At the entrance to Soportújar, a village in the Alpujarra mountains south of Granada, lies a cave in which lived – so the legend tells – two sister witches. At the back of the cave the red-black rock twists like a solidified tornado up into the mountain, a snapshot of geological processes that took place a million years ago as the Sierra Nevada was forming, but which looked, to early modern Spanish Christians, like a portal to Hell.
The cave has now become a tableau of witchy clichés: stuffed cats, bundles of dried herbs, animal skulls and grimacing mannikins in ragged dresses and pointy hats. Pennies are strewn on the ground, apparently to bring good fortune; keyrings and trinkets of ‘lucky’ witches, grinning gruesomely in pointed hats, are on sale all over the village. Yet this folklore masks the brutal history of the Spanish Inquisition in Granada, where accusations of witchcraft, Islam, and heresy were used to persecute women and Moriscos alike.
The label ‘witch’ was hardly lucky for the women this legend was based on. According to elders from the village, there really were two sisters who lived in that cave, but “they weren’t witches; they just knew a lot about herbs.” The two were dragged away to be tried by the Inquisition for witchcraft, but not before pronouncing a prediction: “One day, this town will be famous because of us.”
Further into the town, their prophecy has been realised in the shape of a gigantic fibreglass, wart-nosed Baba Yaga head, and cast iron silhouettes of figures on broomsticks studding whitewashed stone walls. There’s a small Museum of Witchcraft which has more to do with pop culture references, with two Death Eaters strung at the entrance like Halloween costumes. Up at the top of the village, someone has even created their very own Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house, bejewelled with cement gummies.
But this Disney-fied vision of magical tourism conceals a brutal history of repression, theft, violence and ethnic cleansing of all manners of ‘heretics’ – and being Muslim, or simply accused of living like one, represented a threat to medieval Christendom’s the new uniformity of religion, culture and state. To be accused of Muslimness by the Inquisition was much closer to being accused of witchcraft than most of us realise.
Origins of the Spanish Inquisition
The Spanish arm of the Holy Office of the Inquisition was officially founded in 1478 , and dissolved as late as 1820 CE. The first ruler of medieval Christendom to prescribe the burning of heretics1 was King Pedro II of Aragon as far back as 1197. However, this punishment had not been practised in Castile until the 15th century, when a wave of clerical hysteria about crypto-Jews – amplified by political greed – was triggered by the discovery of a Passover celebration in Seville in 1478.2
Scandalised, the young Queen Isabella instructed Spanish ambassadors to the Vatican to seek a Papal Bull from Pope Sixtus IV authorising the establishment of an Inquisition to purge all extraneous elements from the nation. Because the church was so deeply wedded to the state, rejection of Catholicism, even in the quiet depths of one’s private thoughts and beliefs, presupposed an act of treason against the monarchy.
People whose Catholic faith was considered, on interrogation, to be inadequate were punished in a public auto da fe or ‘act of faith’, which ranged from votive penitence through to life imprisonment and banishment all the way to grisly executions. The first auto da fe was celebrated on February 6th, 1481 in Seville, in which six men and women were burned to death. “Even the dead were not spared, their bones being exhumed and burnt after a mock trial.”3 While figures of those killed are elusive, the Spanish Inquisition would end up killing 15,000 people from Seville alone.
Many people came forward to repent, thus evading the harshest penalties, and had to parade as penitents. This practice is still seen in Holy Week, when a procession of men and women wearing long pointed hoods walks solemnly down the street carrying tall candles. Prisoners of the modern carceral system in Spain may be offered the possibility of commuting their sentences by participating in one of these Easter penitence rituals.
The Inquisition and an ‘Exceptional Crime’
The next group of people to be scrutinised and persecuted by the Inquisition was those people – mostly women – who knew too much about plants. Lurid accounts of their supposed ‘black sabbath’ meetings with the Devil have prompted a huge amount of scholarly pondering. Some of those accused of witchcraft are said to have used hallucinogenic unguents to have orgiastic ‘trips’ with otherworldly beings, in which they reported feeling as though they were flying.
