CHAPTER IX.
Effects of the Example of Alfonso the Tenth. — Chronicles of his own Reign, and of the Reigns of Sancho the Brave and Ferdinand the Fourth. — Chronicle of Alfonso the Eleventh, by Villaizan. — Chronicles of Peter the Cruel, Henry the Second, John the First, and Henry the Third, by Ayala. — Chronicle of John the Second. — Two Chronicles of Henry the Fourth, and two of Ferdinand and Isabella.
The idea of Alfonso the Wise, simply and nobly expressed in the opening of his Chronicle, that he was desirous to leave for posterity a record of what Spain had been and had done in all past time,[256] was not without influence upon the nation, even in the state in which it then was, and in which, for above a century afterwards, it continued. But, as in the case of that great king’s project for a uniform administration of justice by a settled code, his example was too much in advance of his age to be immediately followed; though, as in that memorable case, when it was once adopted, its fruits became abundant. The two next kings, Sancho the Brave and Ferdinand the Fourth, took no measures, so far as we know, to keep up and publish the history of their reigns. But Alfonso the Eleventh, the same monarch, it should be remembered, under whom the “Partidas” became the law of the land, recurred to the example of his wise ancestor, and ordered the annals of the kingdom to be continued, from the time when those of the General Chronicle ceased down to his own; embracing, of course, the reigns of Alfonso the Wise, Sancho the Brave, and Ferdinand the Fourth, or the period from 1252 to 1312.[257] This is the first instance of the appointment of a royal chronicler, and may, therefore, be regarded as the creation of an office of consequence in all that regards the history of the country, and which, however much it may have been neglected in later times, furnished important documents down to the reign of Charles the Fifth, and was continued, in form at least, till the establishment of the Academy of History in the beginning of the eighteenth century.
By whom this office was first filled does not appear; but the Chronicle itself seems to have been prepared about the year 1320. Formerly it was attributed to Fernan Sanchez de Tovar; but Fernan Sanchez was a personage of great consideration and power in the state, practised in public affairs, and familiar with their history, so that we can hardly attribute to him the mistakes with which this Chronicle abounds, especially in the part relating to Alfonso the Wise.[258] But, whoever may have been its author, the Chronicle, which, it may be noticed, is so distinctly divided into the three reigns, that it is rather three chronicles than one, has little value as a composition. Its narrative is given with a rude and dry formality, and whatever interest it awakens depends, not upon its style and manner, but upon the character of the events recorded, which sometimes have an air of adventure about them belonging to the elder times, and, like them, are picturesque.
The example of regular chronicling, having now been fairly set at the court of Castile, was followed by Henry the Second, who commanded his Chancellor and Chief-Justiciary, Juan Nuñez de Villaizan, to prepare, as we are told in the Preface, in imitation of the ancients, an account of his father’s reign. In this way, the series goes on unbroken, and now gives us the “Chronicle of Alfonso the Eleventh,”[259] beginning with his birth and education, of which the notices are slight, but relating amply the events from the time he came to the throne, in 1312, till his death in 1350. How much of it was actually written by the chancellor of the kingdom cannot be ascertained.[260] From different passages, it seems that an older chronicle was used freely in its composition;[261] and the whole should, therefore, probably be regarded as a compilation made under the responsibility of the highest personages of the realm. Its opening will show at once the grave and measured tone it takes, and the accuracy it claims for its dates and statements.
“God is the beginning and the means and the end of all things; and without him they cannot subsist. For by his power they are made, and by his wisdom ordered, and by his goodness maintained. And he is the Lord; and, in all things, almighty, and conqueror in all battles. Wherefore, whosoever would begin any good work should first name the name of God, and place him before all things, asking and beseeching of his mercy to give him knowledge and will and power, whereby he may bring it to a good end. Therefore will this pious chronicle henceforward relate whatsoever happened to the noble King, Don Alfonso, of Castile and Leon, and the battles and conquests and victories that he had and did in his life against Moors and against Christians. And it will begin in the fifteenth year of the reign of the most noble King, Don Fernando, his father.”[262]
The reign of the father, however, occupies only three short chapters; after which, the rest of the Chronicle, containing in all three hundred and forty-two chapters, comes down to the death of Alfonso, who perished of the plague before Gibraltar, and then abruptly closes. Its general tone is grave and decisive, like that of a person speaking with authority upon matters of importance, and it is rare that we find in it a sketch of manners like the following account of the young king at the age of fourteen or fifteen.
