for were all things that were easy to make up or misinterpret.

Blasphemy, Freemasonry, bigamy, and of course, witchcraft.

But there's one other catch.

You see, the Spanish Inquisition didn't answer to the Pope way over in Rome.

It was run by a group in Spain called the Tribunal of the Holy Office, set up by the king and queen, not the Vatican.

And the way it operated was highly authoritarian.

Any case that was considered under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition could be taken over at any moment by members of the tribunal.

In theory, this meant that local authorities wouldn't have the power to engage in those marketing battles to stir up local communities into hotbeds of fear.

It centralized the power and punishment and put every decision in the hands of trained professionals.

Sure, a lot of these accusations would be investigated locally, but at some point the tribunal would find out and their representatives would swoop in and take over.

It was a system that was designed to prevent local fear and those wildfire witchcraft panics that would come in the decades to follow.

The sort of trials that you know all too well from stories we've covered here.

And that's good, right?

We want to avoid those tragedies whenever we can.

But for the people in the Basque village of Zugaramundi, that safety net wasn't enough.

In fact, it was the very people tasked with protecting them that led to a horrific surprise.

Maria de Chemill Degui had been away for just three years, but she returned a little different from how she left.

She'd spent that time in a French city just a little bit north of the Spanish border, so it wasn't really that far geographically.

But in 1608, the cultural gap was huge.

And she came back with stories.

She spoke of a man back in France who was holding violent witchcraft trials, and she knew this because she had become a part of one of the covens there.

She told her friends and family that she had renounced her Christian faith and had participated in secret witch gatherings known as a Sabbath.

And, most importantly, that gave her the ability to spot witches anywhere she went, including there, back home in her own village.

Naturally, Maria started to point fingers.

The first person she accused was another Maria, Maria de Jura Taguia.

But local authorities didn't like the stories that Shamil Daguy was spreading or the accusations, so both women were brought in for a casual interview.

It was too late though.

The people in town were fully bought in and they pressured Chamille Daguy to confess.

When she did, she also named a third woman, another Maria, I'm afraid, named Maria Chapilla de Baronachea.

In fact, Maria No.

3 was the aunt of Maria No.

1, and according to the younger woman's claims, the reason she had become a witch in the first place.

Between December of 1608 and January of 1609, the panic spread.

10 people in the village, a mix of men men and women, were all accused and forced to confess, and from all accounts, the situation truly began to spiral out of control.

Maria number two, the first young woman who had been forced to confess by the town, started to fear that the devil would show up and take her away thanks to her new association with witchcraft.

So she and her husband went to her father's house, along with a bunch of other friends and family, to hold vigil throughout the night.

Safety in numbers and all, right?

But people who were there that night actually claimed to see the devil outside.

Other witches were spotted too, trying to break into the house to find Maria number two.

In a scene straight out of a historical thriller, Maria's family saved her by praying over her with rosaries and declaring her allegiance to God, not the devil.

But moments like that didn't help the public feel any safer.

People started actively breaking into their neighbors' houses, looking for signs of witchcraft so that they could accuse them.

Dozens of people started getting dragged to local priests and were forced to confess under threat of torture.

And just as the village was about to put a stop to it all and give everyone one last chance to confess, find forgiveness, and be pardoned, the Inquisition showed up.

Two men rode into town in January of 1609, one an inquisitor and the other his notary.

They conducted interviews, wrote up a report, and then sent it all off to La Gronia for the tribunal there to read.

The report astounded the tribunal for one particular reason.

It seems that rumors of a witch coven had surrounded that little village for almost a century.

For a long time, the tribunal had assumed that they were just that, rumors, but this new episode had made them wonder.

So they assigned two new inquisitors to the case to learn the truth.

These men though, Becera and Vaya, didn't come in with an open mind.

They were fully 100% convinced that the witchcraft rumors were true, and they were going to find the evidence to back that up.

None of that's innocent until proven guilty stuff.

These men were out for blood.

Ten women were brought before the inquisitors and all of them were interrogated.

Did they go to church?

Did they go to confession?

Could they recite the Ave Maria and the Creed?

Were they baptized and confirmed?

These men pushed hard looking for answers, looking for signs of the devil.

The picture started to come together for Becera and Via.

The witches were worshiping the devil at gatherings called Akayare.

One of the accused described the devil as half man, half goat, and all of them admitted to heinous acts such as killing crops and livestock, vandalism, and causing disease and death.