However, the Spanish term for ‘black sabbath’, aquelarre, simply comes from the Basque term akelarre, meaning ‘fields of akel flowers’. Folk medicine in medieval Europe was largely in the hands of women, who would spend several days in wild places picking herbs; these trips would be held up as ‘proof’ of their supposed diabolical meetings. The Basque country was host to one of the most notorious witchhunts in medieval Europe, in which 88 people (mostly women) were burned to death.
Of course, since torture was sanctioned in these trials, we can assume than none of these ‘confessions’ were true. An estimated 60,000 women were tortured and killed for the charge of witchcraft in Europe in an act that is now described as femicide.4 Women were particularly targeted as they were socio-economically more vulnerable, popularly associated with spiritual realms, and an easy scapegoat for mishaps like sudden infant deaths or crop failures. Interestingly, Spanish historian Rafael Martín de Soto notes that not only did the European witchhunts last longer than any other crusade against ‘heretics’, but there were more trials for witchcraft in Granada – the former Nasrid kingdom, last vestige of Al-Andalus – than in any other kingdom of Spain.5
Since witchcraft was deemed an ‘exceptional crime’, a rumour would suffice as proof of a crime, as would physical defects, being very old, or even having numb spots on the body. Except for rare cases, the accused were not permitted any defence. One of the only ways a person accused of witchcraft could be proven innocent is by witch-dunking, in which the innocent would drown, and those who floated would later be burned.6
Some of these cases were clearly a matter of single women trying to make a living with the dubious practise of fortune-telling; Francisca Hernández, a 50-year-old widow from Granada, was sent to the Inquisition by three female neighbours for witchcraft, but confessed that her fortune-telling was a ruse as she did not have any other form of income.7
A key function of the Inquisition’s tribunals was financial. People accused and tried by the Inquisition would be charged 6 ducats to pay for their trial. If they were executed, or killed (euphemistically known as ‘relaxed’) during interrogation, their property was seized by the tribunal, concentrating the appropriated wealth in the hands of the church and state.
This was good business for Inquisitors. Every last penny that the trials incurred were squeezed from the accused, from the judges’ salaries down to the meals the executioners ate and the firewood used in the pyres. “When the accused could not pay, for lack of assets, the bill passed to the town to which they belonged. This measure must have led many wealthy people to be burned at the stake, victims of the envy of some neighbour and of the ambition of judges and witch-hunters.”8
Even some churchmen of the time cavilled at this evident corruption. The Dutch Roman Catholic priest Cornelius Loos, in De vera et falsa Magia, wrote: “The cruelty of the torture obliged those unlucky beings to confess things that they had not done, and in this despicable way innocent lives are snatched away, minting gold and silver with human blood….”9 Loos was the first Catholic official to publicly decry witch trials, for which he was jailed and forced to recant. His manuscript was suppressed by church authorities, only to be rediscovered in 1886.
Of Witches and Crypto-Moors
The Inquisition’s obsession with the dangers of meddling with natural forces collided with Andalusi Muslims’ extraordinary grasp of health and natural sciences for their time. Islamic scholarship did not separate religious knowledge from worldly knowledge; scholars were polymaths who saw no contradiction between faith and science. Andalusi botanists expanded medieval knowledge of plants by a third, while advances in public hygiene such as hammams supported the health of the bustling metropoles of Al-Andalus.
For this reason, everything to do with a ‘Moorish’ way of life could be a trigger for accusations of heresy, and a trip to the tribunal of the Inquisition. Cecilia, the Morisca10 slave of a Christian in Montefrío, was processed for telling an Old Christian woman to make wudu’ to cure her illness – but not to tell anyone, as “they burn [people for this] in Granada”.11 (Bear in mind that the hammams were universally closed immediately after the capture of Nasrid Granada, partly due to this association.) Luisa Acha of Cúxar was processed in 1577 because she had moved a dying woman to lie in the direction of the qiblah, and encouraging her to pronounce the shahada before passing away.12 The same happened to numerous Moriscos because a neighbour suspected them for washing in December, cleaning their mouths after eating, bathing before marriage, and washing their dead before burial, as well as practising circumcision. Ángela Zulala of Almería was fined for using a lot of henna,13 a practise explicitly banned, as a marker of Muslimness, after the Christian capture of Granada.14Often it wasn’t clear if the accusation was for ‘superstition’, Moorishness, or witchcraft (read: knowledge of plant medicine and other mysterious matters).
