Morales, in his youth, cruelly mutilated his person, in order to insure his priestly purity of life, and wellnigh died of the consequences.
I might have mentioned here the “Comentario de la Guerra de Alemaña de Luis de Avila y Zuñiga,” a small volume, (Anvers, 1550, 12mo,) first printed in 1548, and frequently afterwards, both in Latin and French, as well as in Spanish. It is an account of the campaigns of Charles V. in Germany, in 1546 and 1547, prepared, probably, from information furnished by the Emperor himself, (Navarra, Diálogos, 1567, f. 13,) and written in a natural, but by no means polished, Castilian style. Parts of it bear internal evidence of having been composed at the very time of the events they record, and the whole is evidently the work of one of the few personal friends Charles V. ever had; one, however, who does not appear to much advantage in the private letters of Guillaume van Male, printed by the Belgian Bibliophiles, in 1843. See, ante, Vol. I. p. 499, n.
[204] Pedro de Ribadeneyra, who died, aged 84, in 1611, and for whom a beautiful epitaph was composed by Mariana, wrote several works in honor of his company, and several ascetic works, besides his “Cisma de Inglaterra,” (Valencia, 1588,) and his “Flos Sanctorum,” Madrid, 1599-1601, 2 tom. folio.
José de Siguenza, who was born in 1545, and died in 1606, as Prior of the Escurial,—whose construction he witnessed and described,—published his “Vida de San Gerónimo,” in Madrid, 1595, 4to, and his “Historia de la Orden de San Gerónimo,” in Madrid, 1600, 4to. He was persecuted by the Inquisition. Llorente, Hist. de l’Inquisition, Tom. II., 1817, p. 474.
It would be easy to add to these two writers on ecclesiastical history the names of many more. Hardly a convent or a saint of any note in Spain, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, failed of especial commemoration; and each of the religious orders and great cathedrals had at least one historian, and most of them several. The number of books on Spanish ecclesiastical history to be found in the list at the end of the second volume of Antonio’s Bibliotheca Nova is, therefore, one that may well be called enormous. Some of them, too, like the history of the order of St. Benedict, by Yepes, and several of the histories of those orders that were both knightly and religious, are of no little importance for the facts and documents with which they are crowded. But nearly all of them are heavy, monkish annals, and not one, I believe, has literary merit enough to attract our attention.
[205] Llorente, Tom. I. p. 479, Tom. II. p. 457, Tom. III. pp. 75-82. Carvajal, the author of the “Elógio Historico” of Montano, in the seventh volume of the Memoirs of the Academy of History, (1832, 4to, p. 84,) does not think the course of Mariana, in this investigation, was so frank as it should have been. Perhaps it was not; but he came to the right conclusion at last, and it was a bold and honest thing to do so.
[206] The account of this book, and of the discussions it occasioned, is given amply by Bayle, in the notes to his article Mariana; but, as is usual with him, in a manner that shows his dislike of the Jesuits. I know the treatise “De Rege et Regis Institutione” only in the edition “Typis Wechelianis,” 1611, 12mo; but I believe that edition is not at all expurgated. Certainly, the passage Lib. I. c. 6 is quite strong enough, in extenuation of the atrocious crime of Jaques Clemens, to be open to severe animadversion. (Sismondi, Hist. des Français, Paris, 8vo, Tom. XXII., 1839, p. 191.) From the very remarkable letters of Loaysa, the confessor of Charles V., it appears that the great Emperor himself was as little scrupulous as his son in such matters. This renders the passage in Mariana more easy of explanation. See Briefe an Kaiser Karl V., etc., von D. G. Heine, Berlin, 1848, 8vo, p. 130, and note.
[207] “Joh. Mariana, e Soc. Jesu, Tractatus VII., nunc primum in Lucem editi,” Colon. Agrip., 1609, fol.; my copy of which is mutilated according to the minute directions given in the Index Expurgatorius, 1667, p. 719. It should be noted that the treatise “De Ponderibus et Mensuris,” which contains the obnoxious discussions about the coin, had been previously published at Toledo, in a neat quarto volume, in 1599, a copy of which I have, with all needful authority and privileges. (Santander, Catalogue, 1792, 8vo, Tom. IV. pp. 152, 153, article Proceso del Padre Mariana, MS. Lope de Vega, Obras Sueltas, Tom. I. p. 295.) The “Discursus de Erroribus qui in Formâ Gubernationis Societatis Jesu occurrunt,” written in Mariana’s beautiful flowing style, was first printed at Bordeaux, 1625, 8vo, and then again on the suppression of the order by Charles III.; but in the Index Expurgatorius, (1667, p. 735,) where it is strictly prohibited, it is craftily treated as if it were still in manuscript, and as if its author were not certainly known. In the Index of 1790, he is still censured with great severity. A considerable number of his unpublished manuscripts is said to have been long preserved in the Jesuits’ Library at Toledo.
[208] The most carefully printed and beautiful edition of Mariana’s History is the fourteenth, published at Madrid, by Ibarra, (two vols. fol. 1780,) under the direction of the Superintendents of the Royal Library;—a book whose mechanical execution would do honor to any press in Europe. It is remarkable how much Mariana amended his History in the successive editions during his lifetime; the additions between 1608 and 1623 being equal, as stated by the editors of that of 1780, to a moderate volume.
[209] Mariana, Hist., Lib. I. c. 13. Saavedra, República Literaria, Madrid, 1759, 4to, p. 44. Mariana admits the want of critical exactness in some parts of his history, when, replying to a letter of Lupercio de Argensola, who had noticed his mistake in calling Prudentius a Spaniard, he says: “I never undertook to make a history of Spain, in which I should verify every particular fact; for if I had, I should never have finished it; but I undertook to arrange in a becoming style, and in the Latin language, what others had collected as materials for the fabric I desired to raise. To look up authorities for every thing would have left Spain, for another series of centuries, without a Latin History that could show itself in the world.” J. A. Pellicer, Ensayo de una Biblioteca de Traductores, p. 59.