Le Long Remords de la Conquête is a superb example of how a book that begins as a microhistory focused on a single incident, a story, can become a rich analysis of an entire culture and society or, in this case, of a clash between two rich cultures and complex societies. In 1577 young Diego Hernández de Ávila testified before the Spanish governor of Manila, Francisco de Sande. Although Diego was around eleven years old at the time, and thus too young to be tried for the crimes with which he was charged, sorcery and sedition against the Spanish Crown, Sande nevertheless went forward with the trial and condemned the youth to the galleys, although two years later the Inquisition in Mexico heard Ávila’s appeal and overturned the conviction. Bertrand begins with a deceptively simple question about the case: ‘What was it about Ávila’s crime that so unnerved Sande that he was willing to pursue the case and the boy to the bitter end’? To answer that question Bertrand peels away the many layers of society in sixteenth-century Manila, to reveal a world of deep social, economic, cultural and ethnic tensions that pitted not only the Native peoples of the Philippines against the Spaniards who had ‘conquered’ them, but also soldiers and encomenderos against the governor and the Crown bureaucracy he represented, and the Augustinian friars charged with spreading Christianity and preserving the morals of the Spanish colonists against both the encomenderos and Sande. Ávila’s case sat at the interstices of the fraught relationships linking all these ‘players’ in this drama, and the many cracks in the façade of Spanish rule. Bertrand is straightforward about the nature of his evidence, weighted as it must be due to the production and preservation of Spanish versus Indigenous documents. But he still manages to show how this case of sorcery involving both Spanish and Indigenous defendants rested upon a chasm of cultural difference regarding the nature and purpose of magic.

At the beginning of 1577, young Diego Hernández de Ávila accompanied Brother Alonso Gutiérrez, the Prior of the Augustinian Priory on the island of Cebu, to the home of one of the island’s wealthiest colonists, Andrés de Villalobos. Since the death of Ávila’s brother, Ávila had resided in the Priory under Gutiérrez’s protection. Why Gutiérrez opted to bring Ávila with him that day is unclear, but the results were catastrophic. Villalobos and his family were, they claimed, suffering from a sort of bewitchment brought on by a potion in the form of an unguent that two Filipina servants in their household, Inès, and Beatriz, had made and surreptitiously applied to the family members, causing them to lose their minds. While Gutiérrez and the others frantically searched the house, including digging deep below the floor, for the cause of the bewitchment, Inès seems to have applied the ointment to Ávila’s nostril, causing the boy also to lose consciousness and dream or hallucinate vividly about heaven, hell, demons and witches (with Beatriz and Inès figuring prominently among the latter). So far, it would seem that the boy was a victim of indigenous sorcery. But Ávila’s ‘dreams’ reflected, as well, the rifts among the Spaniards in the archipelago, most notably by placing the hated Sande and his cronies in hell, which pleased the friars and amused most of the other colonists to no end, especially the encomenderos who conquered the islands and considered themselves to be the rightful masters of its human and material riches, to no end. Sande, on the other hand, detected, in Ávila’s account, not just a whiff of brimstone but the stench of sedition that threatened Sande’s authority. Sande suspected as well that Ávila had been complicit in his bewitchment, a sorcerer rather than a victim of witchcraft. A speedy and brutal trial of Ávila, Inès and Beatriz followed. All three were condemned although there is no evidence that any of the three ultimately was subjected to the harsh punishments that Sande ordered.

Bertrand’s analysis begins with Ávila’s dream, but most of the book focuses on three issues reflected in the trilogy of ‘The Governor’s Honour’ (L’honneur du Gouveneur). ‘The Truth of the Brothers’ (La Vérité des Frères), and ‘The Silence of the Sorcerers’ (Le Silence des Sorcières). Bertrand meticulously dissects the roots of the tensions between Sande and the encomenderos, as well as those between those soldiers who had taken part in the conquest but had benefitted little from it and resided in the islands in poverty, and their leaders, such as Melchor de Legaspi and Guido de Lavezaris, who had enriched themselves by appropriating, illegally according to Sande, the lion’s share of the precious metals and other looted wealth of the Natives, and had established themselves as encomenderos over many more Native villages than they were entitled to, again according to Sande. Sande, a quintessential loyal Crown bureaucrat in training and identity, saw himself as the upholder of the Crown’s prerogatives and royal law in a colony whose leaders had appropriated to themselves too much power and revenue at the Crown’s expense. Ávila’s hallucinations of Sande’s cronies in hell and demons preparing a place there for Sande himself could only undermine Sande’s legitimacy and strengthen his enemies. Ávila thus had to be condemned as a sorcerer rather than seen as a victim of bewitchment. The Augustinian friars, by contrast, found in Ávila’s tale much to like, since they were opposed to rapaciousness and disdain of Governor Sande for their own advice (and financial needs), even though the Augustinians were also vocal critics of the encomenderos’ cruelty and oppression of the Native peoples.

Finally, in ‘The Silence of the Sorcerers’, Bertrand attempts despite the paucity of sources reflecting the actual voices of the Native peoples, to elucidate the cultural gulf between what the Natives believed magic was and how, where, and when they practiced it, and that of the Christian Spaniards. The differing conceptions here are familiar to scholars of European witchcraft. The Native peoples believed in magic as an art, as something one ‘did’, making potions and spells of various types that combined substances—herbs, animals, objects—from the natural world, with ‘word magic’ and rituals of various types that drew upon the rich spiritual universe of Native culture. This type of magic was familiar in European culture as well and was the way in which most ordinary Europeans who concocted love potions or other types of magical recipes contained in grimoires understood what they were doing. This magic could be ‘white’ (beneficent) or ‘dark’ (maleficium), but it was not necessarily demonic. The conception that all magic had to be demonic was a Christian concept that even in Europe did not become the dominant understanding of magic until the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. It was this demonic conception of magic that the Spaniards brought with them to the Philippines, however, and which underlay Ávila’s trial in 1577 and its outcome.

This review can by no means do justice to Bertrand’s rich and fascinating book. Although at times Bertrand seems to become bogged down in details such as those of the lineages of the Sande and Ávila families, the book has much to teach us about the real nature of the cultural conflicts inherent in colonization. Anglophone readers, especially from North America, will find Bertrand’s use of the term ‘Indian’ to describe Filipino peoples somewhat awkward, although it is part and parcel of the discussions among scholars regarding the correct terminology to use when discussing Native peoples of the East and West Indies. But historians of early modern Europe and colonialism, as well as of early modern culture and magic, will find much of interest in Le Long Remords de la Conquête.