One of the most striking personalities of Juan II.’s reign was Enrique de Villena, wrongly known as the Marqués de Villena. Born in 1384, he owes much of his posthumous renown to his reputation as a wizard, and to the burning of part of his library by the king’s confessor, the Dominican Fray Lope Barrientos, afterwards successively Bishop of Segovia (1438), Ávila (1442), and Cuenca (1445). Barrientos has been roughly handled ever since Juan de Mena, without naming him, first applied the branding-iron in El Laberinto de Fortuna:—
O ynclito sabio, auctor muy çiente,
otra é avn otra vegada yo lloro
porque Castilla perdió tal tesoro,
non conoçido delante la gente.
Perdió los tus libros sin ser conoçidos,
e como en esequias te fueron ya luego
vnos metidos al auido fuego,
otros sin orden non bien repartidos.
Barrientos, however, seems to have been made a scapegoat in this matter. He asserts that he acted on the express order of Juan II., and, in any case, we may feel tolerably sure that he burned as few books as possible, for he kept what was saved for himself. However this may be, owing to his supposed dealings with the devil and the alleged destruction of his library after his death, Villena’s name meets us at almost every turn in Spanish literature: in Quevedo’s La Visita de los chistes, in Ruiz de Alarcón’s [61] La Cueva de Salamanca, in Rojas Zorrilla’s Lo que quería ver el Marqués de Villena, and in Hartzenbusch’s La Redoma encantada. These presentations of the imaginary necromancer are interesting in their way, but we have in Generaciones y Semblanzas a portrait of the real Villena done by the hand of a master. There we see him—‘short and podgy, with pink and white cheeks, a huge eater, and greatly addicted to lady-killing; some said derisively that he knew a vast deal of the heavens above, and little of the earth beneath; alien and remote from practical affairs, and in the management of his household and estate so incapable and helpless that it was a wonder manifold.’ Yet Pérez de Guzmán is too keen-eyed to miss Villena’s intellectual gifts. From him we learn that, at an age when other lads are dragged reluctantly to school, Villena set himself to study without a master, and in direct opposition to the wishes of his grandfather and family, showing ‘such subtle and lofty talent that he speedily mastered whatever science or art to which he applied himself, so that it really seemed innate in him by nature.’ Here we have the man set before us—vaguely recalling the figure of Gibbon, but a Gibbon who has left behind him nothing to represent his rare abilities.