“And as long as he remained in the city of Valladolid, there were with him knights and esquires, and his tutor, Martin Fernandez de Toledo, that brought him up, and that had been with him a long time, even before the queen died, and other men, who had long been used to palaces, and to the courts of kings; and all these gave him an ensample of good manners. And, moreover, he had been brought up with the children of men of note, and with noble knights. But the king, of his own condition, was well-mannered in eating, and drank little, and was clad as became his estate; and in all other his customs he was well conditioned, for his speech was true Castilian, and he hesitated not in what he had to say. And so long as he was in Valladolid, he sat three days in the week to hear the complaints and suits that came before him; and he was shrewd in understanding the facts thereof, and he was faithful in secret matters, and loved them that served him, each after his place, and trusted truly and entirely those whom he ought to trust. And he began to be much given to horsemanship, and pleased himself with arms, and loved to have in his household strong men, that were bold and of good conditions. And he loved much all his own people, and was sore grieved at the great mischief and great harm there were in the land through failure of justice, and he had indignation against evil-doers.”[263]
But though there are few sketches in the Chronicle of Alfonso the Eleventh like the preceding, we find in general a well-ordered account of the affairs of that monarch’s long and active reign, given with a simplicity and apparent sincerity which, in spite of the formal plainness of its style, make it almost always interesting, and sometimes amusing.
The next considerable attempt approaches somewhat nearer to proper history. It is the series of chronicles relating to the troublesome reigns of Peter the Cruel and Henry the Second, to the hardly less unsettled times of John the First, and to the more quiet and prosperous reign of Henry the Third. They were written by Pedro Lopez de Ayala, in some respects the first Spaniard of his age; distinguished, as we have seen, among the poets of the latter part of the fourteenth century, and now to be noticed as the best prose-writer of the same period. He was born in 1332,[264] and, though only eighteen years old when Peter ascended the throne, was soon observed and employed by that acute monarch. But when troubles arose in the kingdom, Ayala left his tyrannical master, who had already shown himself capable of almost any degree of guilt, and joined his fortunes to those of Henry of Trastamara, the king’s illegitimate brother, who had, of course, no claim to the throne but such as was laid in the crimes of its possessor, and the good-will of the suffering nobles and people.
At first, the cause of Henry was successful. But Peter addressed himself for help to Edward the Black Prince, then in his duchy of Aquitaine, who, as Froissart relates, thinking it would be a great prejudice against the estate royal[265] to have a usurper succeed, entered Spain, and, with a strong hand, replaced the fallen monarch on his throne. At the decisive battle of Naxera, by which this was achieved, in 1367, Ayala, who bore his prince’s standard, was taken prisoner[266] and carried to England, where he wrote a part at least of his poems on a courtly life. Somewhat later, Peter, no longer supported by the Black Prince, was dethroned; and Ayala, who was then released from his tedious imprisonment, returned home, and afterwards became Grand-Chancellor to Henry the Second, in whose service he gained so much consideration and influence, that he seems to have descended as a sort of traditionary minister of state through the reign of John the First, and far into that of Henry the Third. Sometimes, indeed, like other grave personages, ecclesiastical as well as civil, he appeared as a military leader, and once again, in the disastrous battle of Aljubarrota, in 1385, he was taken prisoner. But his Portuguese captivity does not seem to have been so long or so cruel as his English one; and, at any rate, the last years of his life were passed quietly in Spain. He died at Calahorra in 1407, seventy-five years old.
