APPENDIX, C.
ON FERNAN GOMEZ DE CIBDAREAL AND THE “CENTON EPISTOLARIO.”
(See Vol. I. p. 398.)
I have treated the “Centon Epistolario” in the text just as it has heretofore been treated; that is, as a collection of the unstudied letters of a simple-hearted, vain man, who, for above forty years, was attached to the person of John the Second, and familiar with what was done at his court. Still, the exactness and genuineness of the work have not been entirely unquestioned. Mayans y Siscar (in his Orígenes, Tom. I., 1737, p. 203) speaks of Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga, (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 500, Vol. III. [p. 184],) the well-known author and diplomatist of the time of Philip the Fourth, sometimes called Vera y Figueroa, and says, “Feamente adulteró las epístolas históricas del Bachiller Fernan Gomez de Ciudad Real,”—He shamefully adulterated the historical letters of the Bachelor Ferdinand Gomez de Cibdareal; but Mayans gives no reasons or facts to support this severe charge, and he is roundly rebuked for it by Diosdado, (in his treatise “De Primâ Typographiæ Hispanicæ Ætate,” Romæ, 1794, p. 74,) who calls it “an atrocious calumny.” And again, Quintana, in his Life of Alvaro de Luna, (Vidas de Españoles Célebres, Tom. III., 1833, p. 248, note,) is so much troubled about some of the discrepancies between the Bachelor’s accounts of the death of the Constable and the known facts of history, that he, too, suggests all sorts of doubts, but ends by saying that he follows the Bachelor’s accounts as a sufficient authority where they are not directly contradicted by others higher and safer.
My own opinion is, that the book is a forgery from beginning to end; but a forgery so ingenious, so happy, so agreeable, that it may seem an ungracious thing to tell the truth about it, or attempt to disturb the position it has so long held in the Castilian literature of the fifteenth century. The facts on which I ground my opinion are chiefly these:—
1. No such person as the Bachelor Cibdareal is mentioned in the chronicles or correspondence of the period during which he is supposed to have lived, though our accounts from such sources are copious and minute; noticing, I believe, everybody of consequence at the court of John the Second, and certainly many persons of much less importance than the king’s confidential physician.
2. No manuscript of the Letters is known to be in existence.
3. The first notice of them is, that they appear in an edition in small quarto, black letter, one hundred and sixty-six pages, which claims to have been printed at Burgos in 1499. Of this edition, few copies have ever been seen. Antonio, who died in 1684, intimates (Bib. Vetus, Tom. II. p. 250) a doubt about the truth of its date; Bayer, in his note on the passage, 1788, says that learned men commonly supposed that Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga, (who died in 1658,) published this edition; and Mendez (in his Typographia, 1796, pp. 291 and 293) declares the edition to be unquestionably half a century later than its pretended date;—all three of these learned men being experts and good witnesses concerning a fact, which, I think, must be obvious to any person familiar with the earliest printed Spanish books, who should look on a copy of it now before me. The name of the printer on its title-page, Juan de Rei, it is important to add, is otherwise suspected.
4. The next edition of the Letters of Cibdareal is that of Madrid, 1775, edited by Don Eugenio Llaguno y Amirola, Secretary of the Academy of History, who thinks the first edition could not have been printed till after 1600;—a circumstance otherwise probable, as I am not aware that it is cited by any author of an earlier date. Indeed, if Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga had any thing to do with it, we must suppose it to have been printed yet later; for in 1600 that statesman was only about ten years old.
5. The Bachelor Cibdareal gives a date to no one of his letters; but so completely are the facts or hints for them to be detected in the Chronicle of John the Second, that the editor of the Letters in 1775 has been able, by means of that Chronicle, to affix its proper date to every one, I believe, of the hundred and five letters of which the collection consists. This would hardly be possible, if the two works had been written quite independently of each other.
6. The style of the Letters, though certainly adapted with great skill and felicity to its supposed period, is not uniformly true to it, erring on the side of curious archaisms. Sometimes it goes further, and uses words for which no example can be adduced. Thus the use of ca in the sense of than is wholly unjustifiable; and wherever it so occurs in the first edition, it is altered in the edition of 1775 to que, in order to make sense. Other errors more trifling might be noticed; and in the spelling there is a systematical use of c for z in words that never were spelt with a c.
7. The few words in the “Aviso al Letor,” and the still fewer that introduce the verses at the end of the volume, profess to come from the Editor, who, according to Bayer, Mendez, etc., lived after 1600, and should, therefore, have written in the style of the period when Mariana and Cervantes flourished. But he writes exactly in the style of the Letters he edits, which claim to be a century and a half older; and, what is worse, he uses in his own person the ca for que, which, as we have noticed, nobody else ever used, except his Bachelor.
8. All accounts represent Juan de Mena as having died at Torrelaguna in 1456, at the age of forty-five. (Antonio, Bib. Vetus, ed. Bayer, Tom. II. p. 266; and Romero, Epicedio, 1578, f. 486, at the end of Hernan Nuñez, Proverbios.) Now the supposed Cibdareal (Epist. 20) places Juan de Mena, in 1428,—when he was, of course, only seventeen years old,—on the most familiar footing at court, and makes him already historiographer to the king, and far advanced in his principal poem;—a statement the more incredible when we recollect that Romero says expressly, that Mena was twenty-three years old when he first gave himself to “the sweet labor of good learning,”—“al dulce trabajo de aquel buen saber.” See the notice of Juan de Mena, ante, Vol. I. pp. 379-388.
