[12]. This chronicle is probably a rough extract of part of Mosen Diego de Valera’s Memorial de Hazanas,—taken in its turn from Palencia’s Las Decadas de Las Cosas de mi Tiempo, which was originally written in Latin.
The same may be said of Andres Bernaldez’s Historia de Los Reyes Católicos, one of the most valuable authorities for the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel. Bernaldez, parish priest of Los Palacios near Seville, was no ambitious historian; and it is not his lack of bias nor his well-balanced judgment that has won him the thanks of posterity, but rather the simplicity with which he recounts events that he himself had witnessed or that had touched him nearly. We are grateful that he had the kindly thought of memorizing his impressions of the war in Granada, and of recalling the deeds of the hero Columbus, who once stopped in his house; but the work of sifting the grain of his information from the chaff is left to his readers.
In Hernando de Pulgar, author of the Cronica de los Reyes Católicos, on the other hand, we find what might be called the historical consciousness in embryo. The beginning of this work which relates to a period before 1482 when he became official historiographer and secretary to the Queen is often wildly inaccurate; but the latter portion which is much more careful shows an attempt to produce a chronological summary that should give to each event its due importance. If the style is sometimes heavy, its very prolixity provides a wealth of circumstantial detail; and though his admiration for the sovereigns, and in especial for the Queen, have laid him open to the charge of flattery, the tone of his chronicle is in the main neither illiberal nor fulsome.
It is to a later reign and Zurita’s Anales de Aragon that we must turn for the first piece of real historical work founded on a study of original documents and contemporary foreign sources; but in descriptive power Hernando de Pulgar remains infinitely Zurita’s superior. Besides his Cronica de Los Reyes Católicos, he wrote also Claros Varones, a series of biographical sketches of illustrious people of his own day. They are carefully drawn portraits, by many critics considered his best work; but their realism is impaired by his tendency to blur the fine edges of appreciation with over-enthusiastic praise.
It is the courtier’s temptation, which the trend of the Castilian literature of his time towards exaggeration would do little to mitigate. Fantasy not realism was the popular demand amongst the cultured in their leisure hours; and those, for whom the ballads were too rough and the chronicles too heavy, fed with delight on “Romances of Chivalry” as insipid in style as their adventures were far removed from real life. Cervantes, in the story of his mad Knight, Don Quixote, was to kill these monsters of imagination with his satire, but in condemning the whole brood as fit material for a bonfire he spared their original model, Amadis de Gaula. The latter is found by the Priest and the Barber, Master Nicholas, on the shelves of the old Knight’s library.
This, as I have heard say [exclaimed the Priest], was the first book of chivalry printed in Spain, and all the rest have had their foundation and rise from it; therefore I think, as head of so pernicious a sect, we ought to condemn him to the fire without mercy.
Not so, Sir [answered the Barber], for I have heard also that it is the best of all books of this kind; and therefore as being singular in his art he ought to be spared.
With this judgment the Priest at once concurred.
The exact source from which Amadis de Gaula emerged is buried in mystery. It bears the stamp of French influence; but, in the form it appeared in Spain during the fifteenth century, was a translation by Ordoñez de Montalvo of the work of a Portuguese Knight who fought at the battle of Aljubarrota. Gaula, the kingdom of Amadis’s birth is Wales;—the time—“not many years after the passion of Our Redeemer”; but neither geography nor chronology is of much importance to the romance that relates the wanderings of an imaginary Prince, his love for “Oriana, the true and peerless lady,” daughter of an imaginary King of England, and his encounters with other Knights and various magicians and giants; until at length a happy marriage brings his trials to a temporary conclusion.
The immense popularity that this book enjoyed led to innumerable imitations; one of them, the story of “Esplandion” a supposed son of Amadis, by Montalvo himself; but all reproduced and exaggerated the faults of the earlier book, without achieving the charm of style that here and there illuminated its pages. The heroes of these romances are indeed a dreary company, differing only, as it has been said, “in the size of the giants they slay and in the degree of improbability of their colourless adventures and loves.”