“He was,” says his nephew, the noble Fernan Perez de Guzman, in the striking gallery of portraits he has left us,[267] “He was a man of very gentle qualities and of good conversation; had a great conscience and feared God much. He loved knowledge, also, and gave himself much to reading books and histories; and though he was as goodly a knight as any, and of great discretion in the practices of the world, yet he was by nature bent on learning, and spent a great part of his time in reading and studying, not books of law, but of philosophy and history. Through his means some books are now known in Castile that were not known aforetime; such as Titus Livius, who is the most notable of the Roman historians; the ‘Fall of Princes’; the ‘Ethics’ of Saint Gregory; Isidorus ‘De Summo Bono’; Boethius; and the ‘History of Troy.’ He prepared the History of Castile from the King Don Pedro to the King Don Henry; and made a good book on Hunting, which he greatly affected, and another called ‘Rimado de Palacio.’”
We should not, perhaps, at the present day, claim so much reputation as his kinsman does for the Chancellor Ayala, in consequence of the interest he took in books of such doubtful value as Guido de Colonna’s “Trojan War,” and Boccaccio “De Casibus Principum,” but, in translating Livy,[268] he unquestionably rendered his country an important service. He rendered, too, a no less important service to himself; since a familiarity with Livy tended to fit him for the task of preparing the Chronicle, which now constitutes his chief distinction and merit.[269] It begins in 1350, where that of Alfonso the Eleventh ends, and comes down to the sixth year of Henry the Third, or to 1396, embracing that portion of the author’s own life which was between his eighteenth year and his sixty-fourth, and constituting the first safe materials for the history of his native country.
For such an undertaking Ayala was singularly well fitted. Spanish prose was already well advanced in his time; for Don John Manuel, the last of the elder school of good writers, did not die till Ayala was fifteen years old. He was, moreover, as we have seen, a scholar, and, for the age in which he lived, a remarkable one; and, what is of more importance than either of these circumstances, he was personally familiar with the course of public affairs during the forty-six years embraced by his Chronicle. Of all this traces are to be found in his work. His style is not, like that of the oldest chroniclers, full of a rich vivacity and freedom; but, without being over-carefully elaborated, it is simple and business-like; while, to give a more earnest air, if not an air of more truth to the whole, he has, in imitation of Livy, introduced into the course of his narrative set speeches and epistles intended to express the feelings and opinions of his principal actors more distinctly than they could be expressed by the mere facts and current of the story. Compared with the Chronicle of Alfonso the Wise, which preceded it by above a century, it lacks the charm of that poetical credulity which loves to deal in doubtful traditions of glory, rather than in those ascertained facts which are often little honorable either to the national fame or to the spirit of humanity. Compared with the Chronicle of Froissart, with which it was contemporary, we miss the honest-hearted, but somewhat childlike, enthusiasm that looks with unmingled delight and admiration upon all the gorgeous phantasmagoria of chivalry, and find, instead of it, the penetrating sagacity of an experienced statesman, who looks quite through the deeds of men, and, like Comines, thinks it not at all worth while to conceal the great crimes with which he has been familiar, if they can be but wisely and successfully set forth. When, therefore, we read Ayala’s Chronicle, we do not doubt that we have made an important step in the progress of the species of writing to which it belongs, and that we are beginning to approach the period when history is to teach with sterner exactness the lesson it has learned from the hard experience of the past.