9. The contemptuous account Cibdareal gives of Barrientos is not one which a courtier in his position would be likely to give of a person already of great consequence, and rising fast to the highest places in the government. But, what is more, it is not the true account. He represents that distinguished ecclesiastic, as we have seen, (ante, Vol. I. p. 359,) to have burnt, in a very rash and reckless manner, a large quantity of books, from the library of the Marquis of Villena, sent to him for examination after the death of their owner, because he had been accused, in his lifetime, of studying magic,—Barrientos, as Cibdareal would have us believe, knowing nothing about the contents of the books, which he burnt, at once, only because he would not take the trouble to examine them. Now I happen to possess, in an unpublished manuscript of Barrientos, his own account of this very matter. It is in a learned treatise on Divination, which he wrote by order of John the Second, and addressed to that monarch; and in the Preface to the Second Part of which he declares that he burnt the books in question by the royal order, and intimates, that, in his own opinion, they should have been spared. “And this book,” he says, speaking of the one called “Raziel,” to which I have alluded, (ante, Vol. I, p. 359, note,) “this book is the one, which, after the death of Don Enrique [de Villena], you, as king, commanded me, your servant and creature, to burn, with many others, which I did, in presence of sundry of your servants;—a matter in which, as in many other things, you showed and still show the great devotion your Highness has always had for the Christian religion. And, although this was and is to be praised, still, for other respects, it is good in some way to preserve such books, provided they are in the hands and power of good, trustworthy persons, who will take heed that they be read by none but wise men,” etc.;—a very different account certainly from the one given in the letter of Cibdareal, and one which, being addressed to the king, who was necessarily acquainted with the whole transaction, can hardly have been untrue.
10. The most considerable event recorded in the Letters of Cibdareal, and one of the most considerable occurrences in Spain during the fifteenth century, is the execution of the Constable Alvaro de Luna, at Valladolid, June 2, 1452. The Bachelor says, he was with the king in that city the day it happened and the night preceding; that the king showed great irresolution as to the fulfilment of the sentence up to the last moment; that he had a sorrowful and sleepless night before it occurred; and that nobody dared to tell him the execution was absolutely over till he had eaten his dinner;—adding to these striking statements sundry picturesque local details, as if they had come within his own knowledge by his witnessing the execution. Now the truth is, that the king was not in Valladolid on that day, nor for some days before and after; and it would have been a very hard-hearted thing if he had been there at the moment when his old friend and favorite minister of state, to whom he never ceased to be attached, was brought to the scaffold, in order to satisfy the turbulent nobility whom he had oppressed. The king was, in fact, then at the siege of Maqueda, a little town northwest of Toledo, above eighty miles off, as appears by his letters still extant, dated May 29, June 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.; so that many of the circumstances recorded in Cibdareal’s letter (the 103d) are necessarily untrue. Moreover, the supposed Cibdareal places the execution of the Constable on the eve of Saint Mary Magdalen,—“Víspera de la Magdalena,”—confounding it with the date of the death of the king, which happened on that day the next year, and thus placing it on the 21st of July, which was the eve of Saint Mary Magdalen, instead of the 2d of June, which, after some discussion, long since the time when these Letters were first printed, has been determined to be the true day of the execution. This gross mistake in the Letters about the date of the Constable’s death was made, I suppose, in part from carelessness, and in part because that date was not then settled, as it is now. (See Mendez, Typographia, 1796, pp. 256-260; and Quintana, Vidas, Tom. III. pp. 437-439.)
11. The age in which I suppose the Letters of Cibdareal to have been forged was one in which such attempts were likely to be made. It was in Spain an age of forgeries. Guevara had just before maintained his “Marcus Aurelius” to be true history. (See, ante, Vol. I. p. 541.) The “Leaden Books” of Granada, and the “Chronicones” of Father Higuera,—the first decided by the whole civil authority of the realm to be genuine, and the second received as such by a very general consent,—were, from 1595 to 1652, at the height of their success, though both have long since been admitted to be gross frauds, which acute scholars like Montano, and historians like Mariana, must, indeed, have seen through, and were too high-minded to countenance; but which, it should be remembered, they did not feel strong enough openly to resist and denounce. In this state of opinion in Spain, some ingenious scholar—perhaps Vera y Zuñiga—as clear-sighted as they were and only a little less scrupulous, may well have been encouraged to imitate Father Higuera in a matter which, instead of being an attempt, like his, to bring false records concerning important affairs into the history of the kingdom, may have been regarded merely as a literary jeu d’esprit, intended to mislead nobody on any point except merely that of the genuineness of the correspondence. (See, ante, Vol. III. [p. 152, note].)
Against all this may be urged the general simplicity and interesting details of the Letters themselves, so appropriate in their tone to the age they illustrate, and the fact, that for above two centuries they have been cited as the highest authority for the events of which they speak; a fact, however, whose importance is diminished when we recollect how rarely a spirit of criticism has shown itself in Spanish historical literature, and that even in Spanish poetry the case of the Bachiller de la Torre is, in some respects, as strong as that of the Bachiller de Cibdareal, and in others yet stronger. At any rate, all we know with tolerable certainty about the Bachelor Cibdareal is, that the first edition of his Letters is a forgery, intended to conceal something, and more likely, I think, intended to conceal the spuriousness of the whole than any thing else.