lo mío me tomarán;
si maté, non tardaran
de matarme, bien lo sé.
So even the courtly Marqués de Santillana holds up his foe to derision, unconscious that his own death was not far off. In 1454 Juan II. died, and during the scandalous reign of Enrique IV. it might well seem that the great Constable had lived in vain. But his policy was destined to be carried out by ‘the Catholic Kings,’ Ferdinand and Isabel.
Contrary to reasonable expectation, the court of Juan II. remained a centre of culture during all the storm of civil war. Educated by the converted Rabbi Sh’lomoh Hallevi—better known to orthodox Spaniards as Pablo de Santa María, Chancellor of Castile,—Juan II. had something more than a tincture of artistic taste. So stern a judge as Pérez de Guzmán, who had no reason to treat him tenderly, describes him as a wit, an excellent musician, an assiduous reader, an amateur of literature, a lover and sound critic of poetry. Juan II. had in fact all the qualities which are useless to a king, and none of those which are indispensable. He himself wrote minor poetry, a luxury in which no monarch less eminently successful than Frederic the Great can afford to indulge. From his youth he was surrounded by such representatives of the old school of poetry as Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino. Castile might go to ruin, but there was always time to hear the compositions of this persistent mendicant, or those of Juan Alfonso de Baena, with the replies and rebutters of versifiers like Ferrant Manuel de Lando and Juan de Guzmán. It was no good training for either a poet or a king. In the few poems by Juan II. which have come down to us there is an occasional touch of laborious accomplishment: there is no depth of feeling, no momentary sincerity. Poetry had become the handmaid of luxury. Poetical tournaments and knightly jousts were both forms of court-pageantry. Nature was out of fashion; life was infected by artificiality, and literature by bookish conceits. ‘Mesure est precioux tesmoing de san et de courtoisie,’ according to the author of the thirteenth-century Doctrinal, and mesura and cortesía predominate in the courtly verse of Juan II.’s reign. The Galician trovadores brought into Castile the bad tradition which they had borrowed from Provence, and the emphatic genius of Castile accentuated rather than refined the verbal audacities of conventional gallantry. Macias o Namorado, the typical Galician trovador who died about 1390, had dared to introduce the words of Christ Crucified as the tag of an amatory lyric:—
Pois me faleceu ventura
en o tempo de prazer,
non espero aver folgura
mas per sempre entristecer.
Turmentado e con tristura