If the connection between inquisitorial violence against witches and crypto-Moors still seems to be circumstantial, allow a certain 16th century friar, Martín de Castañega, to clarify matters. His modestly-titled “Very Subtle and Well-Founded Treatise on the Superstitions and Witchcrafts, and Vain Magic and Tricks, and Other Related Things; and the Possibility of Remedying Them”15 was published in 1529, soon after the 1486 book Malleus Maleficum (Hammer of the Witches) by German priest Heinrich Kramer, which triggered mass hysteria about witchcraft. De Castañaga’s treatise exposes the conflation, in early modern Spanish Christian society, of heretics, Jews, Moors and witches:
There are two churches on earth: the Catholic and the diabolical. The Catholic Church is the congregation of all faithful Catholics, united under one God whom all adore, by one faith that all confess, with one baptism that all receive. The diabolical church is in general all the unfaithful who are outside of the Catholic Church… Although many think that Jews and Moslems believe and adore the one true God, this belief is false; and if one persists in affirming it he can be considered a heretic. Neither the Jews nor the Moslems adore the three-in-one God; and, as Saint Augustine says, this is God, and no other.16
In this entirely monochromatic view of the world – the Catholic versus the devil-worshipping – it is on women that the brunt of suspicion falls. De Castañega’s assertions are not only rife with misogynistic tropes about women’s moral and mental weakness, gossiping and vindictiveness, but also to their supposed curiosity about esoteric arts. In this circular logic, women are prohibited from learning in acceptable systems of education, which is held up as proof of their inadequacy to it and the evil of the knowledge they produced and carried.
Knowledge of Plants: An Esoteric Science
The advanced medical knowledge that Muslims had in the medieval period evoked mixed responses from their Christian counterparts. Although Old and New Testaments enshrine a respect for Creation, and certain monks and nuns such as Hildegard of Bingen were known for their knowledge of plant medicine, medieval and early modern Christian attitudes to the study of nature generally veered more towards fear and demonisation. A common attitude of medieval Christendom was that illness was the result of sin, and that it was preferable to embrace God’s will than oppose it.17 Christian ethics emphasising compassion slid into centuries of persecution, fear, and domination of nature as a divine mandate, as Genesis 1:2818 appears to command.19
Arab knowledge of medicine can be traced back to the Nestorians, who – labelled as heretics – were expelled from Byzantium, and took refuge in Sassanid Persia in 489 CE, where they began translating Grecoroman texts into Arabic. However it was in the 12th century in Al-Andalus that medical knowledge, based heavily on food, plant medicines and healthy lifestyle, reached its medieval apogee with the works of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn al-Baytar, An-Nabati and others. Andalusi doctors revived Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, one of the main medical texts used in Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They founded the science of pharmacology, and their physicians’ services were requested not only by Muslim emirs but also Christian governors; the only books in Arabic that were spared from mass book burnings during the mislabelled ‘Reconquista’ were those of botany and medicine. It was through Spanish Muslims’ translations that European Christendom knew of Ancient Greek medical and botanical texts, which were treated with suspicion of being laced with paganism – a concern that didn’t seem to bother Muslims.20
The more esoteric sciences of Islam were also, as might be imagined, particularly suspect, perhaps due to the reigning paranoia about Judaism. Kabalá, the Jewish esoteric science, developed in Spain, especially in Catalunya, from the 13th centuries until the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. The mutual influences between Muslim and Jewish philosophers and scholars of Al-Andalus have been pointed out21 – more reasons to conflate Jews, Muslims, and all things unfathomable.
Divination and Superstition
In a sad echo of all the Inquisition’s persecuted people, after decades of Islam being officially banned it was very hard to gain adequate religious instruction, and led to a blurring of Islam with various folk beliefs, for example fortune-telling or finding the famous ‘Moors’ treasures’ using esoteric means. What was thought of as Islam or Muslimness could have taken many forms, making it liable to be confused with ‘superstition’ or ‘witchcraft.’
