Hot on the Trail: Pilgrimage and Crime in Early Modern Spain

Though pilgrims were purportedly sacred travelers, their actual identities and motivations for travel were far from certain. Connotations with criminality and fraud also ran deep. Beginning with a strange case in which an epileptic French priest traveling to Santiago de Compostela was arrested and investigated as an alleged spy, this article considers the ambiguities surrounding pilgrim identity and the difficulty communities had in determining intention and motivation. Drawing upon secular and church records from Navarre, Aragon, and Gipuzkoa, this article examines the methods courts employed to reveal or impose identities, including using complex forensic techniques such as building a blind criminal lineup, associative triangulation of place and person, and relying upon medical and linguistic evaluation. In many cases, these processes of evidence gathering and particularly the idea that suspects could be definitively identified runs contrary to our understanding of the lack of sophistication of early modern criminal procedure and epistemology.