Among the many curious and striking passages in Ayala’s Chronicle, the most interesting are, perhaps, those that relate to the unfortunate Blanche of Bourbon, the young and beautiful wife of Peter the Cruel, who, for the sake of María de Padilla, forsook her two days after his marriage, and, when he had kept her long in prison, at last sacrificed her to his base passion for his mistress; an event which excited, as we learn from Froissart’s Chronicle, a sensation of horror, not only in Spain, but throughout Europe, and became an attractive subject for the popular poetry of the old national ballads, several of which we find were devoted to it.[270] But it may well be doubted whether even the best of the ballads give us so near and moving a picture of her cruel sufferings as Ayala does, when, going on step by step in his passionless manner, he shows us the queen first solemnly wedded in the church at Toledo, and then pining in her prison at Medina Sidonia; the excitement of the nobles, and the indignation of the king’s own mother and family; carrying us all the time with painful exactness through the long series of murders and atrocities by which Pedro at last reaches the final crime which, during eight years, he had hesitated to commit. For there is, in the succession of scenes he thus exhibits to us, a circumstantial minuteness which is above all power of generalization, and brings the guilty monarch’s character more vividly before us than it could be brought by the most fervent spirit of poetry or of eloquence.[271] And it is precisely this cool and patient minuteness of the chronicler, founded on his personal knowledge, that gives its peculiar character to Ayala’s record of the four wild reigns in which he lived; presenting them to us in a style less spirited and vigorous, indeed, than that of some of the older chronicles of the monarchy, but certainly in one more simple, more judicious, and more effective for the true purposes of history.[272]
The last of the royal chronicles that it is necessary to notice with much particularity is that of John the Second, which begins with the death of Henry the Third, and comes down to the death of John himself, in 1454.[273] It was the work of several hands, and contains internal evidence of having been written at different periods. Alvar Garcia de Santa María, no doubt, prepared the account of the first fourteen years, or to 1420, constituting about one third of the whole work;[274] after which, in consequence perhaps of his attachment to the Infante Ferdinand, who was regent during the minority of the king, and subsequently much disliked by him, his labors ceased.[275] Who wrote the next portion is not known;[276] but from about 1429 to 1445, John de Mena, the leading poet of his time, was the royal annalist, and, if we are to trust the letters of one of his friends, seems to have been diligent in collecting materials for his task, if not earnest in all its duties.[277] Other parts have been attributed to Juan Rodriguez del Padron, a poet, and Diego de Valera,[278] a knight and gentleman often mentioned in the Chronicle itself, and afterwards himself employed as a chronicler by Queen Isabella.
But whoever may have been at first concerned in it, the whole work was ultimately committed to Fernan Perez de Guzman, a scholar, a courtier, and an acute as well as a witty observer of manners, who survived John the Second, and probably arranged and completed the Chronicle of his master’s reign, as it was published by order of the Emperor Charles the Fifth;[279] some passages having been added as late as the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, who are more than once alluded to in it as reigning sovereigns.[280] It is divided, like the Chronicle of Ayala, which may naturally have been its model, into the different years of the king’s reign, each year being subdivided into chapters; and it contains a great number of important original letters and other curious contemporary documents,[281] from which, as well as from the care used in its compilation, it has been considered more absolutely trustworthy than any Castilian chronicle that preceded it.[282]
In its general air, there is a good deal to mark the manners of the age, such as accounts of the court ceremonies, festivals, and tournaments that were so much loved by John; and its style, though, on the whole, unornamented and unpretending, is not wanting in variety, spirit, and solemnity. Once, on occasion of the fall and ignominious death of the Great Constable Alvaro de Luna, whose commanding spirit had, for many years, impressed itself on the affairs of the kingdom, the honest chronicler, though little favorable to that haughty minister, seems unable to repress his feelings, and, recollecting the treatise on the “Fall of Princes,” which Ayala had made known in Spain, breaks out, saying: “O John Boccaccio, if thou wert now alive, thy pen surely would not fail to record the fall of this strenuous and bold gentleman among those of the mighty princes whose fate thou hast set forth. For what greater example could there be to every estate? what greater warning? what greater teaching to show the revolutions and movements of deceitful and changing fortune? O blindness of the whole race of man! O unexpected fall in the affairs of this our world!” And so on through a chapter of some length.[283] But this is the only instance of such an outbreak in the Chronicle. On the contrary, its general tone shows, that historical composition in Spain was about to undergo a permanent change; for, at its very outset, we have regular speeches attributed to the principal personages it records,[284] such as had been introduced by Ayala; and, through the whole, a well-ordered and documentary record of affairs, tinged, no doubt, with some of the prejudices and passions of the troublesome times to which it relates, but still claiming to have the exactness of regular annals, and striving to reach the grave and dignified style suited to the higher purposes of history.[285]
