Isabel’s own library displayed a catholic taste in literature; the collection ranging from devotional works and treatises on philosophy, grammar, and medicine, to manuscript copies or translations of Latin, Greek, and Italian authors, such as Plutarch, Livy, Virgil, Aristotle, and Boccaccio; together with national chronicles, and collections of contemporary poems.
When she and Ferdinand built the Church of San Juan de los Reyes, as a thanksgiving for their victory over the Portuguese at Toro, they also endowed the Convent attached to it with a library; while they took a deep interest in the foundation of the University of Alcalá de Henares, of which Ximenes de Cisneros laid the foundation stone in 1500, the building being finally open to students eight years later. Queen Isabel was then dead; but the glory of Alcalá may be said to radiate from her reign, which had seen a man of Cisneros’s intelligence appointed to the Archbishopric of Toledo, to use its wealthy revenues not like Alfonso Carrillo of old for violence or alchemy but for the furtherance of education and knowledge. Cisneros had been in Italy, and his scheme of endowment showed that for all his austerity he had not remained wholly uninfluenced by the spirit of the classical renaissance. Of the forty-two professorships at Alcalá, six were devoted to the study of Latin grammar, four to ancient languages, and four to rhetoric and philosophy.
COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS
FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.
The Archbishop had once denounced the idea of an Arabic version of the Scriptures to Fra Fernando de Talavera as “pearls cast before swine”; but though he condemned the languages of his own day as a medium for Holy Writ, maintaining that ordinary people would through ignorance misinterpret truths to their souls’ damnation, yet the crowning work of his life was to be an edition of the Bible in the principal languages of the ancient world. Under his criticism and supervision the first Polyglot Bible was printed in 1517 a few months before his death; the Old Testament being printed in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Chaldean; the New Testament in Greek and the Vulgate of Saint Jerome. The errors of such a mighty work in that unscientific age were naturally many; but the mere fact of its production shows that the literary spirit was keenly alive. It was a triumph for Alcalá; and the name of the new university soon became famous in Europe.
Other educational institutions were also founded in this reign at Siguenza, Valladolid, Toledo, Santiago, and Avila; mainly through the enterprise of wealthy Churchmen; the College of Santa Cruz at Valladolid, like Alcalá de Henares, owing its origin to an Archbishop of Toledo, though to Ximenes’s predecessor, Cardinal Mendoza. Well-endowed professorships and the report of the growing enthusiasm in Spain for classical knowledge drew scholars of repute from Italy, some by direct invitation to lecture and teach, others in the train of nobles anxious by their patronage to display their literary taste.
The Lombard, Peter Martyr of Anghiera, whose name we have so often mentioned, accompanied the Count of Tendilla on his return from an embassy at Rome, and was at once requested by the Queen to open a school for the young Castilian aristocracy, which was prone, in his own words, “to regard the pursuit of letters as a hindrance to the profession of arms that it alone thought worthy of consideration.”
COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS
FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.
Martyr preferred to follow the fortunes of the Christian army in Granada to their conclusion, probably judging that until the Cross had triumphed he would receive little attention; but on the establishment of peace he began to lecture in Salamanca, the oldest university in Spain, “Mother of the Liberal Arts,” as Lucio Marineo fondly called her. He also opened schools in Valladolid, Saragossa, and other important cities. The young Duke of Villahermosa, Ferdinand’s nephew, and the Duke of Guimaraens, Isabel’s cousin, set an example by their attendance to other youths of high birth, till Peter Martyr’s house was thronged with students, convinced that classical and philosophical knowledge would enhance their military laurels rather than detract from them.