In response, the High Council of the Inquisition, La Suprema, issued instructions to hold an auto de fe, a sort of community-wide gathering where everyone would be allowed to confess, be sentenced, and then receive either punishment or pardon depending on their individual status.

Due to an illness that had already swept through the jail where most of the accused were held though, 13 people had already died, leaving only 12 left to be tried.

That didn't stop the public from getting excited, of course.

On November 6th of 1610, the Otto de Fe kicked off in Lagronia in front of a crowd of over 30,000 spectators.

The result was the conviction of 11 individuals, five of whom had already died in jail.

So the six living and the five dead were paraded through town and handed over to the secular authorities for execution.

Later that same day, all of them, the living and the dead, were burned at the stake.

And that's the end, right?

We've all been conditioned over the years to see the typical witchcraft panic flow in the same predictable manner.

accusation, trial, and execution.

The community then moves on and over time, hopefully starts to regret it.

But Becerra and Vaya just couldn't let it go.

They were receiving letters from other towns in the area with stories of their own.

Children who were being recruited into the coven.

More people and livestock were being bewitched.

The devil was still in power, and they hated that.

By May of 1611, the Inquisitors had collected fresh confessions from over 500 witches and another 2,000 people were being interrogated as possible additions.

But to some, it sort of felt like the uptick in supernatural reports was a bit unusual, convenient almost.

In fact, there was a growing number of skeptics who found themselves at odds with Becerra and Vaya, both sides refusing to give an inch to the other.

That's when an inquisitor named Salazar Frias, who sat on the Lagrona tribunal, stepped in to do a bit of research on his own.

From April to June, witnesses were re-examined by new investigators.

Becerra and Vaya, of course, fought against it, but they were just two players in a much much bigger machine.

And truth be told, Salazar did not like what he was finding.

All of a sudden, the Inquisition had a skeptic in their midst.

Salazar had become an ally to these secular skeptics as well, and priests who had already doubted everything from the start began to come out of the woodwork and approach him.

A better picture was starting to come together, thanks to something that I think all of you would really appreciate.

Good, old-fashioned research.

What did Salazar do?

Well, he got La Suprema to issue what's known as an Edict of Grace, where everyone would sort of have carte blanche freedom to come forward, confess, and get lighter sentences or even a pardon.

No torture was allowed.

No one was asked about accomplices or asked to name names.

It was light and easy compared to the methods that Becerra and Valla wanted to use.

The result was a flood.

Salazar and his team would enter a province, read out the Edict of Grace, and then sit down for a one-on-one interview documenting everything along the way.

There were so many people coming forward that he worked from sunrise to sunset every day and started to fear that he would never complete them at all.

And he noticed something.

When asking people to identify the location of which coven meetings, their collective answers didn't line up.

One person would name one particular field or clearing in the woods, while another would point to a different spot.

How, he wondered, could these meetings be true if no one could agree on where they took place?

Physical Physical evidence was disproved.

Stories of individuals failed to align.

It was all pointing to a total and complete lack of proof that anything supernatural had ever taken place.

I have not found a single proof, Salazar wrote in a letter to La Suprema, nor even the slightest indication from which to infer that one act of witchcraft has actually taken place.

And Becerra and Valla?

Well, they did the only thing that a pair of frauds can do when their lies are called out and proven false.

They pointed their fingers directly at Salazar, claimed that for him to make this sort of statement was utter proof that he was in league with the devil himself, and then waited confidently for the Inquisition to take the bait and arrest him.

La Suprema, however, simply ignored them.

It could have been worse.

It's the optimist's favorite way of approaching bad things.

There is always a darker possibility, a more tragic path for events to follow.

I know that history doesn't always make us feel that hopeful, but in a lot of cases, it's true.

Things could have been a whole lot worse than they were.

In the world of European witchcraft trials, we've seen worse.

The numbers from Scotland alone could make anyone stop and shake their head with grief.

We humans are exceptional creatures, but sadly one of the things we're most exceptional at is being horrible toward each other.

Vilifying one another over slight differences in worldviews, letting hatred and suspicion take the wheel instead of caution and common sense.

We see it time and time again today, and it's been like that for centuries, probably even thousands of years.

People are just really bad at being good.

So for as painful as the Basque witch trials were, were, they really could have been worse.

And we really do have Salazar to thank for how quickly the show was shut down.

He found himself in a bus full of thousands of people approaching a massive cliff and instead of speeding ahead, he pumped the brakes.