The Spanish term jofor, a type of divination mentioned in the Inquisition’s annals, relates to pre-Islamic divination using camel membranes. Likewise a zahorí, a dowser or diviner – usually of underground water or precious metals, using hazel or metal wands – is from the Arabic term for ‘Venus’. This falling into the Inquisition’s category of ‘spells’, the first zahorí accused, in 1586, was Benito Martínez de Horozco of Granada. This blind child was imprisoned and tortured for days without ‘confessing’, but insisted that his gift was God-given, and was finally sentenced to a hundred lashes.
In some of these unfortunate cases, there seems to be a significant overlap between a person’s apparent witchcraft and their crypto-Muslim identity. Ana, a resident of Baza of Amazigh descent, was sent to the Inquisition for “making certain spells to see if a certain girl had died” – and for washing in a way that seemed ‘Moorish’.22 Mariana de Bustos, a 47-year old spinster, details how she practised ‘spells’ to find treasure, to see if a man was alive or dead, what people did inside their homes or whether a marriage was going well. Even after torture she insisted that she did not rely on a demon familiar, as per her accusation; however, she did confess freely that she had been a follower of the “Mohammedan” religion for fifteen years.
Of course, magic is prohibited in Islam, whether the illusionism of Pharaoh’s magicians or the malicious sihr practised against the Prophet Muhammad himself, referred to by the “women who blow on knots” of Surah al-Falaq. However, we could say that supplication – invoking God to change one’s situation, even destiny – is a spiritual technology that is integral to Islamic belief and practise. To secular people today, this would be considered ‘magical thinking’: the belief in an ability to change events or conditions through mysterious or supernatural means. Depending on your point of view, anything mysterious could be considered false or fearsome.
In any case, as seen in Fray Martín’s treatise, the boundaries of where ‘witchcraft’ ended and Moorishness began were virtually indistinguishable in early modern thought. The Inquisition lumped together Christian ‘heretics’ such as Lutherans or Protestants with Jews, witches and Muslims – anyone who did not conform with Catholic orthodoxy.23 In the pluralistic society of Al-Andalusi there was indeed a good deal of shared culture, including knowledge of plants, water and agriculture that made the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada the wealthiest kingdom paying tributes to Castille.
From Repression to Resurgence?
The ‘Final Solution’ that the newly unified Spanish State came up with for their stickiest problem – crypto-Muslims – was expulsion. Soportújar was entirely emptied of its Morisco inhabitants, who had built the village, landscaped the terraces, tended the orchards and gardens and worked its centuries-old irrigation system, and repopulated it by settlers brought from the North. In nearby Bubión the property register was burned, so that no Morisco could return and reclaim their property. The population of the Alpujarras nosedived, and with it the agricultural knowhow that had sustained a thriving population, reducing the Alpujarras to a mythical backwater.24
Yet the traces of the Moors remain, albeit often buried in surprising places. One of the first houses I lived in, on returning to Andalusia, was in a village called Cónchar just south of Granada, on a tiny street named ‘Callejón del Diablo’: the Devil’s Alley. Neighbours explained that the name had to do with the narrow, out-of-the-way-ness of the path; but the Muslim owners, on refurbishing the small, whitewashed stone house, had discovered a niche that looked a lot like a mihrab, facing the Qiblah. Was this originally a small mosque or musalla, and the name given to its street a crude way to demonise its former inhabitants?
The advent of the modern era, ushered in by the overthrow of Muslim Granada, violently intensified bigotry of the Other for politically expedient purposes. For a deeper look at how Andalusi agricultural knowledge and economic systems shaped early modern Spain—and how their erasure became part of the Inquisition’s legacy—see our earlier exploration of Andalusi sugar production and its bitter aftermath. Like Francesca Albanese being called a ‘witch’ by an Israeli ambassador for exposing the genocide in Gaza, even today, those who stand up to this bigotry are scourged. Ironically, the Romans persecuted the early Christians for being ‘necromancers’, claiming that Jesus was possessed by the devil.
