The first instance of its annexation occurs in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, better known as the Celestina. This remarkable book, first published (as it seems) at Burgos, in 1499, has been classed as a play, or as a novel in dialogue. Its length would make it impossible on the boards, and its influence is most marked on the novel. As first published, it had sixteen acts, extended later to twenty-one, and in some editions to twenty-two. On the authority of Rojas, anxious as to the Inquisition, the first and longest act has been attributed to Mena and to Cota; but the prose is vastly superior to Mena's, while the verse is no less inferior to the lyrism of Cota's Diálogo. There is small doubt but that the whole is the work of the lawyer Fernando de Rojas, a native of Montalbán, who became Alcaide of Salamanca, and died, at a date unknown, at Talavera de la Reina.

The tale is briefly told. Calisto, rebuffed by Melibea, employs the procuress Celestina, who arranges a meeting between the lovers. But destiny works a speedy expiation: Celestina is murdered by Calisto's servants, Calisto is accidentally killed, and Melibea destroys herself before her father, whom she addresses in a set speech suggested by the Cárcel de Amor. Celestina is developed from Ruiz' Trota-conventos; Rojas' lovers, Calisto and Melibea, from Ruiz' Melón and Endrina; and some hints are drawn from Alfonso Martínez de Toledo. But, despite these borrowings, we have to deal with a completely original masterpiece, unique in its kind. We are no longer in an atmosphere thick with impossible monsters in incredible circumstances: we are in the very grip of life, in commerce with elemental, strait passions.

Rojas is the first Spanish novelist who brings a conscience to his work, who aims at more than whiling away an idle hour. He is not great in incident, his plot is clumsily fashioned, the pedantry of his age fetters him; but in effects of artistry, in energy of phrasing, he is unmatched by his coevals. Though he invented the comic type which was to become the gracioso of Calderón, his humour is thin; on the other hand, his realism and his pessimistic fulness are above praise. Choosing for his subject the tragedy of illicit passion, he hit on the means of exhibiting all his powers. His purpose is to give a transcript of life, objective and impersonal, and he fulfils it, adding thereunto a mysterious touch of sombre imagination. His characters are not Byzantine emperors and queens of Cornwall: he traffics in the passions of plain men and women, the agues of the love-sick, the crafts of senile vice, the venality and vauntings of picaroons, the effrontery of croshabells. Hence, from the first hour, his book took the world by storm, was imprinted in countless editions, was continued by Juan Sedeño and Feliciano da Silva—the same whose "reason of the unreasonableness" so charmed Don Quixote—was imitated by Sancho Muñón in Lisandro y Roselia, was used by Lope de Vega in the Dorotea, and was passed from the Spanish stage to be glorified as Romeo and Juliet.

Between the years 1508-12 was composed the anonymous Cuestión de Amor, a semi-historical, semi-social novel wherein contemporaries figure under feigned names, some of which are deciphered by the industry of Signor Croce, who reveals Belisena, for example, as Bona Sforza, afterwards Queen of Poland. Though much of its first success was due to the curiosity which commonly attaches to any roman à clef, it still interests because of its picturesque presentation of Spanish society in Italian surroundings, and the excellence of its Castilian style was approved by that sternest among critics, Juan de Valdés.

History is represented by the Historia de los Reyes católicos of Andrés Bernáldez (d. 1513), parish priest of Los Palacios, near Seville, who relates with spirit and simplicity the triumphs of the reign, waxing enthusiastic over the exploits of his friend Columbus. A more ambitious historian is Hernando del Pulgar (1436-?1492), whose Claros Varones de Castilla is a brilliant gallery of portraits, drawn by an observer who took Pérez de Guzmán for his master. Pulgar's Crónica de los Reyes católicos is mere official historiography, the work of a flattering partisan, the slave of flagrant prejudice; yet even here the charm of manner is seductive, though the perdurable value of the annals is naught. As a portrait-painter, as an intelligent analyst of character, as a wielder of Castilian prose, Pulgar ranks only second to his immediate model. He is to be distinguished from another Hernando del Pulgar (1451-1531), who celebrated the exploits of the great captain, Gonzalo de Córdoba, at the request of Carlos V. In this case, as in so many others, the old is better.

One great name, that of Christopher Columbus or Cristóbal Colón (1440-1506) is inseparable from those of the Catholic kings, who astounded their enemies by their ingratitude to the man who gave them a New World. Mystic and adventurer, Columbus wrote letters which are marked by sound practical sense, albeit couched in the apocalyptic phrases of one who holds himself for a seer and prophet. Incorrect, uncouth, and rugged as is his syntax, he rises on occasion to heights of eloquence astonishing in a foreigner. But it is perhaps imprudent to classify such a man as Columbus by his place of birth. An exception in most things, he was probably the truest Spaniard in all the Spains; and by virtue of his transcendent genius, visible in word as in action, he is filed upon the bede-roll of the Spanish glories.

CHAPTER VII
THE AGE OF CARLOS QUINTO
1516-1556

With the arrival of printing-presses in 1474 the diffusion of foreign models became general throughout Spain. The closing years of the reign of the Catholic Kings were essentially an era of translation, and this movement was favoured by high patronage. The King, Fernando, was the pupil of Vidal de Noya; the Queen, Isabel, studied under Beatriz Galindo, la latina; and Luis Vives reports that their daughter, Mad Juana, could and did deliver impromptu Latin speeches to the deputies of the Low Countries. Throughout the land Italian scholars preached the gospel of the Renaissance. The brothers Geraldino (Alessandro and Antonio) taught the children of the royal house. Peter Martyr, the Lombard, boasts that the intellectual chieftains of Castile sat at his feet; and he had his present reward, for he ended as Bishop of Granada. From the Latin chair in the University of Salamanca, Lucio Marineo lent his aid to the good cause; and, in Salamanca likewise, the Portuguese, Arias Barbosa, won repute as the earliest good Peninsular Hellenist. Spanish women took the fever of foreign culture. Lucía de Medrano and Juana de Contreras lectured to university men upon the Latin poets of the Augustan age. So, too, Francisca de Nebrija would serve as substitute for her father, Antonio de Nebrija (1444-1522), the greatest of Spanish humanists, the author of the Arte de la Lengua Castellana and of a Spanish-Latin dictionary, both printed in 1492. Nebrija touched letters at almost every point, touching naught that he did not adorn; he expounded his principles in the new University of Alcalá de Henares, founded in 1508 by the celebrated Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436-1517). Palencia had preceded Nebrija by two years with the earliest Spanish-Latin dictionary; but Nebrija's drove it from the field, and won for its author a name scarce inferior to Casaubon's or Scaliger's.