After the trials were over, Salazar went on to climb the ranks of the tribunal in Valencia, eventually reaching a seat on the council in 1631.

Becerra and Vaya seem to have disappeared from the record, and so many of the accused faded back into the shadows, probably grateful for the spotlight to have moved on or switched off.

And look, I know things weren't perfect.

People still lost their lives because of fear and finger pointing.

Between its start in 1609 and its ending in 1614, the Basque witch trial saw at least 7,000 people accused of witchcraft and examined by the authorities.

Some spent time in jail.

Most, however, did not.

And the six living victims who were burned alongside those five who were already dead turned out to be the only executions carried out during the entire process.

It was bad, there's no doubt about that, but like I said before, it could have been worse.

Witch trial stories are pretty common to anyone who reads enough history, and I know that many of them can start to melt together in our minds.

That's why many people assume that burning at the stake was a universal punishment when, in fact, it was quite rare.

The commonness of the story just sort of creates one homogeneous tale.

So I hope today's tour through Spain's dark past and the Basque trials in particular helps show how different some stories can be.

And to that end, we have one more unexpected panic and trial to share with you.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break, and I'll tell you all about it.

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When I think of medieval trials in Europe with people shouting in the center of town for the execution of their neighbors and former friends, I think of witches.

You probably do too, considering how many witchcraft panic stories there are to read about and discuss.

But putting your money on witches every single time is not the safest bet because some towns, especially those in what is today Germany, sometimes buck the trend and put a different sort of supernatural threat on trial.

Werewolves.

Longtime listeners will know that we've covered a few of those here in the past.

Of course, there was Peter Stube, sometimes known as Peter Stump, who was put on trial in 1589.

His crimes?

Well, it seems that he was a real-life serial killer who blamed his actions on his ability to transform into a wolf-like creature.

A number of people died, but thankfully, Stube was caught and put on trial.

His sentence was execution, although it was almost as brutal brutal as the crimes he committed.

He was nailed to a large wagon wheel, and his skin was ripped from his body with red-hot tongs before his limbs were broken and his head was removed.

Then, as if that weren't enough, his body was burned and his head was put on display.

Clearly, the people of Bedberg didn't approve of his actions, supernatural or not.

But despite this, werewolf trials continued to be common for a very long time.

Sometimes the victims were violent criminals, but often they were nothing more than scapegoats to a town looking for a reason behind a recent famine or a plague.

In those cases, the accused were typically from an easier class of people to arrest and punish ⁇ beggars, social outcasts, and immigrants.

I would like to say that we treat the poor, immigrants, and the marginalized a lot better today.

I really, really wish I could.

But sadly, nothing has changed, except maybe the way in which we vilify them.

Like I said earlier, a lot of the trials that used werewolf folklore as the focal point seemed to occur in Germany, but there were some that happened elsewhere.

In France in 1521, for example, two shepherds, Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun, were accused of similar crimes to Peter Stube, and just like him, their dirty deeds seemed to have been nothing more than that of serial killers.

According to Burgot, he had encountered three dark riders almost 20 years earlier, during a thunderstorm that showed up at the end of the Polony Fair.

When one of the mysterious riders asked Burgot if he would like to spare his sheep from dying in the storm, Burgot agreed to do whatever the man asked.

And what he asked for him was to renounce God and give his loyalty to the horseman.

Oh, and rub a magical ointment on his body that would transform him into a werewolf.

Burgot would go on to share this ointment with Verdun, and the pair claimed that they would use their wolf shapes to travel to gatherings of evil men, as well as to hunt and kill local people.

That was their story.

Although it must be said that when Burgot and Verdun were captured, it was after being caught red-handed, quite literally, mind you, while viciously attacking someone in human form.

Like so many criminals before them, Burgot and Verdun tried to take one more person down with them.

They claimed that they had a third accomplice, a man named Philibert Monteau, who had got him arrested and tried with them.

Pierre Burgot told one particularly horrifying story during his confessions.

He told the authorities that he had leapt over a garden wall into someone's yard and came upon a little girl, maybe seven years old.

He caught her by surprise as she was weeding the garden beds and she dropped to her knees to beg Burgot not to kill her.

But Burgot didn't listen.

Instead, he claims that he snapped her neck and left her body lying among the flowers.

As you might imagine, it was confessions like that which led to their terrible sentence, death by burning.

And although that third man, Philibert Monteau, refused to confess as the others did, he too was tied to the stake and set on fire.

I said before that it could have been worse.

And in this case, at least, it was.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Ali Steed and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.

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