But in a twist that gives some hope in the face of such a harrowing history, as many as 40% of Moriscos were thought to have remained in Spain, and another 10% to have returned.25 The monochromatic fantasies of the De Castañegas of our time are not borne out on the ground; human society is infinitely more nuanced and mutually influenced than the imperialistic behemoths of this world like to think. To resist their homogenising rhetoric is to be a ‘heretic’ in the best sense of the word.
Footnotes
- Christians who did not subscribe to Catholic orthodoxy, such as Gnostics, Cathars, and Protestants, among others. ↩︎
- The Spanish Inquisition, Cecil Roth, pp. 39-40. ↩︎
- Roth, ibid. p. 48. ↩︎
- In 2022, the Catalonian government passed a resolution pardoning over 700 women that had been put to death for witchcraft, naming the witch hunts as femicide. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60149778 ↩︎
- Magia e Inquisición en el Antiguo Reino de Granada (Siglos XVI-XVIII), Rafael Martín de Soto, Editorial Arguval, 2000, p. 17. ↩︎
- De Soto, ibid., p. 74-5. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- De Soto, ibid., p. 76, my translation. ↩︎
- Cited in De Soto, p. 75 – my translation. ↩︎
- Morisco/a, ’Little Moor’, the term given to Muslims in Spain who were obliged to convert to Christianity but were assumed to have done so insincerely, and treated as second-class citizens. ↩︎
- De Soto, ibid. p. 327. ↩︎
- De Soto, ibid. p. 324. Another Morisca, Luisa Alba, did the same for another dying woman and was processed by the Inquisition for it. ↩︎
- De Soto, ibid. p. 331. ↩︎
- De Soto, ibid., pp. 320-1. ↩︎
- Original title: “Tratado muy sotil e bien fundado de las supersticiones y hechizerías, y vanos conjuros y abusiones, y otras cosas al caso tocantes; y de la possibilidad y remedio de ellas”, my translation. ↩︎
- Witchcraft in Spain: The Testimony of Martín de Castañega’s Treatise on Superstition and Witchcraft (1529), David H. Darst, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 123, No. 5 (Oct. 15, 1979), pp. 298-322 (25 pages), https://www.jstor.org/stable/986592, p. 302. ↩︎
- St. Francis of Assisi, renowned for his sympathy for animals, relished suffering as a path to being Christ-like. The Biblical verse “The Most High hath created medicines out of the earth, and a wise man will not abhor them” (Sirach 38:4) was used to persuade him to seek medicine as he had a horror of doctors. ↩︎
- “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitftul and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” ↩︎
- Lynn White’s famous and controversial 1967 essay, The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, attributes 20th century environmental destruction to this misinterpretation of Christian values as well as Roger Bacon’s emphasis on scientific progress leading to technological domination of nature. ↩︎
- The thoroughly researched Granada trilogy of novels by Radwa ‘Ashour features Salima, a medic and healer, tried and burned for witchcraft by the Inquisition. The novelist compares the burning of books with the embodied knowledge of the so-called witches. See Eric Calderwell’s On Earth or in Poems, Harvard University Press, 2023, pp. 150-1. ↩︎
- Pessin 2007, Davidson 2011, Pessin 2013 – see Influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic Thought, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-judaic/ ↩︎
- De Soto, ibid., p. 337. ↩︎
- In his essay on the four founding genocides of the modern era – of Jews and Muslims, so-called witches, Indigenous Americans and Black Africans trafficked in the Transatlantic slave trade – Dr Ramon Grosfoguel draws connections between these entangled processes. https://files.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/8374/files/2019/08/Grosfogel-The-Structure-of-Knowledge-in-Westernized-Universities_-Epistemic-edited.pdf ↩︎
- See, for example, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s openly ‘maurophile’ account of travelling from Guadix to the Alpujarras in his 1860 chronicle La Alpujarra. ↩︎
- Dadson, Trevor J. Tolerance and Coexistence in Early Modern Spain. 2014. ↩︎