Of the disturbed and corrupt reign of Henry the Fourth, who, at one period, was nearly driven from his throne by his younger brother, Alfonso, we have two chronicles: the first by Diego Enriquez de Castillo, who was attached, both as chaplain and historiographer, to the person of the legitimate sovereign; and the other by Alonso de Palencia, chronicler to the unfortunate pretender, whose claims were sustained only three years, though the Chronicle of Palencia, like that of Castillo, extends over the whole period of the regular sovereign’s reign, from 1454 to 1474. They are as unlike each other as the fates of the princes they record. The Chronicle of Castillo is written with great plainness of manner, and, except in a few moral reflections, chiefly at the beginning and the end, seems to aim at nothing but the simplest and even the driest narrative;[286] while the Chronicle of Palencia, who had been educated in Italy under the Greeks recently arrived there from the ruins of the Eastern Empire, is in a false and cumbrous style; a single sentence frequently stretching through a chapter, and the whole work showing that he had gained little but affectation and bad taste under the teachings of John Lascaris and George of Trebizond.[287] Both works, however, are too strictly annals to be read for any thing but the facts they contain.
Similar remarks must be made about the chronicles of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, extending from 1474 to 1504-16. There are several of them, but only two need be noticed. One is by Andres Bernaldez, often called “El Cura de los Palacios,” because he was curate in the small town of that name, though the materials for his Chronicle were, no doubt, gathered chiefly in Seville, the neighbouring splendid capital of Andalusia, to whose princely Archbishop he was chaplain. His Chronicle, written, it should seem, chiefly to please his own taste, extends from 1488 to 1513. It is honest and sincere, reflecting faithfully the physiognomy of his age; its credulity, its bigotry, and its love of show. It is, in truth, such an account of passing events as would be given by one who was rather curious about them than a part of them; but who, from accident, was familiar with whatever was going on among the leading spirits of his time and country.[288] No portion of it is more valuable and interesting than that which relates to Columbus, to whom he devotes thirteen chapters, and for whose history he must have had excellent materials, since not only was Deza, the Archbishop, to whose service he was attached, one of the friends and patrons of Columbus, but Columbus himself, in 1496, was a guest at the house of Bernaldez, and intrusted to him manuscripts which, he says, he has employed in this very account; thus placing his Chronicle among the documents important alike in the history of America and of Spain.[289]
The other chronicle of the time of Ferdinand and Isabella is that of Fernando del Pulgar, their Councillor of State, their Secretary, and their authorized Annalist. He was a person of much note in his time, but it is not known when he was born or where he died.[290] That he was a man of wit and letters, and an acute observer of life, we know from his notices of the Famous Men of Castile; from his Commentary on the Coplas of Mingo Revulgo; and from a few spirited and pleasant letters to his friends that have been spared to us. But as a chronicler his merit is inconsiderable.[291] The early part of his work is not trustworthy, and the latter part, beginning in 1482 and ending in 1490, is brief in its narrative, and tedious in the somewhat showy speeches with which it is burdened. The best of it is its style, which is often dignified; but it is the style of history, rather than that of a chronicle; and, indeed, the formal division of the work, according to its subjects, into three parts, as well as the philosophical reflections with which it is adorned, show that the ancients had been studied by its author, and that he was desirous to imitate them.[292] Why he did not continue his account beyond 1490, we cannot tell. It has been conjectured that he died then.[293] But this is a mistake, for we have a well-written and curious report, made by him to the queen, on the whole Moorish history of Granada, after the capture of the city in 1492.[294]
The Chronicle of Ferdinand and Isabella by Pulgar is the last instance of the old style of chronicling that should now be noticed; for though, as we have already observed, it was long thought for the dignity of the monarchy that the stately forms of authorized annals should be kept up, the free and picturesque spirit that gave them life was no longer there. Chroniclers were appointed, like Fernan de Ocampo and Mexia; but the true chronicling style was gone by, not to return.